Femme

It is filed here as an expression term because what it primarily reports is presentation rather than an answer to the question of gender. A femme may be a woman, may be a man, may be non-binary, may be trans. A great many femmes describe femme as a gender of its own, and that use is old enough and widespread enough that calling it a style and stopping there would misdescribe the word.

How femme grew out of bar culture

Heidi M. Levitt and Sara K. Bridges trace butch and femme to American lesbian communities after the Second World War, when women entering the workforce began wearing trousers and a masculine aesthetic became available inside gay women's communities. The pair became the organising shape of working-class bar culture through the 1940s and 1950s. Levitt and Bridges put the consequence plainly: it made lesbians visible for the first time.

Joan Nestle, who wrote on femme identity from inside it, described femmes as underrepresented in the historical record, attacked for passing as straight and simultaneously accused of imitating heteronormativity for pairing with a butch. Her answer, in The Femme Question, was that butch and femme relationships carried a deeply lesbian language of their own in stance, dress, gesture, love, courage and autonomy. Such couples declared same-sex love publicly when no liberation movement existed to protect them, and in the 1950s particularly they took the brunt of street violence because they were the visible ones. Nestle summarised the reversal that followed: a radical sexual and political statement of the 1950s came to look, decades later, like a reactionary and non-feminist one. Arlene Istar Lev reads the same roles as complex erotic and social statements rooted in gendered erotic identities, and finds no imitation in them.

The word is older than the subculture it belongs to. The Online Etymology Dictionary dates the general slang sense of young woman to 1928 and the sense of the more feminine partner in a lesbian couple to 1961. Femme is the French for woman, arriving through Old French feme from Latin femina, which the same source glosses literally as she who suckles, from a root meaning to suck. Wiktionary's earliest quotation for the plain sense of woman or wife is Richard Francis Burton's 1885 translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, where a character offers herself in marriage with the promise that she will be femme to him.

Why lesbian feminism turned against femme

Lesbian feminism rejected the butch and femme dynamic and the femme identity with it. Femmes were accused by prominent lesbian feminist figures of aping patriarchal beauty standards for wearing traditionally feminine clothing, and Audre Lorde wrote in Tar Beach that the role playing was the very opposite of what being gay was about, which she gave as the love of women.

Bisexual women active in the same communities felt pressed to call themselves lesbians, and bisexual organising did not formalise until the 1970s, which kept bisexual femmes out of the record twice over. Wikipedia treats that erasure as part of the history of the word.

By the 1990s the lipstick lesbian had reached the mainstream and femme had become a catch-all for a feminine lesbian. Citing research from the same decade, Levitt and Bridges record butch and femme moving into bisexual communities, women beginning to write about being bisexual femmes, and very little empirical work following them there. Bisexual and queer writers have since argued that this was a return rather than an arrival: bisexual women were inside lesbian communities and using the word long before political lesbianism drew its line in 1979, so the claim that only women with no attraction to men have ever been femmes is ahistoric.

Who is allowed to claim femme

Since the late 2010s, under the influence of queer and transgender culture on Tumblr, Everyday Feminism and Autostraddle, the word has stretched to cover feminine people across gender and sexuality, heterosexual women, cisgender men and Transfeminine people included. In that reading femme is a political identity, with the erotic one set aside, and a femme need not dress or act in a traditionally feminine way at all: the identity shows in behaviour, interaction and political view. The phrase women and femmes came out of it, and has been criticised for conflating two categories.

Lesbians using the word in its older sense contest the stretch. The argument is that taking a term from an already marginalised community is a form of misogynist appropriation, one that undervalues lesbian identities, lesbian history and the autonomy of women to name themselves outside patriarchal structures.

The Autostraddle roundtable of femme writers found that argument running inside the group as well as at its edges, and its organiser framed the disagreement as the finding: it is possible to claim the same word as somebody else and disagree completely about what the word means. Rudy, who ties femme to care work, spirituality and emotional labour, reads the restriction as generational, and says the people it lands on hardest are trans women and transfeminine people, whose objections cisgender women ought to weigh. Aja, writing at thirty-six and formed by the San Francisco queer scene of the early 2000s, calls that kind of restriction abhorrent and the erasure narrative weak and fearful, and associates femme with vigilance where Rudy had it with emotional labour. Mey describes a Bruja Femme rooted in a long line of Mexican women and in the trans women of colour who were her femme roots, naming Luna Merbruja and Paris Is Burning. The three disagree about what femme is as much as about who may say it.

How femme is used beyond the lesbian bar

Kate Bornstein chronicled being a gender non-conforming person who is a femme lesbian in Gender Outlaw in 1994 and, praising Ivan Coyote's Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme in 2011, described the butch and femme dynamic as a conscious, loving binary of desire and trust, a kinship held whatever the genders of the people in it. In ballroom culture the word is structural: femme queen names a transgender woman and butch queen a gay man. In gay male culture the phrase No Fats, No Femmes ran from the 1970s through the 1990s and survives on hookup apps, shortened to fem where characters are scarce, and challenged there for perpetuating homonormative beauty ideals. Andi Schwartz's soft femme theory tracks a further shift, from the rough, hard-edged women the word described in the later twentieth century to the soft sad girl of social media, and asks whether performing softness transgresses gender norms or only complies with them.

Wiktionary separates the senses of the word, and the earliest dated record on file for each gives a rough but usable chronology.

The dictionary carries one further adjective sense, marked chiefly derogatory, in which femme means effeminate of a man. The verb runs alongside it: Addis writes of a fear of being femmed, an anxiety among men that he is careful to say is not necessarily a fear of homosexuality.

Why femininity is policed across genders

Rhea Hoskin turns the question outward, towards femmephobia: the devaluation, denigration and regulation of femininity in any gender or sex. It is distinguished from misogyny on the grounds that misogyny targets women while femmephobia targets femininity and can therefore land on anybody. The term came out of femme lesbian and sexual minority women's communities, and Hoskin's paper Femme Theory: Refocusing the Intersectional Lens argues that it is not taken seriously as a form of oppression inside queer communities or in academic feminist spaces.

The account splits the bias in two. One half devalues feminine traits, treating femininity as inherently weak, which is why it is used to shame and to motivate in men's sport, and why women in the military and in science report suppressing it in order to be read as credible. The other half polices who may be feminine and how, under expectations the literature calls patriarchal femininity. Inside that sits an assumption named masculine right of access: that femininity exists to attract men and men's attention.

The second half is what catches femmes specifically. A feminine queer woman not performing femininity for men meets social disapproval, and the sources place much of it inside LGBTQ+ communities: exclusion, harassment, bullying and violence, against what the research describes as a masculine privilege within those communities. The literature also names internalised femmephobia, where the bias is turned on a person's own feminine traits. A finding points outward as well: discomfort with femininity in men predicts anti-gay behaviour better than social dominance or authoritarian belief does. The Wikipedia article carrying this account has had its neutrality disputed since December 2024 and lacks inline citations, which limits that telling and leaves the concept standing.

What has been counted about femme

Very little of the word has been measured, and the one study on file is small and described by its authors as preliminary. In 2005 Levitt and Bridges reported that 4.5 per cent of the bisexual women they studied identified as butch, against 30.1 per cent of the lesbians. They also found the two groups pulled in opposite directions: lesbian participants were more sexually attracted to gender expressions contrasting with their own, bisexual participants to expressions resembling their own, which the authors attributed to the different aesthetics available in the two communities and not to anything about the people. Cheris Kramarae and Dale Spender describe the same variety without counting it, writing that many femmes are attracted exclusively to butches, some to other femmes, and some to men.

The Gender Census had femme selected by 11.4 per cent of gender-diverse respondents in 2022. Respondents select themselves into the census, so the figure describes them alone, and among them the word sits alongside masc, butch and a long tail of write-ins.