June Cleaver : Femme Friend or Femme Foe

[aishah]

In constructing femme as performative and ironic, we exclude femmes whose identities are not experienced as transgressive.

the issue i have with this is that - people whose identities are not experienced as transgressive are visible and celebrated already. the rest of us aren't. the reason my identity is transgressive is because i am marginalized - not because i am going out of my way to "perform" femme as something transgressive. i didn't ask to live in a society where being a sex worker is transgressive, for example, but i do. and i do sex work out of economic necessity, not to be performative or ironic.

i don't know. i'm really really trying to understand, and i found what you shared to be extremely thought provoking, and for that i am grateful. but i am struggling to wrap my mind around it.

there are scary and heteronormative parts of my life. i like it when my butch opens doors for me. and i love to bake. but i bake with money i bought with food stamps and then go feed homeless people. or working class folks who come to the sliding scale acupuncture clinic where i work. or at potlucks. sort of far removed from the 1950s housewife baking scene. i covered my hair for years and dressed really conservatively...that's rather scary and heteronormative, i suppose. i embrace those parts of myself.

my issue isn't wanting to exclude people who have identities or values or things they enjoy that fall within the realm of heteronormativity. it's that - when we talk about holding people up as icons or ideals - i feel like we need to have some sort of analysis around the fact that the ideal of the 1950s housewife has been used to marginalize many women, especially working class, poor, and non-white women.

no one should be excluded. but whose voices and experiences are we choosing to center? i choose to center the voices and experiences of disabled folks, sex workers, people who are working class and poor, indigenous & poc, women and/or gender non-conforming folks, because there are so few spaces where our voices and experiences are centered. it sucks that some people feel that that means they are excluded because they don't fall within those categories - i deeply love all of the people in my life, regardless of how they identify. but many of the privileged folks in my life also have a lot of support and they can turn on the tv and see people like them and have role models that look like them and they don't have to worry about how they are going to get medical care or food or about being arrested because of working. the society i live in centers the voices and experiences of people who have privilege. so when i think about where i want my priorities to be, i prioritize and celebrate (and idolize) people in my life who are transgressive.

thank you so much for posting your paper. i'm still sorting through things and it's bringing up a lot for me (and making me think really deeply).

edited to add - i do definitely get the whole - if you aren't x then you aren't queer/femme enough issue. for me at least, especially when i went through a period of being celibate and abstaining from alcohol and dressing conservatively, i often felt awkward in queer community because i wasn't drinking or having sex or wearing provocative clothing, for example. and because i looked pretty heteronormative (as a muslim). i was lucky enough to be around queer folks (many of whom were also muslim, and who dressed differently and did all sorts of different things) where i eventually felt embraced regardless of what i wore or ate or drank or who i slept with (or didn't). and i was able to come to make decisions based on what i wanted to do versus how i was afraid people would perceive me or whether or not i would fit in. i think it's really problematic when we start saying that people HAVE to look or act a certain way to be femme. could someone be a housewife a la june cleaver and be femme? absolutely. do i think june cleaver is a femme icon? no. (at least, vehemently NOT for me.)

[Martina]

We may be talking at cross-purposes. I don't know. I think most of what you say is a given. We start from there. But we don't go on to assert an ID so unique that we lose our ability to recognize ourselves in others.

One of the interesting essays I read -- and I mentioned it -- was by a sex worker who did not claim femme until she read an article by a femme about her straight mother. Now her mother was NOT traditional. Sex positive, working class, tough. But the thing was that it was this person's ability to connect to the story of a STRAIGHT woman that helped her with her queer ID. And, of course, Nestle used her mother's experiences to help her stand up against the dykes who were criticizing her as a femme who liked to be fucked by butches. I don't want to separate myself from the examples and experiences of other feminine women.

gotta go. a pot luck awaits. how lesbian is that?

[JustJo]

Thank you for posting that Martina....a lot of it resonated for me. Not coincidentally, the part about Sheiner's experience of becoming more comfortable with her femininity and her femme self and less troubled by issues of invisibility and passing, as she ages.

I am so there.

I feel like I'm rounding a corner in my life where I just am who I am. I'm comfortable with it. I'm not changing to suit anyone anymore. I don't care if I am invisible as a femme. I don't care if I'm femme enough, feminine enough, tall, short, skinny, fat enough. I just don't care.

I am me. And I am comfortable with me. I'm also comfortable with everyone else being who they are. It feels good.

[princessbelle]

One more thing i wanna say but i don't want to interrupt the flow here and how it is going so i'm just penciling this in as a side note..

Thoughts today about how this topic keeps coming up in different places here and why, personally, i take such a heated heart (for lack of a better term) when the 50s are brought up as "all that" and how it was "so much better" yada yada..

Is IMO from MY view...has a lot to do with my mother. She did that. She was that. She WAS oppressed. She is a beautiful loving being that i am so thankful to have in my life. But. She missed out on a lot. Especially since my dad died some 14 years ago, she has opened up a lot to me about her dreams. She had dreams just like anyone else. She wanted to be a school teacher, she wanted to pursue her art, she wanted to travel. She didn't get a chance to do that.

I wonder, to myself sometimes, if she had been in my era. What she would have become. What would June Cleaver have been. What would have so many women, of all colors and ethnic background back then, been like today or what things they would have done to help and change the world. They were the most amazing women to go through that oppression and come through it. They didn't have choices. We may have had a female president by now. Who knows.

Anyway, just sharing why i get my panties twirled at times about "the good ole days". I personally feel women were cheated out on life. And besides making me mad. He makes me so terribly sad.