Footings

Before going into Joan Nestle's "The Fem Question" I want to respond to the L word comment in the course blog.

There seems to be this inability to escape from dominant parent culture. At what point do you stop struggling and make a home for yourself in what you have. I am not advocating we submit to patriarchy, merely that we not dismiss our parent cultures entirely, afterall we did stem from them.

Aureliano credits shows like "The L Word" to the radicals of the 70s because they were able to "break the essentialist model of womanhood." So we break the model, the radical lesbian emerges, unhindered from societies restrictions (for the most part). What makes them different from one another? To answer this I found a video clip which attempts to summarize the variety of characters on Showtime's "The L Word."



Going a little deeper into a few of the characters. Criticism of lesbians, especially those falling into the Butch/Fem identification accuses them of recreating the patriarichal relationships they "worked so hard to break out of." With women's sexual liberation came the gradual acceptance of women's sexual promiscuity. When is a woman exerting her sexual freedom and when is she making a power play. It seems that there is this notion of promiscuity in lesbian encounters as being purely derived, whereas a heterosexual woman exerting her sexual options is interpreted as raising issue with her male lover in an unnatural shift of power. This following scene exemplifies modern day butch/femm as well as the writers combining aspects of both heterosexual and lesbian relationships regarding monogamy.



The heterosexual aspect is the femm "flipping her shit" and doing something crazy in response to infidelity. The lesbain aspect is the honesty and cool the butch takes in dealing with her deeds.

So where does Nestle's Fem discussion fit in here.
First I'd like to note that Nestle seems to take her femness quite seriously as part of her identity, not just when writing to define the feminist fem, but also as in her introductory line on her website.
Pathologically the fem was "stripped of all power, made into a foolish woman who can easily be beckoned over into the right camp," in their aptness to bisexuality. Bisexuals sometimes feel left out in queer communities because they don't feel gay enough. I feel like the same mechanism is at work with Fems in the lesbian community. A Lesbian looks like this, and if you don't look like this, maybe you're as confused as a bisexual. It's interesting to note the turnover. From lesbians being not even recognized as a minority to having a solid enough niche in society carved out that they can start criticizing and marginalizing their own. It's human nature. As soon as we have a footing we have to make sure someone else has less of one.

For the raw castings of Joan Nestle's thoughts, her blog.