Femininity Gone Wrong: Queering Femme a la Gay Chicano

What makes a femme “femme”: do hip shaking, cat walking, head bobbing, and finger snapping mark one as “femme”? Does femme inhabit a particular body? To explore these questions I analyze male gay Chicano/Latino... [ view full abstract ]

What makes a femme “femme”: do hip shaking, cat walking, head bobbing, and finger snapping mark one as “femme”? Does femme inhabit a particular body? To explore these questions I analyze male gay Chicano/Latino cultural production like short stories and art to interrogate the category of femme. Similar to Roderick A. Ferguson’s initial ruminations of queer of color critique using the eccentric sashaying black drag-queen prostitute figure from Marlon Rigg’s influential film Tongues Untied, I wonder what generative information gay Chicano/Latino male femmes can whisper and or shriek into our ears. I conceptualize femme-ininity as a critical analytic to trace the possibilities of queering femininity and also to explore the relationship(s) between race and femme.
I find femme-ininity a useful analytic that mobilizes a more robust Chicano/Latino gender analysis. Often, the essentialist binary of male (sex)/masculinity (gender) informs a Chicano/Latino gender analysis. This paper attempts to find alternative ways –here, femme-ininity- to engage a Chicano/Latino gender analysis that does not adhere to the essentialist binary of male/masculity. By queering femme, femme-ininity helps us de-essentialize gender norms and rips it from a particular biological body. In other words, femme-ininity allows us to document alternative gender permutations beyond the male-masculinity trope used to discuss Chicano/Latino men.
Femme is a politically driven as well as self-identifying term used by lesbians that can be historically traced to early twentieth-century working-class lesbian communities. The academic field of Femme Studies problematizes the invisibility of femmes by challenging the butch/femme binary and disrupts the biologizing discourses generated to naturalize our perception of gender. Femme scholars Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri re-conceptualize the category of femininity and offer a new reading of femme, “Femininity is a demand placed on female bodies and femme is the danger of a body read female or inappropriately feminine. We are not good girls –perhaps we are not girls at all.” Perhaps femme is not a “girl” at all either. Although Femme Studies attempts to conceptualize the possibilities of queering femininity by detaching femme from a biological female body, the elision of race from this discussion impedes this from happening and only reifies the essentialism of gender and it’s attachment to a biological –lesbian- body. The latter observation mirrors the reductive Chicano/Latino men’s gender analysis that seems to cement the binary of male equals masculinity.
My paper is guided by José Esteban Muñoz’ theorization of disidentification to analyze the ways that gay Chicano/Latino male femmes challenge dominant perceptions of gender and how the analytic of femme-ininity can offer an alternative way of analyzing Chicano/Latino men’s gender that doesn’t replicate the binary of male/masculinity.