On femme lit

Like Son. Felicia Luna Lemus. New York: Akashic Books, 2007.



I feel a little behind the times talking about T. Cooper and Felicia Luna Lemus. Even though I purchased both Lipschitz Six and Like Son months ago, I just got around to them now as the summer reading bug hit me. In the meantime, both authors of this literary power couple have achieved a little bit of well-deserved notariety, exemplified by this interview on Queeerty and a photo spread in Curve Magazine. All of which served to demonstrate to me that these two are one hot couple. Seriously. I want to pin up the Curve photos of them in my room so I can drool. But for all their hotness as a couple, their books each deserve individual attention and not much good is served by comparing them, so I will try to talk about Like Son on its own.

And, independent of all other thoughts and issues, Like Son kept my attention and made me want to keep reading. While it may not be the perfect book, it made me happy because it captured an attitude toward feminity that resonated with me. I didn't exactly love or identify with the main character, who is a disaffected punk transguy. I believe the character is interesting and well-crafted, but somehow he didn't feel right to me. He wasn't the heart and soul of the novel, even though he was the main character, and that in itself is a fascinating literary choice. The power and excitement in Like Son lies in its female characters, the mysterious historical figure of Nahui Olin, a bohemian artist and poet from Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s and the equally mysterious figure of Nathalie, the protagonist's beautifully femme girlfriend.

For me, the utterly brilliant scene that exemplifies this book at its best occurs when the protagonist, Frank, first meets Nathalie. Within the story, "meeting Nathalie was like being hit by a force of nature" (98), but that held true for me as well. Lemus' depiction of this unique, flawed, creatively glamorous woman seduced me from the first hint of her appearance, foreshadowed by the narrator's revelation that "I can't tell you how many times I later wished I could go back to warn my naive self: Yes, she will be complicated. And yes, it'll be hot. But seriously, fool, brace yourself. Loving her will be the hardest thing you'll ever know"(32). From her first appearance, Nathalie is all colors and scents and textures and layers of femninity: "I smelled her breath as she laughed. Bergamot and peppermint and just a hint of expensive vodka. She had on this wrinkeld vintage Ginger Rogers copper-orange ballroom gown, teetering faux-leopard fur open-toe platform heels, and a rust-colored rabbit fur jacket -- an outfit that would have looked like costumed ridiculous on anybody else, but on her was just right. Her flyaway auburn hair was a tangled mess of a Vargas girl updo. Her perfume was incredibly sweet, almost too sweet, like rice milk about to turn" (99). As the relationship between Frank and Nathalie develops, she somehow remains distant and mysterious, her actions inexplicable but alluring. Thoughout the book, I want to know more about her, understand her motivations, hear the story from her perspective. In many ways, though I don't really identify with Frank on a personal level, I am drawn into his fascination with this woman and placed in his position and that is a beautiful experience.

The thing is, I don't want to be Frank. I want to be Nathalie. Like Son is one of a few books that fosters and inspires my own femininity. As I was reading it, I felt more and more inspired to play up and play with my own femininity. I find myself wearing more skirts and dresses, putting on more makeup for going out, lusting after new clothes. It's the kind of book that inspires me to enjoy femininity, layering on too much glitter and gold nail polish and wacky accessories. Reading this book made me want to be more femme.

The character of Nathalie, with Nahui Olin as her historical referent, is a magnificent femme captured in a way that I rarely find in novels, and I'm sad that it's Frank that gets to do all the talking about her. I'd love to hear her voice more. It makes me want to think, though, about books I've read in the past. It seems that there would be many great novels in which a man (or woman, really) meets and is mesmerized by a woman so that she becomes the center of the novel, though without a voice of her own. But I can't necessarily think of examples. Perhaps Lolita? And are there novels with femme voices? When do you get to hear the perspective of women consciously cultivating feminity? What other books might make me feel femme? Or does writing about femininity instantly devolve into chick lit obsessed with men and shopping? Can a powerful femme character be the center of the novel, or does she become something else when the story is told from her perspective and she can no longer be mysterious? Are there queer femme fiction writers out there I should be reading?

Anyway, I may be missing the point of the book, since it really is also a beautiful and engaging story of a queer masculine protagonist fighting toward maturity and learning to leave his personal and imagined history behind. I loved Like Son and I'm decidedly inspired to find more queer femme writing if I can. I will immediately be reading Lemus' first book, Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties, even though I'm highly skeptical about the phrase "dyke princess" which appears in several of the blurbs about the book. But I'll gladly take recommendations of other femme writing. I'd love to find more books that feel as beautiful and resonant and inspiring in queer ways as this one did.

Femme-inism

I thought I had written this post before, but looking back in the archives, it's not readily apparent. So perhaps I have never actually posted musings on femme identity. It's something I think about often and don't talk about a lot because it's easy to fall into the trap of saying things that have been said before and that doesn't interest me much. So here's my femme story. It's simple and very personal and not terribly unique, but perhaps it needs to be said. Apologies if it's a bit rambly.

My relationship to femminity has always been vexed. I was a feminist long before I identified as queer or femme or lesbian. Instinctually, long before I had the proper language or political awareness, I identified with women and yet hated a lot of the ideas associated with feminity.

In high school, I saw my wonderful guy friends dating pretty, dumb girls and I was jealous and angry and mad at the world for the fact that it was in any way acceptable for girls to be dumb. Yes, I admit a tendency toward intellectual snobbery and complete impatience with anyone who is willfully ignorant and girls in my high school were often willfully ignorant or incompetent as a way of performing femininity. They were also manipulative, so that I associated femininity with acting dumb and manipulating boys into doing things. That was profoundly unattractive to me and resulted in a severe disidentification with femininty in high school that might have bordered on misogyny. I was not nice to the pretty, stupid girls.

But I also very much enjoyed the accoutrements of femininity. I went through phases of wearing dresses and makeup for long periods of time. I played with bubble baths and lotions and all sorts of girly products. But I was also always already a failure at feminity because I was not pretty. I also have a fairly pathetic innate fashion sense and I generally looked pretty frumpy throughout high school.

The end result was that I spent large portions of high school in ratty jeans and paint-splattered t-shirts building sets and hanging lights with the boys and trying to distance myself from most of the girls. There were, of course, excpetions; nerdy girls are always OK with me and I still fondly remember Cheese Danish girl, who was probably my first recongizable girl crush. She was wonderfully unique with her princess leia buns and her retro dress and swing dancing. Sigh. But the point is, that I mostly rejected feminity because I couldn't express the fact that I deeply desired to be feminine without the associated manipulativeness, stupidity, and traditional standards of beauty.

In college, I continued to be tough and dirty and bossy, spending much of my time working in the theater and covered in paint and dust, but I also met women who were both tough and feminine for the first time. Satan, a firey redhead who carried a knife and climbed ladders to hang lights in high heels, taught me a lot about finding other ways to be feminine. So I would bounce back and forth between work clothes and dresses, learning to embrace and enjoy the times when I got to dress up and wear a skirt and heels and be girly.

But it wasn't until I met my First Girlfriend that everything really fell into place. When I first saw her, I was on top of a ladder, and I had to look twice to tell if she was a boy or a girl. When she first noticed me, I was wearing heels and makeup and a tight sweater. She loved my girly side, and under her appreciation, it blossomed. Within the context of a queer relationship, I rediscovered my love of makeup and heels and decolletage in a way that made feminity exciting rather than creepy. I didn't have to be dumb or fake or anything else to be feminine, and I didn't feel like I failure just because I didn't look like everyone else.

Since then, my approach toward femininity has grown and changed. I've learned many of the ways that femininty can be fun and playful and provocative rather than confining and heteronormative and exclusionary. And I love that. I always freak out just a little when I start dating someone and they treat me like a girl (or a lady). I'm very bad about having a butch open doors and pay bills for me if I'm just getting to know them. I feel the need to demonstrate that I'm tough and independent and capable first, before I can be soft and flirty. Because that femininity is so charged and carefully negotiated for me, it takes me a while to settle into my own femininity with a new person. But when I'm relaxed and comfortable with someone, there's nothing better than having my feminity recognized, respected, and appreciated. And when I'm in a safe space for queer femininity, I'm so much happier with myself and the world.

Femmes have always been tough, and I love that; it's a proud tradition of strong women. Queer femininity requires walking a narrow line, defending oneself against the many people who will assume you're straight despite vast amounts of evidence to the contrary while trying to mobilize the markers of femininity in queer ways. Using the same things that women have always used to appeal to men, femmes work hard to change the signification of lipstick and heels, stockings and skirts, breasts and legs. In a femme's hands, all of these things become queer, but you're always fighting to make sure people know they're queer. That's a tough, in-your-face process, and it's hard to articulate how that process works. Actually, I'd like to talk more about these strategies. Do any of you out there have insight into how markers of femininity get resignified as queer? What strategies work? How do you know if a femmy girl is queer? How does one recognize a femme?

Some of the strategies for performing femininity queerly that come to mind for me are excess, displacement, and contextualization. Of course, all of these are intertwined, but perhaps I can begin some sort of articlation. Excess is performing super-femininity. That there's something about queer femininity that's just a little bit more than heterofemininity. An extra embrace of makeup or pink or or heels. I love going to parties with drag queens because then I don't feel self-conscious about displaying my body, which is already excessive, or wearing too much bright makeup, because their makeup is inevitably even more multicolored and bright and shiny. Displacement, which I find fascinating, is about marking your performance of femininity so that it can't be naturalized. I picture this as being achieved (for me) by retro clothing or perhaps by specifically class-marked clothing as well (I'm thinking a sort of 'trashy' aesthetic such as gold lamé). By wearing clothes evokative of another time period or social milieu, you distinguish yourself from the everyday performances of femininity that surround you. And contextualization is simply that I'm queer, so if it's on me, it's queer. When a femme is in queer space, her femininity can be recognized and appreciated as queer. This is the one where femme visibility becomes more of an issue. If a femme is obviously with another woman, then her femininity can easily be read as queer. If she's in close physical contact with someone butcher than herself, people can read that as queer. When she's on her own walking down the street, people sometimes have trouble with recognizing that that too can be a queer context. Are there other strategies for performing queer femininity? Other thoughts on the matter out there?