The future of femme: Notes on femininity,aging and gender theory

My midlife fashion crisis

Several years ago, I got an email invitation to contribute to an anthology of writings about femme. It was extended on the basis of my foundational (read, ancient) work in the field, and the salutation hoped that I was at my “femme performative best.” The email actually found me sitting at the computer in my ratty pajamas searching for an anti-aging eye cream that delivered on its promises. I was not, then, feeling at my best in either the femme or the performative department.

The invitation was appreciated, however, and got me to thinking more seriously about questions of gender performativity that had been haunting me in a new way since I turned 40. For many years, I had been fairly secure in being “femme,” which, for me, is an identity, not just an adjective, which is decidedly queer, encompassing gender, style, sexual practice, and alliance with other queers. But a preoccupation with style, specifically, was coming to the foreground as I moved into my 40s. It wasn’t just that the “age issue” of Vogue reserved the most avant garde fashions for women in their 20s. Lately, the playground of consumer culture was becoming a minefield: shimmery eye shadows emphasized fine lines; matte red lipstick suddenly looked too brash; vintage clothes looked suspiciously like I might have bought them new. I had always been a conservative dresser, but now it seemed less a choice than a requirement. What, I wondered, was a middle-aged femme to do? What, indeed, did a middle-aged femme look like?

A cursory review of the literature on my bookshelf, some of which had guided my ideas about femme as a younger woman, yielded no immediate help with a social analysis of femmes, femininity and aging. Though there are complex readings of the femme’s queer attitude, the way she occupies space, moves through time, assumes and surrenders power, and articulates desire, I noticed that femme theory, which might be thought of as a field within gender theory, is populated by representations of the femme as a radicalized “bad girl” that pay scant attention to aging. Prominent titles in the field include anthologies such as The Persistent Desire (Nestle, 1992); The Femme Mystique (Newman, 1995); Femme: Feminists, Lesbians and Bad Girls (Harris and Crocker, 1997); Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity (Rose and Camilleri, 2002a); and Amber Hollibaugh’s memoir My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (2000). My compatriots offer daring pronouncements about who we are. We are strong; we are revolutionary; we are gender renegades; we are, above all, not feminine in the way straight women are. In fact, we reject femininity in its most degraded, “mainstream” form. The author of the essay “On Being a Bisexual Femme” explains that femmes do not look like heterosexual women and that “at our strongest, we are the opposite of feminine heterosexual women, who are oppressed by their gender and held to impossible media standards designed to foster hatred of one’s body” (Albrecht-Samarasinha, 1997a: 142). The introduction to Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity declares that “femme might be described as ‘femininity gone wrong’—bitch, slut, nag, whore, cougar, dyke, or brazen hussy. Femme is the trappings of femininity gone awry, gone to town, gone to the dogs … We are not good girls” (Rose and Camilleri, 2002b: 13). Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh’s “A Fem(me)inist Manifesto” announces that “fem(me) science aspires to a virtual domination of the field of sexual difference. This domination requires the total recall of the feminine, an historically debased and utterly repulsive gender style.” Further, it alleges that “fem(me) science questions the dignity and wisdom of anyone who would wear pink without irony, or a floral print without murderous or seditious designs” (Duggan and McHugh, 2002: 168, 169). These descriptions sound so sexy, so daring. The femme of “femme science” is tough, dangerous, hot—and cool. I picture her as a self-possessed woman who borrows from youth subcultural styles such as punk, goth and Riot Grrrl to mark her alternative femininity.

How could this icon of fem(me)ininity serve me as I moved into mid life? Could she inspire me to stop sitting around in my ratty pink robe feeling old? Wait, did I say pink robe? Glancing at my closet, I saw a floral-patterned dress of fluttery layers of crepe, in reds and … pink. Surely, they were speaking metaphorically about not wearing pink and florals? Or maybe I am a failed femme. I am capable of being a bitch and a nag, but slut, whore and brazen hussy are not my public personas. I am, and apparently look, white and middle-class; I don pink and florals with a depraved lack of irony, and you probably can’t tell me from the straight women at a bridal shower unless the fact that I don’t let my bra straps hang out of my tops makes me look way more queer than I think it does. Unless I am mistaken, I come alarmingly close to looking like a “good girl,” whereas my reading had revealed not only that we femmes are not good girls, but also that good girls are our antithesis, our nemesis.

Trying to account for my own ambivalence about aging, I recognize that I am more than ever aware of our culture’s association between youth and femininity, and more pointedly, its horror of the aging woman. Some of my beloved queer classics, including the films All About Eve (1950) and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), are campy because they ridicule the older woman nostalgic for her youth. And lampooning the aging female star is not an artifact of midcentury movies. As Dorothy Allison celebrated Madonna’s 50th birthday at the 2006 Femme Conference, web tabloids zoomed in on the star’s “gnarled, wrinkled” hands and criticized her for overworking her body rather than “aging gracefully” (O’Hagan, 2007). The media is not unique in repudiating the aging woman. Lynne Segal points out that “wherever we look, inwards or outwards, calling on the orthodox or the dissident, whether in literature, psychoanalysis, feminist scholarship or the language of Queer, fear or denial of ageing is ubiquitous, but especially and overridingly, fear of the ageing female” (2007: 42).

Surely, though, there are women who confront the ubiquity of ageism without researching eye creams and taking inventory of their wardrobes. I wonder if the fact that my femininity is not markedly alternative, by straight or queer measures, heightens my cognizance of sexist ageism. Maybe looking “mainstream” renders me more vulnerable to conventional beauty standards than women with more alternative feminine styles. Maybe, by looking so conventional, I set myself up for a midlife fashion crisis. Even as a younger woman, I never carried many signatures of alternative femininity; once I wore “combat boots” (the Nine West version) with a pleated skirt, but my feet felt so clumpy that I had to go home to change. My single, tiny tattoo is so strategically placed that I forget it’s there—for me, the little black dress just clashed with “tattoo on shoulder.” My nose was never cute enough to decorate with a discreet diamond, and I wasn’t about to pierce anything else.

When I was younger, my version of “alternative” primarily involved adhering to anachronistic fashion dictums, playing with outmoded femininities for a potentially campy effect. I was fond of rules that Stacey and Clinton in What Not To Wear have been declaring outré for years—matching shoes and pocketbooks, no white after Labor Day, no suede shoes in summer, no stockings with open-toed shoes, and no mixing metals. As I age, I fear that adhering to these rules no longer reads as camp, but just as, well, old fashioned. And as I get more rulesy about what is off-limits—miniskirts, liquid eyeliner, short shorts—I also have the sense that it’s important to stay modern. This means breaking my cherished codes. Suddenly, wearing shoes with little matching handbags looks like I never got the news flash on fashion rules you should break. Since I have passed 40 and it seems that “less is more,” my style has fewer markers of anachronistic feminine performance. I have lots of neutral lipsticks in my palette, with names like “Twig” and “Rosewood,” sitting next to the now less-worn “Satin Red” and “Russet Moon.” If I wear a vintage piece, it’s always mixed with newer pieces. It was hard to tell me from a straight woman before; what was going to happen to me now that I was softening the edges?

If, as I fear, I am aging out of my own somewhat muted version of alternative femininity, I am probably closer than ever to flunking femme science and embodying a “repulsive” gender style. Further, if gender warriors are secure and postmodern enough to play the identity game with purpose, to use and not be used by consumer culture, then midlife shouldn’t be threatening to my femme style. If it were threatening, wouldn’t that mean I was participating in the ageism that was part of beauty culture? Wasn’t I submitting myself to a heteropatriarchal regime that I should, by all rights as a lesbian fem(me)inist, be free of?

Perusing the admittedly selective collection of quotations I had compiled from my literature review, it seemed that the answer to my questions would be yes—I was slipping into the territory of abject femininity. Not only was I aging, but my thoughts about aging were infected by conventional messages about youth and beauty. This was not in keeping with the revolutionary mode of the femme. Femme theory celebrates an insurgent gender style that is distinct from femininities that are not “queered.” In fact, it appears that celebrating the femme sometimes depends on abjecting mainstream femininity—a femininity not clearly associated with a specific gendered style so much as it is associated with victimization. Mainstream femininity might be Susan Brownmiller’s femininity—oppressive, polite, submissive, and notably “not something that improves with age” (1984: 236). To assume femininity, then, would be to put oneself at the mercy of a culture that links youth and femininity together, that sees “girlishness”—innocence, softness, modesty—as typifying “the feminine principle at its ephemeral best” (Brownmiller, 1984: 236).

To claim femininity for gender insurgency, femme theory is compelled to distinguish queer femininity from the femininity of the oppressed, but first it must construct the oppressed. It does so by mapping the oppressed and the liberated onto the existing dichotomy between the heterosexual and the queer, without always exploring the social circumstances that might shape expressions and experiences of femininity. Although “femme” remains largely a white, western construct, to be fair, it recognizes that multiple femininities are produced especially at intersections of race and class. Femme scholarship attends to how femininities may be guided by body type, geographic location, generation, sexual practice, social tradition, and so on, and observes that an individual’s adaptation of feminine style may shift according to context. Oddly, though, sometimes femme studies elides multiplicity within the opposition between straight and queer femininities—in other words, whereas queer femininities may be inflected by difference, heterosexual femininity is not. Ironically, this homogenous representation of the heterosexual woman may close off discussions of multiple femininities. The construction of queer femininity in relation to “mainstream” femininity can subordinate diversity to monolithic representations of both queer and mainstream femininities.

In the opposition between queer and mainstream, “mainstream” is vaguely synonymous with straight, middle-class, white femininity. I say “vaguely” because it is difficult to associate “mainstream” femininity with a particular style. What does a middle-class, white heterosexual woman look like? Like she is accompanying her family to church in her lace-trimmed dress and white pumps? Like she’s chauffeuring her kids to organized sports driving her mini-van and wearing her driving mocs? Are these degraded styles? And if so, is it because they are associated with particular moralities and social positions rather than with a specific feminine style that characterizes middle-class white women, who, as individuals, may or may not have nuclear family households, mini-vans, or the other accoutrements of heteronormativity? To further complicate the separation of mainstream from queer femininity, many heterosexual women adopt ironic and iconoclastic femininities—not just celebrities such as Madonna in fetish wear, Siouxsie Soux in punk glam, and Tina Turner in rocker chic, but women dressing for everyday life or for an evening out. Is it possible, then, to associate any given style with what RW Connell terms “emphasized femininity,” which accommodates men’s interests and desires (1987: 183)? If femmes have taught us anything, it is that it is difficult to assume whose interests and desires femininity directs itself towards.

Femme theorists do register the opposition between the femme and her mainstream other, and argue that “mainstream” or “normative” femininity is an invention. Clare Hemmings writes that “all too often, femmes produce themselves as queer subjects in opposition to an imagined straight femininity” (1999: 455, emphasis mine). Clare Farquhar remarks that, despite the shift away from identity politics since the 1990s, “lesbian identities continue to be organized in opposition to hegemonic heterosexuality” (2000: 221). Elizabeth Galewski argues that this rhetoric of differentiation tries to “distance femmes from any potential association with heterosexuality,” asserting that “for the most part, this process of self-differentiation has come at the expense of feminine heterosexual women. Straight women largely have come to represent a background of passive victims against which the femme can be convincingly reconfigured as subversive, feminist, and free” (2005: 191). Galewski also observes that femme theory unlinks “femme” from “femininity”: “The femme is constituted as possessing dangerous, revolutionary potential, while femininity comes to represent conformity in the face of oppression” (2005: 192).

This need for distinction from heterosexual femininity can be partially explained as a function of queer visibility politics. Understandably, femmes want to locate themselves within the queer community, to align themselves with other queer subjects. For the femme, these subjects are the butch, the drag queen and, increasingly, the transgendered person as figures of gender performativity and iconic gender warriors. Notably, all of these figures foreground movement across borders of gender; they cross categories and blur boundaries. Femininity, in contrast, seems static. The feminine woman makes herself over in accord with fashion cycles, but she changes to conform to the current embodiment of gendered norms. She consumes only to repeat herself as a better version of the feminine, not to interrogate the function of repetition as part of gender performance. It makes sense that “femme science,” resisting this paradigm of femininity, would try to put the femme in motion, having her cross into the dangerous territory of the sexual outcast or the gender warrior.

To put the femme in motion, to make her a gender warrior, femme theory often installs another binary to uphold the distinction between the femme and her hegemonic other: the dichotomy between voluntarism and determinism. Typically, we associate voluntarism with free will and determinism with a relative lack of agency. Applied to styles of femininity, this dichotomy enables femmes to position themselves as agents in the expression of queer femininities. The femme is the subject with “choice,” “freedom,” and the ability to manipulate and subvert the fashion system with intention. Her heterosexual other is the static feminine figure who is determined by and made a “victim” of normative femininity and who does not have the liberty of choice. In predicating the femme’s radicalism on an opposition between voluntarism and determinism, we undertheorize both the femme and femininity. Few, if any theories of power that inform gender studies would support such a polarized notion of agency: the femme’s will to power cannot be as unbound as postulated, and the “mainstream” woman cannot be as homogeneous, as abject, or as subordinate as femme theories typically claim.

The distinction between the femme and her mainstream counterpart recapitulates a heteronormative misogyny that femmes would reasonably seek to criticize. We know that compulsory heterosexuality demands of women that they become feminine, and then despises them for being what they have become; we recognize that as a function of misogyny. But how are femmes moving away from that misogyny by making distinctions between radicalized “bad girls” and debased “good girls,” between active femininity and passive femininity, between chosen femininity and victimized femininity? To put “mainstream femininity” in the category of the abject means that we cannot recognize anything substantive in femininity; femininity becomes a vestigial gender, one that we have not necessarily dismantled, but have censored.

When “mainstream femininity” becomes inadmissible in queer circles, femmes risk silencing themselves about the relationship between queer femininities and social circumstances such as aging that we see as the concerns of the victimized, not the liberated. According to the logic of voluntarism, it should be the (heterosexual) feminine woman, not the femme, who is subject to tyrannies of what Sandra Bartky terms the “fashion-beauty complex” (1990: 40)—thinness, prettiness, sexiness, and youthfulness. If, as we femmes age, we experience these tyrannies as tyrannies, then we slip into the abject, the feminine. Who wants to articulate the shame of having collapsed into the feminine when she should be dominating the field of sexual difference? But if we do not articulate our experiences of aging, we might find ourselves trapped by what Laura Kelly terms “body silence” (2007: 876)—a reticence among lesbians to discuss body image concerns with each other, because we fear those anxieties do not reflect the consensus that lesbians have moved beyond trivial issues of appearance. ¹

Some sociological work on lesbians conceptualizes what Gayle Pitman calls a “lesbian haven” (2000: 50), maintaining that feminism protects lesbians against the internalization of beauty norms that heterosexual women face. Within this haven, lesbians would not feel the pressures of body silence. Other sociological research argues that any study of lesbians and body image based on interviews will be complicated by that very notion of a “haven” (Pitman, 2000: 50–51). The expectation that feminism not only will, but should, make lesbians more resistant to beauty norms could make lesbian interviewees reluctant to admit that normative standards of female beauty affect their self-esteem. Though very little research on lesbians and aging attends to gender differences among women, let alone focuses on the femme specifically, body silence among femmes could manifest itself around aging, when expectations that women manage cultural imperatives to remain youthful and to age gracefully may circumscribe gender style in new ways.

This body silence might account for the lack of reference to femmes and aging, compared to the more-often mentioned issues of race and class present in femme literature. Although a number of femmes “of a certain age” are publishing, very little of their work elaborates on aging. Rather, confessions and asides, often embedded narratives of femme empowerment, suggest that femmes do share the anxieties of heterosexual women about aging, and that femmes have their own concerns and opinions about aging. ² A few women touch on their grief at relinquishing some of the artifacts of youthful femininity, and a sense of “decline-via-aging” that Margaret Gullette, studying ageism, finds to begin relatively early in the midlife course of women (1999).

While I thought that my own “midlife crisis” was linked to my conservative gender style, the voices of other 40-something femmes, who saw their styles as more alternative than I saw mine, expressed familiar thoughts about maturing. Their concerns imply that femme, like feminine, can be subject to ageist misogyny associated with dominant culture. For example, Jess Wells speaks to how women performing alternative femininities associated with youth culture, such as punk and New Wave styles, may feel the need to moderate their appearance as they approach midlife. Wells writes, “now that I’m nearly forty, I’m simply not pert enough to get away with things that are harsh or unbecoming—like razor-short hair with stripes and safety pins for earrings … Then I discovered that even my punk gone New-Wave look was starting to suffer” (1995: 137–138). Wells is clearly aware of pressures to establish age-appropriate appearance or to risk looking like “mutton dressed as lamb.” Her sensitivity to these pressures is consistent with research on heterosexual women who confront the imperative to modify alternative femininities as they age (Holland, 2004). If Wells’s remarks reveal ambivalence about looking age-appropriate, Amber Hollibaugh, at the relatively tender age of 37, describes approaching midlife as devastating to her self-image. Having always identified with drag queens and having been proud of “looking like a girl who doesn’t look like a girl,” Hollibaugh finds that aging changes her relationship to her body:

I am horrified to be aging, to be entering middle age. I care about my youthful appearance and my sexual desirability, much of which I attribute to my looks. My feminism, I had hoped, would protect me from caring about such things; I would stride right up to middle age and wear it proudly … I see clearly that my need to be young and attractive is tyrannical, forcing me to reach for a steadily diminishing possibility … . (Hollibaugh, 2000: 170–171)

Both Wells and Hollibaugh are also concerned that, as femmes, they will age differently from their butch cohorts. Speaking to the conjecture among lesbians that just as men are thought to age better than women, butches may be thought to age better than femmes. Wells notes that her ex-lover “exclaimed that lesbians tend to look more butch the older they get. I told her femme drag is just too much work after a while” (1995: 138). Hollibaugh claims that her lover “also fears the passing of time … [but] she will age with distinction … trading in for a salt-and-pepper look and a low-set stride that gives her body substance and power. As a femme slipping into middle age, I must truly face the rigid standards of female beauty and become increasingly pathetic” (2000: 171). These remarks raise a complex set of issues about how aging and femininity are perceived within the butch/femme community.

Wells’s exchange with her lover insinuates that femmes might not only want to, but ought to forgo “femme drag” as they age. Karen Parker, another femme reflecting on her feelings about herself during her early 40s, remembers that she wanted to become “invisible” and gave up wearing dresses and her flirty and flamboyant attitude: “During that time, I didn’t feel femme because I wasn’t engaged in high-maintenance femininity, the performance—that meant ‘femme’ for me. I felt like a woman and a lesbian, but I didn’t feel like a femme, and it made me feel like only half a person for a while” (cited in Steel, 2006). Parker speaks as if she had to give up high maintenance-femininity, which she sees as a privileged marker of femme identity, even though it made her feel as though she lost that identity. But what pressure makes the femme feel as though she has to relinquish high maintenance femininity, except for the horror of looking like an aging woman who is trying to hang on to her youth? Or, perhaps worse, looking like an aging drag queen?

Performance artist Peggy Shaw articulates one way that the association of femininity with youth works within the queer community in her cleverly titled show “A Menopausal Gentleman,” where she asserts that “a woman passing as a man looks like a younger man; a man passing as a woman looks like an older woman … I keep young by passing. I sacrifice being a woman for youth” (cited in Steel, 2006). Here she elucidates how the masculine woman benefits not only from looking more youthful than a biological man her age, but also from the cultural acceptance of aging masculinity. ³ While Shaw does not address whether or not, or how, butches worry about aging, she does intimate that butches may postpone concerns about aging longer than “women,” for whom the artifacts of gender performance, including hair color, makeup, and “shapewear,” might begin to appear not as radically playful, but as part of a failed attempt to conceal the aging body. When the maturing femme keeps up “high-maintenance” femininity and risks the “tragedy” of looking “like a female impersonator” (Angela Carter cited in Segal, 2007: 52), or modulates her femme style and faces “becoming more butch,” she is up against the cultural logic that posits femininity as the gender of artifice and naturalizes masculinity. The perception that the woman who gives up “femme drag” becomes more butch suggests that without the effort of feminine contrivance, femmes revert to a more genuine, artless gender. Such an assumption erases markers of femininity such as posture, gait, and voice that might remain with the femme regardless of dress, but are, correctly or not, more closely associated with biology than with affect. Further, it implies that butches do not also work at masculinity, but inhabit it in some effortless an innate way.

Exploring how aging femmes are perceived and how we perceive ourselves may thus bring us uncomfortably close to recognizing that we have, in fact, internalized the norms we thought we had escaped when we made mainstream femininity abject. If this is the case, what is the status of the distinction between femmes and heterosexual women that has marked femme theory? Does it diminish as we age? Afraid that we will “lose our looks,” do we also lose the power of our outlaw sexuality? No matter how we answer these questions, they point to the tenuousness of the voluntarism/determinism binary. If, at midlife, the femme questions her ability to sustain a radical performance of femininity, perhaps she has never controlled the performance femininity as much as she claimed. But her shifting relationship to femininity does not need to signal either the endpoint of being femme, or the potential radicalism of femme as a role. Rather, it should serve as an opportunity to rearticulate how femme can contribute queer studies by theorizing gender and aging.

Rethinking femme theory

The first step in reexamining aging and femininity is to understand how the binary between mainstream “victimized” femininity and queer femininity has become such an entrenched element of femme theory. Looking back at academic femme theory since its inception in the early 1990s (it is still a relatively “young” discipline), we can see that the opposition between the mainstream feminine and the radical femme is no doubt overdetermined and could be analyzed from multiple perspectives. What follows here are notes on three arenas that femme studies might consider to situate itself in historical and theoretical contexts that would clarify the origins of the opposition between the mainstream feminine and the radical femme. In exploring its relationship to these arenas, femme studies might become a more productive place to theorize femininity. First, femme theory would benefit from a thorough grounding of the contemporary femme’s emergence as a sexual outlaw from the legacy of the sex wars. Second, femme theory, steeped in the discourse of gender performance, must analyze how that discourse is haunted by voluntarist descriptions of the performing subject, despite the somewhat commonplace assumption that any tinge of voluntarism is the product of a “bad reading” of Judith Butler’s foundational work on performativity. And third, femme theory should address issues of femininity and style, particularly how the construction of the femme as alternative versus mainstream is, consciously or not, indebted to theories of subcultural style, which have been criticized for invoking voluntarist notion of the choosing subject.

Studying the femme in historical context, her existence in the 1950s has been well documented by scholars such as Joan Nestle (1992), Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy (1993), and Lillian Faderman (1991) among others. The re-emergence of butch and femme identities in the late 1980s, sometimes referred to as “neo-butch/femme” (Faderman, 1992), has been located in the context of the sex wars of the 1980s. However, femme studies itself could do more to identify the current construction of the femme as lesbianism’s “bad girl” as a legacy of the historical moment when debates about pornography, sexual practices such as sadomasochism, and denounced identities such as butch and femme polarized the lesbian community. Aligning themselves with other pro-sex feminists, femmes took up the position of sexual outsider. The femme defined herself as a sexual outlaw against radical feminism’s rejection of butch/femme, as well as in contrast to her supposedly apolitical heterosexual counterpart, the heterosexual feminine woman. Femmes gave voice to erotic possibilities at odds with lesbian feminism, resignifying femininity outside the provinces of heterosexuality and of lesbian feminism. ⁴ Stylistically, the femme asserted her sex radicalism in part by reclaiming traditional sartorial markers of femininity, such as high heels, short skirts, and stockings, which some feminists defined as tools of the patriarchy. To wear such attire was to be “dressed to be killed”; femmes were often read as victims of beauty culture and sometimes felt unentitled to the lesbian identities they were trying to claim (Morgan, 1993: 43). The burden of proof was on femmes to explain how their appropriation of such sexualized apparel did not make them purely objects of the male gaze. Throughout the literature defining what femmes are and what femmes could be, there is a refrain emphasizing “the one thing that femme does not mean: straight” (Carter and Noble, 1996). By differentiating herself from the straight woman, the femme tried to ensure her status as sexual and gender dissident, placing herself among other female sexual outlaws such as the slut and the prostitute, who claimed that these subject positions did not necessarily equate with sexist pathology or victimization, but could be sites of female sexual empowerment.

With the emergence of queer theory, the femme could also access theoretical discourse to support her status as gender and sex radical. The most significant theoretical framework to construct the femme’s agency relative to her “mainstream” other is Judith Butler’s work on gender performativity. Borrowing from Judith Butler’s analysis of drag as a performance of gender that reveals the instability of normative gender identities, femmes make a distinction between “playing” with gender stereotypes of femininity and “being” feminine; playing with femininity is iconoclastic, while “being” feminine is to invest unknowingly in the heterosexual regime of female gender roles. Butler’s theory of the performative carefully attempts to steer a course between a deterministic model of the gendered subject, on the one hand, and a voluntaristic model of the subject, on the other. Butler has challenged readings of her work that equate gender performance with agency, stating that “[performativity] cannot be conflated with voluntarism or individualism, much less with consumerism” (1993: 15). Here, Butler clearly resists the notion that, in postmodern culture, style itself is a form of agency. Still, with reference to performance theory, the femme’s agency is often signified by verbs such as “doing,” “queering,” and “fucking” gender. Further, the language of choice and intentionality persists in the way that femmes talk about performing gender identities. For example, as a younger woman discussing Butler’s emphasis on visible performances of gender dissonance, I claimed a certain confidence in being able to “manipulate” my style to purposefully demand “a rethinking of what a lesbian looks like” (2001: 206, 213). Similarly, Maltry and Tucker, theorizing notably youthful femme identities, use Judith Butler, among others, to assert that “many femmes have located [their] agency precisely in their choice of femininity, and that “the choice of one’s femininity must play a fundamental role in the future politicization of femme” (Maltry and Tucker, 2002: 97, emphasis mine). Technically, these readings ascribe to the individual act of self-representation (properly named “performance”) an intentionality that is not present in Butler’s notion of “performativity,” which understands gender to be the effect of a stylized repetition of actions that “in no way presupposes a choosing subject” (Butler, 1993: 15). The prominence given to choice in these quotations exemplifies what many, including Butler, identify as “bad” readings of her work because they deploy a language of voluntarism that she cautions against (Butler, 1993: 83). To be fair, critics have pointed out that confusion about agency and gender performativity cannot be entirely divorced from Butler’s work (Glick, 2000: 35); in these instances, however, the emphasis on choice misconstrues Butler’s concept of performativity, which “highlights how constraint is constitutive but not fully determining of gender subjectivity” (McNay, 1999: 177). Performativity, then, acknowledges the constraints of social circumstances such as race, class, and age, and it leaves room for agency, but is not equivalent to agency (Butler, 1999: xxv).

The point in offering examples of how femme theory misappropriates Butler’s work is neither to argue that performance theory is of no use to femme studies, nor to propose that simply doing away with bad readings of Butler will rehabilitate femme studies. Rather, the point is to analyze how the rhetoric of voluntarism enters into performance theory, and thus into femme theory, and to offer other examples of how performance theory can be used to explore both the possibilities of and constraints on gender performance. For example, Duggan and McHugh call attention to how femme performance may be best understood not as parallel to, but as different from the performance of other queer figures. The femme is “not a performer of legible gender transgression, like the butch and his sister the drag queen, but a betrayer of legibility itself. Seemingly ‘normal,’ she responds to ‘normal’ expectations with a sucker punch—she occupies normality abnormally” (Duggan and McHugh, 2002: 167). Intentionality is not necessary to this reading of gender performance, and the femme’s agency—her potential to create social change—is located not in her visible disruption of gender norms, but in her disruption of heteronormative space through her “unnatural” appropriation of the feminine. Offering a reading of the language of gender performance, Robin VanNewkirk argues that the discourse of “queering” sometimes naturalizes rather than denaturalizes femininity:

Femme, as a label, carries even greater weight when it gets pulled into the discourse of queering femininity, as if femininity is manifested in a fixed and natural state that must then be modified or ruptured by the abnormal and therefore defiant queer impact. In the most radical approach, both femininity and femme would be something one does rather than something one is while resisting the urge to measure the subversive potential of either through polarity (VanNewkirk, 2006: 76).

Here, VanNewkirk uses the idea of “doing” gender to resist the opposition between mainstream femininity and femme. Further, she analyzes the pressure that “doing” gender creates for her as a woman trying to occupy the identity category “femme”:

I resist the label of femme sometimes … This is particularly true when people start talking about high femme; versus what? Thankfully, you don’t hear people talk too much about low femmes, but it still leaves me wondering if I can truly manage this identity … Can I still be subversive if my actions are not always a manipulative and tactical strategy for resistance? What if the subversive potential of femme identity becomes an expectation that I cannot always fulfill? (VanNewkirk, 2006: 76–77)

Surprisingly, the discourse of performativity within femme studies has not produced an extensive analysis of how wardrobe, one of the staples of femme “drag,” is related to social contingencies such as class, race, size and age. And this is not because wardrobe is not an issue. Pages of femme writing overflow with descriptions of stockings, dresses, shoes, and lingerie. The erotics of dress are lovingly detailed—the feel of the zipper running smoothly up the back, of a breeze rising up a skirt, of breasts cradled in a pushup bra, of the slick of lipstick across the mouth. Some femme narratives attend to the pleasures of shopping, especially of finding a coveted item on sale, but most articles of clothing just appear from a drawer, and the acquisition of the garments is underplayed, with most focus put on the effect of consumption and its ability to create femme identity. Femme blogs such as “Sublime Femme Unbound” and “Fit For a Femme” and podcasts such as “Femme Cast” pay more attention to shopping itself, including fashion photos and “chronicles of daily wardrobe choices,” posts on “must have” items, links to beauty blogs, product endorsements, and budget fashionista tips. Noticeably, there are not many tags on age and not many posts labeled “femme over 40” or “fabulous at 50,” which might be too obvious a capitulation to fashion as a “mainstream” enterprise that was not conceived to challenge traditional beauty norms, though it can be a source of power and pleasure for consumers.

Although femme theory does not necessarily articulate its relationship to fashion and style through a particular theoretical apparatus, it has more ties to subcultural theories of style than to fashion theory. Both subcultural studies and femme studies see style as communicating cultural difference. Subcultural studies has been optimistic about the potential for youth, in particular, to use clothes to create identities that resist, disrupt, and create new possibilities within, or in opposition to, “mainstream culture.” ⁵ Theorists such as Ted Polhemus have seen youth as being free to create radical identities from the postmodern “supermarket of style” that play with ideological meaning (1996). Similarly, the femme who combines fashion artifacts from punk, glam, vintage and fetish wear, can be seen as “sampling and mixing,” playing with “meaning as well as style.” Her oppositional signification of femininity ideally resists readings of femme style that cannot distinguish the femme from the “mainstream” heterosexual woman who has not properly appropriated those symbols of gender from dominant culture.

The voluntarism evident in theories such as Polhemus’s “supermarket of style,” which endorses the individual’s freedom to make cultural choices outside the mainstream, has been critiqued from within subcultural studies (Shildrick and MacDonald, 2006), from within the field of fashion theory (Crane, 2000; Entwhistle, 2000), and from within lesbian studies (Clark, 1991; Hennessey, 1994) for offering consumption itself as a form of postmodern agency. Scholars such as Danae Clark (1991) and Rosemary Hennessey (1994) have argued convincingly that “lesbian” style, because it is subject to commodification, creates an imaginary lesbian subjectivity available only to women of a certain class status. So, while lesbians may appropriate identities from fashions associated with dominant culture, the dominant culture is simultaneously appropriating lesbian fashions for itself. Thus, the boundary between subcultural and mainstream style is hardly stable. As Clark puts it, “style as resistance becomes commodifiable as chic when it leaves the political realm and enters the fashion world” (1991: 193). Similar critiques of style as a form of political agency have been leveled at pro-sex theorists of butch and femme. For example, Elisa Glick maintains that celebrations of dissident sexual styles might “legitimate a commodification of lesbian culture” by substituting style for politics (2000: 29). Given the relatively long history of the “style debates” within feminist and lesbian theory, one might wonder why femme theory seems to share, rather uncritically, the voluntarist assumptions of a certain strand of subcultural studies of style.

Perhaps the appeal of subcultural studies is precisely its construction of a monolithic mainstream to the subcultural element—an opposition that may be too deconstructed in postmodern fashion theory to serve the femme’s need to establish her status as sexual dissident within the register of the visible. For femme theory to create the femme as a sex radical, she must be stylistically distinguishable from the “mainstream” woman, because the mainstream becomes a trope for what is “other” to the alternative and the hip. Through the construction of the mainstream other, the femme accesses what Sarah Thornton (1996), a theorist of subcultural studies, terms “subcultural capital.” Thornton explains that: “the logic of subcultural capital reveals itself most clearly by what it dislikes and by what it emphatically isn’t” (1996: 105). She is critical of subcultural capital precisely because it relies on an untheorized distinction between subcultures and a monolithic “mainstream”; she argues that subcultural capital is based on “veiled elitism and separatism [that] enlist and reaffirm binary oppositions such as the alternative and the straight, the diverse and the homogeneous, the radical and the conformist, the distinguished and the common” (1996: 5). Thornton’s critique of subcultural capital as elitist can help to explain how opposition between the femme and the mainstream woman assumes elements of misogyny. The femme’s claim to subcultural capital does reject the figure of the mainstream woman, but that rejection is not based, as some might suspect, primarily on lesbian femme separatism from heterosexual women. For femmes, what matters most is the ability to deploy subcultural capital within a queer culture that values visibility. In this context, marking the femme as alternative is not really about heterosexuality, it is about queerness and the femme’s demand to be recognized as belonging to a queer community. But the price of this belonging is the distinction between the queered femme and her monolithic mainstream other who, in representing what she is not, embodies the aspect of the feminine that she renounces.

For femmes entering midlife, the limitations of subcultural studies are not only its strain of voluntarism and elitism, but also its focus on youth subcultures. Most subcultural studies of adolescents do not follow subjects past young adulthood, perhaps assuming that subcultural participation ends as youth moves into adulthood, marriage and parenting—in other words, participants apparently “grow out” of youth subcultures and their associated styles. It is unclear where this might leave the femme. If queer culture is not a youth subculture, do femmes also grow out of subcultural style? If so, how do they confront maintaining alternative femininities that are associated with youth subcultural styles as they age?

At its best, subcultural studies can articulate relationships between subcultures and “dominant” culture that complicate femme studies. Judith Halberstam, in her book on queer time, suggests that queer theory might disrupt the conflation of youth subcultures with subcultural studies. She argues that queer subcultures are not driven by the same lifecycle as straight youth subcultures, and that many queers prolong the periods of life devoted to subcultural participation (Halberstam, 2005: 160). Her work opens up interesting possibilities for exploring how queer participation might or might not change as queers approach midlife. The femme in particular, could study how this prolonged participation in subcultures might change the way women experience the embodiment of alternative femininities as they age, and could consider whether this participation revises the notion of aging as “decline,” a term that Gullette explains “unites gerentophobia, middle ageism, and the threat of early hopelessness offered to people below forty, thirty, or even younger” (1997: 36). However, femme forays into subcultural studies would need to be cognizant, and I would say critical, of the voluntarism that has characterized the discipline. Some fundamental questions to pose at the intersection of femme theory and subcultural studies might be: What happens to femme’s subcultural capital if she feels that aging changes the way she is able to embody femininity? How, if she has used her bodily appearance as a marker of distinction from heterosexual femininity, does she maintain that distinction in the face of changing bodily appearance as she enters middle age? If that distinction blurs as she ages, is it still possible to have an “other” who represents what we refuse about femininity? And finally, do we still want or need such an other?

Interrogating femme studies, its history and its theoretical assumptions, I am aware that I have raised more issues than I can address. Using my own experience of aging to reflect on the femme’s construction as gender and as sexual outlaw leads me to believe that the aging femme is in a unique position to reconsider historical and theoretical configurations of femme identity. We might begin by admitting that we do not need a mainstream feminine figure against which we define ourselves, but that we do need to recognize that what we thought we refused about femininity is not necessarily abject, and that it may still be very much with us. One might argue that such a project is moot. Some have claimed that the renaissance of butch and femme reached its peak in the 1980s, and that the identities themselves have become passé (O’Sullivan, 1999); others have claimed that the debates surrounding lesbian gender roles are less salient since the sex wars (Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, see ‘Lesbian’, 2009: 486). If these claims are true, femme theory, like the aging femme, may just disappear into the mists of 20th-century lesbian history. It would seem, though, that femme, or, more accurately, butch/femme, survives in spite of repeatedly being relegated to the trash heap of lesbian culture. Recent publications such as Femmes of Power (Volcano and Dahl, 2009), suggest that femme is alive and well. The idea that gender roles are not as salient to the lesbian community as they used to be overstates the irrelevancy of gender identity to a younger generation; the claim itself reflects the need to investigate what Ken Plummer calls “generational sexualities,” which can be described as a shifts in the symbolic events, embodiment, and languages that people of different age cohorts use to imagine and talk about gender and sexuality (2010: 179–180).

In fact, if the femme is not simply a relic of the 20th century, and assuming that the femme experiences aging differently from other “gender warriors” and from heterosexual women, then the femme could use her own midlife crisis as an opportunity to ask questions that go beyond the scope of this article, and complicate both feminist theory and queer theory. For example, the femme at midlife and beyond is well qualified to belie the fantasy of the “lesbian haven” that lingers in some feminist theory, where lesbianism is offered as a sanctuary for escaping the vicissitudes of heteronormative culture. Having challenged that fantasy, femme theory and feminist theory could undertake more measured considerations of how femmes and heterosexual women both overlap and differ in their experiences of aging and ageism. The femme might expose the omnipresent pressures of ageism, but also theorize its impact on her self-image and sexuality by exploring her relationship to the more mythologized queer figures of the age-defying butch and the aging drag queen. I could continue listing projects that the femme might launch to interrogate the effects of aging on our sexual practices, to reframe empirical studies that would generate more complex understandings of lesbian gender, and to study how aging intersects with social contingencies such as race, class, and nation, among others. But an essay presented as notes that is primarily conceptual in nature has no real conclusion; rather, it invites responses to how the femme might rethink her history and her current status in a post-sex war, post-subcultural studies, and perhaps post-post structuralist era.