Seher, Kori, and Taylor discuss queer fashion now, historically, and how we might sort of be doing just a little gatekeeping as well.
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Further Reading (Thank you Taylor!)
Lesbian/Bi terminology:
- Califia, Pat. “Gay Men, Lesbians, And Sex: Doing It Together”; Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. (1983) (1994)
- Caprio, Frank. The Story of a Lesbian; Sexology magazine (October 1953)
- Cartier, Marie. Baby, You are My Religion: Women, Gay Bars, and Theology Before Stonewall. (2014) (p. 75)
- Donoghue, Emma. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668–1801. (1993)
- “But usually what writers comment on [in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] is the quality of passion between two women, not their personal histories. Lesbian culture seems to have been understood as a matter of relationships and habitual practices rather than self-identifications. Whether or not a woman also had loving relationships with men, her passionate connections with women were worthy of comment.” (pp. 7-8)
- —
- “In an essay called ‘Who Hid Lesbian History?’, Lillian Faderman has exposed hostile biographers’ strategies of ‘bowdlerization, avoidance of the obvious, and cherchez l’homme’ (look for the man). But who hid bisexual history? Lesbian historians must take some of the blame; redressing the wrongs done by lesbian-hating biographers, they have often edited the lives of women who loved both sexes into exclusively lesbian histories.” (p. 8)
- Duder, Karen. The Spreading Depths: Lesbian and Bisexual women in English Canada, 1910-1965 (2001)
- Erwin, Terry McVannel. For, By, and About Lesbians: A Qualitative Analysis of the Lesbian Connection Discussion Forum 1974-2004 (2007)
- https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=ohiou1185390725
- “This study analyzed 4,633 letters or items of discussion and responses published in 170 issues of [Lesbian Connection] over a period of 30 years from [1974 to 2004].” (Erwin p. 367)
- Erwin charted the “Top Ten Items of Discussion” over this period. (pp. 628-629). Number 10 on the list was, “[D]iscussions regarding whether bisexual women or “ex lesbians” have a right to identify as lesbian and attend lesbian-only events,” (p. 368).
- Gutterman, Lauren Jae. Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage (2019)
- “In the 1970s, however, as lesbian feminists sharpened the boundaries around lesbian identity and the lesbian community, the once amorphous “ghost” of female bisexuality solidified.” (p. 150) (pp. 137-152)
- Jones, Anastasia. She Wolves: Feminine Sapphists and Liminal Sociosexual Categories in the US Urban Entertainment Industry, 1920-1940. (2017)
- “Interwar sapphists were assuredly what we would now call queer, but they were not what we might think of as modern lesbians–they were not, in other words, women for whom homosexual object choice was a distinct and visible social sexual identity that tended to eclipse other modes of cultural belonging. Recognized for their homosexual inclinations–that did not necessarily negate heterosexual relationships, dalliances, or desires– these women juggled complex and elastic social and sexual identities.” (p. 2)
- Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky; Davis, Madeline D.. “Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community” (1994)
- https://archive.org/details/bootsofleathersl00kenn_0/page/386/mode/2up
- “In an ethnography, the precise use of language is a significant part of conveying a community’s culture. In this context the use of the term “lesbian” is problematic. We use the term “lesbian” to refer to all women in the twentieth century who pursued sexual relationships with other women. Narrators, however, rarely used the word “lesbian,” either to refer to themselves or to women like themselves.” (p. 6)
- “Maybe even do it [sleep with a man] for nothing” (p. 101)
- Marcus, Eric. Interview with Stella Rush. Monday, August 21, 1989. Interviewer is Eric Marcus (1989)
- Miller, Meredith. Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature (2006)
- “In lesbian writing the term femme, which came into common usage in the 20th century, most often refers to a feminine dressing and acting lesbian or bisexual woman. […] During the mid-20th century, a working-class bar culture in Europe and America made femme roles visible to the world.” (p. 64)
- https://books.google.com/books?id=xPIpPaM5EkEC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&lpg=PA63&dq=%22bisexual%20women%22%20history%20femme&pg=PA63#v=onepage&q&f=false
- Queen, Carol. Lesbian Love in the Swingin’ Seventies: A Bisexual Memoir (2002)
- Sawyer, Ethel. A Study of a Public Lesbian Community” (1965)
- Stone, Sharon Dale. Bisexual Women and the “Threat” to Lesbian Space: Or What If All the Lesbians Leave? (1996)
- “It remains common to hear lesbian feminists argue that bisexual women dilute the movement. Bisexual women, however, have been in the lesbian feminist movement all along — perhaps the movement has always been diluted. It seems to me that bisexual women do not dilute the movement; rather, there are lesbian feminists who would weaken the movement by kicking them out.” (p. 113)
- https://www.dropbox.com/sh/r0uc3c0vmnx5hm2/AADKrxT3Sy0QSdipO-N_l_7na/bisexual%20women%20threat.pdf?dl=0
- https://twitter.com/hopeisunseen/status/1249700408404119552?s=20 (@thotscholar on Twitter)
- @teamarimo. Twitter thread (2017)
- Wofford, Carrie. The Bisexual Revolution (1991)
- Woolner, Christina Anna. “The Famous Lady Lovers:” African American Women and Same-Sex Desire from Reconstruction to World War II (2014)
- Weiss, Jillian Todd. GL vs. BT: The Archaeology of Biphobia and Transphobia Within the U.S. Gay and Lesbian Community (2004)
Femme:
- Michel, Fran. Do Bats Eat Cats? Reading What Bisexuality Does”; RePresenting Bisexualities: Subjects and Cultures of Fluid Desire anthology (1996)
- Murphy, Melanie. FEMME (2016)
- http://web.archive.org/web/20120320234912/http://bossyfemme.com/2012/02/21/what-is-femme-anyway/
- “Femme is intentionality. When you compliment my outfit, you are appreciating my taste, my resourcefulness, my creativity, my sense of adventure, my liberal application of glitter, my choice to wear sequins with sequins. […] Femme is about taking the time to be present with the body, to make time to care for your self. Femme is about quiet moments waiting for your nail polish to dry, the hair dye to develop, the moisturiser to soak in.”
- Capitalism, alienation, and the mind-body dichotomy that helped form the philosophy (Federici)
- “I would probably add to “Femme is not the opposite of butch”.. ‘femme does not exist as a counterpart to butch, nor rely on butch in order to exist as queer; as a femme with very little interest in butch people its something that I often have to make clear to people who assume that femininity is essentially something done to attract or please masculine people.” — OllieFace (commenter) → maybe this perception is reflective of the aesthetic/[…?] evolving beyond relational understanding
- “Femme is intentionality. When you compliment my outfit, you are appreciating my taste, my resourcefulness, my creativity, my sense of adventure, my liberal application of glitter, my choice to wear sequins with sequins. […] Femme is about taking the time to be present with the body, to make time to care for your self. Femme is about quiet moments waiting for your nail polish to dry, the hair dye to develop, the moisturiser to soak in.”
- http://web.archive.org/web/20120321145936/http://queerfatfemme.com/femme-sharks/femme-shark-manifesto/
- “FEMME SHARKS WILL RECLAIM THE POWER AND DIGNITY OF FEMALENESS BY ANY MEANS NECCESARY.
- WE’RE GIRLS BLOWN UP, TURNED INSIDE OUT AND REMIXED.”
- http://web.archive.org/web/20130114222713/http://ozyfrantz.com/2013/01/09/other-peoples-makeup-use-none-of-your-business/
- “On the other hand, a lot of anti-makeup sentiment– particularly anything that starts talking about how “frivolous” and “shallow” makeup is– is also misogynistic and femmephobic. Makeup is a form of visual art. If making your face beautiful is shallow, so is making a canvas beautiful or a block of marble or a hunk of plastic. If you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when they make a gorgeous print, you understand why someone would feel satisfied and happy when their makeup looks perfect. I do not think it is accidental that the form of visual art almost entirely practiced by women is the one that gets accused of frivolity and where the talent exhibited by many of the artists is ignored or denigrated.”
- https://www.wussymag.com/all/2018/2/17/on-femininity-and-being-a-fierce-autonomous-radical-queer-femme
- “Ultimately, to be “femme” is to forge a self-made femininity that subverts the gender binary and heteropatriarchy by refusing to be defined in opposition to manhood and masculinity. In its autonomy, femmeness does not merely “queer” normative ideas about femininity—it confronts them and challenges them, necessitating a radical reimagining of gender and identity in the process.”
Butch:
- Sweeny, Robin. Too Butch to Be Bi (or You Can’t Judge a Boy by Her Lover); Bisexual Politics anthology (1995)
- “But being a butch woman who is also bisexual can be difficult. It feels sometimes that the idea is so challenging—since the assumptions in our communities are that all butch women are lesbian women and all femme women are bisexual women—that often a butch woman trying to come to terms with being bisexual is stuck.” (p. 182)
- https://www.them.us/story/inqueery-butch
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V09C98Xt7Q
- The “Lesbian-Only Term” Myth: A Comprehensive Historical Essay on ‘Butch’ and ‘Femme’, femmebis (2019) (Tumblr)
- “Name that Butch. The first one to correctly identify this local Boston bi in her butch attire and email [email protected] will win a copy of ‘Hot & Bothered 4: Short Short Fiction on Lesbian Desire.’”
- https://taylorssources.tumblr.com/post/623843955500580864/the-lesbian-only-term-myth-a-comprehensive
Miscellaneous Sources:
- Ross, Becki L.. Dance to “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” Get Churched, and Buy the Little Lady a Drink: Gay Women’s Bar Culture in Toronto, 1965-1976 (1993)
- “Sex, Lives, and Archives: Pleasure/Danger Debates in 1970s Lesbian Feminism”, Becki Ross (1991)
- Thorpe, Rochella. “A house where queers go”: African-American Lesbian Nightlife in Detroit, 1940-1975; Inventing Lesbian Cultures in America anthology (1996)
- Worthen, Meredith G. F.. Queers, Bis, and Straight Lies: An Intersectional Examination of LGBTQ Stigma (2020) p. 31
- Sappho, Lesbians and Bisexual Exclusion
- https://curvyandtrans.com/p/004222/sappho-lesbians-and-bisexual-exclusion
- “It was not until the 1970s, when second-wave radical feminism gave rise to the lesbian separatism movement, that a cultural war developed within gay rights organizations over whether the word lesbian included bisexual women.”
- Sex in the City: Sexual Spaces in St. Louis, 1945-1992
- Femme Histories Roundtable – Part I
- http://notchesblog.com/2017/02/16/femme-histories-roundtable-part-i/
- http://notchesblog.com/2017/02/23/femme-histories-roundtable-part-ii/
- “By structuring an interview around the “coming out story,” which implicitly values visible and definitive forms of identification, interviewers and narrators sometimes reduce the complexity of gendered and sexual practices that occurred both before and after the privileged moment of “coming out.””
- https://shopbigirlsclub.com/why-butch-femme-belong-to-bisexuals-as-well-and-bi-history-resources/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20181205020843/https://www.intomore.com/culture/a-brief-his-and-herstory-of-butch-and-femme/ccdfe298b3834c85
- https://taylorssources.tumblr.com/post/623921271742316544/navyasarchive-inactive-the-harvey-milk-institute
- https://taylorssources.tumblr.com/post/623921062252609537/look-the-shittiest-white-gay-men-didnt-write-no
- https://lgbtqgamearchive.com/2015/08/23/caper-in-the-castro/
- https://www.tiktok.com/@singdney/video/6816779362642201861
- https://taggmagazine.com/white-lesbians-you-are-not-studs/
- https://lesbianherstorian.tumblr.com/post/176753670997/stud-lesbians
- http://www.stlouislgbthistory.com/2-uncategorised/197-ethel-sawyer-pioneering-research.html
- http://web.archive.org/web/20170814120144/http://elisechenier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Ethel-Sawyer-A-Study-of-a-Public-Lesbian-Community-1965.pdf
- http://www.glbtqarchive.com/ssh/butch_femme_ssh_S.pdf
- https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/08/ballroom-cultures-gender-model-offers-rich-alternative-to-cis-trans-division.html
- https://books.google.com/books?id=_OHWDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT36&lpg=PT36&dq=asian+butch+femme+tom&source=bl&ots=BAFBWkRwKJ&sig=ACfU3U3vfT_nnn3Zt6gfrjqNT1RIjGAMGw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrwsy_sbfqAhVuoHIEHSDQCPwQ6AEwCnoECAsQAQ#v=onepage&q=asian%20butch%20femme%20tom&f=false
- http://www.queermango.com/5076/understanding-toms-dees-lesbians-thailand-everything-always-wanted-know/
- https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/news/tomboys-of-thailand-29497
- https://www.autostraddle.com/the-bisexual-bob-a-bold-haircut-for-a-beautiful-future-439852/
