A discussion over at LesbianDad these past few days has gotten me thinking, again, about femme identity, feminism, and queer politics. (And I should add that this post is in no way a negative reaction to that discussion; rather, I’m very grateful to LD for inspiring this post and for the commenters there who gave me food for thought. What I write here is actually somewhat tangential to LD’s original post.)

It took me some time to come to terms with my femininity. (An aside: I hesitate to use the word feminine to describe myself, mostly because I don’t think it quite captures the whole picture. Femme-inine allows for a bit more movement, a bit more subversiveness, a bit more, well, queerness. Though of course, the distinction is purely written. But for the sake of clarity, I’ll stick to femininity here.) When I first came out early in college, I went through what I saw as a mandatory transformation. I cut off my long hair, I packed my skirts and girly tees away in the back of the closet, I discarded my jewelry and make-up, I adopted a swagger, and I wore sports bras and Timberlands. I was under the impression, see, that in order to be truly gay, as a woman, I had to be gender non-conforming. This was in the context of a women’s college, where the rugby players were ersatz frat boys and where the “straight” girls who swooned over them were deemed “lugs” — lesbians until graduation (when, presumably, they would once again revert to a hetero life). “Lug,” you have to understand, is not a desirable moniker. Everyone was constantly straining to prove their authenticity.

So, I went through a vaguely uncomfortable and intensely self-conscious androgynous dyke phase. It didn’t feel right. But I wanted so badly for it to feel right, because I thought that otherwise, I would never be accepted by the queer community. But I would never belong to the straight world either. I would be in some sort of gender and sexuality purgatory.

Now, of course, I’ve come back to myself. A lot of that has to do with time passing, girlfriends coming and going, and general introspection. Everything that I realized I was not could help me figure out who and what I was. Here I am in my 20s, still not with a full picture, but at least with a more whole sense of self and a body I feel I own.

But a lot of it also has to do with reading and processing, feminism in particular. I’ve come to be able to articulate what I see as a central dilemma in feminism today: how can we both value and strengthen femininity as a valid realization of self and undermine it as an arbitrary set of patriarchal standards for women?

See, feminists in the 2nd wave (and forgive my gross oversimplification) accomplished a lot — they realized that a society in which men dominated women set the standards for how women were supposed to be. And the brave women of the 1960s and 1970s struggled to break free from those standards, to say, look, we can do and be all these other things. We don’t have to follow your prescriptions for how we’re supposed to look — we can let our body hair grow. We don’t have to act how you expect us to act — we can be assertive and aggressive and stalwart. We don’t have to be limited by what you think we should be — we can be professors and athletes and construction workers and business people. In a nutshell, “look at all these things we can be! We can be everything you can be, and more.”

The problem with that is that it makes femininity unenlightened. It reduces feminine women to women who haven’t yet liberated themselves from the confines of patriarchal standards. And it judges those women, too. It’s complicated, of course, because I’m sure there are many women who don’t have so-called “enlightened” visions of their gender presentation. I, too, have a slight discomfort with heterosexual women who seem to buy into the ultimate heteronormative notion of Family (dad works, mom stays home and watches the kids; dad talks politics and finance, mom talks interior decorating and child-rearing; etc.). It does seem to me that many of these women aren’t making much of a conscious choice about their gender roles; they’re not really challenging (either personally or socially) the rigid structure they’ve been socialized in. And I do think it is important to work on this, to figure out: how can we undermine patriarchy, and enable women to make decisions about their lives, their bodies, their desires, their families?

But the thing is, we need to do it in a way that doesn’t preclude femininity from also being a part of the solution. A feminism that relegates femininity to the lowest rung of self-expression, that says “but you can be MORE, you can be BETTER!”, that assumes that femininity is just a first step for women — this kind of feminism is complicit with patriarchy. It continues to buy into the notion that masculinity is better. Femininity is still undesirable.

We need — I need — a feminism that instead emphasizes the value in all expressions. A feminism in which weak and passive are okay, because they are just companion traits to strong and assertive. Chattiness and bared legs and emotions and sensitivity and make-up are okay. A feminism that calls for self-discovery, empowerment, and finding the way to true expression of the self, a feminism raises up femininity, celebrates femininity, enables femininity in all humans is a feminism that is for me.

But how do we do this? How do we strike the subtle balance between empowering women to be ourselves and celebrating femininity where we see it? How can we say, “you don’t have to be this way, you’re not limited to this expression of your identity” without implying, “you need to move on, break free, leave this antiquated self behind”? How do we recognize unempowered femininity and aim to empower it, while also strengthening and supporting those women who are purposefully and intentionally feminine? How can we do any of this without messy judgments and hurt feelings and alienation?

I don’t know. I’ll get back to you on that one. In the meantime, if YOU have any idea, please do tell.