queerbert:

Just a thought but

if I’m talking about the queer community, and you don’t identify with that term…

I’m not talking about you!

Just leave me alone, thanks.

This is still relevant. Thanks.

zeezoutenijs:

teiledesganzen:

Today I’m the one wanting a (recent) history lesson about language.

When did “femme” stop being a term that was mostly used by lesbian/bisexual/queer people (who were mostly assigned female at birth, and while not all of them were personally attracted to butches and/or other nonbinary/genderqueer/transmasculine people, they still moved in the same queer communities as them) and become a term for “an activist and cultural movement that challenges masculine-centrism and femmephobia in society“ as Julia Serano has put it (source)? When did “femme” become a word that heterosexual (and I’m deliberately not saying “straight” here) feminine women comfortably use for themselves? Heck, when did “femme” and feminine” become near-synonyms? Is “femme” now a general word for “feminine + feminist”?

I’m mostly asking because I feel like I missed the point (sometime in the past few years) where the “majority meaning“ of “femme” had shifted, and I would like to know what contributed to that shift (I have some ideas of my own but I’m also interested in other people’s perceptions)? I’m also asking because I want to know what new conversations about misogyny and anti-femininity we can now have by using the above definition of “femme” instead of “woman” and/or “feminine”? And what conversations have become harder now that “femme” is basically being de-queered?

Also (even though it’s not directly related to my questions about the term “femme” aside from the fact that it seems to have happened fairly recently), when did “sapphic girls” (and variations thereof) become a widely-used (at least here on Tumblr) umbrella term to describe women who were attracted to women (which, as far as I understand, includes both cis and trans women, and both lesbians and bisexual women) that was used over other terms (such as “lesbians,” “dykes,” “bisexual women,” etc.)? What conversations are enabled by this term? What others are harder to have?

I’m not looking for the One Definite Source To End All Sources, but rather for your individual perceptions and observations, so I can piece together a picture that is not just made from my own view of things. So, any input on this?

I think the femme and sapphic thing areperhapsrelated. I know nothing about femme at all and can’t say I’ve seen much on the topic, but because of the trends that exist in Tumblr Discourse, I can imagine similar things happened.

Words, especially ones popular in discourse, pretty much go two ways
- Either words become inclusive of more people bc of new insight into gender and sexuality
- Or they become utterly unusable by sheer derailment and misuse

(Aka I don’t have an opinion about whether sapphic is a good word, but I do have an opinion on the way people argue on the internet and how this leads to constantly having to come up with new words.)

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Thank you for this response! It has been very helpful indeed in understanding what is going on here.

My response comes with a lot of parantheses (sorry) and got a bit long and ranty (not sorry). I think I mostly agree with your take here?

I understand why it would be useful to have a term like “sapphic” that (at least the way it’s used these days) is a bit blurry around the edges. I mean, I am happily queer-identified, and also like queer both as a political group term and as an umbrella term for The Community, and there are reasons for that…

HOWEVER.

Side note: Wow, I wasn’t even aware yet that some people are now reading “LGBT” as “I’m deliberately excluding groups of people here, namely intersex, ace/aro, and pansexual people” - and it still remains pretty baffling to me. I mean, just off the top of my head, I can think of several other valid reasons why people might use “LGBT” over any other combinations of letters - because it’s an established term others may use to look for information and they want their information to be found by those people; because they’re not aware that other acronyms even exist (since not everyone is a Full-Time Discoursologist, for a variety of really good reasons, including but not limited to the need to earn a living in a way that uses up pretty much all of the available brainergy); because they’re directly or indirectly quoting someone else; because they’re lazy; because they made a typo or were autocorrected; because they’re not English native speakers, these things work differently in their first language, and their first language influences their use of English; because they’re unsure what combination of letters is the “best” to use ( LGBTIQQ? LGBTQIA? LGBTQIAP? LGBTQQIP2SAA? and in what order should we put the letters after the T? and do we repeat letters for different identities or can we summarize both aces/aros and allies under the same A and queer and questioning ones under the same Q?), so they default to the shortest one they know and assume non-LGBT people will know they’re still included (because pretty much ALL identity terms have pretty much ALWAYS included more people than were literally included - never mind the ongoing in-group debates of how to even DEFINE “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual,” or “transsexual/transgender/trans*/trans” - and I can personally attest to the fact that even back in 1994, when I attended a workshop titled “what is a lesbian?,” we did not arrive at any consensus about that whatsoever - and we didn’t even include trans women or nonbinary people in our considerations that day)…

It’s also baffling to me to see all these intense attempts at prescribing other people’s use of language (including for THEMSELVES) and the result that fewer and fewer words seem to be at least vaguely acceptable to use for any of us. While simultaneously seeing people seriously and without even a hint of irony link to lists like this one that contains over one hundred (100+) “genders” (all of which can apparently also be combined with all sorts of other prefixes and suffixes) and expect anyone to even understand what the hell any of this is supposed to mean, let alone remember even half of this list (never mind that the same people probably also yell very loudly about the use of technical jargon that excludes people who are not specialists in a given field - but apparently that is only true for things that exist as academic disciplines and not for lists of - #sorrynotsorry - Tumblr genders?). By which I mean that I frequently just sit here, look at my screen, shake my head in disbelief and wonder whether people ever look at their politics as a semi-coherent WHOLE instead of just a list of disconnected slogans and memes… And I honestly can’t tell anymore whether that gender list is for real or whether it’s a joke!

And right now I’m sitting here, reading about people not wanting to use “SGA” or “same gender attracted” because it’s apparently a term rooted in conversion therapy. And I can’t help but go: But you’re all cool with “SAPPHIC”???? Which, let’s remember, is a term that is derived from a wealthy European poet and goes back to the exact same source that gives us the word “lesbian” (= from the island of Lesbos, where Sappho was born)?! And nobody thinks that is maybe a tad eurocentric (or classist)? When Black lesbian Audre Lorde has already criticized this use of a Western European “tradition” (as imaginary/mythical as it may be) almost FORTY years ago? Or is this where we suddenly don’t care about intersectionality anymore because “sapphic WOC” just know that they’re included in the whole fuzzy-edged sapphicness?

(Mind you, I don’t think that “same gender attracted” is a particularly useful term, either, because it always makes me wonder if my attraction to butches as a femme counts as “same gender” or “different gender” attraction (even if all involved identify as cis women, which in my specific case we usually don’t)…)

So, frankly, from where I sit, all of these terms have THE EXACT SAME problem: They try to describe a group of people clearly enough that it actually has a meaning (so the term needs SOME boundaries = people it EXcludes) but also openly enough so it doesn’t require everyone in the group to be exactly the same (so the term needs to be a little fuzzy around the edges or it won’t be INclusive enough). And for a (usually very, very short) while, everything is mostly okay among the lesbians, dykes, same-gender attracted women, wlw, sapphic girls, etc. Until someone comes along and rightly points out that the chosen term has some Problematic Associations - it’s eurocentric, it’s been used as a slur, it’s been used in conversion therapy contexts, it’s not inclusive enough of people who don’t wholly identify as women, etc. - and therefore shouldn’t be used as a group term (or even as a self-identification) because it will alienate/hurt/exclude people we don’t want to alienate/hurt/exclude. Which is usually followed by people yelling at each other because no one likes giving up words that have been important identity landmarks, and community makers, and even literal life-savers. And because no one likes being alienated/hurt/excluded from a community they feel a strong affinity with. (And of course they’re all RIGHT to have these feelings!) And then the search for a new term begins and the cycle repeats…

Of course this has been happening ever since we’ve HAD any terms to describe attractions that are not between a masculine cis man and a feminine cis woman (and I could look up the NINETEENTH-century sources to prove that if necessary). It’s just that the speed of the interwebs and Tumblr Discourse has made this process so fast that you can literally take a break for only a year (like I did) and then come back and be all, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT, PEOPLE?! <returning with pizza to inexplicably burning room.gif>

My personal reaction to all of this is that I kind of want to go back to calling myself a “dyke” in an act of retro-defiance because “queer” has seemingly lost all relevant-to-me meaning now that apparently every straight, white, middle-class cis boy who has ever worn nail polish for a day at university feels free to claim that term as his without the need to pay even the slightest bit of respect to those who have made that nail-polish-wearing possible for him, and “femme” has lost all relevant-to-me meaning now that it seems to be just a younger, hipper way of saying “feminine female” (or, occasionally, just “feminine”) so that it can easily be used to sell sex toys that are sorted into anatomy-based binary gender categories (no, the sex toys are NOT the problematic part here - except for the part where “for her” lists only SEVENTEEN “butt toys” whereas “for him” suddenly shows THIRTY-SEVEN of them because… women don’t regularly come equipped with a butt?) and no one needs to even think about queerness anymore. If only “dyke” didn’t come with the assumption that the people who use that term are not attracted to anyone BUT women (which also has never been a universal truth, but never mind)… But at least “dyke” doesn’t sound as if it goes well with the pastel colors that seemingly are inseparably required for all “sapphics” (and which are of course absolutely fine for other people to use, and I will fight for the right of people of all genders to wear millenial pink, it’s just that pastels of pretty much any hue really don’t look good on my mid-40s queer femme pervert self)? I would still get yelled at, though, since apparently it’s also “d slur” nowadays…

I don’t know. Maybe we should spend less time discussing language-and-language-only and more time on coming up with other ways to make people feel as if they and their issues are included in our culture and politics? Because, personally, if I know a space is cool on the inside, and there are stories around that let other people know that/how/why it’s cool on the inside, I really don’t give much of a fuck about what label is stuck on the door. I mean, here in fandom, we can all read gay subtext into pretty much anything, including inanimate objects, so why are we suddenly having problems with implied meanings when it comes to non-fictional human spaces?

P.S.: I also miss genderqueer. <checks clock> Is it time for a revival yet?