#to me being a femme lesbian describes my experience with the way i feel within myself and the way i love queer masculinity. it doesn't feel | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hellomynameisbisexual · 3 years

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Dr. Lauren Beach was 14 years old when she/they first came out as bisexual. Beach revealed the truth to friends and curious classmates at her/their suburban Michigan high school. The reactions varied, but not many were affirming.

"I experienced a lot of people who eroticized my attraction to femme people. It's like, 'oh, you're bi. That's so hot,'" says Beach, who has a Ph.D. in molecular, cellular, developmental biology and genetics.

Other friends asked Beach if she/they were doing it for attention. Beach says only three people, including Beach, at her/their school were openly out as queer. Instead of being embraced by them, Beach received flak for her/their sexuality.

"One of the other people there who was queer was like, 'You're a fence sitter! You're a switcher. You can't be trusted, you might date men after dating me," recalls Beach.

This kind of biphobia, which perpetuates stereotypes, hatred, and prejudices about bisexual people, is not uncommon — even (or sometimes especially) within the queer community. Stigma against bisexual people stems from a larger culture of homophobia, Rory Gory, digital marketing manager of the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization, wrote in an email to Mashable.

"Since bisexuals often move between straight and queer spaces, they are subjected to both homophobia and biphobia," Gory explains.

Bisexual people make up a sizable population within the LGBTQ community, given more than 50 percent of queer people in America identify as bisexual, according to the Williams Institute. The think tank does research on sexual orientation and gender identity to ensure stereotypes don't influence laws, policies, and judicial decisions. To be clear, bisexuality means a person is attracted to more than one gender. It doesn't mean bisexual people are more sexually active than others or going through a phase (two common myths).

As a teenager, Beach bought into stereotypes about bi people. But now 22 years later, she/they are a professor at Northwestern University where she/they focus on the health of bisexual people and works to dispel myths about them. Additionally, Beach co-founded the Chicago Bisexual Health Task Force, a coalition that advances the heath equity of bisexual people.

Mashable spoke with Beach, and representatives from advocacy organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), GLAAD, and the Trevor Project to learn about the unique challenges bisexual people face and how to be an ally.

1. View bisexual people as individuals

It's easy to lump a single group together but resist that trap. Like anyone else, bisexual people are individuals and their personalities and preferences vary. As Beach says, "there's not one single experience of bisexuality."

For example, Beach is asexual or ace. This means Beach doesn't experience sexual attraction, but she/they are romantically attracted to people across the gender spectrum. One can be both asexual and bi, with some asexual people preferring to identify as biromantic. Although many asexual people are not interested in having sex, some may choose to engage in sexual activity; asexual people can have varied preferences and experiences. Beach's experience doesn't mean all bisexual people feel the same way.

Getting to know more bisexual people can help scrub away your pre-conceived notions. You could already have friends who are bisexual and not know it. Be open about your intentions to learn so you can tear down your misconceptions about bisexual people, Beach recommends.

"You'd be surprised by how many people are like 'Oh, I'm actually bi. Let's talk," says Beach. "From understanding the breadth of experience, you personalize people."

2. Challenge negative stereotypes

As you expand your knowledge about bisexual people, speak up when you hear people perpetuating harmful misperceptions. Sometimes we don't even know we've absorbed negative stereotypes if we're not informed, says Mackenzie Hart, coordinator of GLAAD's Media Institute, which advises media, television, and film professionals on accurate LGBTQ representation.

An easy way to interject when you hear a myth about bisexual people is to say, "Actually, that's not true, my friend who is bisexual does not fit that stereotype," suggests Hart. It can also help to arm yourself with accurate statistics to further back up what you're saying, says Madeleine Roberts, HRC's assistant press secretary. HRC is a helpful resource for these stats.

"Barsexual" is a hurtful label often used to demean bisexual people. It refers to the incorrect belief that bisexual people will only interact with certain genders when they are intoxicated, explains Hart. It upholds the myth that bisexual women are actually straight as it implies they only flirt or make out with women when drunk. It also contributes to bi erasure, which GLAAD says happens when "the existence or legitimacy of bisexuality (either in general or in regard to an individual) is questioned or denied outright."

You should also push back against the harmful stereotypes that bisexuals can't be trusted to commit to a relationship, says Gory. "Embrace bisexuals as valid members of the [LGBTQ] community, rather than referring to them as 'allies' of the community."

Additionally, you can be an ally by understanding certain words and promoting proper usage. For example, you can clarify the difference between bisexual and bi+. Bi+ is an umbrella term inclusive of people who are pan, queer, fluid, and those who don't prefer labels. Use the full acronym of LGBTQ rather than gay as an umbrella term for queer people, explains Roberts. By taking these steps, you can "create spaces where people are hearing these words," says Hart.

3. Healthcare providers need to educate themselves

One time, a clinician asked Beach how many sex partners she/they had.

"I was like, OK, what do you mean by sex?" says Beach. The practitioner questioned why Beach would ask this. Beach told the clinician she/they are bisexual and, therefore, needed clarification about what sexual behavior she was referring to.

"She got really uncomfortable and said 'deep vaginal penetration,'" says Beach. "She started off guessing. She said, "you seem like a nice girl. So what is it, like one or two people?"" says Beach. The provider then said, “So, what you’re saying is more than 30 or 40 people.”

"It shows how someone [in a healthcare setting] can make this jump based on biphobic stereotypes of what my sexual behavior would be,” explains Beach.

After that encounter, Beach never went back to that doctor. To this day, Beach doesn’t have a designated primary care provider.

“I have to work up the emotional energy to want to go put myself through that potential experience," Beach says about seeking out healthcare.

Beach's experience isn't uncommon. Biphobia may discourage bisexual people from going to the doctor, with 39 percent of bisexual men and 33 percent of bisexual women reporting that they didn't disclose their sexual orientation to any medical provider, according to a 2012 study by the Williams Institute. Comparably, 13 percent of gay men and 10 percent of lesbians did not share their sexual orientation with a doctor.

Providers shouldn't presume anyone's sexual behavior because they know their sexual identity, says Beach. Hart echoes this advice. A doctor once asked Hart, "Are you seeing anyone?" Hart said no. She then asked, "If you were seeing anyone, would you be seeing a woman, a man, either, or other?" It wasn't perfect, Hart says, but asking open-ended questions that are inclusive of gender nonconforming people made Hart comfortable enough to see her again.

"Even if you aren't sure of certain words... you can make it clear you aren't going to be judgmental and you understand there's a wide array of experiences," says Hart.

4. Uplift bisexual people of color

Roberts recommends following prominent bi+ people of color on social media such as singer and actor Janelle Monáe, NFL player Ryan Russell, writer and transgender rights activist Raquel Willis, and politician Andrea Jenkins to become familiar with their lives. The next step is to share their stories with your friends and family.

At last year's Academy Awards, actor Rami Malek won Best Actor for his portrayal of British singer Freddie Mercury. Malek described Mercury as gay during his acceptance speech but Mercury was actually bisexual. Willis called out the bi erasure in a tweet.

Of the four people Roberts listed, two (Willis and Jenkins) are transgender. Just like one can be asexual and bi, one can also be transgender and bi. In 2015, the National Center for Transgender Equality surveyed 27,715 transgender people from every state and D.C., U.S. territories, and U.S. military bases abroad and 14 percent of respondents described their sexual orientation as bisexual.

To ensure you're not erasing transgender bi+ people's identities, always use inclusive language like "siblings" instead of "brothers and sisters," says Roberts, when addressing people as if they're family. This guarantees you're not assuming every bi+ person (or anyone generally) identifies as either male or female.

Taking into account the role intersectionality plays in the lives of bi+ people is important — especially when you're looking to amplify their voices.

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gettin-bi-bi-bi · 4 years

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1. A lot of times on lgbtq media, I’ll see things that include all wlw but will be labeled as for lesbians. Like “lesbian term”, “this song for lesbians”, or they’ll be posts or media talking about “lesbian only” experiences that could apply to all wlw. What bugs me is that bc lesbian has a very strict definition, I really don’t feel included in these. Whereas “gay” is an umbrella term and I often feel like I wouldn’t have these problems as a bi man cause I feel like gay covers me.

2. Lesbians of course have their own things, but I’m only talking about stuff that def includes all wlw but is called “lesbian”. Like “lesbian” couples that may have a bi women in them. I feel like there’s this split between communities bc any time I see a bi girl use the term lesbian(not as a label; for anything else) there gets so much crap thrown. While I know bi men prob feel that same sometimes, gay is such a universal term that I don’t see it as much. Idk if that’s invasive of me to feel

disclaimer: I was typing and typing and.... this kinds turned into a rant so. Take it or leave it, I don’t know how much sense I’m making. You know, up until ~50-60 years ago the word “lesbian” just meant every woman who had sex with women. That 100% included women who also had sex with men. (Note that at the time those labels were about sex acts and not about an identity based on attraction.) So many lesbians back then were what we would now call bisexual or pansexual.

However, lesbian separatists and “political lesbians” (basically the OG radfems) decided that a true lesbian should not have anything to do with men. And thus they started to exclude bisexuals from lesbian spaces and terminology and we were forced to make our own community. Which we did.

Now in the last couple years, especially on tumblr, there’s been this attempt to “reunite” lesbians and bisexual women into a shared community called “wlw” or “sapphic”. Unfortunately there’s still lesbian separatists. And that’s how you get entire campaigns on tungle dot hell where people recycle radfem rhetoric to tell bi women we aren’t “allowed to use butch/femme because those are just for lesbians” and other historic revisionism like that.

Most of the time I see people use “wlw” or “sapphic” it's bi/pan women who make that effort. And I notice a development in which the same thing happens to wlw/sapphic as it did to “lesbian” back in ye olden days: bisexuals are being told to keep their mouths shut about their male partners because “this is wlw safe space and this shouldn’t be about Straight Things” and as a result many think that “sapphic” is just a synonym for “lesbian”.

And note that this is all something that happens in relatively niche online communities like tumblr. When we’re looking at mainstream media then it’s a whole other piece of cake because mainstream media, especially when created by and for cisgender heterosexuals, just doesn’t fucking care about these distinctions. Sometimes it’s “just” ignorance and not even malicous - they just really don’t know the difference. Sometimes (often times!) it’s textbook bisexual erasure.

Personally, I totally get how you feel. I don’t feel connected to the “lesbian community” at all. I have a couple of lesbian friends but I don’t engage in any lesbian community events (even though Berlin has plenty to offer). I don’t feel like I have anything to add there and frankly, I don’t feel like I can openly talk about the fact I am bisexual and dating a man.

Even terms like “wlw” and “sapphic” - even though I do use and appreciate the sentiment behind them - don’t really give me a sense of community or belonging. Maybe that’s also a generational thing. I also don’t feel like I have one type of attraction that’s sapphic and then another type of attraction that’s [insert adjective] for men (and another again for enbys?) - all of my attractions are bisexual so I don’t feel comfortable describing my attraction to women as “sapphic” bc it implies that it’s something different than my attraction to other genders. But again, that’s just my personal feelings. I don’t mind those terms and I don’t mind if someone would use those as umbrella terms for me or as identity labels for themselves - go for it. I just don’t feel any significant connection to them personally.

I’m also a petty asshole though so if some event or media or whatever is advertised as “lesbian* .... party / movie night / pride / book club” then I’m just like, well, I’m not a lesbian so that’s not for me, guess they’ll be missing out on getting to know me. And I get even more pissy when they add in small print “*also welcome to bisexuals” because if you wanna make an event for lesbians and bi women then why not advertise it as that? Putting us in parantheses or small-print is at best tone-deaf and at worst an expression of how little they value us.

Many lesbians aren’t actively biphobic and would never want to exclude us and would actually genuinely welcome us. So, don’t take this as me slagging off all lesbians. However... many, especially the younger ones, are still incredibly oblivious to the history of their own label (because radfems work very hard at erasung that history so it doesn’t include bi and trans women) as well as ignorant about the struggles that bisexual women have to face in particular both in mainstream society as well as within the LGBTQIA+ community. They often don’t realise how alienating it is for us to always only being an after-thought at best. Which is kinda hilarious given that they often (rightfully!) voice the same criticism when everything is made about cis gay men and lesbians are just the after-thought.

So long story short: I get it. It sucks. That being said, bisexual men also face a lot of issues and biphobia affects them in some specific gendered ways that are also pretty shitty. They really don’t have it better or easier then other bisexuals when it comes down to biphobia.

Now, you can either say “fuck it, lesbian stuff is for me, too” and ignore all the separatism and basically reclaim your rightful place in this community. Or you can stick to the bi community and seek out media/events that are explicitly for all the queers.

Maddie

#I may have said this before but I'll put it here again:#I feel a stronger connection and can relate better to gay men than to lesbians #*shrug emoji*#Anonymous

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thedeadflag · 5 years

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so this is something I've been mulling over for a while now - do you reckon it'd be possible to make a version of a/b/o that isn't fundamentally transphobic, or would it reach the point of "this is so different that you might as well not call it a/b/o" before that? off the top of my head you'd have to take out all elements of g!p, mpreg, and biological essentialism, and it'd probably be possible to write a version of a/b/o with that framework, but I don't know if I'm missing anything.

a/b/o is a reactionary trope that relies on cissexism-derived biological essentialism to function. Like, that’s the engine that powers the bdsm/power dynamics, cisheteronormative breeding/family building, “dub/non-con”, etc. elements that draw people to it, and led people to create it in the first place.

Like, my best attempt at describing a non-transphobic, non-shitty typical a/b/o adjacent fic would include:

Werewolves (let’s face it, werewolves can be really cool if written well, and there’s a lot of really good ways to write them, a lot of ways to subvert tired subtropes within the trope)

Found Family-focused family/pack building (because wolves often adopt wolves from other packs into their own, blood lineage isn’t really a thing; much like vampires being created, newly turned werewolves of any age can be considered their sire’s child; if it needs to have a pregnancy arc between two men or two women, there’s IVF/IUI, or magically/spiritually-induced pregnancies, and of course writing a fully fledged complex trans character with their own non-pregnancy arc and virtues/flaws/goals/etc. and getting relevant trans beta writers who aren't your friends to keep it on track if you’re a cis writer)

A flexible, non-binary gendered society (rather than the rigidly structured biology-is-destiny a/b/o society) that’s trans inclusive either explicitly, or implicitly if it’s a new social universe with different rules.

If mating seasons have to exist, they’re cultural more than biological, and no biological processes that could impede or trouble a person’s ability to properly consent.

No inherent, glorified or reified power dynamics, certainly none rooted in or fostered through biology.

That doesn’t seem very much at all like a/b/o to me. It’s a werewolf AU, which is the reason why a/b/o was created in the first place. It wasn’t enough. It needed something more than just a supernatural bent

I’ll continue on below for a bit on some simplified functions of a/b/o, but it’s mostly just some ramblings.

Like, to quote the originators of the genre/trope:

I'd like to see Alpha male Jared, and Bitch male Jensen. Jensen is a snotty prude (think Lady from lady and the tramp) he may be a bitch male but he's not just going to let anybody take a go at his sweet little ass...until he meets Jared...then prudey little Jensen turns cock slut for Jared. Bonus points for J2 being OTP, Jensen was a virgin before Jared, and now that they met each other, it's for life.

...

There are three types of men, alpha males, beta males, and omega males. Alpha males are like any ordinary guy with the exception of their cocks, they work just like canines (the knot, tons of cum, strong breeders, etc) The beta male, is an ordinary guy without the special cock. Omega males are capable of child bearing and often called bitch males.

Like, I want you to look at that real close and see what’s going on in there.

This was created to be a trope where there’s a world where women, as we explicitly know them, don’t exist, but where a subgroup of men take up the functional role of the woman in the heteronormative social structure of the world. It’s also not surprising that (assumedly cis) women created and initiated the spread of this trope.

Look at the language used. This is heavily, explicitly gendered for a reason. If you’ve read much of anything about how the male gaze impacts female sexuality, you’ll know a common response is for women to position themselves out of the proverbial frame entirely, so that no part of them can explicitly exist as an object, where they can take on the role of a subject. There’s no women whose experiences will directly link to her own and her own perceptions, comfort/discomfort/etc.

However, many of these women also have been heavily affected by the male gaze and heteronormativity, and that combined with not knowing what a real gay male relationship is like, what it looks like, what experiences might be unique to it...they fill in the blanks with their own conditioning.

And maybe seeing a lot of that toxic masculinity in media content was unsettling because of how women get treated in that content, and how they in turn might feel in those shoes. But if a MAN, even if it’s a heavily female-coded man, were to undergo that...well, it’d be easier to appreciate those tropes and dynamics they’ve been force-fed to believe were arousing, hot, desirable. Especially if they can have two hot men in it. They can enjoy that self-created taboo, bypass their own discomfort and insecurity, and project it onto a type of person different enough to suspend their disbelief and maintain that difference, even if they’re pumping that guy full of all the typical misogynistic tropes and experiences they’re not comfortable having directed towards them and other women.

In short, it’s a way to get off on heteronormative norms/tropes, using another as a vehicle in order to keep up their cognitive dissonance.

Of course, this eventually spilled out into the Het fandom (makes perfect sense, since many of the a/b/o originators and proponents were het women), and then worked its way into Femslash fandom by piggybacking on g!p in order to meet the necessary criteria for PiV sex.

Just, in this case, you necessarily shift some of the puzzle pieces around. Trans women take the place of the “alpha”, acting as an acceptable vehicle for a toxic masculine cis man, since lesbians aren’t into men. Even if the trans woman is generally written, in nearly every way aside from part of her body, as a toxic cis man. The original a/b/o’s “Bitch Male”/Omega Male is swapped out for the Omega Female, usually a spunkier, more in your face version outside of romantic/sexual contexts in the media content, but let’s be real here, she’s still by and large submissive when it comes down to it.

In a world where more wlw grew up feeling predatory for their attraction to other women, for feeling sinful, for being rejected from female intimacy het women enjoyed with each other after coming out, etc., it’s pretty common for a lot of lesbians to lack initiative, not be able to read or communicate romantic/sexual cues between each other...to essentially be “useless lesbians’ as the joke goes,and to feel isolated and undesirable.

So writing a F/F fic where some hot woman modeled in the image of some hot cis woman pursues you? Takes the initiative sexually/romantically? Doesn’t beat around the bush, but is blatant? Who can’t control her lust around you? Who can give you the perfect nuclear family you’ve been conditioned to want in order to feel value in our heteronormative world, but were told you weren’t worthy of or could never feasibly attain? Who gives you a sexual encounter you have some education in and some emotional stake in due to common conditioning of PiV sex > all else? Who can give you plausible deniability for a number of contexts due to a lack of ability to explicitly consent? etc. etc.

Like, yeah, that’s going to feel comfortable for a lot out there. That’s going to seem pretty hot/arousing. It’s a way to get off on the norms and expectations thrown on women in society, but in a way that lets them distance themselves ever so slightly from men by shifting it from text to subtext, explicit to implicit.

Don’t just take my word for it, though. Here’s a few snippets from one of the most popular g!p/omegaverse femslash writers (if not the most popular) that help illustrate how/why this trope has found an audience

Why Do I Write G!P?The elephant in the room. It arouses me, but it’s also a form of self-comfort. I grew up in a very fundamentalist home. Women being with women was at first unspoken, and then derided, both by my church and at home. I felt insanely guilty for my attractions, so I developed ‘cheat codes’ to deal with it.

It was okay if the woman I had sex with in my dreams had a penis, for example. It was okay if she forced me to have sex with her. It was okay if we basically simulated heterosexual sex.

Because of my childhood (which included conversion therapy), I found myself falling into heterosexual roleplay patterns, at least sexually. It was a lingering thing from my childhood.

It’s still there, and I know I’ll never be rid of it.

...

I associate penetration with power. You know, being steeped in sexism from an early age turned some problematic thoughts into kinky lemonade. And since I’m a femme sub, taking power away from the top by ‘penetrating’ them can ruin the mood for me. I mean, I can write power bottom scenes with the best of them, and I enjoy them, but… *shrug* if I’m going to write omegaverse or g!p, someone’s getting fucked, and it’s not the top.

There are rules to a/b/o. There are specific reasons it’s sought out, read, and created, and that’s why it’s hard to imagine a version of it without those harmful elements, because the trope requires them for the audience to be satisfied.

It’s why all gay male a/b/o fits a pretty specific pattern. it’s why femslash a/b/o fits a very specific pattern. There’s nearly no deviation as a rule, because there are so many parts that have to be in play and functioning in a specific way in order to get the desired result.

I could go on for hours about this, and the above is all a pretty damn simplified take of what’s going on in a/b/o for it to exist in the way it does and meet the needs of the audience, and I’ve already written a lot about this in the past, so I’ll try to cut it short here.

#a/b/o #omegaverse #trans fetishization #creative responsibility #transmisogyny #cissexism #genitals tw #genital mention tw #long post #fandom dynamics #fandom meta #heteronormativity #g!p #biological essentialism #Anonymous

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yelloskello · 5 years

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i fucking hate the stag/doe - butch/femme thing. I hate it. I hate that we are explicitly told that we’re not allowed to use these terms, and for what? I went a’googling to see what lesbians were actually saying in regards to why they’re lesbian-exclusive, read the arguments straight from the horse’s mouth, and it amounts to this:

TERFs (and no, I do not mean lesbians = terfs, I mean it is TERFS who came up with this) straight-up believe that bi women and trans women just weren’t there in our history. They say that butch and femme carry the weight of a painful history and fighting for our rights in the words, and that when anybody but lesbians use the terms, they’re putting it on like a fancy dress and calling it an aesthetic.

As if bi women and trans women just straight-up weren’t there for that history, too.

They argue that ‘nobody fights men to use phrases like bear/otter/twink!’ and quite frankly, i’m pretty fuckin’ sure bisexual men and/or trans men can happily use those terms, too, so shitty argument there pal.

So they kick us out of a history that we were actively a part of, and younger lesbians who want to do the right thing but don’t know the history of this argument latch onto it, and bisexual people... Within the last year... Create the terms stag/doe, since it’s evidently morally wrong to use terms that are part of our own history, but since we can experience the same kind of dynamics in our relationships, we need SOMETHING to describe them. And what do people say?

‘wtf this is so dumb/fucked up, this is just watered/down butch and femme, they’re literally the same thing, why would you make up new words to mean the same thing?’

because we experience the same goddamn thing, just because we like multiple genders doesn’t mean we always hop on “opposite” genders, we can have relationships with similar-gendered/nonbinary people, even outside of a relationship we are still part of the community, we still experience Gay Attraction, and it can still be part of our identity because we’re still LGBT+, but we’re not allowed to use those terms! We’re damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.

I hate the wave of separatism that we’ve gone through. I hate the idea that everything has to have shit exclusively for them, even if it has a history of being used by multiple sexualities. I hate that people think No Experiences Overlap Ever, when in truth, marginalized people (and I don’t mean just queer/LGBT+ people - I mean PoC, disabled folks, etc) have SO much more in common than anyone might ever think. Yes, some groups do have things that exclusively happen to them, as a white person i’m NEVER going to fully understand the struggle that brown and black people go through, there’s SO much i’m still ignorant to concerning that, i’ll never pretend all our experiences are exactly the same, but there are also at least some issues that I can strongly empathize with because I hear what they go through and can see similarities in the way i’m treated as an AFAB person or as a bi person or as a nonbinary person. A microaggression because you’re gay and a microaggression because you’re brown are both microaggressions, even if they’re presented in different ways, over different issues. Multiple groups are denied housing and jobs for their identities, even if it’s done quietly behind closed doors so the law doesn’t crack down on peoples’ bigotry. As a trans person I can feel the personal pain of my people being accosted in bathrooms by bigots, and I can look at how black people are assumed to be criminals by virtue of simply walking around in a store, and even though the issues are very different, I can see the similarities - we both are mistrusted by “””normal””” society based on hideous stereotypes - and I can feel for them, even if I don’t experience being assumed to be a criminal personally. I listen to them and I believe them not just because they’re fucking people who deserved to be listened to and believed, but because I have seen how general society treats people like me, so why should it be so hard to believe they could be treated like shit, too?

People think that our struggles are so fucking exclusive that they lose all empathy for other groups, thinking that the only people who have ever suffered are themselves. It’s always baffled me that LGBT+ people can be so fucking ignorant and racist and hateful when you think they’d be able to tap into their own hurt and understand that other people are being treated in similar ways because they’re ‘different’, too. But then again, LGBT+ people can barely understand how other subsets of LGBT+ people have struggled, so I guess it shouldn’t be that surprising. I think of how ace people can write a laundry list of things they personally experience, and other subsets will scoff and say ‘yeah as if we don’t go through that too’, completely fucking ignoring what that overlap means. Thinking that since they go through that, anybody else who reports that they might, too, are just Faking, or trying to steal the spotlight. How can people so completely lack empathy? Why are we not there for each other? Why do we not care about anybody else? Why can’t we recognize the same fucking pain we’re all going through, even if that same pain comes in different flavors, and try to be there for each other because nobody should have to go through what we’re going through?

Like, it’s a complicated issue. Like I said, yeah, groups do have stuff that effects them exclusively, and it can be frustrating to express unhappiness with something exclusive to your group and have people who clearly aren’t actually understanding what you’re going through say they can relate. But denying that there are any similarities at all just drives us farther apart when right now marginalized people desperately need the support of one-another.

(I was gonna give bi people’s Double Discrimination as an example of that exclusivity, unwanted by communities on either side of the fence, since obviously lesbians and gays don’t experience that... But y’know who probably can empathize? Mixed race folks. Or folks with invisible disabilities. Or ANYONE who’s caught between both communities, not x enough for one and not y enough for the other.)

Speaking only of communities that I am personally in: in LGBT+ circles, separatism breaks up the subsets and causes infighting. In circles concerning disability and mental/physical illness, it isolates its members, denies them support, makes them feel like nobody truly understands, even people dealing with the exact same disability or illness, because symptoms can be so widespread and varied. Hell, even when dealing with our oppressors, separatism fails to actually try and change the views of the people oppressing us: i’d much rather have narratives where men are gentle, kind, feminine, loving, supporting, open to their emotions, and respectful permeating our culture, teaching young boys how to be as they grow, than narratives where men are just evil.

There’s a lot of gray area. There are people who have been so hurt by oppression that I do not blame them one bit for prescribing to a separatist narrative. But I mean in a general sense... I don’t want separatism to be pervasive. I don’t want it to be the mindset people automatically turn to regardless of what they’ve gone through. I want sympathy and support for the people who have been hurt, and I want the groups that have been doing the hurting to change. I want people to recognize the similarities between each other and be unafraid of empathizing and sharing.

The butch/femme and doe/stag thing is a result of separatism, and I can see where they get the idea for it - basically pulling the ideas of appropriation from communities of PoC telling white people not to appropriate their stuff - but they’re lashing out at the wrong people. When a white person appropriates locs, they’re seen by the public eye as being carefree, trendy, and cool, while black folks are still punished for wearing the same look that occurs naturally for them. When a white person puts on a war bonnet, they’re seen as being high-fashion and ‘exotic~~~’, while literally desecrating a sacred part of a culture they don’t belong to in any way, shape, or form. When a bi person calls themselves butch, they’re a part of the community that shares the exact same history, their histories are literally interwoven, and experiences extremely similar dynamics, at the very least, as lesbians. These are two very different things. Tell cis/straight people not to appropriate the terms, but remember, other LGBT+/queer people aren’t fucking cis/straight.

anyways this got way longer than I was expecting but shit, I got like 60 followers, who gives a damn what I say, right? peace.

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xeno-aligned · 6 years

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copy & pasted under the read more in order to have a local copy.

A Brief His and Herstory of Butch And Femme

BY: JEM ZERO 16 DEC 2017

When America’s LGBTQ+ folk started coming out of the closet in the 1950s, the underground scene was dominated by working class people who had less to lose if they were outed. Butch/femme presentation arose as a way for lesbians to identify each other, also serving as a security measure when undercover cops tried to infiltrate the local scenes. Butch women exhibited dapper and dandy aesthetics, and came to be known for being aggressive because they took protective roles during raids and other examples of homophobic violence. The image of the butch lesbian became a negative stereotypes for lesbians as a whole, leaving out femme lesbians, who are (pretty insultingly) considered undetectable as lesbians due to their feminine presentation.

In modern times there’s less need for strict adherence to these roles; instead, they become heritage. A great deal of political rebellion is wrapped up in each individual aesthetic. Butch obviously involves rejecting classically feminine gender expectations, while femme fights against their derogatory connotations.

But while butch/femme has been a part of lesbian culture, these terms and identities are not exclusive to queer women. Many others in the LGBTQ community utilize these signifiers for themselves, including “butch queen” or “femme daddy.” Butch and femme have different meanings within queer subcultures, and it’s important to understand the reasons they were created and established.

The Etymology

The term “lesbian” derives from the island on which Sappho lived—if you didn’t already guess, she was a poet who wrote extensively about lady-lovin’. Before Lesbos lent its name to lesbians, the 1880s described attraction between women as Sapphism. In 1925, “lesbian” was officially recorded as the word for a female sodomite. (Ick.) Ten years before that, “bisexual” was defined as "attraction to both sexes."

In upcoming decades, Sapphic women would start tearing down the shrouds that obscured the lives of queer women for much of recorded history. Come the ‘40s and ‘50s, butch and femme were coined, putting names to the visual and behavioral expression that could be seen in pictures as early as 1903. So, yeah—Western Sapphic women popularized these terms, but the conversation doesn’t end there, nor did it start there.

Before femme emerged as its own entity, multiple etymological predecessors were used to describe gender nonconforming people. Femminiello was a non-derogatory Italian term that referred to a feminine person who was assigned male—this could be a trans woman, an effeminate gay man, or the general queering of binarist norms. En femme derives from French, and was used to describe cross-dressers.

Butch, first used in 1902 to mean "tough youth," has less recorded history. Considering how “fem” derivatives were popularized for assigned male folks, one might attribute this inequality to the holes in history where gender-defying assigned female folks ought to be.

The first time these concepts were used to specifically indicate women was the emergence of Sapphic visibility in twentieth century. This is the ground upon which Lesbian Exclusivism builds its tower, and the historical and scientific erasure of bisexual women is where it crumbles. Seriously, did we forget that was a thing?

The assumption that any woman who defies gender norms is automatically a lesbian relies on the perpetuation of misogynist, patriarchal stereotypes against bisexual women. A bisexual woman is just as likely to suffer in a marriage with a man, or else be mocked as an unlovable spinster. A woman who might potentially enjoy a man is not precluded from nonconformist gender expression. Many famous gender nonconforming women were bisexual—La Maupin (Julie d'Aubigny), for example.

Most records describing sexual and romantic attraction between women were written by men, and uphold male biases. What happens, then, when a woman is not as openly lascivious as the ones too undeniably bisexual to silence? Historically, if text or art depicts something the dominant culture at the time disagrees with, the evidence is destroyed. Without voices of the Sapphists themselves, it’s impossible to definitively draw a line between lesbians and bisexuals within Sapphic history.

Beyond White Identities

Another massive hole in the Lesbian Exclusivist’s defenses lies in the creeping plague that is the Mainstream White Gay; it lurks insidiously, hauling along the mangled tatters of culture that was stolen from Queer and Trans People of Colour (QTPOC). In many documents, examples provided of Sapphic intimacy are almost always offered from the perspective of white cis women, leaving huge gaps where women of color, whether trans or cis, and nonbinary people were concerned. This is the case despite the fact that some of the themes we still celebrate as integral to queer culture were developed by Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ folk during the Harlem Renaissance, which spanned approximately from 1920 to 1935.

A question I can’t help but ask is: Where do queer Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color fit into the primarily white butch/femme narrative? Does it mean anything that the crackdown on Black queer folk seemed to coincide with the time period when mainstream lesbianism adopted butch and femme as identifiers?

Similar concepts to butch/femme exist throughout the modern Sapphic scene. Black women often identify as WLW (Women-Loving-Women), and use terms like “stud” and “aggressive femme.” Some Asian queer women use “tomboy” instead of butch. Derivatives and subcategories abound, sometimes intersecting with asexual and trans identities. “Stone butch” for dominant lesbians who don’t want to receive sexual stimulation; “hard femme” as a gender-inclusive, fat-positive, QTPOC-dominated political aesthetic; “futch” for the in-betweenies who embody both butch and femme vibes. These all center women and nonbinary Sapphics, but there’s still more.

Paris is Burning, a documentary filmed about New York City ball culture in the 1980s, describes butch queens among the colourful range of identities prevalent in that haven of QTPOC queerness. Despite having a traditionally masculine physique, the gay male butch queen did not stick to gender expectations from straight society or gay culture. Instead, he expertly twisted up his manly features with women’s clothing and accessories, creating a persona that was neither explicitly masculine nor feminine.

Butch Queens Up in Pumps, a book by Marlon M. Bailey, expounds upon their presence within inner city Detroit’s Ballroom scene, its cover featuring a muscular gay man in a business casual shirt paired with high heels. Despite this nuance, butch remains statically defined as a masculine queer woman, leaving men of color out of the conversation.

For many QTPOC, especially those who transcend binary gender roles, embracing the spirit of butch and femme is inextricable with their racial identity. Many dark-skinned people are negatively portrayed as aggressive and hypermasculine, which makes it critical to celebrate the radical softness that can accompany femme expressions. Similarly, the intrinsic queerness of butch allows some nonbinary people to embrace the values and aesthetics that make them feel empowered without identifying themselves as men.

Butch, Femme, and Gender

It’s pretty clear to me that the voices leading the Lesbian Exclusive argument consistently fail to account for where butch and femme have always, in some form, represented diverse gender expression for all identities.

‘Butch’ and ‘femme’ began to die out in the 1970s when Second Wave Feminism and Lesbian Separatism came together to form a beautiful baby, whom they named “Gender Is Dead.” White, middle class cis women wrestled working class QTWOC out of the limelight, claiming that masculine gender expression was a perversion of lesbian identity. The assassination attempt was largely unsuccessful, however: use of these identifiers surged back to life in the ‘80s and ‘90s, now popularized outside of class and race barriers.

Looking at all this put together, I have to say that it’s a mystery to me why so many lesbians, primarily white, believe that their history should take precedence over… everyone else that makes up the spectrum of LGBTQ+ experiences, even bi/pan Sapphics in same-gender relationships. If someone truly believes that owning butch/femme is more important than uniting and protecting all members of the Sapphic community from the horrors of homophobic and gendered oppression, maybe they’re the one who shouldn’t be invited to the party.

As a nonbinary lesbian, I have experienced my share of time on the flogging-block. I empathize strongly with the queer folks being told that these cherished identities are not theirs to claim. Faced with this brutal, unnecessary battle, I value unity above all else. There’s no reason for poor trans women, nonbinary Black femmes, bisexual Asian toms, gay Latino drag queens, or any other marginalized and hurting person to be left out of the dialogue that is butch and femme, with all its wonderful deconstructions of mainstream heteronormative culture.

It is my Christmas wish that the Lesbian Exclusivist Tower is torn down before we open the new chapter in history that is 2018. Out of everything the LGBTQ+ community has to worry about already, petty infighting shouldn’t be entertained—especially when its historical foundation is so flimsy. Queering gender norms has always been the heart of butch/femme expression, and that belongs to all of us.

#lesbian #butch #femme #bi-#queer history #fenpost #wlw #sapphic #also #nlw #cause the author is a nb lesbian

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cowboyjen68 · 6 years

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Given the topic of labels lately, what labels make you personally proud or personally uncomfortable? Do you think age plays a role in what people are comfortable or uneasy identifying as?

First, I do think age can have a lot to do with labels. It can be what was popular or comfortable when you came out, or just the ID that fit you best as you were forming your sense of self. I often see a “rub” between generations as to labels people love, are okay or or absolutely hate. Sometimes the meaning has just changes, the English language is like that, but it only changes to those who do not have experience or memory for the origin of the word, or its common connotations from before they were around. My older lesbians friends (this is a generalization, because there can be factors besides age, much prefer lesbian and not ever queer. They much prefer the spelling of woman to be without the “man” or “men”. SO there are various ways to spell it. They also are very connected to “butch” and “femme” IF they fit within one of those categories and they take it pretty seriously. It is a source of pride and connection for them. My older gay male friends (meaning my contemporaries or older) also prefer Gay over queer most of the time. They do use some of the terminology such as “twink” or “top” and “bottom” but it almost seems like they are not super serious.. more in a gently teasing way when interacting with each other.

Now about me… disclaimer.. this is just me, my opinions and my feelings and connections and experiences with language. I have a degree in English but NOT gender studies (my minor is religion and philosophy). So I do find our language amazing and important. I also know it can be personal and i do not like to police anyone’s language that they use for themselves, whether I like it or not. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. When I feel like someone is using a label that is important to me, and I think they use it wrong either on themselves or towards me I repeat to myself, people are more important than the words.

One more thing. I do believe labels are important, at least at certain times in life, maybe always for some. It helps us identify our community with in our community. It helps us find mentors within that ID that look like we look, or will look when we get older. It helps people to know they are not alone, that there are others who feel the same way and that they are not wrong about how they feel or want to look, just because society tells them they can’t possibly be what they know they are:

Ok Me

I love Lesbian. I love all the power it holds. It’s very meaning of women who love women. That is me. I always use it. I don’t mind “gay” but if Identifying myself I will always chose lesbian. Sometimes I make the challenge to say it in conversation at least one a day just because I am so proud.

Female and woman. These are also important to me. I align my gender with with physical sex and I love them both. My parents were pretty good about not gendering anything for the most part (I mean it was the 70′s it was fairly common to not over gender clothes and toys etc) I never played with dolls or liked dresses. Growing up I was not afraid of those things I align with my femaleness, such as my hips, vagina and breasts. Those “parts” are my experience being female and while they are not perfect and of course when I was younger I was not fond of them (since they were never the cultural ideal), As i aged I grew to love them and appreciate them. Part of that was I realized how much I loved them on the women I was attracted to and the overwhelming sentiment was that they were shocked someone thought they were lovely. I don’t hold a grasp on these terms so tightly that I mind if they have grown to encompass more that a “woman born with a vagina” . These are not my terms to define, but I am proud of what I connect with to feel like a woman and I encourage others to search and see what connects them to the ID.

There was a bar in Iowa CIty when I was in my early drinking days. It was my “home” as i came out. A very good friend painted a mural on the back wall that said “Are You Queer?” on it. I own the rights to it, he left them to me when he passed away. I have thought or re releasing the art for shirts. I am at a bit of a crossroads. I love the art. And I never was attached to the word “queer”. I usually thing of it as a gay man’s term but now I hear it more often as a way women define themselves. I think it works fine for other. It is not for me. I will always default to lesbian. Queer is too broad of a stroke for my comfort. But I will be releasing the shirts, and in fact did a trial run to raise money for an LGBTQIA Youth Club. I will put a photo of the graphic on my blog some day. I love it because Dan painted it at a time when “queer” was a bold statement and it was HUGE! And because my memory of that bar helping me find myself is sentimental and rich with experiences that make me me.

Butch: Okay.. I just LOVE THIS ONE> IT is ME..It is just ME> As soon as someone called me Butch… i fell in love with it. I was already the very definition of it, I just didn’t know it was a “thing”. Once my older lesbian friends (many fall somewhere on the butch to soft butch spectrum) started to teach me the ropes... the butch nod, that it is okay to shop in the men’s department. Suspenders are always in fashion, my cowboy hat was okay with them and everyone who didn’t like it could “piss off” as one 70 year old once put it. They taught me that butches can be scared of snakes, and change the oil or go to Jiffy Lube. Butches could hate sports and love to camp or vice versa. That we are varied and diverse, but there are in tangible things that we recognize in each other and don’t doubt my instincts. Soft butch actually fits me a little better 75 percent of the time. Just depends on what I am doing or, how butch I look up against the women I am hanging out with.

Terms I am not comfortable with. I get “him’ and “ sir” a lot and it is okay with me. Usually is a snap call based on a sudden glance or look in my direction. I almost always correct it but in a kind way. After the third or 4th correction, I just let it go. Not that big of deal. I would never use them on purpose. I don’t like to be referred to as cis gendered. That is just a personal preference. I know the meaning and I know the reasons and history. I teach about it when I speak. For some reason it strikes me as more information than anyone needs about me in general. If someone uses it about me, I totally let it go. It is fine. I just never use it on myself. And close friends know I prefer they not use it when describing me. I don’t use gnc, even thought technically that could apply. Mostly because I DO consider by dress and hair and butchness to be ALL female. I am just as much a woman in grubby work over alls with short hair as I would be with long hair and makeup (cultural gender stereotype) so I don’t really see myself as non conforming. I am conforming, to what I, as a woman, like to look like. There you go. Took me two days and saving it as a draft several time but I got ‘er done. Thank you for the ask/prompt.

#butch #soft butch

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homosociallyyours · 7 years

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Hi there, I'm genuinely asking how does one come to a place of comfort within their sexuality to portray their truth? any advice?

Hey Nonny!

I can speak for my own personal process. I was late to the party in terms of sexuality and didn’t really know I was a lesbian til I was in my early 20s. Even then I was really unsure whether or not I was “allowed” to be one. But fortunately I had a good number of friends who weren’t straight and who helped me feel comfortable.

From there, I did a lot of experimenting and read some queer theory, both old and new. I did drag, tried dressing more “androgynous” (masc, honestly), went to queer shows and gatherings, and basically just dipped my toes into everything I could. Somewhere along the line I started to identify as queer, in part because I didn’t want to deny my attraction to queer masculinity, and also because it felt politically and intellectually more aligned with my identity.

Coming to femme identity was a lot harder because I knew very few femme (identified) queers when I first came out. What helped me most was meeting/seeking out people who had a deep sense of their femme identity but a myriad of ways of expressing it. Meeting high femmes and low femmes and diesel femmes and femme dommes and soft femmes and so on. I did that at first in the drag community and then through the folks I met there and in my extended circles.

I will say that reading Dorothy Allison, Amber Hollibaugh, and Joan Nestle at this moment in my life was like someone throwing open the curtains and shining a light on my heart and inner experiences. It resonated for me and in me and around me and the more I read and the more folks I met the harder it was to deny.

Identifying as genderqueer was a really similar process. I remember the first person I met who described themselves as genderqueer, and my reaction was “I guess I could never be that.” I think that in general if this is your response to something, it’s good to ask yourself why. And who says?

For me the voice that said no was a sad voice, and when I started to ask myself why I realized that it was all connected to shit that I had internalized about gender. I have a lot of friends who are genderqueer or non-binary, and talking to them about their identities and experiences once again made a huge difference. I realized that we were saying a lot of the same things, and that the ways I felt about my gender were a lot more tangled and non-linear than I’d first thought.

So. Um. I think I said too much. tl;dr: -start by seeking out queer (or LGBT) communities in person or online. -if you are able to read some classic LGBTQ authors it’s a really good place to start (honestly I think I listened to Le Tigre’s “hot topic” and just looked into every name there to start). -ask yourself what is stopping you from being open about your identity. are there hostile ppl in your life? can you find ways to limit your exposure to them? is there something inside you that’s blocking you? can you explore it more w/ a trusted friend or counselor?

OK hopefully that was useful! I have no problem answering questions like these on or off anon, so please don’t hesitate to ask!

#long post #text post #genderqueer #queer #femme

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roidespd-blog · 5 years

Text

Chapter Six : L AS IN LESBIAN

THE STORY OF SAPPHO OF LESBOS

Sappho (630–570 BC) was a Greek poetess from the island of Lesbos, located in the northeastern Aegan Sea. Sappho (or as some would call her “The Tenth Muse” or “The Poetess”) was known for her lyric poetry, usually written to be sung while accompanied by a lyre. Over the centuries, most of Sappho’s poetry was lost, except for one complete poem :

ODE TO APHRODITE Iridescent-throned Aphrodite, deathless Child of Zeus, wile-weaver, I now implore you, Don’t — I beg you, Lady — with pains and torments Crush down my spirit,

But before if ever you’ve heard my pleadings Then return, as once when you left your father’s Golden house; you yoked to your shining car your Wing-whirring sparrows

Skimming down the paths of the sky’s bright ether On they brought you over the earth’s black bosom, Swiftly — then you stood with a sudden brilliance, Goddess, before me;

Deathless face alight with your smile, you asked me What I suffered, who was my cause of anguish, What would ease the pain of my frantic mind, and Why had I called you

To my side: “And whom should Persuasion summon Here, to soothe the sting of your passion this time? Who is now abusing you, Sappho? Who is Treating you cruelly?

Now she runs away, but she’ll soon pursue you; Gifts she now rejects — soon enough she’ll give them; Now she doesn’t love you, but soon her heart will Burn, though unwilling.

Come to me once more, and abate my torment; Take the bitter care from my mind, and give me All I long for; Lady, in all my battles Fight as my comrade.

Though not much is known of Sappho’s life, her work speaks of a great admiration and fascination for the beauty of women. Fragmented biography written on papyrus states that Sappho was accused by some of being “irregular in her ways and a woman-lover” but it does not prove anything at all. It cannot be denied that the remaining 650 lines from her body of work portray homoerotic feelings. The conclusion of this is nobody knows Sappho’s life. That didn’t stop them from originated the word Lesbian from her place of origin.

ETY-HOMO-LOGY

The term Lesbianism, to describe erotic relations between women, had been documented as early as 1870. By 1890, the term Lesbian was used in a medical dictionary. Synonyms from the early 20th century include invert (which seems to be the equivalent of our “butch” term), homosexual and… sapphist.

Interestingly, far less was written by medical professionals about lesbianism as it was viewed as a lesser problem than male homosexuality. In some cases, it was not acknowledged to exist at all. We could talk about the works of sexologists Ebing (Germany) and Ellis (UK) but they believed a woman’s attraction to another woman could be either medically reversed or vanish after the woman had experiences marriage and a “practical life”. They also indicated that homosexual men has behaviors that should not be considered a criminal vice. So.. Yeah ? Misogyny wins ?

LESBIANISM AS AN IDENTITY

As a cis gay man with no rights to give a personal opinion to what is and isn’t considered lesbianism, please acknowledge I’m only reporting previous theories and opinions that were stated by more or less qualified people than me.

It seems that the act of sexual relationships between two women is still up for debate as to be defined as lesbianism. According to feminist writer Naomi McCormick, Lesbianism was mostly constructed by men, whose primary indicator of lesbian sexual orientation is sexual experience with other women. As I believe sexuality is a spectrum and not a series of boxes to check, I would tend to agree with that statement. But I will not give more of an opinion on the subject. She also stated that emotional, mental and ideological connections between women are as important or more so than the genital. As the definition of lesbianism was clearly unfocused depending on who you were talking to, and the rise of feminism in the second part of the 20th century, women felt safer claiming to be more sexually adventurous, allowing them to be feel more accepted by the male gaze. In the 1980s, a significant movement rejected the sexualization of lesbianism which became part of a heated controversy called the feminist sex wars. The movement is built to counter the idea that women is long-term relationships with other women were having less sexual contact that heterosexual or homosexual male couples, calling this “Lesbian Bed Death”.

The idea is that a woman that does not identify her sexual feelings toward persons of her sex as lesbianism and does not engage if long-term emotional attachment will keep on being sexually viable in the eyes of society. Using the word “lesbianism” as a death sentence on your sex life, putting you right in the category of asexual beings. Misogyny wins again ?

In direct consequence with the male gaze and the construction of the word lesbianism by male minds, homosexual women from western culture often adopted lesbianism as an identity itself. As most people are taught that heterosexuality is an innate quality in all people, women who realize her romantic and sexual attraction to other women go through an ‘existential crisis’. The identity of a lesbian, challenging what society had offered in stereotypes about homosexuals and learning to function within a homosexual subculture. From that perspective came the stereotypes that were naturally reused in the media as to make the whole thing comprehensible to heterosexuals with no capacity for nuances.

STERE-HO-TYPES

First, let’s talk about what other dumb people can think about a lesbian : 1. Lesbians just haven’t been with the right guy yet — There is no right guy. 2. Men molested them as children and turned them into lesbians — sexual identity cannot be changed to any events whatsoever. And why do you have to associate that to tragedy ? 3. In every lesbian couple, one has to be the man — Men are useless most of the time. You don’t need your idea of a man. 4. Lesbian hate men — I don’t think they do. But do men hate lesbians ? The idea of, no. Them ? Probably a very emasculating thought. 5. It’s not real sex if there’s no penis — you clearly never had good oral sex in your life. 6. All lesbians use strap-ons/No lesbians use strap-ons — there are contradictory reports. Do that I say the fuck do you care ? It’s not your concern!

We also have the two main categories of lesbians that are absolutely and definitely real and nothing else because otherwise, how are we gonna understand those people ?

If you are a lesbian (and we highly doubt that cause you haven’t met the right guy yet), you are a butch or a femme. As everything had to be either masculine or feminine in gender, sex or identity studies, even lesbians adopted that way of thinking in the last century. A US study from the 90s showed that “95% of lesbians are familiar with butch/femme code and can rate themselves or others in terms of those codes”. Those two clichés of what a lesbian should be also created debates inside the community, subculture and the feminist movement. For some, the sexual and romantic association of butch and femme was a replication of heterosexual relations while other commentators argue that, while it resonates with heterosexual patterns of relations, butch-femme simultaneously challenges it. A lot of theoretical talk for something people don’t seem to totally understand.

NO BI, BI, BI

Lesbians in western cultures generally create an identity that parallels those built on ethnicity : they have a shared history and subculture (as gay man do but more focused), a similar experience with discrimination (homophobic AND misogynistic) which has caused many of them to reject heterosexual principles. It created a point of contention with the ideas of a bisexual woman and a lesbian who once had sexual relationships with men. Lesbians who have never had sex with men may be referred to as “gold star lesbians” while those who have may face ridicule and rejection from others. Bisexual women also face, more so than in heterosexual relationships, identity challenges with regard to defining what it means to be interested in women. I had a conversation the other day with someone who happens to be a gay woman about what she was looking for in a girl. I scanned for people I might know and talked about a friend of mine, single as well. It seemed that the bisexuality of my friend was a point of no return, as she did not want to engage with someone “who didn’t know what she wanted”. As I’m going to cover the B in LGBT in another article real soon, I won’t get to far in that particular area today. Though I need to insist right now (and yes, this is a fact AND an opinion) : Bisexuality is not a half-way stop to homosexuality. There is not transition. Saying you’re bisexual while you are actually gay is something a 15 year-old confused teenager would say out of fear of being rejected. A grown-ass woman does not have that fear. She knows exactly who she is just as you do. B as in Bisexual… coming soon.

LESBIAN REPRESENTATION

If I say Lesbian, you say Ellen ! Lesbian! Ellen ! Lesbian ! Ellen ! As I’m also covering Ellen in the future, I won’t get too much into that right now. Yes, Ellen Degeneres is probably the most famous (and possibly richest) lesbian in the world. And though she broke barriers, she was not the first.

Selma Lagerlöf, first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Jane Adams, first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Julia Morgan, first woman admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Lili Elbe, first identified recipient of gender confirmation surgery (Yes, transgender woman can also be lesbians as sexuality and gender are two different things). Eleanor Roosevelt, first lady of the United States (still disputed by many though). Marguerite Yourcenar, first woman elected to the Académie Française. Interesting to notice that while I was researching those names, many of them (Joséphine Baker, Frida Kahlo) were bisexual women, showing that even now, bisexuality is not accepted as face value and just another name of lesbianism for women.

In literature, The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (1951) comes to mind, depicting the first-ever “happy ending” for a lesbian couple. The release of the book was so scandalous at the time the author had to use a pseudonym. Following the Stonewall Riots, lesbian themes multiplied in more diverse and complex themes, though mostly through essays on feminism and sexuality. Important lesbian writers to read are Rita Mae Brown and Audre Lorde, to name a few.

In cinema, openly lesbian content in mainstream films began appearing during the 1990s, exploring sympathetic lesbian characters. By 2000, some films portrayed characters beyond issues of sexual orientation, reflecting a wider need to see lesbianism as more than sexual desire. Unfortunately, most mainstream films with lesbian protagonists are directed by heterosexual male directors. 2001’s Mulholland Drive put two women in a grotesque exposure of their sexual desires. 2013’s Palme d’Or winner Blue is the Warmest Color (La Vie d’Adèle Partie 1&2) gives us the most explosively graphic lesbian sex scenes in recent memory, though it was received by some lesbian communities as exploitative and offensive. Summer of Love (2004) is a great indie movie with delicate use of lesbian themes and characters but it was directed by Pawel Pawlikowski.

In television, lesbians were largely ignored for quite a while. Not until 1962 were there mentioned in reports concerning female homosexuality. On scripted shows, the word “lesbian” was never heard of, instead using codes like “villain” or “neurotic”. In the 80s, L.A. Law included a lesbian relationship in one of their storylines, causing outrage. Sci-Fi shows of the 90s implied more than stated that characters were gay. It really only changed with Ellen’s 1997 Puppy Episode (more on that later, I told you). After that milestone, Soap operas included a couple of lesbians here and there, cable shows tried it too. The L Word was created by Showtime as a response to the network’s own Queer as Folk. Though not a great show in terms of writing and pacing, it remains an important landmark in lesbian history and is getting rebooting in the next few months.

I do believe the bigger, brighter and thoughtful representation of a lesbian romance was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But even then, the network did not want the two lesbian characters to kiss on screen (they had to wait over a year after the met for depicting the smallest kiss in the face of grief). In our golden age of television, we have the likes of Orange is the New Black, The Fosters, characters on Grey’s Anatomy, American Horror Story, Orphan Black. Not enough, but a start.

Overall, the lack of representation in the media justified the accumulation of basic lesbian clichés put together by society and the community itself.

IN CONCLUSION

Is lesbianism an identity ? If not, were lesbians force to assume this as their primary identity as a way to get ground and recognition ? That L is important. They have it rough. But not as ruff as Black Lesbians.

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femslashrevolution · 7 years

Text

Towards A Darker Femslash by holyfant

This post is part of Femslash Revolution’s I Am Femslash series, sharing voices of F/F creators from all walks of life. The views represented within are those of the author only.

Hello everyone! I hope your Femslash February is going great so far. I was stoked to be asked to write a little something for I Am Femslash, particularly because while I’ve written bits and pieces about my experience as a young, queer, multishipping and writing young woman in fandom, I’ve never really tried to put any of my thoughts together in a truly coherent way. So, here I go, attempting to write about a topic that is dear to me. Feel free to engage me on any of the points I make in this little essay!

So, hi. I’m holyfant, a 26-year-old ESL fanfic and (aspiring) original fiction writer. I’ve been active in fandom for nearly fifteen years, and have written fic for a lot of that time, picking up English and fannishness along the way. Writing fic gave me a way to connect with other people who had to same interests I did – and only later did I realise it also paved the way to more self-knowledge. At some point during my teens, the question of my own sexual and romantic identity became pressing; maybe paradoxically this first drew me to male slash, and only later to femslash – perhaps because the former was and is more visibly present in fandom than the latter, and perhaps also because reading and writing femslash was still too direct a way to engage with my own identity at that point. I still don’t fully understand this; I remember that when I was first playing with the idea that I might not be straight, it felt safer to read about men in love than women in love. Maybe seeing male characters discover their non-straightness was close enough to my own experience to stir up emotion and feeling, but far enough removed from it that it didn’t stir up panic. Who knows?

Either way, when I was more comfortable with who I was, I returned to f/f and found it infinitely rewarding. I read a metric ton of femslash fic and wrote lots myself – for a fairly long stretch of time I enjoyed deep obscurity in the Harry Potter and Greek mythology fandoms as a niche femslash writer with two or three loyal readers, and it was truly a lovely time. I engaged with femslash in a curious, non-discriminatory way – I shipped everyone. I’d take two minor female characters who perhaps had never even interacted in canon and found a way to put them together. I took prompts for characters that were only featured in throw-away lines, and wrote a lot of fic for the now sadly defunct LJ community hp_rarestpairest, which encouraged the nichest of pairings. Basically I was honing my writing skills, while also representing my questions, hopes and fears about my own sexuality at the same time. In my fics I dealt with women falling in love, being rejected, having sex with each other, coming out to their families and friends, dealing with heartbreak – all of these were things that I was thinking about, was experiencing or wanted to experience, or was scared of. I think it will surprise few queer femslash writers to hear that reading and writing femslash taught me a lot about my own identity and sexuality and gave me a community of queer women that I would otherwise never have found.

Despite the fact that I was mostly a femslash writer in my early times in fandom and the fact that I write f/f in my current fandoms today, it remains a curious truth that my growth as a writer from someone who wrote 1,000-word oneshots in one go to someone who wrote novel-length fanfic over several months coincided with going into a different fandom where my main focus was a m/m ship (BBC Sherlock, where I was sucked into the black hole that was Sherlock/John). I said I “shipped everyone” earlier – it would be just as correct to say I shipped no one, because I had no deep emotional investment in the ships I wrote about, and often wrote only one fic per ship. (Perhaps the only exception was Lavender/Parvati, which I wrote often and regularly gave me the warm fuzzies to think about.) It wasn’t until Sherlock happened that I started to understand what people meant when they said a ship was their OTP, or how people could get so intense about their reading of a relationship. As a result of this increased feeling of investment I read and wrote so much fic that I became a much better writer for it, by pushing myself to write more and more complex stories. This was all fine in itself, but even as it happened I was aware that it was curious that this sudden spur of feeling and craft was because of a juggernaut white dude ship, something that had never held much interest for me before. I felt – even at that heady time when you’re in a new fandom and it’s like being in love – like I wanted to continue to write smaller pairings and explore female characters, too. And I did, but the point remains that when I look at my story stats now, it’s clear that my f/f stories are shorter in word count and are less varied in their plot and execution than my m/m stories.

All this to show that I am 100% part of what I am about to describe: not a problem, per se, but an observation that I think is useful to be aware of and think about. The fact is that femslash, across fandoms, remains a niche category, and that while there are great amounts of people who read and write almost exclusively m/m this is barely ever the case for f/f. A lot of the f/f writers I know have talked at some point about the realisation that f/f in general seems to lack novel-length stories and stories that have the diversity of plotting and thematic exploration that we easily find for m/m ships. Most f/f stories are shorter stories or oneshots that focus on meet-cutes, sex and domestic bliss. Longer fics are rare. Darker themes, such as character death and grief, trauma, relationship issues, adultery, abuse and so on are also rare. I am not the first to notice this and not the first to theorise on it, but I would still like to identify why I think f/f fandom has developed in this direction, and to formulate some ideas as how to diversify our creative experiences a little.

I think there are a lot of possible reasons that f/f writers are in general less motivated to write long stories that explore complex themes, and these will surely differ for everyone. For me, I’ve identified three causes, in increasing order of importance: 1. a small audience, and therefore a smaller possibility of extensive feedback, 2. a lack of variation and complexity in female characters and their relationships in a lot of canon materials, and 3. the awareness that f/f is often rooted in a deeply lived experience for many of its readers and writers, and that it’s therefore necessary to be wary of representing “bad” female characters or negative tropes about lesbian and bisexual relationships. The most complex of these is certainly no. 3, which is why that’s the one I will be writing about a bit more.

Statistically f/f is most likely to be written and read by cis queer women, which of course influences our relationship with the characters we portray, because they refer to our own lived existence. This makes f/f different from m/m – m/m is also mostly written by cis women (straight and otherwise), which creates a certain leeway for “true” realism. Anecdotally I can share what happened when my housemate and my best friend, both cis gay men, delved into the world of m/m fanfic on some of my recommendations. While they enjoyed a lot of the stories I told them I’d liked, they also talked about many of the things they felt were inaccurate about gay sex and romance – for instance, they could name several often-described sexual acts that they said didn’t quite “work that way”, and they were generally uncomfortable with the fannish (certainly often problematic) tendency to label characters as strictly tops or bottoms, especially if this was based on stereotypical characteristics outside of the bedroom. If gay men were to write these stories (which they do, of course, only in much smaller numbers), they might look different – they might be less fictionalised, less genre-specific; the language developed to talk about men in love might be different, there might be different focuses. It’s hard to definitively say what it would be like. Either way, it would seem logical that it follows, from the fact that lesbian and bisexual women overwhelmingly write the fannish stories that we have about lesbian and bisexual women, that we should find it easy to access their spaces and write about many different aspects of their lives. In reality this doesn’t necessarily seem to be so. Perhaps the scrutiny, both internal and external, is larger – perhaps because we are writing about ourselves we put more pressure on ourselves to “get it right”, and perhaps our audience, who is looking to see itself represented, does the same at times. Or maybe we simply perceive our audience as being more critical than it truly is.

What is a “bad” female character? Most people will agree that women often get the short stick of characterisation in most media – to such an extent that there are tropey names for them, like the Girl Next Door, the Femme Fatale, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and so on. Women are still often used as crutches for men; their stories are supporting stories, their pain is used to further a male character’s pain. Writing about women in fanfic is often already a rebellious act in itself, one that reverses harsh or flippant treatment by canon writers. While this is fine in se, and sometimes even lends a pleasant sheen of fannish disobedience to writing female-centric fic, I do believe it has the unintended and unsavoury result of effectively also policing the sort of woman that can be written about. This may seem like a paradox, but in reacting to the one-dimensional representations of women in fiction it can become important to “fix” those wrongs, and this makes it hard to write about women who don’t overtly challenge assumptions about womanhood: unsympathetic women, women who are perhaps weak-willed, petty, bigoted, jealous, aggressive, criminal, highly sexual, or abusive. Considering that, at least in a Western vision on literature, stories derive meaning at their base from conflict, removing the option to write “bad” women removes a lot of possibility for thematic conflict. This might be part of the reason why there are significantly less plot-driven f/f stories than there plot-driven m/m stories; plot usually requires conflict, and conflict often requires flawed characters and flawed relationships.

I know that when I write about women I’m conscious of the fact that I have internalised societal ideas about what it “should” mean to be a woman, but I’m also aware that in trying to combat those ideas it’s easy to get mired in different ones. I know that I sometimes interrogate myself about what it is that I’m saying about women when I write about this particular woman cheating on her partner or being generally secretive and untruthful – doesn’t that reproduce a societal prejudice that women are untrustworthy? It’s very hard to separate a single performance of fictional womanhood from the general performance of womanhood – this is not usually a problem with (white) men, who are allowed to represent only themselves, and not their entire gender.

The above paragraphs talk about “women” – clearly the problem of treatment that I write about becomes many times more pressing when dealing with women who are on other intersections of oppression. Women who love women are more vulnerable to prejudice and abuse than straight women, and wlw of colour are again many times more vulnerable than their white sisters. And when these wlw or woc are not cisgender, again their situation becomes many times more dire. These societal realities are often reproduced in media – 2016 was the year in which no lesbian or bisexual woman on tv seemed to be safe, and their pain and deaths hurt all the more because we are confronted with this pain in real life, too. I remember my tumblr dash around the time that The 100’s Lexa died; the pain there for many queer women who watched the show was very real, because – I think – it echoed a feeling of being unsafe, of being cruelly treated in society. I remember fans writing about how hurtful it was to see a brave female character who loved another woman killed off like this; in their pain many people stated that it was unacceptable that lesbian or bisexual female characters should be killed in fiction at all. Of course, this was understandable considering how hurt fans were, and how often they had been disappointed – still, the typical fannish tendency towards lack of nuance frustrated me. In capable writers’ hands, tragedy can be performed very meaningfully. I wrote a little about this on my blog at the time, because I was starting to feel insecure about my own tendency to prefer darker thematic material – was I complicit in my own oppression, and was I hurting other queer women by writing what I enjoyed? Clearly my own privilege was also part of this question: I am a wlw, but I’m white and cisgender, and I hail from a country where legal equality has been realised for the entirety of my adult life. Obviously homophobia is still a problem, but my close environment has been nothing but supportive and accepting from the moment I first came out as lesbian at 16, and again as bisexual at 24. So I haven’t experienced much of the tension and fear that other wlw might have experienced. Does this make me a part of the oppressive machine that performs queer women’s pain for shock value? I seriously thought about this question before tentatively concluding that I had to have faith that I was a thoughtful enough writer to avoid these pitfalls.

It might seem from this essay that I find writing femslash to be an exhausting trial of constantly having to think about what prejudices I’m reproducing – this is not the case. I love writing femslash and I love my femslash-writing friends. I’ve learned heaps about myself and others by reading some of the stellar f/f stories out there, and with every f/f story I write I become more aware of how much I love to write about queer women – and I remind myself that I should certainly do it more often, and more ambitiously. As I stated above, this is something that I’ve noticed in my own writing practice, so it’s not an accusation leveled at anyone else. It’s simply something that I find worthwhile to examine. Judging by some of the conversation that periodically does the rounds in my f/f-loving circles, I’m definitely not alone in that.

Now how to deal with this in our f/f-writing community? There’s no singular answer to that, and whatever we can do is both blindingly obvious and hard to actually do. One of the possible answers is, as it is with so many complex questions that have complex roots, to simply push through and do it anyway, to try to ignore some of the fear and uncomfortable associations we might feel in writing unsympathetic f/f narratives and write them anyway. Diversifying the stories we write will automatically diversify the stories we feel we’re allowed to write. Audience response is probably important too; I think that there must be plenty of people who feel, like me, that it’s a shame that so much of femslash is short and that a lot of it focuses on narrative happiness rather than also exploring narrative unhappiness and conflict, which (in my opinion, at least) yields more fertile literature. And if we feel that way, then we have to try to reward people who write the things we like to read, through our attention, our comments, our kudos, our podcasts, our recs, et cetera.

I write this mere days before the beginning of Femslash February, and I’m certainly planning to walk the walk that I’ve talked in this talk; I’m absolutely sure that the strong core of people who love to read about women loving women will continue to keep this community vibrant and alive and that there are plenty of new directions our stories can go in. I’m looking forward to seeing what the other voices who are participating in I Am Femslash have to say, and I’m looking forward to all of the new content that will be produced. I’m grateful that as a young teen I stumbled upon fandom and that I found my way towards femslash a few years later; I’m pretty sure my own journey of discovery and creativity would have been very different, and probably more difficult, if I hadn’t found this community. So, to all of us: We Are Femslash! <3

About the author

holyfant is a 26-year-old bisexual woman from Belgium, who’s been writing about women and their relationships since she was a budding young wlw. She loves to think about literature and how it relates to the core of our human experiences: the only thing she really wants to be, in the end, is a storyteller.

Tumblr: http://holyant.tumblr.com

AO3: http://archiveofourown.org/users/holyfant

#holyfant #I Am Femslash #Type: Meta #Femslash February #Femslash February 2017 #submission

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drsilverwoman · 5 years

Text

Femme Friendship

Published in The Journal of Lesbian Studies

Abstract

This autoethnographic study of femme friendship explores the connection and relationship between two femme lesbians – my femme friend Amber and myself. The shared experience of invisibility and the related perils and privileges that come with passing as straight enact a bond unlike either of us have previously experienced. Meeting within the context of a polyamorous relationship adds a layer of complexity to our friendship that deepens the relationship. The story of our friendship showcases a specific sort of friendship, one grounded in theories of gender performance, sexuality, invisibility, and language.

Keywords: Femme, Fem(me)ininity, Lesbian, Invisibility, Friendship,

Autoethnography, Polyamory

Amber and I have been friends for less than a year, but for all of the experiences we share in common as femme lesbians, time is irrelevant. We know what it’s like to cut our hair short and wear baggy clothes in hopes of being recognized, only to realize that we are uncomfortable and unhappy without makeup and without curves. We know what it’s like to be told we’re too pretty to be gay. We know what it is like to be the prettiest girl in the room and then feel immense insecurity and jealousy when suddenly we are not. We know what it’s like to try and catch the eye of a woman we find attractive, only to have her think we are staring at her and disapproving of her masculinity. We know what it’s like to have our sexuality questioned because we love masculinity. We know what it’s like to admire the pretty painted finger nails on the hands we use for fucking, and we also know what it’s like to feel a stone butch melt from our touch. We know what it’s like to strap on and feel powerful, and we also know what it’s like to have our identities dismissed as easy, as privileged, and as not really gay. We know what it is like to exist in a world where normative presentations of femininity are rewarded and also degraded and belittled. We know what it’s like to have a plumber, or roofer, or an electrician come to the house and speak only to our wives or ask where our husbands are. We know what it’s like to be unwillingly touched and harassed because we are women. And we know what it’s like to want to be seen and to be recognized for who we are when we continue to remain simply invisible.

Many of our experiences are experiences most, if not all, women share. Unwanted looks, unconsenting touches, competition, and beauty standards are not specific to lesbians. They are specific to misogyny and they are byproducts of living in a patriarchal culture. What doesmake our experiences exceptional is the consciousness that arises from living within multiple cultures, what Phalen (1993) names the perils and privileges of “passing.” Amber and I are femmes. To be clear, by femme[1]I specifically mean lesbians who perform and succeed at normative standards of feminine beauty and also date butch women. I am not referring to lipstick lesbian couples – two feminine women who date each other – nor am I discussing androgyny of any sort or feminine lesbians who date women whose gender performances cross the spectrum. I speak only of women who “pass” as straight and who partner with women masculine of center.

Femme invisibility has been discussed in academia for well over 60 years, yet there has been nothing in those discussions that can teach me how to be seen and recognized as queer in my daily, lived experience. Suggestions to “rhetorically reconstruct” (Galewski, 2005) myself are fine in theory but not in practice. That I may be a queer body in a subversive form of fem(me)inine drag (Maltry & Tucker, 2008) or that I am in fact fem(me)inine (not feminine), both of which are inherently queer performances of identity (Douglas, 2004; Duggen & McHugh, 1996), are fascinating concepts, ones I like very much, yet not helpful strategies for recognition. The knowledge that my identity, like a heterosexual woman’s identity, is constructed in relation to my masculine counterpart and works to limit alternative performances of gender by reiterating binary scripts (Halberstam, 1998; Kennedy, 1997; Gibson & Meem, 2002; Rubin, 2011) does not help me to be seen for who I am or by the women I want to attract. None of this helps me to understand how I can be recognized as a lesbian. And neither does the claim that I should believe I look queer simply because I am queer (Lizz, 2011).

Whatever the answer may be to femme invisibility, I do not have it. But, like many others, I know that by claiming it only as a privilege and not recognizing how it is also a peril, a space of invisibility, we negate ourselves a chance for productive dialogue and as such, we advocate conformity as a means to acceptance. So I create scholarship on the popular practices of femme identity as a means of dismantling the patriarchal, heteronormative binary within which I am invisible. My contribution is the femme friendship. The femme friendship is a friendship between two femme lesbians – two women who as individuals have experienced all that it is to be femme and whose friendship helps them better negotiate and understand their identity as femme.

Like all femme women, Amber and I know what it’s like to come out and identify ourselves as gay on a regular basis. We know that the dismissal of our identity unwillingly shoves us back into the closet over and over again and that queer visibility is a double edged sword, that sometimes the enemy you know is better than the enemy you don’t know, and that coming out is scary because we are forced to wonder whether the person treating us with courtesy would treat us with contempt if he or she knew we were married to a woman. We also know that by being femme, we are safer than our butch counterparts. We do not fear public bathrooms nor do we get mistaken for the wrong gender. We do not get stared at by people who cannot easily read our gender. We are not socially punished in any way for our gender performance; in fact, just the opposite. Everyday that we perform our gender correctly, we are rewarded (Butler, 1990) by our larger society and, at the same time, we become invisible within our queer community.

I experience this invisibility in the world. I share this experience of invisibility with Amber. And through my friendship with Amber, I’ve learned how empowering this shared experience can be. Amber and I speak the same language of invisibility and of identity, and having shared language with which to speak, one I have never been able to speak before, legitimates my experience. The rich feeling of legitimacy, provided by finding a person with whom I share a similar voice, is the impetus for this work. This essay tells the story of my friendship with Amber. Having my first femme friend at thirty-eight years old has been a life changing experience. Our year of friendship has taught me more about who I am than years of friendships with straight women ever has. Amber helps me to understand who I am and who I have been. She helps me understand my coming out process, my dating experiences, and my current relationship. She helps me understand how and where I do and can fit amongst other lesbians, and how and where I do and can fit within the larger world. She does this for me as much as I do this for her. Being invisible together is quite different than being invisible alone. Together, we begin to name that invisibility. Together we speak a common language of invisibility. Together we create a meaningful bond of friendship.

***

I’d met Amber a few times over the years at events and parties, yet we only grew to become friends when my wife – Abby – began dating Amber’s friend Joan. Joan was Abby’s first girlfriend after we opened our marriage. It was towards the end of Abby and Joan’s relationship that Amber became my confidant. When the relationship between Abby and Joan dissolved, Abby and I began dating Amber and her wife Helen. My relationship with Helen lasted only half the time of Abby and Amber’s relationship. During that additional time, Abby and Amber grew to love with each other. Also during that time I grew to love Amber and she me. Our friendship and the relationship of sharing a partner became a deep and powerful form of connection.

Metamour is the term used within the poly community to describe the person with whom your primary partner is having a relationship. Poly books, websites, and blogs all insist that metamours do not need to be friends; Abby and Helen never created a friendship nor did Joan and I – although we all tried. Metamour comes from the blending of Greek and Latin: meta meaning “with” and amor meaning love. Oddly though, the idea of meta being a term regarding that which is self-referential is not part of the poly lexicon, when perhaps it should be. If Amber and I are connected through Abby, then in some ways do we not both reference her through ourselves? And are Amber and I not connected to each other through our references to Abby? When Abby and Amber’s relationship grows and changes, does it not impact my relationship with Abby? And when my relationship with Amber deepens, doesn’t that effect the relationship between Abby and Amber?

Before Amber was in my life, when Abby was dating Joan, I incessantly compared myself to Joan. Years of social conditioning made me see Joan as the enemy, as my competition. Yet I was also pulled towards Joan. I wanted to be friends with my metamour. I wanted to be better than jealousy. I wanted to work through the jealousy and be her friend. I had never had a femme friend and I longed for one. I was also new to poly and part of poly is working through jealousy.

For a brief time, Joan and I bonded over our experiences of being femme. We went shopping together and got our nails done together, and we laughed with each other when the women doing our nails insisted keeping them short was ugly and we should let them grow longer. We shared clothes and got ready together for parties we were attending. Our friendship reminded me of when I first came out and started dating women; these were dates that led into nights, nights that turned into weekends, and then days would go by without being apart. I fell hard and fast in those early relationships and the stereotypical (and somewhat embarrassing) “U-Haul” scenario emerged. Those first few weeks with Joan were like sleepovers with friends as a child – the feeling of never wanting it to end because we were having too much fun. And now, as an adult, it didn’t have to end. When Joan started spending time at our house, we were having all the fun; we were going out, kissing each other, kissing Abby, and exploring our new relationship.

Whatever the reason, as much as Joan and I tried, we never truly connected as friends. When I insisted Abby end the relationship due to problems occurring in our marriage, Joan blamed me. Maybe I was simply jealous of Joan for catching the eye of my wife, an eye that had only seen me for years. Maybe because we acted on our mutual crush and had sex with each other and Abby, the lines of friendship were crossed in a way that we couldn’t move back from. Maybe the jealousy of sharing the same woman was too much for us. Or maybe we are simply incompatible as friends. But there’s something about the meta in metamour that leaves me doubting a simple incompatibility.

In the weeks leading up to the end of Abby and Joan’s relationship, I reignited my friendship with Amber. She became my go-to person for all things Abby and Joan – my jealousy, my insecurity, my doubts, my fears, and my growing lack of trust. She assured me that I was not acting irrational and even provided information about Joan’s behavior that confirmed deceptions I thought to be true. When Amber fell ill, I spent hours in the hospital with her and she consoled me over the mounting distrust I had for Abby and Joan’s relationship. She gave me the support and reassurance I needed to ask Abby to end her relationship with Joan and I brought her cool towels for her head. She gave me the strength I needed to stand up for what was right and I brought her flowers and magazines. When I insisted Abby end her relationship with Joan, Joan lashed out at me and Abby fluctuated between understanding and anger; Amber offered me support.

A few months after Abby and Joan’s relationship ended, Abby and I began dating Amber and Helen. Similar to Joan, Amber and I bonded over being femmes and our friendship was hard and fast. We texted each other daily and unabashedly told each other the stories of our lives. We talked about dating each other’s wives and in doing so we both saw parts of our wives we hadn’t seen in a while. Seeing my wife through a new woman’s eyes is powerful and being able to share that experience with a woman I trust is exceptional. The four of us experienced our own U-Haul-like period of time; Abby and I were at their house or Helen and Amber were at our house constantly. It was fun and easy, until it wasn’t. Like most relationships, once the novelty wears off something deeper must emerge. Helen and I lacked that deep connection and by the time we all went on vacation together, my relationship with Helen was basically over.

Without the ease of a foursome, familiar feelings of jealously returned. But this time it was different. Amber and I had built a friendship and through our friendship we were able to negotiate the envious feelings we had towards each other. For the most part, jealousy emerged with regard to sex, attraction, and emotions. Does Abby like sex better with Amber than with me? Is Amber prettier/skinnier/sexier than I am? Is Amber more fun than I am?

Whereas the same sorts of questions emerged with Joan, unlike Joan, Amber and I could discuss how these questions made us both feel, because she too wondered these questions about me. We had long, deep, brutally honest conversations, conversations in which we discussed us both dating and having sex with the same women. Initially, those conversations were silly and lighthearted. We tiptoed around what was okay to say and what wasn’t about us each having sex with each other’s wives. We moved from peripheral topics like what types of men’s or women’s clothes Abby and Helen would or wouldn’t wear, to challenging conversations about whether or not Helen and Amber should talk to Helen’s thirteen year old daughter about the relationship among the four of us – a decision they decided against. As the conversations deepened, Amber and I grew closer.

There is no doubt the initial equality of a foursome rather than a triad helped our situation, but I know it was more than equality, it was equity that made our relationship work. Heather and I gave each other what we needed to feel safe. For example, I needed to come home to a clean house after Amber had spent the night and so Amber ensured Abby did the dishes. When my relationship with Helen ended – in part because I lost interest and in part because I saw the way she was hurting Amber through her lack of attentiveness – Abby and Amber’s relationship did not. In fact it continued to grow stronger. Amber and I were able to learn to talk to each other about a woman I love deeply and have committed my life to and a woman Amber was falling in love with. This type of conversation does not come easily. There are no scripts to follow, no models or guides to learn from; we did this on our own, we created our own language. We crossed every line about what may or may not be okay to discuss, and then we came back and crossed them again. And when language failed us, we often found we didn’t need to speak – that our shared experiences and understandings spoke for themselves.

We reached out to the other, to spend time together, and stayedfriends when it felt easier to walk away. When I was jealous, and as a result angry or fearful, it felt normal to direct those feelings at Amber and to hate her. Instead, I texted her and I emailed her and I told her how I was feeling. And like a good Director of Human Resources, she responded to each of my concerns line by line. An excerptfrom one of our emails:

Me: Right now I am very upset - with Abby primarily but also as a result of, and individually with, you. It's hard for me to determine where my anger is coming from and how much of it is shit about Abby that I want to blame on you. I don't want to blame it on you, I don't want to be mad at you, but I am and so I am hoping maybe an email communicating some issues will help me express my feelings, hear what you have to say in response and then we can move forward.

Amber: First, I am sorry you are so upset. It kills me to hear you are upset with me, but I am so glad you told me so we can talk about it. I don't want you to be mad at me either, but if you are, we are going to face it head on and work it out. The fact that you care enough to tell me how you are honestly feeling shows me that you value our friendship, and that means everything to me.

This was not our most eloquent writing but it represents our honest communications that allowed us to move forward. Being friends with Amber forced me to be honest with myself in ways I never have been before. She forced me to answer the questions that had long been brewing in my mind.

The jealousy of sex? Did I notice Amber’s beautifully large hands and her love of fucking women? Yes I did. I also noticed when Abby accidentally used our joint Amazon Prime account to buy a harness and a dildo. But more than anything, I understand that both Amber and Abby have histories of violent sexual abuse and their sex offered them a space to heal, a space I cannot provide because I don’t share that experience. It was in that difficult understanding, that Amber offered Abby something I never could, that I moved from accepting Amber as my wife’s girlfriend to appreciating her as my wife’s girlfriend. Abby and Amber’s relationship healed my wife in places and in ways she had long since forgotten needed to be healed. I watched Abby grow stronger in who she is by revisiting parts of her abuse. Our marriage grew stronger and my understanding of who Abby is deepened further. This shift in my marriage is because of Amber, and my friendship with Amber only deepened as a result.

The jealousy that emerged from looks? The competition of being the prettiest girl in the room? Well not only is that competition, in Andre Shakti’s words, “a victory lap for patriarchy” (2016) but more so, I’ll take second place in that beauty pageant any day if a gorgeous woman and I can sit down together and share our experiences of femme identity. I love spending time with beautiful women, and our chances of finding cute butch girls to buy us drinks and flirt with us only get better when there are two of us. Abby couldn’t even imagine saying no to us when we worked together to get what we wanted.

And the jealousy of emotions? In some ways, that jealousy felt familiar. I don’t know a single lesbian who hasn’t stayed friends with an ex, dated a friend’s ex, or learned to accept a partner’s ex in her life. In fact, most lesbian friendship groups emerge as people sleep their way into the community. Amber and I know this, we’ve been through this, and jealousy is not worth losing people over. Instead, we worked hard to get over our jealousy. And in this experience, jealousy strengthened our friendship.

***

When Abby and Amber ended their relationship, it was because of me. However, it was not because of any jealousy I had towards Amber but a realization about myself. At this point in my life, poly is not for me. I do not want my wife to love another woman. For many of the reasons that Abby loved Amber, I love her too. I value what she brought to Abby’s life and, as a result, to mine. Our relationship was truly one of metamour. Because of us both being with and loving Abby, we learned to love each other. But more importantly, on our own, we developed a strong friendship. We created a friendship built on admiration and respect for each other’s strengths and differences and for all the experiences we have in common. It hasn’t been easy and, like any relationship, it takes work. The work has been extremely rewarding.

When Abby and Amber ended their relationship, they did it because they love me. Amber and I talked through the pain and hurt of their breakup and the pain their relationship caused me. Amber offered me new perspective on Abby’s behavior and my responses to it, she validated some of the feelings Abby disagreed with, and she assured me that throughout their relationship, I had always been number one. I offered her assurance that Abby did love her and was deeply saddened.

***

A recent New York Timesopinion piece by lesbian blogger Krista Burton (2016) claims any attempt at differentiating between today’s trends and queer lady culture is impossible because “Lesbians invented hipsters” (para 8). Burton lists organic communal farming, undercuts, messenger bags and androgynous clothing to highlight a few markers of hipster identity that have historically been iconic of lesbian culture. In her piece, Burton laments over the increased difficulty of recognizing lesbians as a result of popular fashion styles, while at the same time also being proud of living in a word with less “ballerina flats and Michael Kors handbags” (para 24). But what about the lesbians who like ballerina flats and Michael Kors handbags? Or, let me say knee-high boots and Marc Jacobs cross-bodies? Because I, like Burton, would happily see the aforementioned accessories disappear. But you get the point. Her happiness about the loss of feminine symbols coupled with her resentment over the loss of lesbian signifiers reiterates the fact that the two are not the same. Underlying her question about this brave new world that welcomes androgyny and her assumptions about queer identity is the belief all lesbians look the same and were once recognizable.

As I’ve mentioned, I have never been recognizable as a lesbian. And while I may agree that bikes as transportation and people getting angry over pesticides (and less ballerina flats) will do the world good, I resent her assumptions and her reiteration of what it means to look like a lesbian.

Burton concludes by stating, “I’m sorry. But mostly for myself. Because it’s harder to tell who’s queer now” (para 23). As someone who has a hard time being seen as queer, I am not sorry. Instead, I am thankful for my femme friend.

My femme friend Amber empowers me as a femme and as a lesbian. As fem(me)inine women we occupy similar spaces in the world and as friends we reflect our experiences to each other. Without popular culture representations, or any other representations that mirror who we are back to ourselves, we do that for each other. Amber and I understand each other as femme lesbians; we exist in a space of femininity as well as femme identity. We speak the same language of identity and share experiences that legitimate who we are as people. We nod to each other with common understandings and shared experiences. We are burdened by all that it means to be a feminine woman in the larger world and a femme woman in the gay world. We are the other within an already othered group. And like everyone else who has ever been an other of an other, we have found strength in the margins and in creating community – even if for now, for us, it’s a community of just two.

References

Burton, K. (2016). Hipsters Broke my Gaydar. The New York Times. December 31

Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

Douglas, E. (2004). Femme Fem(me)ininities: A Performative Queering. Thesis. Miami University

Duggan, L. & McHugh, K. (1996). A fe(me)inist Menifesto. Women & Performance, 8(2). 153-169

Galewski, E. (2005). Figuring the Feminist Femme. Women’s Studies in Communication. 28(2). 183-206

Gibson, M. & Meem, D. (2002). Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go. (Eds.). New York: Routledge

Halberstam J. (1998). Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP

Kennedy, E. L. (1997) The Hidden Voice: Fems in the 1940s and 1950s. in Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls. Edited by L. Harris and E. Crocker. New York: Routledge

Lizz (2011). You Need Help: Being the Visible Femme. Autostraddle. November 4. https://www.autostraddle.com/you-need-help-so-youre-femme-and-no-one-knows-youre-gay-120512/

Maltry, M. & Tucker, K. (2008) Female fem(me)ininities. Journal of Lesbian Studies. 6(2). 89-102

Phalen, P. (1993). Unmarked: the politics of performance. Routledge

Rubin, G. (2011). Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham: Duke UP

Shakti, A. (2016). How to Confront Femme Competition Within Polyamorous Relationships. Harlot Media. March 29. http://harlot.media/articles/664/how-to-confront-femme-competition-within-polyamorous-relationships

[1]I recognize that many LGBTQ people’s identities go unseen and that invisibility is not specific to femme identity. Many LGBTQ people perform gender in ways that do not call attention to their sexuality or gender performance; many LGBTQ do this, on purpose, for a variety of reasons (safety, family, profession) and some do it simply because it is who they are. Gender performances are as diverse as the reasons why they are performed; this paper focuses only on femme identity and femme invisibility.

#lesbian #femme #femme visibility #academic

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brush-haus-blog · 5 years

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Essay planning - reflective report

Within this reflective report, I will be discussing the research that I have conducted so far for the essay assigned within this module. The assignment is to write an essay in which we have chosen two of the methodologies talked about in our lectures and apply readings to two different art works to add context to the pieces. Moreover, this reflective report is also to allow me to reflect upon my previous work and how I can use my knowledge of writing them to aid me in writing my future assignments. If I am not able to look back at previous work and the feedback I received from it, then I am unable to improve my work much further.

In the first semester of my second year, I found it somewhat hard to adapt to the Art and Representation module, as the contents of the lecture was not just information about artists or about art movements. The content was largely to do with theories behind art history and historians that had thought that way, which I felt challenging to comprehend. I have never really done much research into philosophy and similar areas, therefore the concepts were foreign to me. However, with help from our lecturer and the discussions that we had with my course mates helped greatly, and allowed me to begin to understand how methodologies have a place in art history. Yet, whilst writing the essay for that module, which was a 2500 word essay on a contemporary artist, I still found it difficult to add deeper criticism to my work. This could be seen in my feedback, where my lecturer described my work as good, but it lacked deeper thought, and I included too much description of the artist and his work. I still got a high 2:1 for this essay, and believe that with some extra thought and planning, that I can get a 1st for this next essay. Because of this, for my next essay in this module, I am going to try to keep my descriptions of the artists and their work to a small minimum, and only include the necessary details. I am aiming to focus on describing the methodologies to ensure that I am understand them, before applying them to the work of the artists that I will be discussing.

My aim for this module is to continue having good attendance to the lectures, so I can fully understand all of the topics that we are covering. By doing this, I can then choose which methods and topics I want to use within my essay without worrying about not understanding them. I appreciate that our lectures have been quite in depth so far, and haven’t just covered a basic understanding of the topics. For example, I didn’t truly understand the overall concept of post-colonialism and the importance of the methodology, yet through the lecture I began to grasp the theory better than I had before. Furthermore, by reading the articles and books set for the lectures, this has helped me to understand the origins of the methodologies and how they have been applied in the context of art history. One example of this is the reading that we had for the biographical lecture, being the book Legend, myth, and magic in the image of the artist: a historical experiment by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz. By reading the chapter The heroization of the artist in biography (chapter 2), this helped me to understand why this method was so important to art historians. That looking back at an artist’s history and life could gain insight into why they created the works that they did. This reading helped me to begin thinking of all the different artists and works of art that I could use for my essay; however, I had not begun to realise a solid idea at this time. My plan was to think of as many ideas as possible, to brainstorm them until I found the right one for me. Through the lectures on Thursday mornings, my knowledge of artists, old and new, expanded thoroughly. Artists such as Gillian Wearing, Zanele Muholi, Pierre Molinier and Nan Goldin all interested me for different reasons, yet I couldn’t think of a good argument as to why pair two of these artists and then couple them with two different methodologies. I wanted to use two artists/artworks that were different from each other, yet still had enough similarities to compare from, so my essay didn’t seem as if I was just trying to grasp at straws for connections between them. If this were the case, the essay would end up being messy with little structure, whereas I would want it to flow easily and connect well. Being intrigued by Pierre Molinier’s work and thinking that I could link his work well to the feminist and LGBT+ methodologies, I began to research him and his work, however I couldn’t find much written about him academically. Whilst within my essay I would be largely discussing the methodologies, it would still be fruitful to have a plentiful knowledge on the artist and his works, and plenty of research to accompany it, such as journal articles and books. I decided against using Pierre Molinier’s work and continued looking at artists to make connections between. Initially, I wanted to use the methodology of psychoanalysis, as from completing an A level on the subject, I have been interested in psychology ever since. However, I have previously done essays and presentations using this methodology and thought not to use it again. Whilst I am able to do so, I wanted to push myself too, and not just do the same methodology or type of theory for every assignment. I see my university assignments as chances to explore different fields of work and research, and to prove that I can effectively write about many different topics. The only issue was, finding something I was interested in in different areas. During the lecture on feminism we received, a new field of work had been opened up to me. I typically tended to stay away from feminism as a subject to write about. Whilst in my day to day life, feminism and the happenings around it are very important to me, I feel as if the subject is already written about a lot. Whilst this doesn’t stop me from including my own opinions, I thought I would find it hard to find a subject to talk about that would still stand out and not be overshadowed by already published work, or the work of my peers. However, I was introduced to the work of Mickalene Thomas, who is a contemporary African-American artist. Her work, consisting of paintings and collages, typically examines the ideas surrounding feminism, race, sexuality and gender. After seeing her work, Sleep: Deux Femmes Noires, I felt the need to use this piece in my work. Not only, aesthetically, was the work different to most I have seen, that being that it is a collage and not a painting, but it also tackled the issues of black feminism, but also black lesbian women. I felt like this would be a perfect opportunity to talk about feminism and LGBT+ within my work and it still be relevant and fresh.

I began to think of many different artists, and how their work would be able to compare to Mickalene Thomas’s. Instead of only thinking about artists that had been discussed in the lecture PowerPoints thus far, I thought to any I knew previously to see if they could fit the feminist LGBT+ narrative I wanted to tell. I then remembered the artist David Hockney, an English artist who’s works often commented on homosexual relationships that reflected his own. Whilst he would easily fit the LGBT+ section of my essay, I didn’t initially know how any of his work would link into a feminist perspective. Personally, my favourite work of his is the painting titled

Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool

, largely due to the aesthetic nature of the work. However, I then realised I could use this as a gateway to talk about male feminism. My reasoning would be that throughout history, particularly in older paintings, that men are depicted as muscular and strong with little emotion showing. Yet in this painting, the figure of Peter has feminine curves and is posed in a somewhat flirtatious way, contrasting the typical stance of men in history. I feel like this is a good topic to discuss, as usually feminism is only about women, and sometimes about non-binary people. Whilst those topics are valid and still need to be discussed, encouraging men to be open and not typically masculine is just as important. Including feminism focused on men will also allow my essay to be different and more unique, which is what I like to keep consistent throughout my work.

With a solid idea in place, I began to research the artists and the methodologies to be used. In the past I have found it hard to locate academic sources, and therefore with this essay I am going to look for more substantial sources. I began my search using the university’s library, looking for books and articles on the artists and the methodologies. From this, I found a good few sources, such as

Mickalene Thomas

(D.Murray), an article about the artist and her work. By using sources about the artists and artworks I am using, I can write a more solid point about how they relate to the methodologies I have chosen.

I have also noticed that I work better when I print off a hard-copy and go through it, rather than just reading them online. This is because when I go through the hard-copy, I can use a highlighter to pick out important points to return to later, and even make notes on the paper next to certain areas. It also helps me to colour code the readings for the lectures, as well as the readings I am doing for my essay, as it helps to separate the points made in the papers.

For the rest of this essay, I am going to continue researching different areas for my essay, such as the feminist and LGBT+ methodologies I am going to use. This may also mean researching different methodologies like social history and biographical theories. This is because feminist and LGBT+ theories come under the umbrella term of social history and biographical. Therefore, I must have a good understanding of these methodologies before attempting to write an essay including them.

So far, I have been using the universities library, both using physical books and also articles and journals. I have also been using Jstor, which is a website database that holds many journal articles that, with a little more time spent on, I could locate many sources that I could use within my essay.

Within this report, I have identified the goal for my essay and the plan I have for it, such as the methodologies to be used and which artists/artworks I have chosen to incorporate. I have also picked out the areas in which I have to improve on in my essay in comparison to my previous essays. Therefore, I believe I have a good plan for my essay and should be successful in writing it

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buinhathahuong · 7 years

Text

The Problems Within The Lesbian Community in Vietnam

I first awared that I liked girls when I was 11. Unlike most lesbians’ experience when they first found out, I was not confused or felt bad about myself. Instead, I went to find people who were like me, attracted to girls, right away. Internet was my bestfriend. It was something I totally relied on, I trusted people who shared the same experience with me online rather than my own family. Of course I admitted that it was not a wise thing to do for me or any other 11 year old girls who has not yet gone through anything serious in life. But I was like the others, feeling alone and disconnected to “normal” people around us. Internet was a great thing to me, it brought me so much new information and details that I could never find in school or the enviroment that I lived in, especially with the lgbt themed films, writings, and art. I was really into an anime genre called “Yuri”, it focuses on the relationship between 2 females and I got to make new friends in the Yuri’s fandom. As I grew up, I was terrified to think whether my attraction was legitimate or I was just affected by the images I watched from those films. And I concluded I was not misconcepted about myself, but instead those animations helped me realized that my feelings were real, and that those kind of relationships do exist.

My parents eventually found I was active on a anime forum when I was 12. They were mad, they called me names, hit me, and banned me from using computer. I was upset and started to experience depression from then up until now, even I have officially come out to them and been accepted by my parents. But an other part of me felt grateful for what they did and thought they made the right choice to me even it was brutal. Being isolated was terrible, but I was having all the time in the world to reflect and understand myself better. There was nothing to influence me but myself alone. So at 14, I was able to access the internet thanks to my cousin’s Ipod that was given to me. I went back to all the forums that I spent my times on and feeling exciting to finally meet “my people” again. Instead of the joyful reunion that I imagined, I was like a foreigner wandering around the community that I was supposed to feel related the most.

Before the 2000s, there were not much information about the LGBT community in Vietnam. Then the internet happened. LGBT people who lived overseas or able to understand English started to translate any news they came across about the community and uploaded to forums so people could read about it. More people started to understand more about sexualities, new terms were met and applied to people from the community. I came across the terms identifying different types of lesbian when I was 11. Two notable words that are still not frequently used by lesbians are “soft butch” and “femme”. A “soft butch” is a homosexual female who likes to express her appearance more masculine and tend to dress male’s clothes. “Femme” in the other hand is a “normal” feminine girl who just happens to attract to females. Those terms would be fine and only used to describes the appearance of homosexual females if they were not used to determinate the individual’s role in a relationship, and even affacted the value a human being. Now, I have nothing against if a woman feels comfortable being boyish for I used to be one myself, and there is nothing wrong with that in the first place. I believe people should be allowed to dress and express themselves in anyway they want. The root of the problem is the Vietnamese culture and its views on gender identity.

Since Vietnam is heavily influenced by Confucianism, we still view sexes and genders as black and white. If you’re a man or a woman, you must dress in a certain social accepted way, act in certain ways, interest in certain things. If you just show a small sign related to the opposite gender to yours that is not what the society expecting from your gender, you will be view as less of a man or a woman. Vietnamese lesbians are still deeply depended on this cutural participate, therefore when one shows a sign of being more dominate than her significant, she will immediate think is her job to become “the man” in the relationship. She will cut her hair short, dress boyish, and act aggressively. She will also try to show her emotions less since “men should not show their emotions”. Since femmes still fits the idea of a feminine woman, they play the role of the woman in the relationship and they are expected to be submissive to the soft butch or the other more dominating lesbian. This makes women are not only being oppressed by men in Eastern culture, but also by other women. Some can argue that if this way may works for their relationship or just for themselves personally then there is nothing to criticize. Why I agree that I am in no place to tell others what to do with their relationship. But this does not stay in a personal level, this problem has been affecting the whole community for a long time and it has made it way to become what considers the standard of a lesbian relationship. These standards are harmful especially for young lesbians who just start to discover themselves, this makes them instead of trying to understand what they want, they lock themsselves in the stereotype boxes.

When I was just starting to learn more about my community, I knew that I disliked to be told what to do by others and wanted to control my ownself. I also did not feel comfortable wearing dresses and having long hair was annoying. I then assumpted those signs meaned that I was a soft butch and then tried to fit the stereotype of the soft butch image back then. It was until I hit 13, I realized I was too “girly” to be a soft butch, I stopped trying to be one. I still kept my short hair and dressing tomboyish up until 18. The more I grew, the more I felt the comfy from my femininity. But not many lesbians experienced the same way as I did. When I went through some fanpages on Facebook for lesbians recently, I have seen some butch lesbians trying to tell others what is the right way to be “a man”, how to treat your “woman” right. Physical and emotional abuse exists among the lesbian relatioships, soft butches abuse and hit their feminine girlfriends to show their domination. They consider the numbers of the girl they sleep with as their pride. The more girls they have slept with, the more valuable they are. Soft butches criticize other soft butches for being to girly. Femmes laugh at soft butches who are not the dominant one in their relationship. It was and is still a mess. You can easily find these people at shopping mall in district 5 and 3, walking together as groups, and the securities watching them cautionly fearing they might steal something from the stores. I remembered hanging out with my cousin when she was going to study abroad. A shop keeper used a male pronounce to call me, when I told them I am a girl, they were surprised. Vietnamese lesbians also feel that the concept of a “soft butch-soft butch” couple or a “femme-femme” couple are weird, and they came up with ridiculous terms such as “soft butch gay” or “femles” to describe those people. But isn’t lesbian is about a realtionship between 2 homosexual females? Aren’t soft butches and femmes females? Why are we imprisoned ourselves and reinforce the gender role stereotypes instead of trying to break free from it? This misconception is not just within the lesbian community. Society view those “standards” as what a lesbian is supposed to be, other GBT community view those standards as what lesbians are supposed to be. You can easily see those lesbian stereotypes in news about lesbian. Even in literature such as “Bóng”, an biography by Hoang Nguyen, in which he describes a butch lesbian as “a sloppy, dirty, misbehave man in a woman’s body”. Or in a fiction book called “Les-Thế Giới Không Có Đàn Ông”, roughly translated to “Les-A World Without Man” by writer Bùi Anh Tấn, it still portrayed a gender role based lesbian couple. It is like a circle, we keep wandering around and around, and will never find the way out. And it is not just me, many lesbians I know and talked with also find this mindset is problematic.

Moving on to 2011, a new era of lesbianism started with the rise of a new literature genre called Bách Hợp. Bách Hợp means relationship occurs between 2 females who are not necessary lesbians. They can be lesbian, bisexual, or even pansexual as long as they are in a same sex relationship. The upside in this era is femininity started to be more appreaciated. Homosexual women were being encourage to be feminine rather than forcing the image of a man to themselves, and that was the only good thing. Being feminine does not stop the mind set of applying gender role into the relationship. Gender roles are not as visible like in the soft butch-femme era, but it is still heavily influenced. The people who have “Bách Hợp” mindset like to criticize any lesbian that looks to much like a man, they hate the heterosexual pronounce in the romance relationship, but yet they still believe in dominant and submissive roles. New terms were adapted, “Công” is used for someone who is for someone who is more dominate in the relationship, “Thụ” is used for the passive one. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Yes, it is still the same stuffs just with longer hair. “Công” is always preffered by others since they are the active one in bed rather than the one who just lie their on their back and “enjoy” everything. The lesbian’s value is now being measured based on what a person’s position on bed. And like the mainstream lesbian culture, they can never comprehense how can 2 Công or 2 Thụ can be together. There is nothing progressive in this new era nor it contributes anything good to the community.

The mainstream lesbians and Bách Hợp lesbians think they are different, but actually they are the same. They both still views feminity or woman’s role as a sign of weakness, and only with masculinity or man’s trait is considered strong. While I may sound like I’m blaming everything on men, it is not like that. Like I have mentioned about how Vietnamese culture is influenced heavily by Confucianism and gender roles, Vietnamese women or Asian women in general tend to be looked down by society. Lesbians, like any other people, were raised with conservative mindset by our parents. Maculinity was always being held higher by society compares to feminity, and no one likes to be considered weak. This also happens in the gay community as well, where masculine gay men are always get more respected by not just heterosexual people but also the gays themselves. And it is not just gay and lesbian, straight males, straight women are all being affacted. It is not only men’s fault but women’s as well, it is our fault to keep participate to this misogynist culture.

Things got better when organization like ICS or Hanoi Queer appeared. The people who run and work for these organization are well informed by progressive thoughts and mindsets. They are the most active one to raise awareness about sexuality and gender identities to the community, also pointing out the gender stereotypes that exists within the Vietnamese LGBT culture. They held events, talkshow, discussion events. They created other organization such as Rainbow School, focus on creating club and a safe enviroment for LGBT students. For the first time, lesbians have some places to go to meet and exchange opinions to eachother. Of course not all lesbians have the privillege to come to those events, but it is a great start for lesbian community. Liberal lesbians started to be more active and raised their voices about lesbian’s issues. They advocate on breaking stereotypes and gender roles, while still being respectful to other people’s choice of relationship and identity. But as much as I appreciate their work, as I have volunteered to some of their events, I still see some problems in their ideology when it comes to lesbian identity and LGBT community in general. As liberal and pro-choice, they seems to be accepting to every new ideaology just a bit too quick. I got a chat with 20 year old lesbian when she said that “lesbians can still enjoy having sex with men”. Her reason was “All humans l enjoy sex. If you blindfold someone and let a person simulated sexual act on their body without the blindfoled person knowing what gender the other is, that person will get turned on, therefore they enjoy it”. I pointed out to her that of course that person will get turned on, it is like when you get hit and you feel hurt, it is body’s reaction. And when that person was blindfolded, he or she already lost their consciousness about the enviroment about them, they will get turned on if being simulated. But when you take the blindfold away, that person will gain back their awareness. When they see the person who just praticed sex act on them is someone they are not sexually attracted to, they will immidiately feel uncomfortable and violated. That is how sexuality works, it is the awareness of who you find attracted to. And even if that person is someone they are sexually attracted to, they will still feel violated because that person acts without their consent. Her example was awful. As we talked more, she went on and blamed on all the labels and thought they should not be exists. Ironically, she labeled herself as a lesbian. What she did not realize, it was not the labels’ fault but the person who chose to use those labels. There were a lot of conflicts in what she said in her debate, I could write another 3000 words just to analyze them. It would have not been a big problem if she was irrelevant to the LGBT community, but she was an active member and contributor to the Hanoi Queer, the biggest LGBT organization in the North. This frightened me in many levels, I wondered what have they taught to their members and other LGBT people. How many unreliable informations were spread?

But that girl was not the one who made me become skeptic to these organization. ICS was the first thing that made me realized I could not just trust anything that this organization said. But this one is more subjective to my own opinion than the other one and it is sensitive to today’s issues. Beside from not agreeing with them for the not accept but not against incest, I do not believe in transgenderism, and in no way approve that a transwoman who attracted to women should be consider lesbian. But I support that they deserve to have human rights since I can never get what they have gone through. Even I have some transgender friends in real life, but I have to admit it does not make me less of a transphobe. Just when it comes to my own identity, I do not want it to be taken away from me. Liberal lesbians’ arguement was simple, a transwoman is a woman due to her gender identity, therefore when she’s attracted to other women, it makes her a lesbian. Some would go far enough to call any lesbians who refuse to date transwomen even if they look like a real woman a.k.a feminine, “transphobe”. But lesbians are homosexual females, they are romantically and sexually attracted to same sex people. Transwomen’s gender might be women, but their biological sex are not. Feminity does not make a woman, her womanhood and experiences in life is. Using gender expression to determinate someone’s gender identity is nothing but reinforcing gender stereotypes which we are trying to break. Why hijacking lesbian’s identity after we have invented nearly a dozens of sexualilties? The problems with liberal lesbians are the most dangerous to lesbianism even if they have been sugarcoated by what the contributed to the community. They are changing and erasing lesbian’s identity. I would willing to support making a new terms for homosexual females just to stay true to our identity. All the phases and eras we have been through, we are just taking one step foward but two steps back. We have been skipping to many steps instead trying to make things right from the start.

After 3 years exposing to feminism and comprehensing opinions from liberal views when I was 18. At the age of 21, my mindset is set back to when I did not know about feminism. I am now considering myself as a moderate but leaning just a bit to the right. Some of my other liberal queer friends called me “conservative” due to my view on transgenderism. But if being conservative means sticking to my own ideas and still willingly to listen to other ideologies and see if I can shift my view to be more open-minded, then I’m happy to be one. I am not alone, there are actually a lot of lesbians like me out there, but they prefer to stay silence. But as the development of social network, I started to see some of lesbians who have the same mindset as mine started to speak up. The world is still changing and maybe we can find balance for eachother.

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