I don’t get to speak For femme, but only what I personally know of femme from the connections I have in my life. It’s got nothing to do with “femininity” and everything to do with femininity at the same time. In the same way Butch takes the man’s weapon and turns it into a shield, femmes totally rebirth femininity. Something used to confine by one segment of society is used to liberate another. And there’s no single aesthetic quality which ties it together. Every femme I know is different - the hyperfeminine fairy, the punk-goth-alternative crushing a crucifix under her boot heel, the tomboy who wields a rapier, the drawn-on hair made real and earrings that scream love, the dripping in class whilst rocking a mullet. Femme goes beyond femininity to reinvent it.
And each one is golden-hearted, community-minded, thoughtful and invested and always reaching out to hold someone’s hand; for the other’s sake or for their own. It’s powerful, protective, never passive. Femme doesn’t dream of running away to a cottage in the woods, divorcing itself of responsibility, living an isolated fantasy. I see those hands and the seeds they plant and that they’d rather do it in a garden everyone can access. To hell with it if they get dirt under their fingernails.
To me being a femme wlw is about repurposing femininity for sapphic love. Not just about being a wlw who’s vaguely feminine or not-masculine, but whose femininity is a key element of their lesbianism or bisexuality; in the roles we play in our relationships and/or sex, in the way we seduce our partners, the way we embody our genders, etc.
That’s what I mean when I say not just any wlw who’s not butch is a femme, and that there are femmes who’re also gnc. It’s an act of repurposing femininity outside of heterosexuality, intentionally expressing and experiencing it in the realm of same gender romance and eroticism.
And it is powerful to me, to be women or sorta woman-adjacent and be feminine but to say “my femininity exists away from or beyond men, despite what I was told my whole life”.
Our femininities exist not for men exlcusively as the default but, in the case of lesbians, expliticitly NOT for men at all ever, and in the case of bi women, for anyone of any gender they they choose. I really think that’s a powerful, if mostly silent, subversion.
