Citations:femmeness

Noun: "the state or quality of being femme"

 * 1984, Common Lives, Lesbian Lives, Issues 11-14, page 18:
 * The other is that we make no assumptions about what butchness or femmeness means to each of us. Many wimmin have stereotyped me when they learned that I call myself a femme.
 * 1989, Sheila Jeffreys, "Butch and Femme: Now and then", in Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History 1840-1985, page 180:
 * What is the appeal of femmeness since it doesn't have the obvious attractions of maleness, i.e. power and privilege, associated with it?
 * 1993, Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex", page 115:
 * And if butchness requires a strict opposition to femmeness, is this a refusal of an identification or is this an identification with femmeness that has already been made, made and disavowed, a disavowed identification that sustains the butch, without which the butch qua butch cannot exist.
 * 1998, Sally Munt & Cherry Smyth, Butch/femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, page 61:
 * Some femmes share heterosexual pasts, some pass through butchness before they arrive at femmeness, some move back and forth between boy identities and woman identities.
 * 2003, Alexander Doty, "'My Beautiful Wickedness': The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy", in Hop on PopThe Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (eds. Henry Jenkins III, Jane Shattuc, & Tara McPherson), page 148:
 * Or, perhaps, the tomboy-in-gingham trying femmeness on for size in front of a potential mentor and a dangerous, yet exciting, butch spectator.
 * 2012, Gina de Vries, "Girls", in Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (ed. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore), page 79:
 * My femmeness is about acting sweet and playful, glittery and queeny; it's not about being perfectly-coiffed and deliberately cool.
 * 2019, Morgan Lev Edward Holleb, The A-Z of Gender and Sexuality: From Ace to Ze, page 113:
 * I suggest that anyone who is queer and feels an affinity toward femmeness has a legitimate claim to it.
 * 2021, Kaila Story, "Not Feminine as in Straight, but Femme as in Queer #AF: The Queer & Black Roots of My Femme Expression/Experience", in Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought (ed. Briona Simone Jones), page 74:
 * This meditation on femmeness provides the reader with more clarity and nuance when it comes to thinking about and discussing femme identity.