Figuring Femme

Abstract

Abstract Approaching femme as a figuration, a political fiction that merges critique of the here-and-now with an ethics of affirmation, driven by desires for an elsewhere/otherwise, the article engages in an experimental – autophenomenographic, poetic, and philosophical – figuring process. The aim is to foreground critical-affirmative potentials of femme and femme-inism in queer and posthumanist perspectives. Starting from a poem that spells out the author’s process of becoming-femme, the article establishes a conversation between the poem’s personal framing and theoretical interventions, selected from archives of critical posthumanist, queer, philosophy in the feminine, transgender and femme theory. The figuring process is based on a vignette methodology. Each of the poem’s stanzas give rise to a vignette, linking the poetic images with resonating theory fragments stitched together to an assemblage. Rather than as an attempt to synthesize a seamlessly interwoven theorization of femme, the figuring process is a meditation on the assembling of unruly fragments.