Resistant Femme as Domestic Terrorist

Lois Weaver. Diary of a Domestic Terrorist. UCLA. 11/30/06.

Lois Weaver, consummate femme performance artist, gave a combination show and lecture that included a retrospective of some of her past work, excerpts from her current performance piece, What Tammy Needs To Know, and, most importantly, a call to arms. She explored two intertwined terms, "Domestic terrorist" and "resistant femme" to posit strategies for resistance against dominant regimes. Weaver offered public, active domesticity and femininity as techniques for celebrating resistance. The image of Weaver hanging her laundry in public, projected onto a sheet, becomes an image of oposition against those who want us to be quiet and orderly. Instead of behaving properly, Weaver takes off her clothes. Instead of censoring her nipples, she shows a video in which she let them all hang out. She distributes clothespins (aka homemade nipple clamps) with the label 'domestic terrorist' on them and encourages eveyone to use them proudly and visibly. Weaver's domestic terrorism is a subtle form of resistance, but in its active opposition it terrorizes those who terrorize us. Weaver is feminity with power, performed actively and by choice, visible and deliberately not perfect. This is her performance as a 'resistant femme' embracing, celebrating, and subverting femininity. She finds the power and the threat in domesticity and performs femme as visibly queer and visibly resistant even without the butch to make it visibly lesbian. She's an excellent femme role model as well as an excellent speaker and performer, and if you're ever given the chance to see her do her thing, please take it.