Queer Femininity Research Articles

Cyd Sturgess, Different from the Others: German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire, 1918-1940

Cyd Sturgess, Different from the Others: German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire, 1918-1940

Different from the Others: German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire, 1918–1940

Different from the Others: German and Dutch Discourses of Queer Femininity and Female Desire, 1918–1940

“Sky-high, matte black faux snakeskin heals”: Femininity, clothes, and humor in Jacob Tobia’s Sissy

The article traces the interweaving of femininity, clothes, and humor in Jacob Tobia’s 2019 memoir Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story. It first discusses the societal devaluation of the femme and queer femininity Tobia textually constructs. It then argues that in Sissy, this femininity is enacted primarily through clothes, which appear as a symbol and a proxy for the protagonist’s identity, a source of embodied pleasures, and an organizing element of the narrative. Finally, the article demonstrates that Tobia employs humor to counter the devaluation targeting their kind of femininity, and to reclaim this femininity as a site of pride, resilience, and joy.

Oceans, Archives, Perverts

This study follows the oceanic routes of female migrant laborers as a way to reconsider the geographies of queer theory through the colonial port city. In so doing, the author highlights feminized forms of migrant labor, including sex work and care work, as a central facet of the history of sexuality beyond the nation-state. This history begins in the 1920s and 1930s, when the League of Nations sponsored a massive investigation into international sex trafficking, through surveillance of port cities across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. These investigations reveal the ways that female migrant laborers were constructed as nonnormative sexual subjects, both through their transient status as citizens and for performing reproductive labors outside the context of the white nuclear family. In this way, the league investigation offers an early case study for technologies attending to the biological specificity necessary to detain individuals at the border. This biometric archive lays the groundwork for a theorization of queer femininity, often ignored by historians of sexuality focused on the criminalization of sodomy. Through attention to an early biometric database, rather than criminal archives, what follows offers a geography of feminized labor and queer femininity based across a transoceanic network of port cities. A consideration of sex work in the midcentury novel, including Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark and J. G. Farrell's Singapore Grip, more closely establishes the biometric and aesthetic categories used to construct female sexual deviance at the midcentury.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

We Flesh: Musser, Spillers, and Beyond the Phenomenological Body

Not all homo sapiens are human subjects. This paper explores the lived experience of homo sapiens but not human that I call “lived flesh.” A lived experience/distinction that shouldn’t be possible on Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm.” The use of flesh is deliberate and emerges from my engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” through Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Hortense Spillers’ “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” and “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Amber Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The affective, experiential, and ethical practices of american Blackwomxn in these texts problematize Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity and his account of the generality of Being (“The Intertwining – The Chiasm”). Merleau-Ponty’s effacement of raced, sexed, and gendered difference results in a construct of the human subject that cannot include all homo sapiens.

Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

The Sedgwickian Queerness of an Anime Lesbian: Reading Revolutionary Girl Utena

A tentative response to Eve Sedgwick's timely question "How to bring your kids up gay?" lies at the heart of Kunihiko Ikuhara's anime TV series Shōjo Kakumei Utena (1997). This article explores the affective sustenance that Revolutionary Girl Utenaoffers to some queer children and teens in the face of a somber heteronormative reality. This essay performs a close reading of Episode seven "Unfulfilled Juri", and it focuses on one of the queer feminine formations that the show cultivates, the tragic (joyful) anime lesbian. Paradoxically, and fortunately, the anime lesbian far from being an abject figure, becomes a site for queer identificatory projections and desires.

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

QUEER FEMINITY MULTIMODAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS ON WEB SERIES BOUNDARIES: CONFINING OR FREEING(?)

This study attempts to explain and dissect the position of queer femininity in the gender order constellation in the context of queer in Indonesia, exploring the position of queer femininity on the Batas web series. Analysis of multimodal discourse from the perspective of Kress and van Leeuwen with terminologies; representational meaning, interactive meaning and compositional meaning, shows that queer femininity discourse within Batas explains the shifting and blurring of boundaries between subject-object and active-passive which always refers to rigid masculine and feminine binary. Queer femininity discourse in Batas shows that femininity is not monolithic. A queer perspective can provide a subversive position, negotiate and resist the dominant discourse. On the other hand, it shows the idealized codes of heterosexual discourse, patriarchy and media.
 Keywords: Queer, Femininity, Discourse, Multimodal, Webseries

The ‘Good Indian Queer Woman’ and the Family: Politics of Normativity and Travails of (Queer) Representation

ABSTRACT Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (dir. Shelly Chopra Dhar, 2019) is touted as the mainstream commercial venture that cemented Bollywood’s journey from creating queer homosocial and homoerotic moments on screen to representing a queer relationship between two women for the first time. This paper tries to understand how the film’s liberal messaging about queer acceptance and anti-discrimination, through the coming out narrative of its queer protagonist, is made possible through the embodiment of sanitized class and caste markers, how Indian queer femininity is encoded in the film and what its relationship with the heteronormative biological family reveals about the film’s messaging. It also tries to explore the figuration of Sweety, an upper-class feminine queer woman in small town Moga (in the North Indian state of Punjab), who is portrayed as the quintessentially ‘good’ queer woman. Even though Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga offers a queer visual and imaginative landscape, it limits itself by constructing discursive, narrative, and visual terrains where Sweety’s dissidence is deemed acceptable on grounds of her class privilege, her reverence for her family, her respectable femininity, and the embeddedness of her queer subjectivity in the family and culture. This paper interrogates the nature of queer representation in the film, how it tackles anxieties around acculturation, queer opposition to the nation-state and the visual and narrative means by which it domesticates queerness by sanitizing and inviting it into culture, family, nationalism and the nation-state.

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Femme Migritude

This article examines the queer feminist Afro-Asian poetics and politics of spoken word and performance artist Shailja Patel’s 2006 onewoman show and 2010 prose poem, both titled Migritude. Patel’s migritude poetics resonates with and departs from much contemporary migritude writing, particularly with respect to the genre’s focus on a global-North-based, black Atlantic African diaspora. The article draws attention to a “brown Atlantic,” in which Africa is the site both of diaspora and of homeland. More important, it shows that Patel’s queer femininity unsettles a diasporic logic of racial exceptionalism. This logic aids and abets a (black) native/(South Asian) migrant divide in colonial and postcolonial Kenya. Patel’s femme migritude, as I call it, draws on nonequivalent histories of black and Asian racialized dispossession to construct a mode of global-South, cross-racial political relationality.

Making intelligible the controversies over femme identities: A functionalist approach to conceptualizing the subversive meanings of femme genders

Quite a number of heated arguments have been put forth in the controversy about the meanings and appropriate uses of femme identities. In this article, the authors apply a functionalist theoretical framework, developed to explicate the links between gender and gender identities, to reframe the disputes about femme gender. They position two femme identities as responding to distinctive forms of oppression—one that centralizes the affirmation of gender diversity in the face of cisgenderism, and one that centralizes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) femininity to counter femmephobia. They consider the subversive functions of the two identities in terms of unmet needs across four domains. These needs include the need for authenticity in identity (psychological domain); for the prizing of socially devalued characteristics (cultural domain); for security and affiliation (interpersonal domain); and for aesthetic desirability rather than shame (sexual domain). Instead of seeing the two femme identities as at odds, they see them as serving some shared functions, but also distinctive functions in resisting stigma of varied forms. The framework can be applied to other forms of femme-inity (and other genders) to distinguish the varied meanings inherent in gender identities and facilitate research that advances gender theory.

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla Musser

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla Musser

Why femme stories matter: Constructing femme theory through historical femme life writing

We argue that historical femme life writing forms a rich resource for femme theory that contributes to, challenges, and extends contemporary academic femme literature. We focus on the experiences of femmes during the second-wave feminist movement, specifically within the context of 1970s and 1980s U.S. lesbian feminism. The texts we examine include My Dangerous Desires by Amber Hollibaugh (2000), A Restricted Country by Joan Nestle (1987), Minnie Bruce Pratt’s (1995) S/he, and selections from The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Nestle (1992). Informed by Clare Hemmings’ (2011) and Victoria Hesford’s (2013) critiques that past feminisms are often retold using reductive narratives, we (re)read this femme life writing to foreground the ways in which femmes have historically troubled and resisted monolithic accounts of lesbian feminism, lesbian identities, femininity, and sexuality. By centering queer feminine voices from this period to highlight major themes of this life writing, and drawing on Andi Schwartz’s (2018) positioning of femme cultural production as a basis for theory, we argue that earlier iterations of queer femininities are relevant to and important for contemporary femme theory. Ultimately, we analyze what historical femme life writing reveals about the place of femininity within the lesbian and feminist communities of their time, how these dynamics inform current perceptions of queer and femme politics, and how femmes resist their cultural and critical marginalization.

Review of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla Musser (NYU Press)

In <i>Sensual Excess,</i> Amber Jamilla Musser develops an epistemological project that calls into question modes of producing knowledge around black and brown bodies, especially in relationship to femininity and queerness. In doing so, she interrogates the kind of racialized understandings of femininity produced by what Hortense Spillers has called "pornotroping" in order to draw a contrast to something Musser calls "brown jouissance." She is looking for those places where fleshly experience exceeds the ideological constraints of the pornotropic image, developing an epistemology based not on the visual, but on the affective experiences of the flesh. In doing so she analyzes Lyle Ashton Harris’s <i>Billie #21</i> (2002), Judy Chicago’s <i>The Dinner Party</i> (1979), Kara Walker’s <i>A Subtlety</i> (2014), Mickalene Thomas’s <i>Origin of the Universe 1</i> (2012), Cheryl Dunye’s <i>Mommy is Coming</i> (2012), Amber Hawk Swanson and Sandra Ibarra’s <i>Untitled Fucking</i> (2013), Carrie Mae Weems’s <i>From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried</i> (1995–1996), Nao Bustamantes’s <i>Neapolitan</i> (2003), and Maureen Catabagan’s <i>Crush</i> (2010–2012).

Bicha travesti worldmaking: Linn da Quebrada's disidentificatory performances of intersectional queerness

Abstract Brazil has one of the highest rates of violence against trans people in the world. It is in this context of dehumanization that the work of self-identified Black travesti artist Linn da Quebrada emerges. In this article, I analyse Linn da Quebrada's performances in three of the artist's official music videos, all released in 2016: 'Talento', 'Enviadescer' and 'Bixa Preta'. After briefly introducing the ideas of embodied translation and disidentifications, I analyse Linn da Quebrada's survival strategies in terms of simultaneous rejection of cis-masculinity and the embracing of queer femininity, resulting in a bicha travesti worldmaking; a world in which travestis of colour are fully human. Ultimately, Linn da Quebrada's disidentificatory performances concomitantly suggest a mode of survival and a vehicle for structural change, both of which deserve close consideration from scholars interested in queer transnational contexts.

Beyond the visible: Rethinking femininity through the femme assemblage

While there has been much focus on the disempowering and incapacitating effects of ‘normative’ femininity, less attention has been paid to the queer possibilities of femininity. Queer femme has been proposed by some as a key site for rethinking femininity. Extending upon these discussions, and drawing on interviews conducted with queer femmes in Australia in 2013, this article proposes focusing on affective dimensions to deepen our understanding of queer femme as more than an identity, but rather, as assemblage Working from the basis of assemblage, this article examines exactly how and why femme bodies queer femininity. However the article also argues that where queer femme discourse distances itself from non-femme, or ‘normative’, femininity, it misses an opportunity for advocating for a different approach to gender presentation within a broader collective. The central argument of this article is that from an affective theory of queer femme as assemblage, we can better understand both queer femme identity and the attachments to femininity that people maintain more generally, without relying on a binary logic that proclaims femininity as only disempowering or empowering, queer or not queer enough.

Femmebodiment: Notes on queer feminine shapes of vulnerability

In a time when worlds, communities and subjects are increasingly presented as ‘vulnerable’, much remains to be said about the distinctly feminine shapes of ‘vulnerability’; weakness, softness, permeability, a sense of being affected, imprinted upon, or entered and shattered. While this presumed vulnerability of the feminine body has often been the basis of feminist sexual politics, feminist goals of autonomy often presume an internal and external undoing of vulnerability as such. Drawing on ethnographic research with queer femmes and building on Sara Ahmed’s (2004a) idea that vulnerability is a ‘particular kind of bodily relation to the world’, this experimental article challenges the popularised idea that to queer femininity requires action, intention, agency and strength. Extending the work of femme authors Dorothy Allison and Ann Cvetkovich, the article considers the cracks in such femme politics, and focuses on how femme feelings of vulnerability take shape and figure in movements, and become what sticks between femme bodies of flesh and knowledge. Attending to the sensuous canvas of skin, to high-heeled movement and desire for both sex and sisterhood, these are notes on the work of affect in what is here called femmebodiment towards a somatechnical understanding of femininity.