I have been living in a world which is populated almost only by women for months. This is partly a choice of where I hang out and partly who I connect with in social spaces. Being in women’s space, in women’s community has been healing. It has also had the effect of denaturalizing men’s behavior. I became acutely aware of the changes that often occur when men enter the space. They so often dominate conversation without thinking.
One explanation which may work is that boys are socialized in a very competitive arena. Some boy is always trying to dominate. You defend your conversational space, or identity or physical space by pushing back and claiming space. We had to learn ways of resisting bullies by internalizing the bully to some extent. It is survival of the bully-ist.
Sometimes it seems that men just keep playing the same game around women. Nobody else at the table is pushing back so they just claim all of the available space. They just never learned to share, because a willingness to share and compromise makes you into a victim as a boy, and maybe even as a man. Some of the problem is testosterone, but who can say how much given that the genders are socialized so differently. Until men can imagine “queer spaces” where they can explore new gender roles, we just do not know what is nature and what is nurture. The queer space that I inhabit on the margins of the dyke subculture is probably not fertile ground for a mass movement of femme men.
There is some room in straight subcultures like the sex-positive, burning man, bi poly kinky, ecstatic dance and neo-hippie subcultures. But if you do not live in a very cosmipolitan urban area your access to this queer geography is limited. Bi and gay men have access to queer men’s culture and subcultures like the radical faeries. My impression as an outsider is that there is not as much fulltime gender play in the gay world as in the lesbian world. Drag queening seems more of a performance with discreet boundaries when compared to the butch ‘lifestyle.’
Judith Halberstam has an interesting discussion of of queer spaces and queer time which are created by queer subcultures and create the possibility of living, feeling and being differently. I feel like the the queer space that I inhabit in San Francisco has been created by the dyke community. The transgender narrative gives me a certain degree of legitimacy in this queer space, but at the same time dyke space is extremely gendered and I do not expect to ever be assimilated into that subculture. So, on the margins of this queer space I have found the space to explore and shift gender. The city of San Francisco itself is also queer enough to tolerate my fashion experiments.
Having access to SF’s different queer spaces has privileged me in my transition. I think often of liberating straight men from their cages and allowing them greater diversity of feminine identity and expression. Given the current socio-political climate, I can hardly see how though.
Transexuality is a radical option for embracing femininity. It is one end of the continuum. There needs to be room in the middle of the continuum. I would like to femmeboy as a lifestyle choice much like butch is. In my ideal world the dyke community would embrace femmeboys as allies, but because gender is such a foundational concept within the lesbian narrative I do not see how this is possible. No mass lifestyle experimentation with the femmeboy gender is possible without the creation of queer spaces that don’t organize group membership along the lines of the gender and sexual orientation binaries.
Filed under: Gender, Fashion and Society Essays | Tagged: gender theory, male femininity, queer theory, transgender
Hey! What a great insightful article about femme boy inclusion. I have been wondering if there is any sort of ‘femme boy dialogue’ happening online and came across this post trying to see if there were any femme boy blogs (and I don’t think there exclusively is).
As a self-identified femme boy I often struggle with feeling accepted within certain queer subcultures. While many of my lesbian friends definitely embrace radical femininity and support it I still feel like the gay male scene is still SO afraid of it and like you said, only willing to engage with it when it’s confined to say a drag performance. I experience so much fucked up misogyny from gay men who perceive me and my politics as similar when in fact I am such a believer in feminism and such a strong supporter of women.
I am so empowered and inspired by femme boys who push gender and identity boundaries: whether they love makeup, love being a smart “sissy”, love being sensitive but also tough! I want the world to know that soft femme and hard femme boys exist outside of boundaries, in-categorizable in so many ways and much smarter than the Chris Crockers and other vapid “femme boy personas” of the YouTube celebrity era.