“lesbians that can't find their shells”
By Maria Lis
Publishing by Mel
Credits: Luiny
How come in the age where lesbian history is being shared, and thankfully becomes more and more popular, one can still feel so lost and like if something is missing?
I’ve noticed a lot of tension and struggle in the area of labels (oh, this cruel thing called a label). This little drawer you can put yourself into and fit in, blend in with others, feel at ease and in the right place.
Yet the labels can be quite deceiving for the ones who don’t fall into the traditional butch/femme categories. And it seems like it’s a today’s problem - yet, the lesbian writer and a poet Audre Lorde described it perfectly back in the second half of the past century:
“I wasn't cute or passive enough to be "femme," and I wasn't mean or tough enough to be "butch." I was given a wide berth. Non-conventional people can be dangerous, even in the gay community.” ¹
So we are not alone, since even our queer ancestors recognize this feeling.
What we have to remember, in this aesthetic-driven word, is that: butch and femme are not aesthetics. Those are not the looks that somebody can embody simply by putting on jorts and a big t-shirt, or a mini skirt and a little top. (Look, do you see how stereotypical and looks-focused my description is? Let’s not do that! Let’s not put that pressure onto ourselves!)
It’s, of course, easy to be driven towards certain aesthetics. To see photos on pinterest, with our eyes widening and mouth opening, thinking: I want to be like that. But it’s all, oh so very deceiving.
Butch and femme are not just labels - they are identities. They are the very essence of the lesbian existence to some of us. They are part of history, too. They are so powerful - that they literally “walked, so the AESTHETICS of butch/femme could run”. Some lesbians fought so hard while being butch or femme, so we could think of it all as non-bindingly and superficially as of today.
Some researchers emphasize that to think of butch and femme as the lesbian equivalents of male and female is a great mischaracterization - rather than that “butch and femme transcend and radicalize traditional gender roles”².
Credits: Valeria Ushakova
Besides butch and femme… what else do we have to choose from? There must be other words to describe the lesbian experience others have, the others that feel like Audre Lorde from the fragment in the very beginning.
It’s okay to experience some dissonance. I know some of us want to wear a tie with a shirt - but instead of styling it with trousers, we combine it with a skirt. Some of us put on a full face of makeup and wear it with clothes as huge as the whole ocean is.
To be human means to be dual; to have something conflicting inside of ourselves. Isn’t it? No one is either black or white, we’re all just these odd mixtures of grey. So it’s okay to find your lesbianism in something different than in the two ends of one spectrum - see, the spectrum exists for a reason and is so much wider than just the two of its ends!
Well, there are for sure some WORDS to call yourself, if you’d really, desperately need them- there is androgynous and “futch”, for example, but many lesbians find them quite problematic, and here’s why…
The word androgynous seems a little contentious, since the people outside our community often use it to “soften” the butch identity, to make it more digestible, so it’s easier to grasp the concept of a woman who’s opposite of what this patriarchal and heteronormative world wants from her. Since the word is used so frequently by people with not-so-good intentions, and by ones outside of the lesbian community, it starts to feel infected and troubling to continue to use it.
When it comes to history - the feminists from 1970s groups during the second wave of feminism in the USA incited butch/femme identities to be “aping of traditional gender roles” and they “prescribed” for lesbian culture an androgynous feminist aesthetic and non-gendered social interaction, as Levitt and Horne said in their research³, which is, just… offensive, to say at least.
A lot of people also seem to have problems with the word “futch”, that evolved from the well-known “futch scale”, that has been going around the internet since forever. The internauts claim the scale to be extremely controversial, and while researching reddit i’ve found one answer that sums everything up perfectly:
to put it simply, there is no scale. You can be Butch, you can be Femme, and you can be neither. There is no "less femme" or "less butch" it's an identity, not a way of presenting.”
Sculpture by Stella Singleton-Jones
So, if I were there to give a piece of advice to myself from years ago, I wouldn’t tell her to find the right WORDS to describe herself in the lesbian world.
I think it’s crucial to embrace your lesbianism and practice it as it comes to you; to not put pressure on yourself to be “either this or that”. Your lesbianism exists just because you exist, and you don’t have to prove it or perform it or painfully fit in the identities of butch or femme, and masc or fem. You don’t even have to name it androgynous, “futch” or any other word - you can just live your life as one word you for sure are, which is: a lesbian.
Treat lesbianism as a vase that’s going to take the form of whatever you pour into it. Let yourself shape your lesbianism and create it however you want to; and not the other way around.
Sources:
1 - Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
2 - Levitt, et al.: The misunderstood gender: A model of modern femme identity
3 - Levitt & Horne: Explorations of Lesbian-Queer Genders: Butch, Femme, Androgynous or "Other"
