On Being an Indoor Femme

When we got the stay home order, my acrylic nails hadn’t been filled for over two weeks. The layer of shellac had already inched up far enough to reveal the half moons rising above my cuticles. And by then it was too late. There would be no nail fills for the foreseeable future.  I lookedContinue

On Being a Dirtbag Femme: An Interview with Morgan Bimm

Morgan and I met in grad school, but our bond really solidified when we wrote an academic book chapter together about Carly Rae Jepsen. Through the process, we discovered we have so much more in common than just our love for intellectual curiosity about Carly Rae Jepsen: we graduated from the same journalism program, rockedContinue

What We Can Learn About Femme Theory from Legally Blonde

We may never agree on what femme means, except to agree that femme’s meaning is boundless. Indeed, much of femme writing so far has bounded beyond our previous understandings, has written into the space around femme. This writing has been important interjections, slicing in to the word and carving out a space to insert ourselves.Continue

Is Softness a Critical (per)Form(ance) of Femininity?

In Kathleen McHugh and Lisa Duggan’s 1996 Femme-inist Manifesto, they wrote: “Fem(me) science questions the dignity and wisdom of anyone who would wear pink without irony, or a floral print without murderous or seditious designs.” Of course, some of us unironically wear pink and/or floral — an arguably “soft” aesthetic. Does this mean we areContinue

The Future is Soft: On Soft Femme, Hard Femme, and Femme Theory

Sometimes when I talk about softness, emotions, earnestness, and vulnerability I’m talking about them as a reaction to what I see as the privileging of hardness, irony, and lack of emotion. Softness is part of femme for me, so sometimes I talk about soft femme in relation to hard femme. I have been asked ifContinue

What I Mean When I Talk About Softness

When I talk about softness I’m talking about vulnerability, openness, and flexibility. I mean soft like breathable fabric in summer. I mean soft like ripples on the lake. I mean noticing your reaction, how you feel. I mean acknowledging emotions. I mean admitting when you are hurt and that things hurt you. I mean usingContinue

Broken Pencil Death Match: Louisa

“Tonight we’re going to a party, and by ‘we’ I mean everyone. I know because I’ve been tracking the Facebook guest list. And maybe a few individual profiles. It’s going to be fun, I silently assure myself that night, when I’m back in front of the mirror applying my make-up. I wonder what boring hipsterContinue

Colour Coding: Creating Queer Bonds with Nail Art

**The following is a longer version of a femme flagging article I wrote for Shameless magazine. Check out the Shameless version, “Flag ‘Em Down” (and another story of mine!) in the Alternative Beauty issue, Winter 2015.**  Through history, queer folks have had come up with creative ways to communicate their desires. In the 1970s, gayContinue

Resisting Pretty: A Hair Story

When I trim my bangs, I release my femme. There’s nothing that makes me feel more like myself, more powerful, and more femme than hacking off the overgrown fringe covering my forehead. I look back at photographs of myself as a little femme and see that I have always had the same hairdo as IContinue

Emotional Labour of the Femme

My favourite photograph of us isn’t one that garnered tons of notes on Tumblr, or one from our first vacation to Nova Scotia. My favourite photograph of us is one I took myself. I’m seated on the toilet lid, wrapped up in a fluffy purple towel aiming the camera at my feet. She’s kneeling thereContinue