Femmebodiment: Notes on queer feminine shapes of vulnerability

Introduction

Over a decade of research, a crack has been growing in the soul of my femme-inist research. My interest in and approach to the lesbian/queer femme, a figure who is distinctly and queerly feminine, has gone against the grain of, and sought to scratch beneath the made up surface of categorical identity politics. ¹ Rather than aiming to make femme visible as an object of inquiry by defining her in sociological terms or transforming her into a liberal right-bearing subject – femmes are doing a great job of that themselves – I have been fuelled by her queer tendencies to cause rippling sensations around easy categorisations. Increasingly, I have moved beyond the emphasis on transgressions of gender norms and seeming contempt for femininity that has characterised much queer activism and theory, including with regard to femmes, and have been less interested in the dichotomies of gender than in infinite intra-categorial variations of femininity. How can we understand femme otherwise and why should we? For me this is a question of how we, as feminist theorists, might research and (re)write feminine difference and its queer shapes in ways that do not, in Luce Irigaray’s (1985) terms, reproduce the logic of the same.

Fuelled by a wider desire and need to rethink the meaning of femininity, especially in the face of continued sexism and the limits femininity seems to pose to liberal ideas of subjecthood, I have proposed that femme can be understood as a feminist figuration in a broader genre of femininity. A figuration stitches together ‘theoretical reasoning with fantasy, desire, creativity, materiality and lived experience’, and as a concept to think with it offers ‘a way of returning theory to the network of thoughts, bodies, objects, emotions, texts and experiments where it exists and develops’ (Lundberg, 2008: 43). Following Donna Haraway (2004: 1), femme as a figuration collects both hopes and fears, possibilities and dangers, the brazen and the injured. It is material-semiotic, both lived and enfleshed, and I consider it as an emergent political fiction (Braidotti, 1994) and a figure with which to imagine feminine subjectivity otherwise.

In previous work (Dahl, 2011, 2014), this figuration has been explored by examining how the figure of the femme, as a kind of vintage presence, traces a particular and non-linear genealogy in intimate encounters with a lived archive of femme writing and theorising. Through performance and activism, I also argue, femme crafts a kind of ‘écriture femme-inine’ that both exceeds discourse and performs a reconfiguration of sexual difference, one more marked by red nail polish than white ink. As such, she is a figure who disrupts, rather than repeats conventional genres of scientific writing, and through performative writing creates a distinctly femme-inine body of flesh and knowledge (cf. Duggan and McHugh, 1996). Beyond female sex, as an emergent sex which is not one (Irigaray, 1985), both the other and multiple, femme is not defined solely by the lack of the dark continent of femininity; she insists on feminine difference and yet exceeds woman and lesbian. While affirming a feminine principle, understood as a figuration, femme is not concerned with a search for a (queer) universal but rather haunted by differentials. Such an understanding might seem utopian or redemptive, or at least unscientific; but the starting point for me is that existing frameworks do not suffice and that feminist theory still has trouble with the question of femininity (see: Dahl, 2011). As I have shown before and will illuminate here again, femme’s relation to feminism is indeed a sore point. One reason, I want to argue, concerns a crack, and what I will call the queer feminine shapes of vulnerability.

In this article, I put a femme twist on Sara Ahmed’s contention that vulnerability refers to a ‘particular kind of bodily relation to the world’ (2004a: 69) that is tied to a notion of openness, and specifically consider how femme feelings of vulnerability take shape (2004a: 68). Furthermore, with Ahmed’s queer phenomenological approach (2006) I argue that as a figure, femme is not only marked by a feminine aesthetic that we may or may not identify as queer, but rather femme constitutes a form of being in the world shaped by orientation towards some objects and bodies and not others. With affective cues from the work of Dorothy Allison (1994) and Ann Cvetkovich (2003) and attention to the touch of bodies of flesh and knowledge and its imprint on skin, in this article I consider femme orientations not only in terms of sexual desire, but also rather through desire to other femmes and to the genre of femininity. Finally, I want to ask how vulnerability and the fears that it engenders are tied to such orientations and how this vulnerability is linked to desire for and among ‘the sex which is not one’ (Irigaray, 1985).

In its various queerly feminine shapes and shades, I will argue here, vulnerability is neither foundation nor simply a blush; it is both surface and beyond and thus part of the make up of what I will call femmebodiment, a queerly feminine corporeality or embodiment. I propose that skin is simultaneously a surface boundary, a canvas for femme-inine expression and the body’s largest sensory organ, that in its nakedness (beneath the shield) both undoes and empowers figuration. Moving beyond the idea that ‘we’, the feminised, experience our bodies primarily as things/objects and in ways that are above all restrictive (Young, 2005), I take a somatechnical approach which, as Sullivan and Murray (2009) contend, highlights the reciprocal bond between soma and techne, matter and technology, and thus subject and object. As a figure, femme embodies the imbricated, open and always incomplete relationship between ideas and materialisation, between technologies and matter, and between femme bodies of flesh and knowledge, to use Nikki Sullivan’s (2006) somatechnical poetics. Emphasising the role of affect in touch, I argue that here feminine corporeality is constituted through what Ahmed calls ‘the sticky associations between signs, figures, and objects’ (2004b: 120), and explore how vulnerability is part of what makes femmebodiment sticky. Undoubtably promiscuous in theoretical tools and variations of soma, and consciously challenging the formalism of journal article-sameness, I follow Braidotti’s notion that feminist theorising can indeed ‘practice a merrier brand of idiosyncratic and hybrid thinking, something that is neither conceptually pure nor politically correct’ (1994: 58). Differently put, in order to craft new knowledge out of old ideas, to move beyond the logic of the same, I borrow and rework seemingly contradictory traditions of sexual difference, poststructuralist thinking and somatechnics, in the hopes that it may take us elsewhere, as Teresa de Lauretis (1987) once put it. I invite you, the reader, to follow along in my ‘ecriture femme-inine’, where next I will set the stage for my argument with the sensuous, affective nature of a conference space where a ‘crack’ in a powerful femme soul ripped open a series of rhizomatic and relational reflections on the femme-inine shape of vulnerability.

A femme crack in the soul

In 2008, hundreds of mostly feminine queers gathered in Chicago for the second bi-annual femme conference. ² Award-winning US writer Dorothy Allison was the principal keynote speaker at a gathering that stretched over three days, and that featured a range of workshops and an impressive program of performers which in many ways took stock of contemporary femme politics in the US at the time. As is customary, the keynote was preceded by a framing introduction that set the mood for what was to come; in this case by a member of the organising femme collective consisting mostly of working-class femmes of colour, size and vision, who offered a deeply emotional testimony about the personal significance that Allison’s body of work had had for her. Like when keynote speaker Amber Hollibaugh was welcomed at the 2006 conference, the introduction sat on the threshold of the confessional and the connective, sprinkled with gasps and tears.

After seemingly never-ending welcoming applause to this rare public appearance, Allison staged a parodic imitation of a ‘hair crisis’ that invoked nervous laughter, acknowledged all the workers that made the event possible, and then complimented the crowd on their shoes, remarking on the beauty of what she called new model of fem in that southern drawl that unmistakably places Allison in the phantasmatic white trash margins of US empire (Stewart, 1996). Self-defining as a ‘femme grandma’, she began addressing the crowd of predominantly femmes in their twenties and thirties, declaring that, like everyone else who had gathered, she too was a self-actualised, autonomous femme. Everyone cheered. This was after all a utopian event in the sense that it was forward-looking and aimed to empower femme not only in her (historical) relation to butch, but in her own right, drawing on both feminist and queer strategies and theories. ‘What, then, does an autonomous femme need?’, Allison asked. After a long pause and a variety of comments hollered from the audience, she responded: ‘A nation of autonomous femmes standing next to her’. The audience cheered again, glitter-eyed and enthusiastic, not only because the conference had indeed brought people from across a nation used to this kind of rhetoric and people with knowledge of the work of queer nation and other militant organising. As a progressive, feminist and community-affirming crowd, hungry for solidarity, empowerment and wisdom from an ‘elder’, the femme movement also knew its queer legacy (cf. Berlant and Freeman, 1992) and still had hopes for a different world. But, Allison added, offering another peering pause, ‘We got us some dangerous ground between femmes’. Time seemed to stand still as hundreds of femmes held their breath, while pink blush spread on rows of necks and eyes lowered to the floor in shame or contemplation. Nobody seemed to object; the air was thick with the stickiness of emotion rippling through the rows. ‘And I don’t see it going away’, Allison said. Another long moment of silence followed, and then turned into quiet whistles and snaps.

Like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, who in her keynote the same year spoke of the politics of racism and whiteness in femme movements, in some ways the awaited heroine interrupted the affirmative flow and took the shape of a femme killjoy (Ahmed, 2010). In a space centred on promise, she pulled the collective body back to a sore point, to what is often unspeakable within a framework that seeks to highlight the positive in femininity. Unlike the majority of other speakers and participants, Allison spoke less of the injustice of femme invisibility, past and present, so frequent in queer contexts that demand outing and pride (Walker, 2001), nor did she address the contempt for or pleasures in feminine aesthetics that so much of contemporary femme activism has centred on. Her speech offered little by way of a story of an individuated path to self-love and acceptance. Her body was no eccentric and exquisite subject proud of her porn-making or burlesque – or even of community organising efforts. Among those pretty shoes, Allison spoke of aging, of a broken body and heart, about nipply bits and greedy sex with a texture of sheer gritty perversity and a queer sneer seemingly both real and grotesque. By the looks of love and fear on the audience’s faces, Allison was an eerie reminder that queer femininity, and indeed femme, exceeds its pretty stereotype and thus both what is visible and conventionally beautiful.

Peering out over rows of dresses, tattoos, high heels and curls, Allison declared: ‘jealousy, inadequacy and shame are the condition, where we live, the crack in the soul’. She paused again. This, she said, is what femme builds on. To be femme, Allison proposed, is to be willing to be ‘genuinely miserable’, humiliated and full of feelings of inadequacy. She offered no absolution, no self-helpful therapeutic cure. During her slow, precise deliverance, parts of an audience that for most of the conference was concerned with affirmative moves and with defending, redefining and articulating the ironic, subversive, sexy and glamorous dimensions of contemporary queer femininity, began quietly sobbing. Nobody, it seemed, was left untouched. Through the touch of Allison’s body of flesh and knowledge, the soul of a brazen badass femme nation cracked and the room and the collective body in it took a femmebodied shape of vulnerability. In that moment, femme appeared not as the radical break from, but a continuation within, a broader genre of femininity and in affective relation to its idealised form(s).

Set at a generic convention type hotel by O’Hare airport and conjuring up these kinds of public feelings, the conference and Allison’s keynote could of course be framed in terms of what Lauren Berlant (2008) has called a distinctly American and highly sentimentalised ‘intimate public sphere of femininity’. Arguably, the US femme movement extends a certain feminist legacy built on ‘a view that the people marked by femininity already have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate, revelatory, and a relief’ (Berlant, 2008: ix), even if it aims to queer what is meant by feminine. We could point to the history of linking femininity with emotionality and sentimentality (Cvetkovich, 1992) or conduct an intersectional analysis of how emotions circulate within a mostly working-class femme movement with deep investments in challenging all forms of oppression. We could argue that this form of femme politics departs from what Wendy Brown (1995) has described as ressentiment, and point to how ‘states of injury’ in the shape of invisibility, contempt for femininity and so on become rallying points for such a movement. Inspired by Elizabeth Freeman (2010), we could explore the queer temporalities and seemingly anachronistic dimensions of a movement/event that retains feminist principles of democratic decision making, inclusivity and community making, and focus on how in its emphasis on femme legacies, aesthetics heroines and narratives of the past this figuration reflects revisions and extensions of rather than disruptions from feminist and queer pasts. Why, in other words, choose this focus on vulnerability?

While all potential approaches to the affective dimensions of femme figurations sketched above are compelling, here I take my cue from Allison’s daring body of flesh and knowledge, and from the shape of vulnerability that it opens for, in order to develop a concept of femmebodiment as a way to understand femme subjectivity figuratively. While femme writings, poetic and theoretical, are often centred on accounting for aesthetics and desire in ways that make them archives of feeling in Cvetkovich’s terms, Allison’s speech disrupts the extraordinary performance of femininity that so often gets associated with a contemporary queer femme politics steeped in excess and radicality, and instead points to how it articulates with more conventional expectations of being in the world. Inspired by Lauren Berlant’s contention that ‘for femininity to be a genre like an aesthetic one means that it is a structure of conventional expectation that people rely on to provide certain kinds of affective intensities and assurances’ (2008: 4), I aim to focus on the kind of affective intensity that vulnerability generates, and on how it structures femme affinities and feminine embodiments.

In the next section, I turn to a range of arguments about the concept of vulnerability that stitch together my proposal that femme emerges as a figuration not through her extraordinariness, but rather through her relation to convention, and through what sticks affectively between bodies of flesh and bodies of knowledge. I propose that this points to how femmebodiment works through vulnerability affected through the skin as both a ‘layer of toughness’ (Cvetkovich, 2003) – a painted and dressed surface – and a supple, sensuous and porous interface with the world.

Femme shapes of vulnerability

‘The femme who allows herself to be vulnerable’, writes Ann Cvetkovich in An Archive of Feelings, ‘removes the layer of toughness or the cortical shield that she might carry in the face of a homophobic culture that declares her desires to be shameful or does not recognize the beauty of her queer femininity’ (2003: 65).

(Re)reading this passage, I am always struck by my own affective response. Cvetkovich’s argument touches me, as it resonates with my own femmebodied experience of toughness and vulnerability; it touches a paradox of femininity. How do we capture the way teariness reflects the sensuous nature of sight and sound and the leakiness of bodies? How to convey the rippling sensation of goose bumps or the blush of shame at Allison’s speech or even when reading Cvetkovich?

Like the femmes at the conference who were moved by Allison’s words, past and present, I am continuously touched by femme history and by the poetic, political and playful work of femme theory, and also by queer work that points to how ‘histories can touch one another’ (Cvetkovich, 2003: 49). My ethnographic and archival femme-on-femme work for the past decade has been shaped by what Cvetkovich calls ‘the affective charge of investment, of being “touched” (that) brings the past forward into the present’ (2003: 49). In some ways, this is an open – as in vulnerable – position of research, insofar as in touching the subject of vulnerability, the vulnerable subject of femme politics, my starting point is that it touches me. My aim is not simply and belatedly to celebrate ‘the affective turn’ as ‘the’ way forward for cultural (or femme) theory as a whole (Hemmings, 2005: 550). Rather, it is a modest way to stitch together a figurative theory of femmebodiment and to figure out what makes the figuration stick together and, also, fall apart.

As Anu Koivunen (2013) has noted, the concept of vulnerability has been taken up and understood in many ways in recent debates: as phenomenological/ontological, psychoanalytic, as a political condition, as interdependence and through a range of new materialist ways. Like others, I am interested in exploring the notion of vulnerability as a key concept for thinking about gendered questions of power, difference and agency, although less in the question of the particular vulnerability of women or any particular subjugated population. Here I wish to explore perhaps an obvious but still seemingly under-investigated point; namely how vulnerability is predominantly understood as feminising and subsequently as negative, scary, shameful and, above all, something to be avoided and protected against.

A history of feminist critique of femininity could be read as a history of conventional, normative femininity’s associations with vulnerability and dependence and as strategies to move beyond this situation. While it is often argued that ‘vulnerability is the human condition’, conventional definitions of vulnerability connote weakness, softness, permeability, a sense of being affected, imprinted upon or entered and shattered. Indeed, vulnerable comes from the late Latin vulnerabilis, related both to vulnerare (‘to wound’) and vulnus (‘wound’), and refers to being ‘exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally’ (Oxford Dictionaries, n.d.). In her early work, Judith Butler discussed linguistic vulnerability as the way that words appear to injure and shape us as language and sound does. Cvetkovich (2003), who draws on psychoanalysis, links vulnerability to the trauma of all touch as it inevitably implies the penetration of boundaries and that along with exposure seems to be how we have mostly used it here. As Margrit Shildrick contends, ‘every instantiation of erotic touch breaches the boundaries of embodied being. In consequence, sexuality is paradigmatically a site that invokes feelings of vulnerability, feelings that may be either positive or negative’ (n.d.: 331), which reminds us that desire and sexual acts and orientations matter. While standard definitions point to how the boundaries of bodies are tenuous at best, femininity is far too often understood in and through these very transgressions, as taking the shape of not quite human status.

Less concerned with its ontological status than with how ontology translates as interiority, I am interested in how vulnerability is neither simply a feeling nor an affect and yet it is both – culturally specific in its shape and always bodily. At times it seems to precede emotion, as in when woundedness and exposure to ‘the possibility of attack’ evokes fear, which, as Ahmed notes, is presumed to be ‘a reasonable response to vulnerability’ (2004a: 68). As such, I would argue, it also both registers and anticipates intense affect, such as shame. While we might live in fear of being vulnerable and even shield ourselves against it, it seems that its very effect and effectiveness lies in how it seems to arise when you, so to speak, least expect it (like in that moment when, giving a talk or a lecture, you suddenly are not sure if you are right). It is the crack in a seamless armour, the uncanny moment of undoing, a threshold. It is an orientation to past and future encounters with both objects and subjects, and as such it also registers a politics of location. This understanding resonates with recent work by Butler in which she argues that ‘vulnerability is not a subjective disposition, but a relation to a field of objects, forces, and passions that impinge upon or affect us in some way’, and furthermore that it is ‘a kind of relationship that belongs to that ambiguous region in which receptivity and responsiveness are not clearly separable from one another, and not distinguished as separate moments in a sequence’ (2014: 14). What remains of crucial interest to me is how such a relation, including one in which there is a possibility of attack, takes on a feminine shape.

Lingering with conventional definitions, we could say that to be feminine or femme is to negotiate ‘the possibility of attack’ on a daily basis in a patriarchal world, and that this shapes femmebodiment as a distinctly feminine bodily situation. For instance, one of my femme conversation partners said, ‘I never wear shoes that I can’t walk in – or run and fight in if I had to’ (Dahl and Volcano, 2008: 81). As Ahmed notes, vulnerability is restrictive insofar as it is ‘an effect that works to secure femininity as a delimitation of movement in the public, and over-inhabitance in the private’ (2004a: 70). Indeed, Butler contends, women and queers (and people of colour, we might add) as collectives have long grappled with how to respond to a vulnerability to violence (2004: 231). What I call femmebodiment captures movement and the technologies that both restrict and enable it, such as comfortable shoes.

At the same time, an understanding of vulnerability tied to femininity also marks an orientation to a regulatory ideal which bears traces of a white bourgeois heterosexual respectable femininity, one that popular feminism often critiques and that popular culture thrives on. This femininity is certainly not universally available or even desirable, but as an ideal it is a shape that can generate vulnerability precisely within the affective relationship with or proximity to the ideal. This is also the ‘dangerous ground between femmes’ that Allison talked about. Am I feminine enough? What is my proximity to the ideal and what happens if I transgress it?

Another femme, a London-based playwright and author of African descent, noted that, ‘as a femme I do fear being sexually harassed by men on the streets to the extent that I can’t always wear what I want to’, even as she acknowledged that she never feared being mistaken for a man or outed as a dyke (moments of queer vulnerability we might say). At certain points in her life, she said, white queers have not read her as femme (which to her as a sexual position is associated with submissiveness), and she noted that it was ‘as if we, black women, had to be sexually dominant’ (Dahl and Volcano, 2008: 31–32). As Ahmed reminds us, vulnerability as an ‘ideal state’ of femininity is not an inherent characteristic of all, or even some bodies and the shape it takes as an ‘affect’ or a ‘feeling’ of femmebodiment in the streets and in the sheets differs depending on racialisation, class position, age and body shape, not to mention location in the world and time of day. A history of black feminist thought is instructive here; indeed, white femininity has always been understood as vulnerable, as in need of protection from black men by white men. Rarely has vulnerability to racist attacks been the starting point for feminist orientations on this question.

Sometimes in popular discourse, vulnerability is defined as ‘to have one’s guard down, being open to censure or criticism’ (Wikipedia, n.d.), and this too is a bodily relation, which then becomes a form of femmebodiment. Censure and criticism, both from the world at large – say, in the shape of ‘how dare you click, click down the street in those heels and that short skirt, you should be ashamed of yourself’ – registering the normative policing of femininity, and from other queers and feminists (‘you are privileged in your invisibility’ or ‘your aesthetic tells me that you have internalised a patriarchal fantasy of woman’, as popular arguments have it), are common and clearly ‘affective’ topics in femme writing and politics. For instance, in a discussion about fashion, one femme said: ‘while I don’t subscribe to the theory that dressing “sexy” makes me either a bad feminist, or “asking for it”, I won’t wear clothing that would keep me from being able to do my work or defend myself, or that is made by unethical companies’ (Dahl, 2010a: 172). This, I would argue, shows the simultaneously ideological/theoretical and material dimensions of an armour. Allison, whose body of flesh and knowledge is constituted by sexual abuse and the shame of poverty, nevertheless emerges beyond it, as in: ‘I wear my skin only as thin as I have to, armour myself only as much as seems absolutely necessary. I try to live naked in the world, unashamed even when under attack, unafraid even though I know how much there is to fear’ (1994: 250). Always both recalling and anticipating criticism and attack, then, femme bodies of knowledge and of flesh cannot be disentangled from, but rather engage with and respond to, the readings that their aesthetics, their surfaces and their bodies invite and anticipate.

With flat-shoed or defence-generating dress that reflects a conscious protection against the fear of attack, and by living naked in the world, even under attack, femmebodiment emerges as the negotiation of vulnerability through that layer of toughness that Cvetkovich describes. The skin here is a not simply a surface layer; it is simultaneously bodily and sensuous, narrated and excessive. Understood somatechnically, in the sense that ‘the material intelligibility of the body (soma) [is] inseparable from the techniques and technologies (technics) in and through which bodies are formed and transformed’ (Stryker in Aizura, 2009: 305), femmebodiment is not simply a matter of affective matter; it is constituted through the technologies of femininity, and involves the incorporation of certain objects (practical shoes) and signs, and manifests in a certain stride or self-defence. Vulnerability, it seems, is the glue of techne and soma emerging as a shape, and is understood as an affective state of openness, what makes relations between bodies, what makes a figuration stick.

Vulnerability and removal

Ann Cvetkovich’s work is the most sustained attempt to address femme vulnerability and, like Allison’s work, she touches me and many others. But what does it mean for femmes to ‘allow’ themselves to be vulnerable, as Cvetkovich puts it? Is that what happened when Allison pointed to the crack in the soul? Cvetkovich’s insightful discussion about vulnerability affectively stresses the transformative potential of vulnerability as opening. As such, it pivots around three premises: butch/femme desire, a distinction between interiority/privacy and exteriority/public, and an idea about removal and thus, we might infer, exposure. Here I would like to build on and stretch her discussion and, in particular, extend the concept of desire in order to understand the queer feminine shapes of vulnerability.

Cvetkovich’s argument draws on and reworks Freud’s notion of a cortical shield, as well as the idea that touch is inherently traumatic insofar as it always risks the subject’s undoing through penetrating its inherent openness. An intimate encounter in particular, she contends, ‘invokes the powerful fears of vulnerability that being affected by sensations or being touched can arouse’ (Cvetkovich, 2003: 51). This notion of vulnerability thus connotes a kind of interiority at risk; allowing oneself to be vulnerable requires a removal of this ‘cortical shield’ or layer of toughness that femmes, as we saw above, may well need publically. According to Cvetkovich, it is only in and through desire for butches, and through a kind of undoing that occurs in the intimate, private and erotic realm of fucking, that femmes are able to be vulnerable and thus transformed. In her readings of the archive of butch femme feelings, she writes that ‘constructed as “openness”, vulnerability as an emotional state is connected to the body’ and reminds us that vulnerability thus ‘takes on positive meaning as a desirable and often difficult achievement’ (Cvetkovich, 2003: 58).

In this important part of her argument (which, again, is concerned overall with sexual trauma, the trauma of all touch), Cvektovich joins other femme theorists (Harris and Crocker, 1997) in arguing that, for femmes, ‘penetration’ is neither ‘passive’ nor traumatic, but in fact healing, insofar as femme desire is about (sexual) receptivity. Challenging femininity’s association with passivity has been a central part of femme theory, and if we consider Ahmed’s argument that ‘the fear of passivity is tied to the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others’ (2004a: 2), we get a particular understanding of femme as again, at least publically, primarily brazen and agential. The very understanding of femme here presumes a certain desire structure (butch/femme) and, more notably, a particular understanding of sexuality as the intersubjective dimension of giving and taking. For Cvetkovich, this specifically means a replacing of penetration and passivity with enveloping and receptivity, and a transformation of trauma into healing. Cvetkovich’s notion of vulnerability as receptivity (a common argument among femmes who are tired of being met with the ‘who’s the man?’ and the ‘do me queen’ arguments, I should add) thus offers a potentially profoundly transformative reading both of female/femme sexuality and of vulnerability itself, insofar as it suggests that it is a kind of daring openness. Yet, it seems that for vulnerability to be possible, Cvetkovich’s femme needs a safe, comfortable, enclosed and private relationship, preferably with a butch lover.

While many of us certainly have investments in the pleasure of intimacy with butch lovers, this argument literally privatises/domesticates and interiorises a kind of authentic femme subjectivity as vulnerable and keeps femme inherently constituted by what Sue Ellen Case (1988) once called the butch-femme aesthetic. As much early historical work on femme (Kennedy and Davis, 1993; Nestle, 1992) has shown, however, femmes have been a central part of lesbian bar culture, of feminism and of queer movements, that is to say of public culture, and this means that we need to theorise femmebodiment in relation to space in ways that extend beyond the (imaginary) bedroom. Furthermore, as recent years of metropolitan femme activism in the North/West illustrates, femme sexual subjectivity also exceeds intimate relationships to butches and positions we assume in fucking. Unless we want to ‘domesticate’ and privatise feminine/femme sexuality and argue that identity is reducible to sexual desire, it seems that asking about the shape that vulnerability takes for femmes as public feminine beings who orient ourselves towards some issues and objects and not others is important. Moreover, as the opening anecdote shows, the intimacy of touch exceeds that of bodies in a private sphere and femme also constitutes an intimate public, where words touch, recall and stick, to use Ahmed’s approach. As I have argued above, femmebodiment can also be understood as a figurative movement in public in spite of the fear of attack (including for being invisible or for embodying a ‘patriarchal’ version of femininity). This might mean moving in and through that queer feminine shape of vulnerability and keeping the definition of receptivity open.

If we assume that femme is an orientation, towards some objects and subjects and not others (Ahmed, 2006), and if we consider the collective organising of contemporary femmes, I suggest that we also need to rethink femme desire. That is, if femmebodiment, as I argue, is a form of feminine sexual difference both within and from a sex which is not one, we must also attend to what Irigaray has called ‘commodities among themselves’. For Irigaray, patriarchy is about homosexuality; relations between men where women, or the feminine, are of the market, nothing but commodities in exchanges between men and thus, she contends, women can only relate to one another as rivals (1985: 196). In an attempt to speak of love, homosexuality between women, Irigaray wishes for a utopian economy of abundance. I am interested in how desire operates in how femmes relate to one another. As such, femme-on-femme desire is not only same-sexual but ‘homosocial’ – the desire for sisterhood, for a sense of belonging and identification – and as such it must transcend the assigned value of the feminine.

What Allison called the ‘dangerous ground between femmes’, the way that ‘jealousy, inadequacy and shame’ condition femme subjectivity, suggests that femme desire also includes the desire to be like other femmes; pretty, performative, brazen, talented, sexually popular, desirable – in short, the complex negotiations of those things that are commonly understood as valuable qualities and assets of femininity. This, it has turned out in my years of ethnographic research, is an exceptionally vulnerable topic, and on countless occasions it has been cast as fears of inadequacy or fears of betrayal. One femme stressed that her commitment to femme solidarity was motivated by a need to ‘get over our inherited self-hatred and trust issues, because in most societies women are raised to believe that they are worth nothing aside from beauty’ (Dahl and Volcano, 2008: 106), whereas French feminist theorist Virginie Despentes noted (perhaps aware of her Irigarayan legacy) that such a thought is nearly impossible, as ‘sisterhood is not a feminine tradition’ (Dahl and Volcano, 2008: 106) in a society in which to be feminine is to identify with the man and see all other feminine beings as threats. At the US femme conferences, countless workshops on topics ranging from aging to polyamory, from anti-racism to ‘tittie-tassling’, concern, I would argue, the issues of jealousy and insecurity, what is at times called ‘overcoming an economy of scarcity’, enhancing the importance of femme-on-femme validation, loyalty and support, all of which point to the subject of vulnerability and how to negotiate it.

This may of course come as no surprise within an ‘intimate public of femininity’. The visible markings of femininity – that is, among other things, those aesthetic properties we attribute to the (painted) hue and elasticity of skin, the size of buttocks, bosoms and bags, the height of heels and hair and so on – along with ‘feminine’ traits such as softness, nurture and emotionality, have long been sources of subordination, scrutiny and scandal for ‘women’ and other feminised beings. Cast as assets or as mere reflections of patriarchal projections, they are certainly sources of vulnerability, as I hint at above. Inspired by Lauren Berlant, I argue that we may wish to distinguish between sexual desire between the feminised and ‘a desire to occupy, to experience the privileges’ of the other’s body, ‘to wear her way of wearing her body, like a prosthesis or a fetish’ (2008: 109).

While they are potential sources of (predictable) feminine jealousy, these vulnerable qualities of femininity are also, I contend, the somatechnical connective tissue of femmebodiment; they are what sticks and soils and softens openings of conversations and bodies, like kiss-proof lipstick or lube on our lips that speak together, the glitter in tear-filled and laughing eyes. As we saw in Allison’s speech, the stickiness also creates intimate publics. If, as Ahmed argues, ‘emotions do not reside in a subject or figure, they work to bind subjects together’ (2004b: 120), this feminine shape of vulnerability cannot be reduced to singular femme bodies, but rather resides in the desire for (being) the other, and also shapes collective and individual femmebodiment. If allowing oneself to be vulnerable is potentially transgressive, as Cvetkovich proposes, and if vulnerability is an embodied relation to the world, the shapes that it takes between femmes point to the affective tendencies of jealousy, humiliation, fear and anger, as Allison’s keynote alluded to, but also to the joy, interest and pleasures of femmebodiment as orientation.

I would like to develop an understanding of femme desire that does not extend from one bodily entity as an integrated totality (in)to another and that cannot be reduced to a heterosexualised logic in the psychoanalytic sense of desire as lack (Grosz, 1995: 182). That is, femme desire (and thus vulnerability) does not simply concern sexual desire between two autonomous liberal subjects that are hopelessly caught in a logic of whether desire itself pivots around a heterosexualised model of gender and sexuality. Rather, with Elizabeth Grosz, we might think of desire ‘not in terms of what is missing or absent, not in terms of depth, latency or interiority, but in terms of surfaces and intensities’ (1995: 179). If femme vulnerability is connected to a desire to be seen and touched by other femmes, it is a vulnerability that emerges around the somatechnics of femmebodiment, sur/face to sur/face, as it were.

Aside from the focus on butch/femme and the emphasis on public/private, Cvetkovich’s notion of vulnerability in its transformative form is tied to intentionality (a very common theme in contemporary femme politics as well); the femme ‘allows’ and ‘removes’ the layer of toughness, making it seem as if the cortical shield was itself an armour, a pretty dress or an adorned surface that could be washed off, or as if it was one which seemingly both reflects and masks ‘the beauty of queer femininity’. If to remove is to expose and that means making something visible by uncovering it, and if exposure of oneself is allegedly tied to vulnerability, then we need to ask again about how the body and its surface and skin are tied to the make up of subjectivity. As with the queer porn community that we have heard about here, a large part of contemporary femme visibility politics is quite literally concerned with exposure and removal of clothing, and with a discursive, at times confessional, ‘outing’ of sex itself. Not only are many ‘public’ femmes involved in burlesque, striptease and other forms of sex work, but many activists and theorists like Cvetkovich are keen to argue that butch-femme sexual subcultures provide us with other and even better models of sexuality.

When Sydney’s Femme Guild march in Mardi Gras with raised fists under paroles such as ‘we can do it’ and ‘see how straight I look with my fist up your cunt’, or when The London Bird Club demands ‘sexy without sexism’, to give but two examples (Dahl, 2014), it is a kind of activism that suggests that both the ‘attack’ and the state of alleged vulnerability that it brings up are possible to combat by letting vulnerability take the shape of a collective layer of toughness, a kind of high heel sisterhood, developed through a pun on Western feminist history and on the discourse of invisibility. In refusing to cover up or to stay closeted, this removal not only seeks to take back the night, or to make femmes into queer cover girls – it turns vulnerability as exposure inside out.

But does this engagement with and response to the feminine shapes of vulnerability help us understand the ways that vulnerability still erupts, and seems to both precede emotion and anticipate affect, the way that its power resides in its ability to surprise when we least expect it? While the queer pedagogies that contemporary activism engender are certainly both therapeutic and potentially liberating, I am not convinced it fully addresses the problem, nor that it helps us understand what vulnerability does in femmebodiment. How do we address the porousness of that layer of toughness without it seeming intentional and hence synonymous with surface? Needless to say, skin, cortical shield and layer of toughness are not the same thing entirely, nor can they be reduced to surface or its decoration. Rather, it seems that femmebodiment is the entwining of technologies of femininity and political practices, and the reconfiguration of nudity, skin and sexiness as sources of vulnerability in the first place. It challenges feminine sexuality as passive by insisting that it is receptive and thus involves agency, yet it does not help us understand the part of desire that is also concerned with annihilation. To fully understand femmebodiment, it seems to me we need to go beyond surface and depth, beyond sexual desire and intimacy as private matters that can or should be outed, and the by now taken for granted dimensions of such intentional acts.

Towards a femme shape of vulnerability?

There is nothing superficial or simple about femme activism and writing (including my own) that seeks to contest the idea that femininity, in the words of Imogen Tyler, ‘is nothing but surface; the visual construction of women as desirable objects for the male gaze’ (2001: 71), or about the popular arguments that queer femininity is the radical, brazen, intentional and subversive form of femininity. The affective responses to Allison’s keynote and to Cvetkovich’s argument with which I began this article both reflect and produce a crack in that very ‘layer of toughness’ that a femmebodied figure of ink and eyeliner, of dazzling beauty, fierce stride and at times grotesque excess often needs to move in the world.

It seems to me that the complexity of femme lies precisely in the ways that her queerness, in Jasbir Puar’s words, ‘underscores contingency and complicity with dominant formations’, and thus that femme cannot be reduced to a ‘dissenting, resistant, and alternative (all of which queerness importantly is and does)’ understanding of femininity (2007: 205). With Berlant’s notion of femininity as a genre, instead of insisting on the ‘queer performativity’ of femmes as simply that of all contemporary fictions of liberal autonomous subjects, we might attend to ‘variations within a conventional expectation of self-and world- continuity, rather than mainly providing dramas of potentially frame-breaking alternativity’ (2008: 4).

Staying with vulnerability as a bodily relation to the world, feeling sensuously, in my own research archive I sense how the alleged brazenness of a femme identity politics set on demanding recognition for that ‘tough queer beauty’ Cvektovich talks about dissolves into mascara tears as we are touched by speakers and poets. I see not only the defiance against heteropatriarchy among plumaged birds, I see plucked eyebrows raised in disapproval, glittery eyelined eyes wrinkled in and by laugher, red lips not only speaking together but pressed together in silent protest or disapproval, I sense perfumed skin nestled into sweaty, unshaved armpits as we embrace as old friends and, perhaps most of all, that sudden wobble in a swanky stride in killer heels.

These affects of fear, shame, joy, excitement, and the narrative forms that they take – and that emerge between bodies – both make and unmake attempts to create a kind of femme sisterhood for ‘commodities among themselves’ (Irigaray, 1985). If engaging with affect has become a way to engage with ideology, in the case of femmes, feminist critiques of patriarchal ideologies of femininity have now been replaced by a route of femme activism that centres on a kind of identity politics based on seeing femme difference in how we practice sexuality or adorn our bodies, among other things. Attending to vulnerability as a kind of opening or a crack, and to the ephemeral traces it leaves, might transform, and it certainly creates openings both in and between (femme) bodies of flesh and knowledge.

If we reduce vulnerability to how it concerns the feminine shapes with regards to exposure, susceptibility, and liability to succumbing, criticism and attack, we assume an understanding of an embodied subject who fears loss of face and of bodily boundaries. Conventional definitions of vulnerability, and many understandings found in the literature, seem to presume a subject who lives as though she should be unified, closed, masked and disciplined; if you will a liberal, human subject, whose biggest hope and fear is to be shattered through sex/intimacy as penetration. An affective loss of face or wobble in a stride might be significant to some femmes who marvel in beauty boxes and dress up boxes – vulnerability is not as simple as performing an intentional strip or using make-up remover, it cannot be cured through changing shoes at the end of the night. Rather, the ‘dangerous ground’ between femmes, histories of shame and inadequacy reminds us that affect ripples along surfaces, accentuates hues and shapes dispositions that, through a desire for belonging and connection, crack open toughness.

My research suggests that, in its queer feminine shapes, vulnerability is not just about susceptibility to emotional and physical ‘penetration’ or ‘attack’, but rather it speaks precisely to the difficulty and the persistence of vulnerability as an openness in and to the world. As such it might suggest something along the lines of Braidotti’s (2006) nomadic ethics in the sense of offering a different mode of thinking subjectivity and corporeality. It is vulnerability that reminds us that subjects are constituted in and through the world, and, as Ahmed puts it, it concerns bodily relations to the world, and to each other. That is to say, again, that vulnerability concerns our orientations both to histories (memories or beliefs about attack, feminist, queer and otherwise) and relations (those objects and subjects that might attack, harm, manipulate, tempt and so on). Butler notes in Undoing Gender that, by virtue of our embodiment, we are from the start given over to another; this, she contends, ‘makes us vulnerable to violence, but also to another range of touch’ (2004: 23). Femmebodiment in my understanding offers a way to think beyond a closed, autonomous body on the one hand, and one where embodying femininity means understanding oneself as an object on the other hand (Young, 2005). Femmebodying vulnerability constitutes giving over to one another, as commodities among ourselves (Irigaray, 1985), not freed from patriarchal constrictions but also not only bound by them.

In order to account for femmebodiment in all its complexities, then, we must think through the skin, to use Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s (2001) apt formulation, not only as sur/face or as shield. We cannot simply stay on it or insist on an essence beneath it; we must think of sensations, intensities and the force of desire in figuring femme as an assemblage, a desiring machine with particular orientations. Allison’s crack in the soul, the feeling of walking in the world in spite of fear, points to the impossibility of both ‘having’ and ‘removing’ a shield or a layer of toughness; it refuses a simplistic distinction between surface and depth, gender and sex, technology and matter, past and present. In that sense, and returning to Cvetkovich, vulnerability, while feminising, is not ‘something’ femmes simply ‘carry around’ as a deep interior ‘truth’ about morphologically defined sexual difference – it does not exist beneath but through the adorned shield, and it is not always something to cover up. Rather, vulnerability is intimately tied to femmebodiment in a complex field of pleasure and danger, one in which femme touch is central and where cracks, rather than toughness and its removal, are what we must attend to. In a discussion about monsters and the encounter of difference/the other, Margrit Shildrick has proposed that ‘we might begin to see vulnerability as positive, a link between ourselves and others that sees danger not in the flow across boundaries, but in the isolation peculiar to the sovereign subject’ (n.d.: 11). The nation of femmes has never been an autonomous, sovereign one, but rather a femmebodied figuration that fears both difference and sameness, a body of flesh and knowledge, because Allison’s crack in the soul is also where the light comes in.