Феминность в лесбийской идентичности: история и современность.

Identity for lesbians, with feminine characteristics

Femme (/f//ɛ//m/; fam, literally meaning "woman") is a term traditionally used to describe a lesbian woman who exhibits a feminine identity or gender presentation. While commonly viewed as a lesbian term, alternate meanings of the word also exist with some non lesbian individuals using the word, notably some gay men and bisexuals. According to some academic studies about the butch/femme subculture, "Femmes were sometimes bisexual." Derived from American lesbian communities following World War II when women joined the work force,
By the 1990s, the term femme had additionally been adopted by bisexual women. Arlene Istar Lev argues that through their subversive appropriation of heteronormative gender roles, these identities were considered "complex erotic and social statements" rooted in "gendered erotic identities". Nestle states that they publicly declared same sex love between women at a time when there was no liberation movement to support or protect them, and adds that "in the 1950s particularly, butch femme couples were the front line warriors against sexual bigotry. Because they were so visible, they suffered the brunt of street violence. The irony of social change has made a radical, sexual, political statement of the 1950s appear today a reactionary, non feminist experience." Many bisexual women also active in the lesbian community felt pressured to identify as "lesbian", resulting in bisexual erasure factoring into the history of femme identities. This is further impacted by the fact that bisexual communities and the related bisexual movement did not formalize until the 1970s.

During the 1990s and the emergence of the lipstick lesbian identity into the mainstream, femme became a catch all term to describe a feminine lesbian. Citing research from the 1990s, Levitt and Bridges stated that the terms butch and femme "began infiltrating bisexual communities, and women began writing about their experiences as bisexual femmes", but also that "very little empirical research has been conducted looking at the expression and experience of gender expression and gender identity within bisexual women." Some research has indicated that butches are more likely to be exclusively lesbian, while femmes are sometimes bisexual. Praising the publication of Ivan Coyote's Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme in 2011, Bornstein said, "The butch/femme dynamic is a conscious, loving binary of desire and trust it's a dance of love and outlawed romance. Butches and femmes share a sense of tribe, extended family and kinship—no matter what our genders might be." Since the late 2010s, influenced by the emergence of queer and transgender culture on sites such as Tumblr, Everyday Feminism, and Autostraddle, femme has been expanded to describe feminine people across gender and sexuality categories including heterosexual women, cisgender men and transfeminine people. The postmodern queer conception of femme is a femme identified person who does not always dress or act in a "traditionally feminine" (meaning a feminine aesthetic, such as wearing makeup, heels, and numerous accessories) way, but who expresses femme identity through feminine associated behaviours, interactions and political views. Rather than an erotic identity rooted in lesbian women's culture, queer femme has been reframed into a political identity that is inclusive of all who wish to identify with it, feminine presenting or not. As femme has moved into the mainstream, it has also been connected to notions of emotional labor, witchcraft and self empowerment. Based on the understanding of femme as describing a person (not necessarily a woman) who presents femininely, the expression "women and femmes" is sometimes used, but it has been criticized as conflating two different categories of identity. Femme has also been used to describe a form of contemporary feminism which rejects the gender binary and acknowledges that individuals can fall anywhere within the gender spectrum, resulting in the possibility to be gender less, gender fluid, femme or masculine of center. Often using the phrase "women and femmes", adherents to this definition of femme believe that misogyny is used not only against women to inflict theoretical and physical violence but primarily against all feminine people. Connecting cisgendered male violence to toxic masculinity, they believe that patriarchy not only negatively affects female identified people but men as well. The term femme is also essential to ballroom culture through the terms butch queen and femme queen, denoting a gay man and transgender woman respectively.

By the 1990s, the term femme had additionally been adopted by bisexual women. Citing research from the 1990s, Levitt and Bridges stated that the terms butch and femme "began infiltrating bisexual communities, and women began writing about their experiences as bisexual femmes", but also that "very little empirical research has been conducted looking at the expression and experience of gender expression and gender identity within bisexual women." It has however also been argued by bi+ and other queer activists that since the term bisexual is relatively newer than lesbian, and the term bisexual as a sexual orientation only began to take shape in the mid 19th century, bisexual women historically once formed part of the lesbian community and thus used the term femme as a sub group of lesbians. This argument posits that the claim that only women with no attraction to men have identified as femmes is ahistoric. While today there is a common consensus that the term lesbian refers to women who exclusively feel attraction towards women and femmes, the term has carried various changing implications and expansive interpretations throughout history, particularly with the rise of political lesbianism in 1979. Hence, the adoption of femme by bisexuals in the 1990s is considered by some to be a re adoption by a portion of the same community following the distinction between lesbians and bisexual women and the lesbian separatist movement of the 1970s.

Theorists have used aesthetics to analyze and addresses the evolution of the word "femme" throughout the 21st century. Femme theorist Andi Schwartz uses comparisons of modern and historical associations of the femme identity to outline "soft femme theory." She asserts that in the mid to late 20th century, "femme" was used to describe rough, badass women. Today, however, especially on social media, the word "femme" is used to describe the "soft, sad girl" trope that is commonly seen online and in trending fashions. While Schwartz offers a critique of this aesthetic and the erasure of pre internet femme identities, she also considers how "performing softness" as an identifier for femininity, both on and offline, can be effective in transgressing hegemonic gender norms.

From the 70s through 90s, gay male culture included the phrase "No Fats, No Femmes", and that persists in queer dating culture today. Constrained by character limitations on gay hookup apps such as Grindr and Scruff, "fem", "femm", and "femme" are used as an abbreviation for feminine. The ubiquitous phrase "No Fats, No Fems", indicating that a user does not want to be contacted by men of a certain size or feminine men, has been challenged by some in the gay community for perpetuating homonormative beauty ideals. "Fem" is used as a descriptor of one's appearance or mannerisms.

Partly in response to the controversy which emerged regarding which communities are entitled to use femme as a personal identity, as well as in recent efforts to carve out unique bisexual identifiers, bi terms were proposed as equivalents to butch and femme among other gender expressions and presentations. This largely arose in 2016 on the social media and blogging website Tumblr. The term coined for a feminine bisexual woman is “doe”, while “stag” signifies masculinity and “tomcat” represents androgyny. However this bi specific lingo never caught on as much as the more widely known “butch” and “femme”, even amongst the bisexual community itself, and one would be hard pressed to find a bisexual who identifies as such offline. These neologisms quickly fell out of favor with some in the bisexual community in online discourse, particularly with women of color and other BIPOC, as many found the animal based terms to be demeaning, dehumanizing, and historically fraught.

The contemporary queer concepts of femme have been challenged by lesbians who still use the term based on its original meaning. With concern about the erasure of lesbian culture and history, it has been argued that taking a term from an already marginalised society is a form of misogynist appropriation that undervalues lesbian identities, history and women's autonomy to self identify outside patriarchal structures. In her paper, Femme Theory: Refocusing the Intersectional Lens, femme theorist Rhea Hoskin offers an intersectional framework of femme theory and addresses the capabilities of subversive femininities. She uses an intersectional lens to address discourse surrounding femme phobia and the ways in which this issue is not taken seriously as a form of oppression within the queer community and especially in academic feminist queer spaces.