FEMME FEELINGS: MAPPING AFFECTIVE AFFINITIES BETWEEN FEMME AND THIRD WAVE FEMINISTS

Clare Lemke

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

August 2011

Committee:

Bill Albertini, Advisor

Ellen Berry

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ABSTRACT

Bill Albertini, Advisor

This latest moment of feminism has been marked by a surge of energy around femininity and the potentially radical and queer pleasures feminists might find in feminized gender expressions. In both academic and popular contexts, contemporary feminist fascination with femininity is discussed as two separate phenomena: as evidence of a third wave feminist

“reclamation” of femininity amongst young and largely heterosexual-identified women on the one hand, and as evidence of a “revival” of femme identity practices in queer communities on the other. These kinds of clear delineations between feminists based on sexual identity and age persist despite efforts in queer and feminist theory to disrupt notions of stable and coherent identity. However, viewing femme and non-queer-identified third wave feminists in isolation to each other ignores how both of these groups are innovating expressions of femininity which reject heteronormative expectations. By thinking differently about how individuals relate to each other, we can see tenuous but telling affinities between femme and third wave feminists, and imagine models for feminist organizing around such affective crossings.

In this literary study, I argue that femme and non-queer-identified third wave feminists have similar understandings of their femininities and their erotic desires, if not necessarily similar sexual experiences or partners. Specifically, I trace how the affects of irony and hunger travel within and between femme theory and third wave theory as partially shared sensibilities.

Ironic femininities are constituted in femme and third wave discourse as self-reflexive, deliberately cultivated and chosen feminized gender expressions which resist repressive iii patriarchal ideals. Furthermore, both queer femmes and heterosexual-identified third wave feminists employ a sensibility of hunger to recode feminized sexual modalities like openness, vulnerability and submission, and to pursue ways of fucking and loving outside of heteronormative models. In order to examine this largely unacknowledged and implicit relationship, I use José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer relationality and Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of “literary publics” as the framework of this study. I argue that feminist coalition building around affect would offer us the chance to explore connections between feminists of various ages and sexual identifications that we currently ignore.

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For my fifth of the office in 240 Shatzel Hall.

Thank you for being a room of my own (sort of). v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am enormously grateful and indebted to my wonderful committee, Bill Albertini and

Ellen Berry for their support of this project. Dr. Albertini provided crucial guidance and highly attentive feedback throughout the writing process, beginning when this study was just a seminar paper in his Spring 2010 Queer Theory course. Dr. Berry infused this project with new energy many times by talking through ideas, problems, and potential sources with me (and by being gracious enough to fix my life every time I showed up at her office hours). I also owe thanks to

Dr. Radhika Gajjala for helping me develop my ideas for this thesis in her Feminist Research

Methods course, and for being a committed graduate student advocate. Furthermore, several sections of this thesis benefited from the productive feedback from members of the Feminist

Writing Group and participants of the BGSU Women’s Studies Research Symposium. Thank you to friends and family for putting up with my moods and boringness over the past year (and the other years, too). Thank you, thank you Jamie Stuart and Marla Wick for lending me your awesome copyediting skills. Special thanks to Manda Hicks for making me feel capable and for encouraging me to write in my own voice. Lastly, thank you to all the amazing femme and feminist writers who have given me inspiration, energy, and the resources to imagine myself otherwise.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Interrupting Narratives …………………………………………………………….. 5

Imagining New Models of Feminist Organizing …………………………………… 12

Finding the Right Frequency: Tuning into Irony and Hunger in Femme

And Third Wave Theory …………………………………………………………… 16

CHAPTER 1. LADIES, FEMMES, AND “FEMINIST FATALES”:

EXCHANGES OF IRONIC FEMININITY BETWEEN QUEER AND HETEROSEXUAL

FEMINISTS …………...... 20

Will the Real Femmes Please Stand Up?: Slippages ……………………………... 24

“Girl[s]-by-Choice”: Irony as a Method for Constructing Feminist and

Femme Femininities …………………………………………………………….... 29

“Real but not natural”: Irony and Desire ……………………………………….. .. 37

“Fem Culture”: Ironic Femininity as a Galvanizing Force ………………………. 45

CHAPTER 2. IMAGINING DESIRE, FINDING AFFINITY:

HUNGER AS FEMME-THIRD WAVE ALLIANCE IN THE WORK OF MERRI LISA

JOHNSON …………...... 49

“Fem Quests”: Countering Heteronormative Scripts...... 54

Dangerous Desires: Sexual Risk and Hunger ...... 62

Reading in between the Lines: Literary Publics as Sites for Affinity ……………... 69

Seeing the “fem place”: Coalitions Rooted in Shared Understandings of Desire … 76

CONCLUSIONS ……...... 82 vii

REFERENCES ...... …...... 97

1

INTRODUCTION

This latest moment of feminism has been marked by a surge of energy around femininity and the potentially radical and queer pleasures feminists might find in feminized gender expressions. Contemporary feminist efforts to queer and transform femininity are manifested in two crucial bodies of literature: third wave theory and femme theory.1 The feminist sex wars of the 1980s prompted a subsequent reclamation of butch-femme subjectivities within academic works and sexual subcultures. More recently, queer activists and scholars have theorized femme as a gender identity independent from the butch-femme dyad and as embodied by more individuals than just biological females.2 In other venues, emerging discussions about third wave feminism stress how third wavers reimage and reclaim femininity as part of their feminist politics.

Both academic and popular sources discuss these two phenomena separately—referring to femme subjectivity largely in the context of LGBT communities and considering third wave consciousness largely in terms of more heterosexual-identified (if flexibly or cynically so) young women’s experience. These kinds of clear delineations between feminists based on sexual identity and age persist despite efforts in queer and feminist theory to disrupt notions of stable and coherent identity.

However, viewing femme and non-queer-identified3 third wave feminists in isolation to each other ignores how both of these groups are innovating expressions of femininity which reject heteronormative expectations. If we read these efforts not only through a lens of age and sexual identification but also through a lens of affect, we can see how femmes and third wave feminists share certain feelings about and understandings of their femininities. I focus on the slippages between femme and non-queer-identified 2 third wave femininities because these affective overlaps are potential sources of connection and alliance for a diversity of feminists. By thinking differently about how individuals relate to each other, we can see tenuous but telling affinities between femme and third wave feminists, and imagine models for feminist organizing around such affective crossings.

Affect is a powerful tool for reimagining feminist coalition building because affect signals more than mere feeling and instead should be understood as a force which creates community and alliance.4 Therefore, I use affect to mean feelings or sensibilities which inform individuals’ sense of self and makes them feel affiliation and collectivity with like-feeling others. While we generally assume that those who feel like us are those who share the same identifications and life experiences as us, I posit that affective connections also transgress boundaries of identity like age and sexual identification.

Hence, I want to consider how affect could create community between like-feeling individuals who have different experiences, but who make sense of their experiences and identities in resonating ways. Recognizing the affective affinities between femme and non-queer-identified third wave feminists provides us with an opportunity to disrupt tired stories we tell ourselves about what feminists are like and how they relate to each other.

Anyone who is interested in this latest moment of feminism (the last 20 years or so) will be familiar with two oft-repeated narratives circulating in both academic and popular accounts of this particular feminist era: First, that third wave feminists differ sharply from second wave feminists because third wavers are interested in femininity, sex-positive politics, and popular culture, whereas second wave feminists are far more skeptical of these things. Second, that queer and lesbian femmes cultivate radical and feminist forms 3 of femininity, whereas heterosexual women uncritically and complicitly embody patriarchally defined femininity. It is frustrating to read these same narratives over and over again because they crystallize second/third wave positions and queer/heterosexual positions in monoliths. Such hard and fast distinctions do not accurately account for the diversity of feminists currently creating feminine gender expressions and feminized modes of desire in opposition to patriarchal norms.

In an effort to destabilize these narratives and imagine more feminist relations, I explore the affective overlaps between femme and not-explicitly-queer third wave theorizations of femininity. Specifically, I trace how the affects of irony and hunger travel within and between femme theory and third wave theory. Chapter One examines how ironic femininities are constituted in femme and third wave discourse as self- reflexive, deliberately cultivated and chosen feminized gender expressions which resist repressive patriarchal ideals. Chapter Two explores how the sensibility of hunger is used by both queer femmes and heterosexual-identified third wave feminists to recode feminized sexual modalities like openness, vulnerability and submission, and to imagine ways of fucking and loving outside of heteronormative models. These exchanges between femme and third wave conceptions of irony and hunger demonstrate how femme and third wave feminists might have similar understandings of their femininities and their erotic desires, if not necessarily similar sexual experiences or partners.

In order to conceptualize how connections between femme and non-queer- identified third wave feminists function, I employ José Esteban Muñoz’s theory of queer relationality. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Utopia, Muñoz argues that a theory of queer relationality must seek out unrecognized or surprising interpersonal 4 relationships (14). Muñoz asserts that queer utopia is not only forged via the transgressive, self-shattering sex acts so often glorified by queer theorists, but also within non-sexual relationships that transverse the borders of class, age, race, and sexuality. He offers the example of the transformative relationship between Eileen Myles, a young lesbian poet, and James Schuyler, an older gay man and established poet who employed

Myles as a caretaker (14-15). Muñoz states that Myles and Schuyler form a relationship that exceed the dynamics between employer and employee and instead these two poets find in each other an electric spark of unanticipated recognition—a “hum of their contact” (14). What makes Myles and Schuyler’s relationship queer is that it does not merely play out typical social relations like the power hierarchies of economic relationships, inequitable relations between men and women, and tensions between gay men and lesbians. Despite this, queer relationships will not be free of conflict, nor will they transcend complicated histories. Muñoz argues that because these kinds of queer connections are not rooted in the notions of cohesion and sameness, strain in these relationships is not only expected but part of the dynamic quality of queer relationships.

Referring to the tensions in Myles’ and Schuyler’s relationship based on gender, class, sexual identity, and age, Muñoz states, “The relationality is not about a simple positivity of affirmation. It is filled with all sorts of bad feelings, moments of silence and brittleness. But beyond the void that stands between the two poets, there is something else, a surplus that is manifest in the complexity of their moments of contact” (Cruising

Utopia 14). Therefore when individuals who by social logic shouldn’t connect do, their relationships will be fraught with “bad feelings, [and] moments of silence and brittleness” rooted in historical and political struggles. And yet, queer relations persist anyway. The 5 particularly queer quality of these relationships is the “surplus” of feelings which cannot be contained within the bounds of clear identification. These excessive feelings forge supposedly illogical, impossible or illegitimate bonds. Hence, queer relationality illuminates the “complexity” of “contact,” and compels us to honor the complicatedness of our lived experiences rather than rely on reductive narratives which always already explain who we are and how we relate to each other.

Therefore, queer relationality destabilizes a conception of collectivity based on shared identities, and instead challenges us to create coalitions outside of readily apparent alliances. Such a model of relation allows for the specificity of particular life experiences to be maintained even as it allows for resonances between different social positions. By claiming that hunger and irony are affective affinities between femme and third wave feminists, I am not arguing that affinity is sameness. There are distinct and significant experiences based on sexual and generational social positioning which inform people’s sense of self and shapes their lived reality. Instead, I see affective affinity as a kind of queer relation where femmes and third wave feminists can maintain what is crucial about their identities while still acknowledging these partial and contingent shared feelings. In this way, feminist affinity around affect would offer us the chance to explore crossings between feminists of various ages and sexual identifications that we currently ignore.

Interrupting Narratives

Before considering how affect could provide us with a new model for organizing feminists across difference, I want to look more closely at two narratives that this study troubles and the historical contexts of these debates. The narrative that femmes construct 6 a radical gender expression in contrast to the gender normativity of heterosexual women cannot be understood outside of the deeply contentious history of lesbian-heterosexual feminist relations. One of the most persistent tensions in feminist sexual politics from the

1960s onward has been the question of what relationship, if any, lesbian and heterosexual feminists have to each other. In the history of U.S. feminisms, the dynamics between feminists of various sexual identifications have been complex scrimmages over privilege, desire, and the boundaries of community, including the following: the homophobia of heterosexual radical feminists of the 1960s who characterized lesbianism as a “male- identified” perspective which objectified women (Echols 55); the “lesbian chauvinism” of lesbian cultural feminists who characterized heterosexual feminists as sympathetic victims of patriarchal conditioning (Snitow et al 30); lesbian separatist hostility towards heterosexual feminists as being complicit with patriarchal gender hierarchies; and the advent of the “political lesbian” in the 1970s—the phenomenon of formerly heterosexual- identified feminists claiming the label “woman-identified-woman” in an effort to bolster strong feminist community (Gerhard 112-113). Such tense histories have set the stage for contemporary feminist relations between queer and heterosexual feminists, including how these dynamics play out in femme theory.

Furthermore, the relation of queer femmes to non-queer-identified, feminine- presenting feminists is complicated by how femmes have historically been marginalized in feminist and queer communities. One example of such marginalization is the critiques by cultural feminists of the 1970s and 1980s that femme (and butch) subjectivities were

“roles” that mimicked oppressive patriarchal gender norms.5 In response to such critiques, femme writers and activists have been increasingly vocal about their place in 7 queer and feminist communities, and since the 1980s there has been a growing body of literature dedicated to theorizing femme subjectivity as a radically feminist and queer gender identity.6 Therefore, in femme theory, the queerness and subversion of femme identity is underscored in order to combat femme invisibility in queer communities and to respond to attacks on femme identity in feminist communities.

However, when femme writers and activists stress the gender transgressions of femme identity, they often do so by defining femme subjectivity as antithetical to the femininity of heterosexual women. For instance, Leah Lilith Albrecht-Samarasinha,7 a queer, third wave poet and well-known femme activist, asserts that femmes are “the opposite of feminine heterosexual women who are oppressed by their gender and held to impossible media standards designed to foster hatred of one’s body. […] Femme women, like MTFs, construct their girl-ness, and construct it in a way that works for us”

(“On Being” 142). Albrecht-Samarasinha theorizes femme identity as a construction which consciously and tactically reworks hegemonic femininity into a feminized gender expression that exceeds the narrow boundaries of heteronormativity. When Albrecht-

Samarasinha argues that femmes “construct [their femininity] in a way that works for

[them]” she highlights the work that femmes do in order to imagine ways to be a woman/a feminized person8 which don’t fulfill heteronormative paradigms. These ways could include embodying a kind of femininity that doesn’t meet conventional standards of beauty and body normativity, or having desires that fall outside of the limited eroticisms of heteronormativity, or thinking of one’s femininity as a cultivation rather than a natural outcome for bodies which have been marked female. In this way, Albrecht-

Samarasinha draws alliance between femmes and gender deviants like MTFs and other 8 trans folks. However, she makes her claim by rendering a monolith of heterosexual women who unconsciously embody a form of femininity which is merely imposed upon them by patriarchal institutions. Her argument is a common rhetorical move in femme discourse which is often performed with the intent to stress the queerness of femme identity and counter femme invisibility.9

I offer my study as an attempt to trouble such neat distinctions along lines of sexual identification because such arguments do not accurately account for the diversity of feminists who are consciously performing feminine gender expressions that challenge patriarchal gender roles. As I shall unpack in the chapters on irony and hunger, non- queer-identified third wave feminists are also participating in efforts to expand conceptions of femininity and to construct femininities that speak to desires outside of heteronormative models. Rather than combat femme invisibility by stressing the exceptionality of femme identity, I propose that all feminists who strive to innovate their femininities “in way[s] that work for [them]” can look to places where they might coalesce with individuals who have similar goals. Such alliances will initially be based on limited and partial affinities. Yet, this strategy offers more possibilities for gender justice than for feminists to be set in opposition to one another based on sexual identifications.

By outlining how the sensibilities of irony and hunger circulate in both femme and not- explicitly-queer third wave discourse, I attempt to disrupt some of the certainty of arguments which divide feminists along inflexible lines of sexual identity.

The second narrative I want to destabilize is that third wave feminists are galvanized by pleasure (including the pleasures of femininity) whereas second wave feminists were galvanized by anger, sexualized violence, and the rejection of consumer 9 culture. From the earliest scholarship on the third wave, this latest formation of feminism is contrasted to the second wave because of third wavers’ interest in femininity, sex- positive politics, and media. In the introduction to their highly significant 1997 collection, Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism, Leslie Heywood and

Jennifer Drake state,

In the current historical moment, then, third wave feminists often take cultural

production and sexual politics as key sites of struggle, seeking to use desire and

pleasure as well as anger to fuel activist struggles for justice. These forms of third

wave activism don’t often look “activist” enough to second wave feminists. (4)

This characterization of the third wave as a stark departure from second wave consciousness, expression, and tactics has continued to define the third wave. In A

History of U.S. Feminisms, a 2008 Seal Press primer, Rory Dicker considers how third wave expressions of femininity are upheld in popular and academic discourse as antithetical to second wave rejections of patriarchal beauty norms. Dicker references the phenomenon of “girlie feminism,”10 and argues that discussions about this trend are representative of how third and second wave feminists become contrasted to each other.

She states,

Third wave feminism is cast as oppositional to the second wave at least in part

because of girlie feminists’ deliberate decision to deploy the trappings of

femininity in a conscious, even parodic way. For many second wavers, such uses

of femininity are nothing more than retrograde; they cancel out the theorizing and

agitating radical feminists did, for instance, in their protest of the Miss America

Pageant in 1968. (123) 10

Hence, Dicker calls attention to how third wavers’ “parodic” and “conscious” interventions into hegemonic femininity are figured in third wave discourse and mainstream media as a palpable shift from the androgynous or anti-fashion styles of second wave feminists. Taking Dicker and Heywood and Drake together, we can see the overarching sentiment that third wave feminism is a politics based on an expansion of pleasure and agency, whereas second wave feminism is contrasted as a politics of negation—a politics more about what feminists need to reject rather than how feminists might access more joy and fulfillment of (political, sexual, etc.) desires.

Crystallizing the efforts of third and second wave feminists into two resolved categories ignores how feminists are mobilized by a diversity of issues in any one era of feminist activism. Such absolute renderings of the wave metaphor conceal nuances like sex radical feminists in the early 1960s agitating for sexual liberation and an expansion of pleasure,11 and the seemingly second wave sentiment of the need for women-only spaces in riot grrrl movements of the 1990s.12 My skepticisms of heavy-handed uses of the wave metaphor are not to suggest that there are no differences between second and third wave feminists. For instance, the identification of third and/or second wave can be useful for positioning feminists within the particular political moment they came of age within and the way that specific histories and experiences impact their politics. However, the way third and second wave become static positions in much contemporary discourse is reductive. Instead, I am interested in how reading feminist relations through affect will complicate this oversimplified use of the wave metaphor. For instance, the femme theory

I consider here is written by femmes who generationally fall into both the second and third wave, yet all the authors I highlight stress the centrality of sexuality in feminist 11 politics and figure ironic femininity as a potentially radical gender expression. In turning to the affects of irony and hunger, how might we read across the lines of third/second wave identification and see new affiliations?

Critiques of the wave model such as the one I have just proposed are quite prevalent in recent feminist scholarship.13 The reductive nature of what Nancy A. Hewitt calls “synthetic studies”(3) which reiterate tired narratives about three feminist waves has compelled some scholars to propose other metaphors for imagining feminist histories. For instance, Ednie Kaeh Garrison puts forth the idea of “radio waves” in order to counter the image of feminist movements as discrete ocean waves which surge, crest, and ebb out.

She states that using the metaphor of radio waves allows feminist activism to be envisioned as “multiple waves existing at the same time—sometimes fading and dissolving, other times interrupted or appropriated or colonized, oftentimes overlooked because we can’t hear or perceive a signal we haven’t got an ear for […]” (244). In short,

Garrison argues that rather than viewing shifts in feminism as chronological or generational, scholars must be sensitive to the fact that any moment of feminism is dynamic and full of a multiplicity of feminist analyses and activist tactics. Therefore, it may be less of a question of what “wave” we are caught up in, and more of a question of what “wavelength” we are “tuned into” (248). In Garrison’s metaphor, different frequencies of feminist discourse and activism are turned on simultaneously, but we may only be focusing on one at a time or one frequency may be dominating others. The goal then is to recognize the richness and nuances of feminist activism, both in our current moment and in the past. The metaphor of radio waves seems particularly apt for conceptualizing organizing along lines of affect for which I advocate. Rather than 12 viewing feminist organizing as simply chronological, I trace the affects of irony and hunger as they come in clearly, fizzle out, and catch static across lines of second/third wave identification.

Despite my critique of these two narratives, I don’t argue that sexual or generational identifications should be discarded as ways of making sense of feminist relations. On the contrary, part of the nuance of the affective affinities I trace in this project is that irony and hunger will have different meanings and stakes in a femme context than in a third wave context. I am interested, rather, in the convergences between third wave and femme positions even if these affective overlaps are limited. 14 By recognizing these affinities, I want to allow these feminist identifications to breathe, to become fully fleshed out categories of identity rather than caricatures or feminist straw women. These identifications could be used to inject complexity into feminist relations, but, unfortunately, too often in current feminist discourse they function as shorthand for what such positions supposedly represent and how feminists must relate to each other. If we consider attraction to specific sensibilities in addition to categories of identification like age and sexuality, what kinds of alliances between these positions could be illuminated?

Imagining New Models of Feminist Organizing

Imagining what affiliations based on affect would look like means reading across lines of identity-based categories like age and/or sexuality and seeing how a diversity of feminists feel their feminism in similar ways. For instance, in “Desire for the Future:

Radical Hope in Passion and Danger,” femme icon Amber Hollibaugh outlines some of 13 the affective congruencies that mobilized feminists of various sexual identifications in the

1960s and 1970s. Hollibaugh originally delivered this paper at the notorious 1982

Barnard conference, and she underscores how “feelings about sex” galvanized women who came to feminist consciousness during the second wave, even if the particular feelings at play were diverse (94). Hollibaugh states,

Many of us became feminists because of our feelings about sex: because we were

dykes or we weren’t, because we wanted to do it or we didn’t, because we were

afraid we liked sex too much or that we didn’t enjoy it enough, because we had

never been told that desire was something for ourselves before it was an

enticement for a partner, because defining our own sexual direction as women

was a radical notion. (94)

Hollibaugh articulates feminism as a politics that was meaningful to a range of feminists because it was a way to understand one’s sexual potential, even if one’s “own sexual direction” might differ from that of others. This could mean using feminism to open up the possibility of having sex with other women, to change the way one has sex with men, or to pursue new sexual practices and fantasies. Hollibaugh’s account is one that gets lost in many of the narratives that rewrite the recent history of feminist sexual politics in terms of opposing poles: the overly enthusiastic sex-positivity of the third wave in contrast to a second wave feminism written as simply skeptical about sex radicalism. The nuance of her statement also gets lost in arguments that define femmes’ radical gender transgressions in opposition to the normativity of heterosexual women’s femininity.

Hollibaugh articulates a feminist politics of women who came to feminism because of their “feelings about sex,” and, in doing so, she recognizes the specificity of all these 14 experiences; at the same time she opens up places for shared understanding. In

Hollibaugh's model, feminists with radically different sexual identifications, practices, and partners could (and did) coalesce in order to pursue women’s sexual self- determination. Therefore, a politics based on feminist “feelings about sex” could address issues ranging from queer rights, to addressing violence against women, to comprehensive sex education, to promoting relationship models other than monogamy, to agitating for federally funded abortions for low-income women. Essentially, a politics such as the one which Hollibaugh outlines recognizes that various feminists will have diverse “sexual direction[s]” based on their social positioning and individual desires, but that the sentiment of longing to “defin[e] [one’s] own sexual direction" could be a unifying force for all of these efforts.

My project imagines this kind of feminist organizing around affect in our current moment by asking in what ways might queer femmes and non-queer-identified third wave feminists be feeling their femininity, their erotic desires, and their feminism similarly. The grounds for a coalition (or at the very least a dialogue) between these two groups based on the affinities of irony and hunger are already available in the literary spaces of femme and third wave theory. My contribution is to recognize the overlapping, yet largely unacknowledged, sensibilities in these literatures and to call these queer relations into being. Muñoz argues that queerness is an action, not a state of being. He notes, “Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future” (Cruising Utopia 1). I draw on his idea and place these two separated bodies of writing together in order to highlight the queer relationship that these affective resonances “perfor[m].” Even if the relationship I posit in this study is not 15 representative of explicit and acknowledged exchanges between femme and third wave feminists, the crossings in these bodies of literature enact femme-third wave relations/community, regardless of the authors’ intents to do so or not. By imagining that feminists have the capacity to forge community in ways other than they do now, I offer my speculative study as “a doing for and toward the future.”

Therefore, the affective convergences and the potential places for coalition are already articulated in these literatures, albeit in implicit ways. For instance, iconic femme writer and founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Joan Nestle, offers a nuanced understanding of where femme and heterosexual feminists might find connection and alliance with each other. She states,

The women I work with form a comradeship with me as a woman, but they

wouldn’t as a fem. They wouldn’t even know what to do with it. And the minute

I say that I know this is not the whole story. The risk of desire has been a shared

bond with some of my straight women friends […] especially the women who are

looking for a touch they desire. […] I think perhaps straight women, in their own

desire, experience their version of what is my fem place. (“I’ll Be” 113)

While initially hesitant to claim a shared understanding of desire between herself and the heterosexual feminists she works with, Nestle acknowledges that there is an affinity between “women who are looking for a touch they desire.” I argue that Nestle’s “fem place” is a model for coalitions based on affect. In this case, the “fem place” is a concept which allows desire to be a site of connection between feminists of varying sexual identifications who seek experiences outside of the erotic poverty of heteronormativity. 16

These kinds of affective contacts emerge with more clarity when we look at the overlaps between the sensibilities of hunger and irony in third wave and femme theory.

Finding the Right Frequency: Tuning into Irony and Hunger in Femme and Third Wave

Theory

Irony and hunger are two sensibilities that illuminate the similar efforts of a wide scope of feminists of differing ages and sexual identifications to innovate expressions of femininity and feminized desire outside of heteronormative models.

In the first chapter, I explore the numerous ironic femininities which populate contemporary feminist landscapes and the slippages between femme and third wave femininities in this moment. Both queer femmes and non-queer-identified third wave feminists figure their feminized gender expressions as deliberate rejections of naturalized and abjected femininity. The kind of irony at work in these tactical and often flamboyant constructions of femininity is neither mere flippancy nor play; instead, femme and third wave feminists claim irony as a tool for expanding conceptions of femininity in order to fulfill more desires. What those specific desires are differ between these two positions, as femmes generally stress their ironic femininities as part of an erotic identity whereas third wavers are more likely to discus ironic femininity in terms of a political identity. Even still, there is a resonance between these figurations of ironic femininity in the ways that both groups articulate irony as a method for accessing a greater number of desires.

In the second chapter, I examine hunger as a sensibility with which femmes and third wave feminists reread feminized sexual modalities such as openness, vulnerability and submission as active practices. In doing so, they challenge heteronormative 17 assumptions about feminine passivity and inferiority. Therefore, hunger becomes a way for femmes and third wave feminists to increase the range of erotic experiences that are possible for women/feminized people in a misogynist culture. However, this sensibility also includes the awareness that these erotic transgressions are enacted within a culture of risk and violence. In this way, femme and third wave feminists employ a sensibility of hunger in order to build sexual politics which avoid the polemics of debates that pit sex- positive pleasures in opposition to sex-negative dangers. By contrast, hunger is a sensibility predicated on contradiction. In order to illuminate this resemblance between how femmes and third wave feminists understand their desires and also that which attempts to repress their desires, I focus on the work of Merri Lisa Johnson in this chapter. Johnson is a third wave feminist who has emerged as a preeminent scholar of third wave sexual politics. I map the similar sentiments between theorizations of femme hunger in femme sexual politics and Johnson’s attempts to restructure heterosexual relationships with a “third wave approach” (“Fuck You” 47). Hunger, then, could be an ethos with the potential to align a diversity of feminists against the denigration of femininity, violence against women, and the repression of women’s desires.

While my project aims to imagine coalitions between a range of feminists, the prevailing whiteness and middle-class privilege of the literature I’m currently working with limits how extensive the implications of my study can be. My research focuses on texts which speak pointedly about “sexuality” and “desire,” which, as Hortense Spillers argues, are privileged terms. In her 1984 essay, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,”

Spillers asserts that white feminists have used the term “sexuality” to signify an expansive analysis of women’s sexual oppression and potential, and yet, much of what is 18 produced as “feminist sexual politics” emerges from white women’s experiences.15

Spillers states that feminist work that claims to examine “sexuality” is inherently narrow in scope and exclusionary because “We would argue that sexuality as a term of power belongs to the empowered” (78).

Spiller’s critique exposes some of the limitations and failings of my own project, as my decision to focus on femme and third wave writings about “sexual politics” or

“sexuality” has produced a partial representation of the many feminist expressions of femininity in this moment. While my study does include the perspectives of writers who identify as women of color, working class women, and two who identify as trans women/femmes, the literary bodies of femme theory and third wave theory are overwhelmingly dominated by the insights of white, middle class and cissexual women, despite an ethos of intersectionality in these fields.16 Keeping Spillers’ critique in mind, it is necessary for me to acknowledge the white privilege and class privilege imbued in many of the primary texts for this project and that this restricts the implications of my argument. The current scope of this project cannot sufficiently address the historical and cultural specificity of women of color’s sexual politics. Such a project, for instance a study of contemporary black feminist sexual expressions and what connections they may or may not have to the affects I’m exploring, would need to be the focus of a whole study in order to provide analysis of adequate depth. This kind of scholarship is highly necessary, but it is not work that I currently have the resources to undertake. I hope that this gap in my research will call into relief the need for more feminist studies of sexual and gender expression from diverse social positions. 19

This study imagines what it would mean to conceptualize and live out queerer forms of relating—what it would mean to draw connection around affect in addition to more legible categories of identification. Queer relationality allows us to consider how people might surprise each other. Surprise is a radical concept in a world where we often interact with each other based on fixed and static positions. Finding recognition or even partial affinity where one is not supposed to can be a powerful experience which calls into question clear demarcations which we use to make sense of each other. I argue that blurring the borders between some of the identifications being built up in master narratives about feminist history in this moment is productive because such a move expands the range of experiences and feelings that are possible. In the case of this study, these sorts of expansions might include identifying as heterosexual, but striving for desires that don’t meet heteronormative standards, or identifying as femme and being surprised to recognize affinity with a heterosexual woman’s “fem place.” In terms of inter-generational connection, these expansions could include seeing the confusions of ironic femininities in contemporary feminist spaces as grounds for celebrating the efforts of younger and older feminists as they both work to queer heteronormative standards.

This study points to the unacknowledged queer relationships between femme and third wave feminists with the hopes that such a move might create more opportunities for surprising encounters and productive coalitions, both on and off the page.

20

CHAPTER 1

LADIES, FEMMES, AND “FEMINIST FATALES”: EXCHANGES OF IRONIC FEMININITY BETWEEN QUEER AND HETEROSEXUAL FEMINISTS

Scholarship about contemporary feminist movements maintains that something significant is happening around femininity in feminist communities over the past 20 years or so, but just what it is seems difficult to articulate. Parodic, hypersexualized, and campy displays of especially white, middle-class femininity saturate feminist cultural landscapes. Examples of these kinds of ironic femininities surface in third wave cultural production such as entertainment spectacles like burlesque or roller derby or in the pages of “feminist lifestyle”17 magazines like BUST or Venuszine. Furthermore, everyday and staged performances of ironic femininity—such as the ubiquity of feminists wearing vintage dresses and hairstyles along with their tattoos and piercings, or the personas of musicians such as Kathleen Hanna of Le Tigre, Beth Ditto of The Gossip, PJ Harvey,

Peaches, Courtney Love, and Bjork—dominate contemporary feminist spaces. This feminist fascination with femininity is discussed as two separate phenomena: the

“reclamation” of femininity by third wave feminists on the one hand, and the “revival” of femme identity practices in queer communities on the other. Therefore, scholars recognize that ironic femininities abound in contemporary feminist and queer communities and cultures,18 but rarely consider what the greater implications of these phenomena could be in terms of relations between queer and heterosexual feminists.

Hence, the presence of ironic femininities is both highly documented and under- theorized in scholarship about contemporary feminisms. In order to address the confusing

“cacophony of messages about femininity, feminism, and fashion” (Stoller 46) circulating 21 in this historical moment, I look to irony as a potential point of coalition between feminists of a diversity of ages and sexual identifications. I argue that femme and third wave ironic femininities are not happening in isolation to one another; instead, these gender performances as constructed in constellation to each other, and a multitude of ironic femininities interact and feed off each other in this historical moment.

Furthermore, these ironic femininities are not just a matter of aesthetic styles or flippant play. Instead, a range of feminists values irony in this moment because it provides a way to construct femininities beyond heteronormative models.

The prevalence of ironic femininities within this contemporary feminist era destabilizes clear markers of sexual identification, causing slippages between femme and not-specifically-queer third wave feminist femininities. In her examination of queer femme subjectivity in this particular moment, femme poet Daphne Gottlieb illustrates this kind of slippage, stating, “It’s not unusual, in San Francisco, for straight girls to dress like femmes. If a straight girl dresses like a dyke, how do you know she’s not a femme?” (19).

While this kind of misunderstanding between queer and heterosexual gender performances could be read as merely a coincidental convergence in fashion styles, I argue that confusion over who’s really femme or not signals something much more significant. I move beyond the observation that queer femmes and feminine heterosexual third wave feminists look like each other in this historical moment, and I explore how these two groups might be feeling their gender expressions in similar ways. Such slippages are useful because they allow us to imagine a feminist politics which capitalizes on the fact that a diversity of feminists are attracted to ironic femininities right now.

In this chapter, I explore how both femme and non-queer-identified third wave 22 feminists reject femininity as a “natural” outcome for bodies marked female and how they employ irony to affirm both political and erotic desires. Femme and third wave feminists figure irony as a sensibility that allows them to “choose” ways of being a woman/feminized person outside of heteronormative models. Therefore, rather than functioning as merely an irreverent stance or style, ironic femininity in femme and third wave discourse is irony with a certain kind of attachment—an irony which expresses visceral desires and an irony which is deeply connected to one’s identity. Hence, irony as a femme or third wave sensibility is a locus for feminist politics and erotic identities. This study posits that irony has the potential to be a locus of feminist coalitional affiliations as well.

The kinds of crossings that interest me come to light in contemporary feminist spaces like magazines, burlesque performances, and popular anthologies. For instance,

Elizabeth K. Keenan’s study of Ladyfests—riot grrrl music festivals—is an excellent analysis of how interchanges between queer femme femininity and not-specifically-queer third wave feminist femininity occur in such spaces. Keenan argues that femininity has become something of a currency for political and cultural legibility in contemporary feminist venues, stating, “Third-Wave feminists, queer and straight, frame the practices of femininity as subversion […]” (396). Keenan figures Ladyfests as places where ironic, playful and/or hyperbolic performances of feminized gender become ways for riot grrrls be visible to one another and to signal their specifically third wave, punk, DIY, and potentially queer politics. In short, the act of performing femininity becomes a political act at Ladyfests, a way to announce one’s third wave consciousness. However, Keenan also stresses that there are tensions between queer and heterosexual riot grrrls over what 23 kinds of femininity register as appropriately feminist and/or queer (388-398). Such convergences and frictions demonstrate how femininity is a source of both connection and conflict in contemporary feminist spaces. As such, ironic femininity offers us a place to examine the nature of queer and heterosexual feminist relations.

On the one hand, the overlapping ironic sensibilities between femme and third wave femininities shouldn’t be mistaken for identical sensibilities because, as Keenan points out, queer and heterosexual riot grrrls perform their femininities within differing contexts and with different motivations (such as signaling their queerness or not) (391-

392). On the other hand, holding fast to the narrative that femme femininity is oppositional to heterosexual women’s femininity fails to accurately describe how femininity functions in contemporary feminist spaces like Ladyfests. Thinking about how affect functions in the crossings and lived complexities of feminist spaces opens up other ways to conceptualize how feminists who are attracted to unnatural expressions of femininity relate to each other. Hence, we have the opportunity to think of feminists not only in terms of “third” and “second wave” or “queer” and “heterosexual,” but as different feminist relations based on affective affinity. In this case, we could begin to recognize “feminists who value irony” or “feminists who are attracted to ironic femininity” as legitimate affiliations for feminist alliance. Looking at shared sensibilities allows us to approach some of these slippages between femme and third wave femininities not only with confusion or skepticism, but also as open to the affective connections between feminists that thinking only in terms of identity have not yet illuminated.

24

Will the Real Femmes Please Stand Up?: Slippages

Slippages between femme and third wave femininities happen at the level of staged, written, and everyday gender performances. Both femme and third wave feminists take up ironic femininity as a method for cultivating self-determined, anti-misogynist forms of femininity and, as such, femininities styled with a sense of self-awareness signal a feminist reclamation of femininity. In this political climate, the word “femme” circulates in theory and media as a way to signal overt, ironic, but not always specifically lesbian/queer, feminized gender.19 The loose use of the word “femme” can lead to some ambiguity over when “femme” signifies a queer identity and when it does not. For example, art history and cultural studies scholar Maria Elena Buszek argues that the development of her third wave feminist consciousness included “mak[ing] the love of my uniquely femme self […] an activist statement” (4). It is hard to know how exactly

Buszek is using the term “femme” here. Is Buszek claiming a queer identity and using

“femme” to locate herself within butch-femme communities and histories? Or is Buszek using “femme” in order to stress the overtly feminized quality of her femininity? Or, perhaps her use of the term “femme” signals that Buszek considers herself an ally to queer femmes and likewise claims her femininity as a defiant challenge to heteronormative standards. In statements such as Buszek’s, the reader is left with the sense that “femme” is meant to signal a way of living feminized gender fiercely, but the specificity of “femme” as a queer identity (queer in a LGBT sense) sometimes gets lost. I would like to suggest that this is not entirely (or not only) an act of appropriation or misreading on the part of non-queer-identified third wave feminists. Buszek’s slip could signal all of the above meanings, or a combination of them. Hence, this kind of slippage 25 genuinely and accurately illustrates the multiple ways in which feminists of various sexual identifications claim their femininities as part of their feminist politics.

While femme writers might have very good reasons to want to police the boundaries of ironic femininity as a queer identity, doing so doesn’t accurately account for the kinds of overlaps occurring between queer femme and heterosexual third wave femininities. In “Diesel,” Daphne Gottlieb illustrates the tendency to claim femme irony as a specifically LGBT practice; at the same time, she demonstrates how such distinctions don’t hold up very well in the milieu of ironic femininities of this moment. Gottlieb addresses how the slippage between femme and third wave feminist femininities might lead to confusion over who is “queer” and who is “straight” in contemporary feminist spaces. Certainly, the problem of femmes being misread as heterosexual has been written about frequently, but Gottlieb asserts a different problem currently occurring—that heterosexual women who adopt styles associated with femmes in queer communities might cause some confusion over how to “know” who is really a femme. She states, “It’s not unusual, in San Francisco, for straight girls to dress like femmes. If a straight girl dresses like a dyke, how do you know she’s not a femme? If you have to ask, you’re not paying attention” (19). Gottlieb acknowledges that, especially in the genderfucking capital of San Francisco, the line between “queer” and “straight” is disrupted when queer styles and sensibilities don’t stay put in queer communities.

These exchanges lead to such confusions as “straight girls [who] dress like femmes.” While what exactly “dressing like a femme” means to Gottlieb isn’t clear, I speculate that to Gottlieb “dressing like a femme” means expressing a kind of self-aware, overtly performative femininity. Gottlieb observes that San Francisco is a place where 26 ironic and femme-esque femininities abound regardless of sexual identification. Yet she insists on the queer/lesbian specificity of femme sensibilities, stating that anyone who can’t tell a “straight girl [who] dresses like a dyke” from a femme is just “not paying attention.” Gottlieb suggests that there is a recognizable queer femme quality—some unarticulated element that you just know when you see it. Hence, even if external appearances confuse us as to who is “femme” and who is “straight,” internally felt and acted upon sensibilities will betray the truth and reveal who is femme and who is just a

“straight girl dress[ing] like a dyke.” However, I challenge Gottlieb’s assumption by arguing that focusing on sensibility will actually reveal more confusion, not less. As I shall discuss later in this chapter, non-queer-identified third wavers also employ irony to create gender expressions which speak to their queer(ed) desires to exceed the boundaries of normative femininity. Therefore, Gottlieb’s suggestion that feeling will trump look and clarify who’s queer or not doesn’t adequately address the ways that the sensibility of ironic femininity cuts across sexual identity in this moment.

Gottlieb’s certainty that there are inherent femme sensibilities betrays itself in unresolved tension within this same essay. Even as Gottlieb maintains some kind of clear boundary between queer femmes and femme-esque heterosexual women, these distinctions cannot withstand the lived complexity of her comings and goings in places where such boundaries are muddled. For instance, Gottlieb describes a bar she used to frequent, a “straight bar” where “night after night, there were girls, free drinks, unblushing propositions, girls, and phone numbers” (17). In a effort to make sense of her popularity with the “straight girls” who frequent the bar, Gottlieb asks the bartender—“a straight girl” who “[knows] this bar inside and out”—what is going on. Gottlieb recounts: 27

“So tell me,” I asked her […] “How do all these straight girls know I’m queer?”

She raised one perfectly twigged eyebrow at me from under her rockabilly bangs.

One side of her bee-stung mouth twitched up in a smirk. “That’s what I was

going to ask you,” she said, teetering on her heels to go pour a beer, leering back

at me over her illustrated shoulders. (17)

This bartender may well be one of those femme-acting straight girls Gottlieb is talking about. She has the markings of self-aware femininity (high heels, pouted lips, “perfectly twigged eyebrow[s]”) mixed up with subcultural markings (“rockabilly bangs,” tattooed shoulders) and bravado (her wicked “smirk” and brazen “leer”)—a seemingly femme- esque combination. Yet, despite the bartender’s ironically stylized femininity and her open flirtation, Gottlieb marks her as “straight.” In Gottlieb’s estimation, the bartender shouldn’t be in on the “joke” which Duggan and McHugh identify as the femme practice of simultaneously embodying and critiquing hegemonic markers of femininity (169). But in this moment the bartender turns the joke back around on Gottlieb and playfully confronts Gottlieb’s assumption that the bartender should have some kind of insight into these dyke-chasing “straight” girls.

The bartender’s statement, “That’s what I was going to ask you,” is ambiguous. Is the bartender outing herself as a queer femme, and hence, suggesting that she wouldn’t know the motivations behind the heterosexual women who pick Gottlieb up every night?

Or, is she challenging Gottlieb’s insinuation that the lines between “queer” and “straight” girls in this bar can be clearly demarcated? It’s a confusing moment and Gottlieb doesn’t try to unpack it for her reader. She allows this instance of slippage between the ironic femininities of queer and heterosexual women to hang in the air unresolved. This 28 lingering tension demonstrates how sometimes one might “have to ask” how to distinguish between a femme and “a straight girl [who] dresses like a dyke,” and that even if one does ask, there might not be a real answer. This tension is illustrated in the documentary FtF: Female to Femme when lesbian femme actress Guinevere Turner comments, “How to tell a femme dyke from a straight girl? I don’t know the answer”

(FtF). As Turner’s open question mark suggests, even if Gottlieb maintains that there are recognizable differences between femme and heterosexual ironic femininities, Gottlieb cannot sustain this kind of certainty. Gottlieb’s inability or refusal to solve these tensions for her reader illustrates how something deeper than a coincidence of style is happening in these performances of ironic femininity.

Pausing in these moments of confusion and slippage opens up a potential space to begin a dialogue between queer and heterosexual feminists about how these crossings occur on the level of feeling. So what about those “straight” girls Gottlieb is kissing, or

Buszek’s ambiguous “femme self,” or the femme-esque camping of heterosexual riot grrrls at Ladyfests? Do we read them as politically suspect and vapid—fashioning themselves in feminine styles and kissing girls in bars without having to examine their privilege? Certainly that’s one possibility for what is happening in performances of ironic femininity, but it’s not the only option. If we see Gottlieb and the “straight” girls in the bar as individuals who are all attracted to ironic forms of femininity, what kinds of openings does that create in these larger narratives? What would it mean to take attraction to sensibility as seriously as we take attraction to the sex/gender of our sexual partners?

Irony is so crucial and prevalent in contemporary feminist spaces we should be paying close attention to how it functions. As I explore in the next section, irony is employed by 29 a diversity of feminists as a way of creating femininities which transgress the limited possibilities of heteronormative gender.

Rather than eliding or ignoring confusions between these figurations of ironic femininity, we should approach such affective affinities as grounds for connection between feminists who have historically been in conflict with each other.

“Girl[s]-by-Choice”: Irony as a Method for Constructing Feminist and Femme

Femininities

While scholarly accounts of ironic femininity discuss such performances either in a femme context or a in third wave context, reading femme and third wave irony alongside each other illuminates a variety of efforts to queer hegemonic femininity. If we are sensitive to how irony is a sensibility that transverses borders of sexual identification, we will see how femininity is constituted in this particular moment of feminism as a self- aware and resistant process of construction. In their essay, “A Fem(me)inist Manifesto,” femme queer theorists Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh identify irony as a radical tactic for creating new, chosen ways for how to be a woman in a misogynist, heteronormative culture. They assert, “Refusing the fate of Girl-by–Nature, the fem(me) is Girl-by-Choice. […] [T]he fem(me) takes from the feminine a wardrobe, a walk, a wink, then moves on to sound the death knell of an abject sexuality contorted and subjected to moral concerns” (166). Duggan and McHugh differentiate between femme femininity and hegemonic femininity by arguing that femmes reject the myth of “natural” femininity—a kind of femininity that is valued in a patriarchal context only because it can be rendered “abject” and properly “moral,” and subjugated. Instead, the femme “Girl- 30 by-Choice” fashions radically queer femininities from what Joan Nestle refers to as the

“text” of femininity (“I’ll Be” 116). Therefore, in Duggan and McHugh’s estimation, femmes ironically embody markers of socially legible femininity (the “wardrobe,” the

“walk,” the “wink,” etc.) but they “refuse” to believe that these feminine codes amount to an authentic or “natural” gender identity. Therefore, the critical distinction between the

“Girl-by-Choice” and the “Girl-by-Nature” is that the latter sincerely embraces feminine codes as the basis of her gender identity, whereas the former queerly manipulates these codes in order to challenge the patriarchal restrictions such codes represent. Throughout femme theory, the subversive use of the “text” of femininity is upheld as a quintessentially femme tactic for constructing feminine genders outside of the scope of heteronormativity.

Separate from these discussions of femme gender subversion, scholars of contemporary feminisms argue that a key tactic of third wave feminism is to ironically rework hegemonic femininity. Feminist media scholar Kathleen Rowe Karlyn states,

In third-wave feminism, popular culture is a natural site of identity formation

and empowerment, providing an abundant storehouse of images and narratives

valuable less as a means of representing reality than as motifs available for

contesting, rewriting and recoding. (62)

As Karlyn notes, third wavers have been characterized by their postmodern impulses to mobilize the rich “storehouses of images and narratives” available in popular culture and to manipulate these “motifs” for the purposes of feminist play and critique. In this way, third wave feminists are also making use of the “text” of femininity by “contesting, rewriting, and recoding” popular stereotypes and fantasies of femininity. Hence, both 31 femmes and non-queer-identified third wavers ascribe to an ethos of “Girl-by-Choice”—a girl who deliberately employs these codes of normative feminine gender in order to access feminist and queer desires which transgress the bounds of patriarchal possibility.

The affective affinities between femme and third wave feminist ironic femininities encompass an ethos of construction and choice as well as a sentiment that irony is a method for accessing desire. Significantly, both femmes and third wave feminists underscore the transformative role of high femme and/or hyperfeminine icons in self-reflexive expressions of unnatural femininity. These icons generally come from

“straight” and “unfeminist” sources.20 In “Oh! Dogma (Up Yours!): Surfing the Third

Wave,” Buszek considers the influence of 1980s pop, punk, and new wave icons on the emerging third wave consciousness. Buszek states,

Maybe it was something in the air. It shouldn’t strike anyone familiar with the

last 25 years of feminist history as surprising to find that the early eighties marked

not only the popularity of glamorous guttersnipes squealing away on top of

synthesizer beats, but the point at which constructionist feminism became a force

to be reckoned with. (3)

Buszek draws a direct correlation between shifts in academic feminisms towards a politics of “constructionist” identity practices (as opposed to more “essentialist” notions of female identity and feminist solidarity) and the popularity of “glamorous guttersnipes” like Siousie Sioux, Poly Styrene, Dale Bozzio and other punk and new wave artists.

Buszek argues that the consumption of ironic femininities from an “arsenal of personae”

(3) was part of her and other feminists of her generation’s education in “constructionist feminism” long before they learned about feminist theory in college classrooms (2). 32

Therefore, such pop culture icons—ranging from dark esoteric figures like Lydia Lunch and Nina Hagen to sugary pop personas like Madonna and Pat Benatar—are valued by third wavers because these performances of unruly femininity have the potential to incite feminist affects like dissatisfaction with the status quo, risk-taking, and the refusal to meet restrictive expectations. This third wave practice of “incorporat[ing] […] unwittingly feminist icons into our collective pantheon” (“Oh Dogma” 5) is reflected in third wave media like the magazines BUST and Bitch. For instance, in her regular column for BUST magazine, “Pop Tart,” Wendy McClure often writes feminist homages to female celebrities and upholds these pop culture icons as having a formative effect on a third wave feminist sensibility.21 Buszek argues that the practice of embracing and embodying these “models” of “glamour and outrageousness” (2) has become part of the larger politics and everyday tactics of the third wave.

While third wave writers habitually utilize “unfeminist” figures in their constructions of ironic femininity, femme writers often claim “straight” performers who embody excessive or transgressive forms of femininity as high femme icons. For instance, Gottlieb describes her femme subjectivity via a cultural genealogy that bears a striking similarity to Buszek’s “arsenal of personae.” Gottlieb states,

I am a Tura Satana femme, a Diamanda Galas femme, a Mary Magdalen femme.

No Donna Reed here. (And isn’t it odd that I can only come up with

transgressive/queered representations of transgressions from the “straight” world,

not “authentic” queerness? Yeah, you got me on this one). (19-20)

Gottlieb’s statement underscores the instability of notions such as “straight” and

“femme” ironic femininities. She celebrates the appeal of icons who represent brazenly 33 hypersexual and aggressive femininity, including pin-up diva Tura Santana of Russ

Meyer film fame; high goth, avant garde songstress Diamanda Galas; and Mary

Magdalen figured as a feminist bad girl. Like Buszek, Gottlieb looks to these unlikely feminist and queer figures as useful artifice for her own unruly and inappropriate feminine gender expression. However, Gottlieb is self-conscious that she claims these women who flaunt patriarchal gender roles as “femme” even while all these icons are

“straight.” If femme femininity is defined by its ironic stance that distinguishes it from the sincerity of heterosexual women’s femininity, how can Gottlieb account for the

“transgressive/queered” femininity she finds transformative in these heterosexual icons?

The answer is she doesn’t. She lets that contradiction remain unsettled for her reader, stating flatly, “Yeah, you got me on this one.” Gottlieb’s disinterest in easing this tension suggests that it’s not productive to try to delineate ironic femininities along the lines of

“queer” and “straight.” Instead, I posit that it is more useful to examine ironic femininities in the context of how a diversity of feminists currently approach femininity as an active construction and a place of agency.

Therefore, ironic femininity, with its connotation of construction and choice, becomes a way for femmes and third wavers to reject the limitations of “patriarchally imposed” (Harris and Crocker 3) femininity. Femme writer Lisa Ortiz describes the process of femme construction this way: “[F]emme is taking all those learned and innate characteristics and directing it towards ourselves. It is reclaiming the attributes associated with femininity that have so often been used against us individually and collectively and using them for our own benefit and pleasure” (92). Ortiz defines femme as a practice of rerouting hegemonic feminine aesthetics and sensibilities into a gender expression that 34 feels radical, feminist, and queer. Her sentiment resonates with Karlyn’s description of how third wave feminists make strategic use of the “storehouse of images” in order to create identities outside of limited patriarchal or popular imaginings. For example,

Buszek describes her engagement with punk and new wave artists Lydia Lunch, Exene

Cervenka, and Nina Hagen as a negotiation of the kinds of femininities each of these women represented for her. She states,

Where Lydia had helped make the love of my uniquely femme self—which I had

inherited from my strong and extremely sexy Hispana mom and aunts—an

activist statement, punk mamas like Exene and Nina expanded this to my blatant

maternal instincts as well. I was picking and choosing from the supposedly

binary poles of feminist thought to find something comfortable in the spectra

between. (4)

Buszek describes her third wave cultural reading practice as a way to cobble together the most enticing pieces of her punk icons. On the one hand, Lunch’s hypersexual, tough girl persona validates Buszek’s “femme self” as “an activist statement”—meaning that Lunch shows her how women who are unapologetic about their overt femininity and sexuality perform a kind of everyday resistance in a misogynist culture. On the other hand,

Cervenka’s and Hagen’s negotiations of motherhood and punk lifestyles show Buszek alternative models of mothering. By “picking and choosing” between these “supposedly binary poles of feminist thought”—the anti-child vamp and the new agey hip mama—

Buszek constructs a femininity which speaks to a holistic spectrum of herself. Much like

Ortiz’s argument that femmes alter models of femininity to fit their own “benefit and pleasure,” Buszek argues that femininity doesn’t have to be a simplistic, restrictive model 35 of what one can be. Instead Buszek cultivates her femininity as a self-reflexive and malleable identity that allows for a fuller expression of her desires. Hence, both femmes and non-queer-identified third wave feminists approach femininity as Duggan and

McHugh’s “Girl-by-Choice”(166), who does a strategic bricolage of codes of femininity, in order to fashion themselves into the kind of women who were never supposed to exist in a misogynist culture.

If feminists of varying sexual identifications view irony as a method for creating ways of being women outside of restrictive heteronormative models, it bears asking to what extent third wavers or femmes “choose” their femininities as something radically different from hegemonic gender. Additionally, the limitation of irony is that the performer relies on her audience to read her correctly. Hence, how can feminists be sure that they are recognized as critiquing heteronormative expectations? If feminists rely on irony as a mode of critique, a sexual identity, or a political consciousness, what kind of anxiety might it cause to be read improperly? Keenan underscores these concerns in her discussion of Ladyfests. She states that all feminists who attempt to make their femininities resonate as subversive have to “fin[d] ways to indicate that the femininity on display does not function as mere titillation for a straight, male audience” but that queer feminists have the added challenge of “endeavor[ing] to make audiences recognize the queerness of their performances” (396). Therefore, when femme and third wave feminists uphold irony as a way to eschew and reroute hegemonic feminine gender, the burden becomes to make their femininities read as transgressive even while they cite codes of hegemonic femininity. 36

In her study of feminist camp in film, Pamela Robertson discusses this kind of challenge when she examines the feminist tactic of “gender parody.” Robertson states that when a female performer employs gender parody she is “play[ing] at being what she is always already perceived to be” (12). Whereas the feminine masquerade placates gender norms via performances of femininity that elide the construction of gender,

Robertson argues that gender parody is a performance that underscores the construction of gender. Therefore, gender parody is a method of performing feminine masquerade wildly and/or self-reflexively—a way to reveal gender as a performance rather than promote gender as an essence. Robertson stresses that gender parody “doesn’t differ in structure from the activity of the masquerade but self-consciously theatricalizes masquerade’s construction of gender identities” (13). Hence, the trick of gender parody is that one cites codes of normative gender, but in such a way as to reveal one’s skepticism of the heteronormative standards these codes represent.

For femmes and third wave feminists who value irony as a transgressive ethos, efforts to approach femininity as construction or choice are potentially undermined by the possibility that they could be read as sincerely attempting to embody heteronormative femininity. Certainly this is some of anxiety around femme invisibility, and as Kennan points out, non-queer-identified third wave feminists might also find themselves in the bind of being read counter to their intents. Despite these anxieties, both femme and third wave feminists still uphold irony as a method for empowerment and fulfilling desire.

Hence, it is crucial to understand that this kind of irony is not just a form of play. Rather, ironic femininities in both a third wave and a femme context are connected to real desires, and the serious need for affirmation of self. 37

“Real but not natural”: Irony and Desire

We typically think of irony as the refusal to be serious about a subject which is regarded with reverence. In terms of feminist forms of irony, this could mean a flippant stance towards traditional gender roles, the privileged status of marriage, or notions of romance. Yet in the case of femme and third wave femininities, irony functions as more than just an irreverent attitude towards these sorts of hegemonic ideals. Instead, the irony in femme and third wave femininities is imbued with an attachment to identity and desire.

While both femme and third wave feminist writers claim irony as a method for

“choosing” ways of living that fulfill their desires, just what those desires are differ. In femme theory, ironic femininity is rendered as intricately bound up with femmes’ desiring, sexual selves. However, third wave writers speaking from a not-specifically- queer position more often frame ironic femininity as a distinctive feminist political identity. Be it the desire to be recognized as a femme or the desire to be recognized as a third wave feminist, both figurations of ironic femininity are rooted in claims to identity and the serious need to have one’s identity affirmed. Therefore, irony is a shared sensibility between femme and third wave feminists in the sense that both groups embody ironic femininities with very real, and particular, attachments to these unnatural, consciously constructed gender expressions.

Many femme writers posit their femininity both as a product of certain self- reflexive choices as well as a central component of their embodied erotic desires and their intuitive gender identities. Joan Nestle demonstrates this seeming contradiction when she asserts that her femme femininity is both a “performance” and “gut-wrenching 38 need” (“I’ll Be” 106). Nestle, like so many femme writers, emphasizes the consciously constructed aspects of femme femininity. Yet femme subjectivity is not reduced to style in these arguments, because, as Nestle demonstrates, the desire to be eroticized and gendered as a feminized person is a real, visceral “need.” Amber Hollibaugh illustrates this kind of “real” “performance” when she describes the femme process of “designing girl-ness” as a “transgendered experience”—a process of transitioning away from a proscribed gender identity and becoming a differently gendered person (“Gender

Warriors” 250). Hollibaugh explains this idea by underscoring how femme irony is simultaneously a kind of conscious “drag” and a visceral attachment to that drag. She states:

[I]f you’re doing high femme, your femininity is profoundly made up. Femmes

make it happen in a way that is not at all natural—it is real but not natural. As a

femme, you have made a decision as how you will appear as a gendered person.

And, when you’re doing it, you don’t take a deep breath and say, “Ah, I’m finally

me.” Instead, you go, “Ha, I finally actually look like the way I think a girl who

isn’t a girl looks.” When I look at drag queens—that’s how I see myself—I like

looking like a drag queen. It matters to me that I look that way. When I look to

and identify with that construction, I am also transgendered. (“Gender Warriors”

250)

On the one hand, Hollibaugh clearly articulates an understanding of femme femininity as drag. Therefore, Hollibaugh’s femme isn’t about becoming “who she really is” as a woman; instead, she aligns her gender expression with drag queens (a common rhetorical move in femme literature22), and argues that’s she’s much more interested in fashioning 39 herself like “a girl who isn’t a girl.” Her words resonate with Duggan and McHugh’s assertion that femme subjectivity is predicated on “a joke, a howl of laughter that would ridicule and demolish any notion of the feminine that takes itself seriously” (169). The femme “joke” at play in these arguments is the cheeky trickery of how femmes ironically fashion their genders via camp and drag practices. On the other hand, by stating that her femininity is “real but not natural” Hollibaugh demonstrates that femme femininity isn’t drag in a mere sense of “style” or “role play;” instead, femme drag is an assertion of real desire and real identity. Hollibaugh stresses that even if she doesn’t think of her ironic femininity as part of her essential woman-ness, her sense of self and her desires are still predicated on “look[ing] that way.”

The reason why “looking like a drag queen” “matters” to Hollibaugh is because her sense of identity as a femme is bound up in these sorts of “profoundly made up” and ironic performances. While one could read Hollibaugh’s statement as a conflation of drag practices and transgender identity, I argue that this passage shows how femme identity is a real attachment to a consciously performed identity. So, Hollibaugh “look[s] to” the highly performative femininity of drag queens as a performance, but as a performance which she intimately “identi[fies]” with. Hence, Hollibaugh’s gender identity is this deliberate, self-aware drag. Hollibaugh describes this as a “transgendered experience” because, even if femmes aren’t “crossing” between male and female genders, she argues that femmes transition away from a naturalized conception of femininity towards a consciously and queerly embodied one. Therefore, Hollibaugh’s desire to be read as femme, and to live out this kind of ironic femininity, is crucial to her gender identity and her need to be eroticized as a feminized person. Her idea of femme as “real but not 40 natural” suggests that even an ironic and campy performance of feminized gender can be rooted in a larger femme erotic identity.

In “A Coincidence of Lipstick and Self-Revelation,” Katherine Millersdaughter heightens Hollibaugh’s suggestion by illustrating both the campy playfulness and the serious erotic desires at work in femme irony. Millersdaughter recounts flirting with a butch stocker working at a grocery store and describes the intricacies of her femme performance:

I say, “Excuse me? I’ve just come from the make-up aisle.” I am suddenly

flirtatious, opening my eyes really big, looking at her sideways and through my

lashes; I am turning the toes of my right toward my left foot and sliding my hands

into my pockets. I am speaking in mock seriousness: “And I’m wondering if I

have to buy a tester, or if I can get my very own, never-ever-used-before stick of

moisturizing lip color.” She looks directly at me, and I make the most of the

moment by smiling really big. I move my hips to the left and rest my palm on the

up-turn. (123)

Exemplifying “femme-camp-flirtation” (Rugg 181), Millersdaughter performs her feminized gender boldly and excessively—using her feminine wiles to charm the butch stocker. There is humor in this moment, as Millersdaughter’s efforts come close to ridiculous when she lays her femme bravado on thick (asking with playful urgency if she can “get [her] very own, never-ever-used-before stick of moisturizing lip color.”) She notes that she is “speaking in mock seriousness” and acknowledges both the humor and the self-reflexive awareness of her camping. Millersdaughter acts every bit the girl, but her tone in recounting the scene reveals the campy insincerity of her performance. Instead 41 of “being” a girl in the supermarket aisle, she is “doing” femme, and doing it within the specific context of butch-femme flirtation.

Despite Millersdaughter’s “mock seriousness,” her performance of femme flirtation does have the edge of what Nestle calls “gut-wrenching need” (“I’ll Be”106).

Millersdaughter ironically embodies stereotypes of hegemonic femininity (the diminutive, little-girl stance, the hip swishing, the sideways glance and lowered lashes) with the explicit purpose of feeling eroticized (by herself, by the butch) as a feminized person. She states that even when she dressed in androgynous styles, she “felt sexy in a particularly gendered way” (120). Therefore Millersdaughter’s femme camping, while highly performative, is also part of what she needs to make her erotic encounters meaningful and hot. The “gut-wrenching need” in her camping is revealed as she describes the butch stocker’s reaction to her femme display. Millersdaughter notes, “She is running her hands through her hair and asking me, ‘So, you want the color you got on right now? It’s pretty.’ I am blown away by the combined triviality and power of the moment: she has called me pretty, and I will never be the same” (124). Millersdaughter’s undoing at being called pretty by the butch she’s flirting with betrays any sentiment that her “mock seriousness” is merely play. She emphasizes the contradiction of this moment: being called “pretty” might be “trivial” but the butch’s response affirms her erotic performance, and, hence, this saccharine sentiment is invested with real “power.” While many queer femme writers underscore the sneer of femme femininity—stressing that femmes do not perform their femininity with the same sense of sincerity as feminine heterosexual women—Millersdaughter’s transformative moment of “triviality and power” exposes the “gut-wrenching need” lurking within femme performance. 42

This kind of connection between erotic identity and ironic femininity just does not emerge with the same urgency and clarity in most third wave theory, and yet ironic femininity in a third wave context also connotes a sense of attachment to identity and self. Ironic femininity in the context of third wave feminism is most often described as a playful postmodern practice—a way to undermine dogmatic identity politics. 23 For instance, BUST editor Debbie Stoller illustrates how ironic femininity in a third wave context is more likely to be discussed in terms of third wavers’ media reading and consumer practices than their sexual or gender identities. Stoller, and BUST, are exemplary of what Baumgardner and Richards call “girlie feminism”—a ubiquitous impulse in contemporary feminism which depicts fashion, postmodern play, sex- positivity, and reclamations of femininity as the framework for third wave politics.24

Referring to third wavers in the 1990s, Stoller frames expressions of ironic femininity in terms of fashion, stating,

Irony had become the must-have accessory of the decade, and feminism was

finally being set free of its antifashion stance. Inspired by these and other

glamour gals of the ‘80s—Cyndi Lauper, Exene Cervenka, the Go-Gos—many of

us made pilgrimages to our local Salvation Army, buying up ‘50s dresses that

made a pointed statement about just how different we were from prefeminist

housewives, and vampy ‘40s gowns that allowed us to camp it up in our new role

as feminist fatale. (45)

For Stoller, performances of ironic femininities signal third wavers’ recuperative pop culture reading practices. She argues that third wave feminists take from a vast pastiche of feminine fashion in order to create visual statements about their engagements with 43 these fantasies of white, middle-class femininity—wearing 1950s housedresses as a playful foil to their feminist politics, or 1940s frocks to signal their sexy “feminist fatale” allegiance to sex-positive politics. Similar to Keenan’s analysis of riot grrrls, Stoller argues that the fashion choices of third wavers help them become visible to each other, assert their gender expressions as counter to patriarchal expectations, and distinguish their politics from the “antifashion” consumer practices associated with second wave feminists. Therefore, Stoller renders the figure of the third wave “feminist fatale” as a chic, hip-swinging, youthful alternative to older, more dogmatic forms of feminism.

What is at stake here is third wavers’ political identity, not their gender or sexual identity.

Certainly these “feminist fatale” constructions of femininity have some relation to third wavers’ gender and sexual identities, but the connection between irony and eroticism is not at the forefront of third wave discussions of femininity as it is in femme theory.

Stoller’s argument about irony as “accessory” dominates third wave discourse and popular feminisms associated with the third wave (like the neo-burlesque movement, the roller derby revival, and feminist “lifestyle” magazines). In this way, irony is most often used to affirm third wave political identity, rather than a sexual or erotic identity.

Even when third wave writers make more explicit attempts to connect ironic femininities to desire and sexual identity, they still figure irony as a distinctive political identity. For instance, in “Pearl Necklace: The Politics of Masturbation Fantasies,” Merri

Lisa Johnson argues that ironic performances of femininity illustrate a particularly third wave erotic consciousness. Johnson states that third wave erotic identity reflects “the sheer fun my generation pursues in the performance of our erotic personas. The silliness, the impromptu acting out of our aggression toward the expected, or accepted” (322). To 44 demonstrate this third wave sensibility of “performance,” “silliness” and “aggression,”

Johnson recalls the act of a stripper she used to work with named “Barbie” who would

“take to the stage in her sardonic black vinyl suit and mouth the words to Prodigy’s techno hit, ‘Smack my Bitch Up,’ while she danced” (322). Johnson upholds Barbie’s performance as illustrative of the way that those who have come of age in the third wave

(“my generation”) cultivate “erotic personas” based on “sheer fun,” sexual bravado, and explicit, excessive pleasure. Yet Johnson also implies that these erotic performances contain a critique of sexual hegemony—the “expected, or accepted.” Therefore, Johnson asserts how this kind of “sardonic” performance isn’t just “sheer fun,” but that irony in these performances serves as a way to assert a specifically third wave kind of sexual self- determination.

Johnson claims Barbie’s performance is representative of a specifically third wave erotic ethos, stating that “[t]his form of feminist desire strikes [her] as particularly third wave, immodest, cocky, the wanting and taking, the little girl with the cereal saying too much is how much I want” (321). Johnson figures brazen sexuality and hyperfeminine excess as integral to “immodest” and “cocky” third wave sexual personae. Therefore, in

Johnson’s analysis, ironic femininity is explicitly linked to erotic identity, but not outside of the construct of third wave political identity. Ironic femininity in a third wave context becomes a way to claim “wanting too much” in a patriarchal culture which stunts women’s desires, and also a way to challenge anyone who might try to proscribe standards for feminist dress, demeanor, or fantasies. In this way, irony in a third wave context is not just a “joke” but instead third wave ironic femininity is also predicated on this visceral sense of “wanting too much.” Therefore, although both femme and third 45 wave feminists value irony as a way to expand desire, their desires are going to be different because of the impacts of their particular identifications and lived experiences.

Hence, we should think of affective affinity not as a way to do away with categories of identity, because, clearly, we cannot ignore the real attachment to particular identities in these figurations of ironic femininity. Instead, I propose we look at affective overlaps between identity categories in order to see the complexity of these positions.

“Fem Culture”: Ironic Femininity as a Galvanizing Force

Using affect as a lens for considering this moment of feminism allows us to think about how irony is informed by specific lived experiences and particular identity categories (the experience of being femme, the experience of being a third wave feminist), but not tethered absolutely to these experiences. Therefore, ironic femininity may become a way to signal femme identity or third wave identity or both, but ironic femininity in and of itself is not an affect that “belongs” to either of these groups. Femme writer Barbara Cruikshank illustrates how formulations of ironic, radical and femme- esque femininities circulate amongst feminists of varying sexual identifications in this moment. Cruikshank recognizes the allure of creating a kind of identity-based, cohesive femme community, yet she also suggests that such a move is not the only way to seek femme empowerment. In her discussion of contemporary feminist cultures, Cruikshank gestures towards the third wave as a space where revisions of hegemonic and heteronormative femininity are also taking place. Cruikshank states, “I fantasize now about creating a fem culture that will make it easier for wanna-be fems to distinguish between fem and feminine. Maybe it is no longer important though. Riot Grrrls and 46 rowdy rockers seem to get it” (117). In wanting to “distinguish between fem and feminine” Cruikshank conceptualizes femme identity as a queered, feminist approach to femininity which works against patriarchal notions of the “feminine” as abject and easily violated. She states that she learned from femme theory that femme is a way of being a woman that offers political empowerment, sexual self-determination, and self- acceptance. In this respect, Cruikshank’s argument doesn’t differ much from most discussions of femme as a particularly queer (in an LGBT sense) identity. However, by invoking riot grrrls, the most often acknowledged manifestation of third wave politics, she implicitly suggests that more feminists than just lesbian/queer femmes are currently creating cultures around self-determined femininities.

What riot grrrls seem to “get” is an understanding of female sexuality and feminine gender that leaves room for femme sensibilities like irony. Cruikshank implies that affective shifts in feminist discourse towards a politics of ironic, anti-misogynist femininity challenge the need for neatly bounded butch/femme, or just femme, communities. Therefore, affective affinities allow for connection with like-feeling others who we wouldn’t see as allies if we continue to create community solely around clearly defined identities. For instance, affect allows us to see affiliations between feminists of varying ages based on irony that we wouldn’t if we stuck to only a generational “wave” model of understanding feminist activism. When Nestle describes her femme femininity as a “text”—a product of her own selective writing and revising—she counters efforts of scholars like Karlyn who characterize the manipulation of popular culture “motifs” as a quintessentially third wave practice. Nestle states, “For me, femininity is a text. I never thought of it as natural, not in the fifties and not now […]” (“I’ll Be” 116). Unlike 47

Karlyn’s argument, Nestle doesn’t see anything particularly contemporary about her ironic femininity. Nestle stresses that her orientation to femininity as a text hasn’t been a recent development in the wake of postmodernism or queer theory. Instead she insists that her femininity was ironic and self-aware even in “the fifties”—a time period that has become emblematic of the most “natural” and sincere forms of femininity. Hence, if femmes have been practicing forms of ironic femininity long before the emergence of the third wave, it isn’t accurate to talk about ironic femininity as the product of isolated

“waves” of feminism. Furthermore, as the slippages in this chapter demonstrate, ironic femininity also can’t be defined solely as a queer femme sensibility. Instead, affect gives us a way of thinking about how feminist sensibilities cut across and through lines of generational and sexual identification.

Irony as a shared sensibility could generate discussion about feminist tactics for being a self-determined, feminized person in a misogynist culture, as the multiple performances of femme and third wave femininities I’ve considered in this chapter attest.

Recognizing these affective crossings could lead to coalitional work around femininity on a scale we haven’t seen before. For instance, both femmes and third wavers strive to expand notions of beauty by innovating feminist and queer femininities which don’t always meet conventional beauty norms. An alliance based on a sensibility of irony between these groups could forge more spaces to affirm and promote such gender expressions. Furthermore, a dialogue about the radical and transformative potential of feminine gender expression could create more conceptions of femininity than we currently employ—including those of us in queer and feminist communities. As iconic trans femme activist, writer and performer Kate Bornstein notes in her lecture, “Sex, 48

Bullies and You: How America’s Bully Culture is Messing with Your Sex Life,” femininity is profoundly devalued in our culture (though required from women).

Bornstein notes that typical stereotypes of femininity include the notions that “If you’re sexy, you’re evil. If you’re cute, you’re dumb” and that such causal denigration prevents women from leading meaningful lives (Bornstein). However, femmes and third wave feminists generate alternate meanings and vocabularies with which to understand femininity. A coalitional discussion could engender more resistant images and conceptions of femininity/feminized people. Hence, there are more ways to work for gender justice than we currently imagine.

Thinking in terms of affect, irony in this case, allows us to consider how affects, like radio waves, fluctuate throughout feminist organizing, moving within and across categories of identity and periods of time. Therefore, we can think about Nestle’s ironic femme femininity in the 1950s and the way it is related to the irony of non-queer- identified third wave feminists who have come of age in this most recent era of feminism.

I trace irony between feminists of varying ages and sexual identifications rather than relying only on impasses in feminist organizing. I advocate that if we recognize irony as a shared affect, we will open up other lines of affinity and other potential lines of communication between feminists.

49

CHAPTER 2

IMAGINING DESIRE, FINDING AFFINITY: HUNGER AS FEMME-THIRD WAVE ALLIANCE IN THE WORK OF MERRI LISA JOHNSON

Even as I argue that irony is not merely an external or stylistic similarity but an internalized or felt affinity between femme and third wave feminists, I can hear Gottlieb’s challenge that anyone who can’t tell a femme from “a straight girl [who] dresses like a dyke” just “isn’t paying attention” lingering in the air (19). I anticipate that sexual desire might be upheld as that crucial, essential distinction between femme and not-explicitly- queer third wave sensibilities. However, in this chapter I argue that even if non-queer- identified third wave feminists and queer femmes might have different sexual partners or different objects of desire, we can still see an affective affinity between how these two groups make sense of their longings, their problematic wants, and the risks they take in pursuing their desires. Both groups approach sexual desire as something which must be understood with an ethos of contradiction—the contradiction between wanting to be erotized as feminine and the violations which being feminine supposedly invites in a misogynist culture. Hence, femme and third wave figurations of desire do not simply uphold desire as that which will ultimately liberate us from oppression. Instead desire becomes that which will transform and push back against repressive social structures and systematic violence.

Specifically, I explore how the sensibility of “femme hunger”25 circulates within femme and third wave sexual politics as a practice available to feminists who strive to find ways of fucking and loving outside of heteronormative models. Hunger is described in femme theory as a sexual ethos that privileges openness, vulnerability, and submission, 50 and recodes these “passive,” feminized practices as active sexual modalities. In An

Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich discusses how femmes give alternate meanings to feminized sexual practices which are typically seen as marks of weakness and violent domination—practices like penetration, submission and receptivity (66). This reclamation of feminized modalities occurs in third wave sexual politics as well, and I use the work of

Merri Lisa Johnson as a case study for how a sensibility of hunger inflects not-explicitly- queer third wave understandings of desire. Hunger functions in femme and third wave discourse as a way of articulating the complexity of feelings of desire, especially those desires that contradict how we normally think of feminist empowerment. For example, pursuing pleasure and erotic transformation via feminized sexual modalities contradicts both patriarchal assumptions that such modalities are passive and hegemonic feminist notions that such modalities are complicit with patriarchal norms. Therefore, hunger is an ethos which honors the contradictions and anxieties that arise when women/feminized people seek sexual self-determination in a culture of risk and violence.

The sensibility of hunger encompasses a radical recoding of feminized sexual modalities and reimagining them as chosen and meaningful rather than purely signs of female subjugation. Third wave femme writer Leah Lilith Albrecht-Samarasinha describes the sensibility of hunger this way:

For me and many other femmes, the core of femme sexuality lies in femme

hunger, in a particularly femme strength of sexual openness, vulnerability, and

need. For me, it can be summed up by the image of “her fist/slams into my cunt

up through my cervix/and grabs my heart/I don’t mind.” (“On Being” 143) 51

Albrecht-Samarasinha rejects the assumption that to be “passively” positioned in sex means one is not an engaged sexual partner. To the contrary, what makes sex meaningful—the “core of [her] femme sexuality”—for Albrecht-Samarasinha is her visceral desire to be vulnerable. In stating, “I don’t mind,” Albrecht-Samarasinha acknowledges the emotional rawness of performing “sexual openness, vulnerability, and need” with one’s lover, yet her statement is also a reclamation of these stereotypically passive and feminized modalities as “a particularly femme strength.”

Citing her own poetry, Albrecht-Samarasinha gives her reader a graphic depiction of this kind of rawness, of being laid bare for her lover. The image of her lover’s “fist slam[ing]” through her “cunt” and up the length of her body implies the violence which penetration typically represents in both heteronormative and cultural feminist contexts. In this way, Albrecht-Samarasinha demonstrates Cvetkovich’s argument that femmes

“expan[d] the erotics” of penetration by “transform[ing] the obviousness of any associations between trauma and penetration” (60). Even as Albrecht-Samarasinha’s description maintains the brutal undoing which penetration connotes, she doesn’t figure herself as overpowered, as merely the “fucked” partner. Instead, her “I don’t mind” signals her determined consent to take on the risks of these feminized modalities. By stating, “I don’t mind,” Albrecht-Samarasinha implies that “sexual openness, vulnerability, and need” provide her access to meaningful pleasure and intense connection with her partner, even with this sense of precariousness and risk. She states that this “vulnerability […] can be both incredibly powerful and incredibly terrifying” and that she “must choose who [she] lie[s] down with very carefully” (“On Being” 143).

Albrecht-Samarasinha suggests that one can’t think of these desires only in terms of 52 sexual liberation or sexual denigration since these modalities maintain both connotations simultaneously. Hence, hunger is predicated on the contradiction between wanting what you want and the anxieties you have about that wanting.

Albrecht-Samarasinha states that hunger is a sensibility “particular” to femme erotic identity, and suggests that hunger is not transferable outside of a specifically queer femme context. However, I see affective overlaps between this definition of femme hunger and Merri Lisa Johnson’s writing about third wave sexual politics and restructuring heterosexual relationships. While not specifically referred to as “hunger,”

Johnson also rejects the patriarchal connotations of openness, vulnerability, and submission. Johnson recodes these practices as active skills and as a means for disrupting the sexual scripts of heteronormativity. For example, as I discuss further in this chapter,

Johnson rereads practicing submission as a way to expand erotic desires rather than a sign of feminine inferiority or a failure of feminist politics. Yet Johnson also underscores the anxieties of enacting such a loaded sexual modality and the risks women face when they attempt to fulfill their desires. As such, Johnson demonstrates how a sensibility of hunger maneuvers around polemical “sex-positive/sex-negative” positions because Johnson doesn’t embrace all pleasure as always already feminist, but she also doesn’t reject problematic pleasures in pursuit of sexual safety.

Whereas the previous chapter explored how third wave and femme performances of ironic femininity interact in public spaces like bars, Ladyfests, and city streets, this chapter focuses on the overlaps between these groups in the space of the writing. I employ Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of “literary publics” to conceptualize how feminists with diverse sexual identifications share this sensibility of hunger. In An Archive of 53

Feelings, Cvetkovich argues that literary publics are of bodies of writing which function as spaces where sexual subcultures can foster community—much like a bar, a performance space, or a sex shop (52). Cvetkovich states that the large body of autobiographical, epistolary, and fictional writings about butch-femme dynamics is a

“literary public” that has historically produced these specific queer communities and identities through the circulation of shared affects (52). In this way, Cvetkovich argues that such writing does not simply reflect a community, but that these texts are fundamental to the formation of sexual subcultures. Katherine Millersdaughter demonstrates Cvetkovich’s point when she contemplates how reading Joan Nestle’s highly influential anthology on butch-femme relations, The Persistent Desire, brought her into her own sense of femme identity. Millersdaugther asks, “How many of us post-

Stonewall dykes have come into our own and other women’s bodies through other women’s writing?” (120). What I add to Cvetkovich’s and Millersdaughter’s assessment that literary publics are central to the formation of queer and/or femme identities is that literary publics have the ability to carry affects between identity categories or communities. Therefore, the influence of works like The Persistent Desire doesn’t merely shape femme-butch communities; instead, the sensibilities that circulate in butch-femme literary publics can infuse other spaces, like third wave sexual politics.

I read the work of Johnson as illustrative of how sensibilities pass between femme and third wave sexual politics, and I offer such affective affinities as grounds for dialogue between these two groups off the page. If we uphold Johnson as representative of third wave sexual thought, 26 this sensibility of hunger allows us to see resonances in how femme and third wave feminists approach the risks of being a sexual, feminized 54 woman/person in the minefield of heteronormative culture. 27 In the overlaps between theorizations of hunger and Johnson’s third wave erotic politic, and her passing references to iconic femme writers and activists, we can see a queer relationship emerge.

José Esteban Muñoz argues that queer relationality is based on felt affiliations between people who have different life experiences and different (sexual, gender, class, nation, etc.) identifications from each other (Cruising Utopia 14). The affective crossings between femme and third wave sexual politics may be fleeting, and even fraught, but they offer us new ways to think about feminist coalition and sexual community.

“Fem Quests”: Countering Heteronormative Scripts

In both femme and third wave sexual politics, hunger works against the overbearing pressure to fulfill heteronormative models of what “good” or “normal” sexual relations look like. Instead of conforming to heteronormative sexual scripts, femme and third wave feminists revalue sexual modalities like openness, vulnerability and submission in order to interrupt patriarchal notions of sex that disenfranchise women’s pleasure. Femme writer Barbara Cruikshank identifies the pursuit of meaningful and vibrant sexual pleasure as a critical femme practice. She states that being femme “is a way of setting standards for yourself, a way to demand great sex, to never settle for bad sex, a way to get hold of freedom” (116). Cruikshank argues that femme erotic identity revolves around the insistence to pursue one’s desires—not to “settle” for perfunctory or disengaged sex. Joan Nestle calls this practice the “fem quest” for a queered, self-determined kind of femininity (“I’ll Be” 108). Hence, there is an understanding in femme discourse that femmes work against systemic structural 55 repressions in order to affirm their erotic identities and to get the sex they want most in an anti-queer culture.

Similarly, in “Fuck You and Your Untouchable Face: Third Wave Feminism and the Problem of Romance,” Johnson articulates the ways that heterosexual feminists confront scripts of heteronormative sexuality in their in their pursuits of meaningful pleasure and sexual agency. Johnson ultimately outlines a third wave feminist vision for cultivating radical forms of heterosexual desire and reorganizing heterosexual relations in resistance to heteronormative models. As I shall discuss later, part of her effort to generate more possibilities for sexual feelings and experiences includes rethinking feminized sexual modalities such as submission as something other than mere patriarchal fantasy. Hence, like Nestle and Cruikshank, Johnson rejects the notion that heteronormative relations are inevitable, and she approaches sexuality as an active construction—a “quest” to become more than the constricted models of desire she’s been exposed to.

Johnson asserts that, even with a vast body of feminist sexual politics and widespread critiques of heteronormativity in radical feminist politics from the 1960s onward, third wave feminists still find their desires consistently circumscribed by sexual hegemony. Despite her particularly third wave feminist sexual bravado, Johnson stresses that for much of her life she has felt incapable of directly articulating her desires, and stifled by “the pressure to perform—for my man, for my ego” (28). Johnson notes that the “pressure to perform” specific scripts of heteronormative sex is far from being an individualized problem. Instead this lack of openness about desire is a product of the repressive structure of heteronormativity. Johnson argues that even when the individuals 56 in heterosexual relationships strive to maintain progressive partnerships there are still limited models for women in these relationships to access the sex and intimacy they want most. She asserts that feminists in heterosexual relationships grapple with

[H]ow to be a woman who loves sex, who even likes it mean now and then, but

still feels enmeshed in inequality in heterosexual couplehood to the extent that she

can’t or won’t say what she wants out of erotic encounters, in which case the

heterosexual bedroom remains locked, a private arena of tense physical exchanges

and inarticulate desire. (26)

Johnson argues that within the “locked” structure of heteronormativity, for a woman to claim her desires, especially her “mean” desires, seems almost unimaginable. For instance, when Johnson addresses a male lover in this essay, she illustrates this kind of

“locked” and “tense” pushing against the pressure to fulfill ideal models of heteronormative sex. She states, “I don’t know how to talk about having sex with you without […] subordinating my own feelings in order to have sex that looks great from the outside but still feels off, a little, to me” (29). Johnson argues that women’s sexual disenfranchisement is in service to a heteronormative ideal of sex that “looks great from the outside” but leaves little room for open communication between partners about desire and sexual needs.

Johnson asserts that she longs for a third wave sexual politics that would reimagine heterosexual relations in order to expand the kind of pleasures and interactions partners in heterosexual relationships might have. Such a sexual ethos would allow her to openly express her desires, to be fully embodied during sex, to be vulnerable, and “[t]o go into sex not knowing what [she] will find there” (29). Johnson advocates for a “third 57 wave approach” to heterosexuality that would imaginatively create new models of heterosexual relations and embrace a greater diversity of gender roles, an emphasis on pleasure, and a broader range of sexual practices which are not hierarchically positioned to intercourse (49). This third wave sexual ethos would eschew heteronormative scripts in favor of sex that’s “experienceable from within rather than merely performable from without” (48-49). Hence, in Johnson’s “third wave approach,” heterosexuality, and sex in general, is something to be struggled with and actively constructed rather than merely learned and performed from tired models of heteronormativity. Rejecting both patriarchal models of sexual relationships and the notion that there are ideal models of feminist sex,

Johnson aims to create a livable feminist politics which can account for the complexity of sexual experiences.

In response to the restrictions of heteronormative eroticism, Johnson asserts that she wishes “To see fucking as wet clay. We are in it to the elbows” (“Pearl Necklace”

324). This idea of “fucking as wet clay” is a queer approach to sexuality in the sense that

Johnson views sex as something which we create and construct between partners instead of trying to fit ourselves into models of what normative sex should look and feel like.

Nestle underscores the queerness of approaching sex as something to be created when she states that “one of the differences between straight society and queer society […], is that we have a recognition that we form ourselves” (“I’ll Be” 116). While Nestle uses the word “queer” here to signal LGBT communities, I argue that this sort of “recognition that we form ourselves” is present in Johnson’s reimagings of heterosexual relations.

Therefore, Johnson challenges the perception that only LGBT people have the capacity to imagine sex and sexuality as otherwise from heteronormativity. As I will consider later in 58 this chapter, there are distinctions between these queer femme and not-explicitly-queer third wave figurations of hunger. For instance, queer and heterosexual women will inevitably experience heteronormative oppression differently. Yet these reworkings of female sexuality resonate with each in the way that Johnson suggests that heterosexual feminists need to start approaching their sexuality with an ethos of construction and unknowing.

Johnson’s desire to “see fucking as wet clay” and to reimagine heterosexual relations is similar to how femme hunger is employed to reject heteronormative assumptions about how power functions in sex. Hunger in a femme context interrupts heteronormative scripts by reclaiming and recoding feminized sexual modalities which are not valued in a patriarchal context. For instance, both femme theory and Johnson’s writing trouble typical understandings of submission. Second wave femme icon Amber

Hollibaugh discusses the nuances of submission, and how difficult it is for feminists to talk about submission as a potential source of agency, pleasure, and collaboration. She states, “It’s hard to talk about things like giving up power without it sounding passive. I am willing to give myself over to a woman equal to her amount of wanting. I expose myself for her to appreciate” (“What We’re” 75). Hollibaugh re-reads submission as an active practice and a mutual act between partners, even though submission is typically not recognized as sexual practice at all. Rather than defining submission solely in terms of being taken over by her lover, Hollibaugh stresses her contribution to this sexual encounter, and, in doing so, challenges the notion that submission is a form of subjugation or resignation. She notes how we have very few conceptual resources to talk about submission as something other than “passivity”—either in a patriarchal context 59 which codes sexual submission as a sign of female inferiority, or dominant feminist contexts where submission is figured as placating patriarchal expectations. Hollibaugh reframes her desire to “give up power” by speaking to an experience which neither of these models account for.

Analyzing this same passage, Cvetkovich argues that Hollibaugh “creates a vocabulary for describing how allowing oneself to be touched is an action” in this moment (59). Hollibaugh offers new language to discuss submission by articulating the pleasure of responding to her lover’s desire for her. She states that submitting to her lover’s touch is an act of “exposing” herself, suggesting that submission is a skilled and enthusiastic opening of herself to her lover’s touch. Furthermore, Hollibaugh also stresses the reciprocity in this act of submission. Whereas submission is typically figured as a one-way transaction—the dominant partner requires submission and the submissive partner gives it—Hollibaugh underscores that her submission is contingent on her partner’s engagement. Hence, Hollibaugh as the submissive partner also has certain expectations to be met—that Hollibaugh’s lover will share her “wanting” with her, and that her lover will “appreciate” Hollibaugh’s act of vulnerability. It is a sensibility of hunger—Hollibaugh’s transformative desire for this kind of complicated and devalued sexual modality—which allows Hollibaugh to rethink what submission means and how it functions in her experiences.

Johnson also explores alternative meanings for submission, and how her own complex experiences of submitting can’t be rendered merely in terms of female debasement. In “Blowjob Queen,” Johnson recounts eroticizing her submissive position after a male lover comes in her mouth without her permission. She states, 60

As I replayed this moment in my mind, I began to inhabit the memory as a

conscious performance of “taking it like a good girl,” and submission became less

clearly marked as weakness or inferiority. Instead, I glimpsed the possibility of

submission as active collaboration in a mutual fantasy of control and being

controlled. I was choosing this position over and over again as I got off on my

own. (83)

Johnson stresses her choice to eroticize herself via submission, even if her initial experience was not completely consensual. As I will discuss later, Johnson’s recoding of submission as “active collaboration in a mutual fantasy” does not erase her fear that she may actually be rationalizing her own complicity with patriarchal power dynamics in this moment. Despite these tensions, Johnson wants to honor the agency and excitement she experiences as she returns to this submissive role in her fantasies. Much like Albrecht-

Samarasinha’s re-reading of “vulnerability, openness, and need,” as transformative, or

Hollibaugh’s rejection that submission equates “passivity,” Johnson reimagines her position of the feminized, submissive partner from being a “[mark of] weakness or inferiority” to an actively claimed, pleasurable, and “collaborative” role.

Therefore, hunger becomes a sensibility which allows femme and third wave feminists to embody submission, vulnerability, and openness, but to also critically challenge that these sexual modalities are signs of “weakness,” “inferiority” or unfeminist

“passivity.” Both Hollibaugh and Johnson want to stress submission as an “active collaboration” between partners in order to challenge the idea that the submissive partner doesn’t “do” anything or have any agency in sexual encounters. Even though Johnson reframes being submissive in the role of pleasuring her partner, and Hollibaugh reframes 61 being submissive in the role of allowing her partner unrestricted access to her body, a sensibility of hunger links these narratives. Both writers re-envision “unfeminist” roles— the passive lover who “lies there” and “lets” someone do things to her, the subjugated woman who services her male lover—and focus on how women might actively orchestrate such roles for their own sense of eroticization and pleasure.

However, hunger as a sensibility is not a joyful tossing away of the anxieties which sexual modalities like submission provoke. Johnson struggles with how to reclaim submission as a co-collaborative and transformative practice when submission is so loaded with patriarchal fantasies of women’s inferiority. Troubled by a fantasy she has of forcing a woman to give her a blowjob, Johnson wonders how she can possibility sort out which of her desires she should entertain as part of a feminist quest for sexual self- determination, and which, if any, she should reject as part of her socialization in a misogynist culture. Johnson states, “I sensed on some level that I was expanding my sexual imagery, not just resigning myself to existing options of misogyny, but I found it hard to tell the difference. I worried my fantasy reeked of the old adage: if you can’t beat them, join them” (85). Hence, Johnson can theorize submission as a way to “expan[d]” her desires (as a submitting partner, as fantasizing about a partner submitting to her) but she can’t uncritically assure herself that female submission can be magically divested of misogynist inequity just because of her desire.

Considering these hard, seemingly irrevocable points, she asserts, “These are my truths: I enjoy submitting. And I hate it. And I fantasize about commanding it from others” (85). Johnson comes up against how to speak truthfully about the ways play with power makes sex meaningful for her, and yet how not to reproduce heteronormative 62 power hierarchies between dominant/submissive, feminized/masculinized, or top/bottom partners. Hollibaugh recognizes this same kind of tension between feminist politics and lived desires for power play in sexuality. She states, “I don't want to live outside of power in my sexuality, but I don’t want to be trapped in a heterosexist concepts of power either.

But what I feel feminism asks of me is to throw the baby out with the bathwater” (“What

We’re” 74). Much like Hollibaugh’s complicated negotiation of power, sexuality and feminist consciousness, Johnson lives within the contradiction of “enjoy[ing]” and

“hat[ing]” submission. Hunger is this sense of stuckness and contradiction. Hunger is a way of making sense of the lived complexity of feminized sexual modalities—of giving voice to feelings and experiences that don’t fit particular heteronormative scripts or dominant feminist concepts of agency. In this way, a sensibility of hunger encompasses the anxieties and conflicted feelings such loaded sexual practices incite. Therefore, in both femme and third wave feminist contexts, hunger is a sensibility which can be used to negotiate the risks of pursuing pleasure and sexual self-determination outside of heteronormative conceptions of women’s sexuality. However, in both of these models, hunger is not a method for unequivocally resolving or transcending such risks.

Dangerous Desires: Sexual Risk and Hunger

Within the space of third wave and femme sexual politics, hunger is a way of honoring the complexity of desire by recognizing how sexual agency intersects with sexual oppression, and how pleasure is informed by sexual risk and trauma.

Hunger is an optic that allows us to see how both femme and heterosexual feminists attempt to broaden women’s sexual subjectivity, but also refuse to give up problematic 63 desires in an effort to avoid risk. Johnson articulates this stance by stressing her frustration with existing dominant feminist theory, stating that feminist sexual politics have thus far offered “either the critique or the clit” (“Jane Hocus” 6). By this Johnson means either a cultural feminist critique which rejects desires that have connotations of unequal power relations or violence (desires like heterosexuality or S/M play) or a sex- positive valorization of pleasure and orgasm which “gloss[es] over” feelings like sexual inadequacy, shame, and contradictions between one’s wants and one’s feminist politics

(“Jane Hocus” 6). Johnson advocates a feminist sexual politics that can critically speak to the sexual dangers women face as well as women’s “inexplicable” desires, such as aggression or submission, which don’t easily conform to feminist notions of agency

(“Jane Hocus” 8).

Johnson figures her approach to feminist sexual politics as a particularly third wave analysis, yet this ethos has been a part of femme sexual politics from the very beginning of the sex wars era. For example, in “Desire for the Future: Radical Hope in

Passion and Danger,” an essay first given at the notorious 1982 Barnard conference,

Amber Hollibaugh rejects cultural feminist efforts to find safer, less violent, or authentically feminist forms of sex. Hollibaugh argues that such efforts have only “forced

[feminists] into a position where we have created a theory from the body of damage done to us” (99). Hollibaugh critiques the efficacy of creating feminist sexual politics based on eradicating the dangers in women’s lives because to do so sets standards for proper feminist sexual practices. However she also doesn’t downplay the risks women take in order to be sexually self-determined. Instead, Hollibaugh states that “Feminism should be seen as a critical edge in the struggle to allow women more room to confront the dangers 64 of desires, not less” (100). If we didn’t read Johnson’s and Hollibaugh’s accounts through the lens of hunger, we would miss an affinity between how risk and trauma are addressed in femme and third wave sexual politics. Both of these writers approach sexual risk as something that infringes upon women’s freedom, but neither believes that working to eliminate risk is a viable goal. Instead, femme and third wave figurations of hunger maneuver between the poles of sex-positive and sex-negative thought in order to create livable feminist theories rather than inflexible feminist dogma.

Hunger as a sensibility is inextricably linked to risk and trauma because the act of the “fem quest”—the process of seeking feminized erotic identity not defined by patriarchal expectations—always takes place within the context of repressive models of women’s sexuality and works against these models at the same time. Nestle stresses that femmes have to work against an entire woman-hating and anti-queer culture in order to reclaim their bodies and desires. Referring to coming into her identity as a femme, she states, “Now I also see that I worked very hard in bed. What I felt to be a natural expression of self, was actually an attempt to get back to a body. […] [W]e had to find a way to change what being a woman meant. I had to find a place for my body that did not promise destruction” (“I’ll Be” 117-118). When Nestle states she had to find a way to be a woman that “did not promise destruction,” she is calling out the erotic limitations of hegemonic, heteronormative femininity, and noting how femmes actively seek other ways of being (sexual) women. If we read Hollibaugh and Albrecht-Samarasinha’s empowered readings of femme vulnerability, Nestle’s ethic of “find[ing] a place for [her] body that did not promise destruction,” and Johnson’s challenge to the “locked” heterosexual bedroom together we can begin to see a shared understanding of how 65 women’s pleasure and sexual agency are dialectically positioned to risk in these writings.

As is made clear in both femme and third wave feminist sexual politics, women are punished for wanting too much, for wanting the wrong kinds of sex, for wanting the wrong lovers, or for openly displaying their sexuality. Therefore, Cruikshank’s stance of

“never settl[ing] for bad sex” becomes not just a personal achievement, but also a precarious endeavor because of the overriding, systemic repressions of women’s sexual self-determination.

While Johnson’s deconstructions and reimagings of heterosexual relations don’t speak directly to femme identity or queer trauma, her vision resonates with Nestle’s sentiment of “find[ing] a place for [her] body in a way that did not promise destruction.”

Johnson’s writing stresses the ubiquitous kinds and degrees of punishment women face, including violence (physical and psychic), sexual dissatisfaction and frustration, feelings of sexual inadequacy for not fulfilling heteronormative scripts, and/or guilt for not living up to feminist ideals of sex and relationships. Johnson argues that because women’s sexuality is often used as a way to justify violence (i.e. the date rapist who rationalizes that if a woman wants to engage in some forms of sex she has already consented to intercourse), that women’s attempts to garner pleasure are acted out with the threat of consequence and danger (“Fuck You” 38). In her essay, “Stripper Bashing: An

Autovideography of Violence Against Strippers,” Johnson outlines this dialectic between women’s sexual agency and the systematic violence directed at sexual women. She recalls escaping a potentially violent frat party where she and her friend were stripping, only to later witness her friend beaten by her boyfriend who was acting as the bouncer for them that night. Reflecting on this painful irony, Johnson states, “Is this story about 66 violence against sex workers? Or is it about violence and heterosexuality? Cops, frat guys, boyfriends, bouncers—the line between valid fear and paranoia blurs. I can’t tell quite where the danger is coming from” (185). Johnson argues that in a patriarchal culture where women are vulnerable to so many forms of violence, the ways in which women are punished for being sexual are too imbricated to be fully distinguished from one another. She figures violence as a locus of heteronormative relations. Therefore,

Johnson’s “locked” and “private” “heterosexual bedroom” should be understood as a space informed by misogyny, violence, and the repression of women’s desires, even if this form of violence is less blatant than rape, partner abuse, or the sanctioned assaults of sex workers.

Nestle articulates this kind of institutionalized sexual oppression when she argues that “what patriarchal society wants to beat down” is “the whore in all women, the girlfriend who says yes to another man, the wife who has an affair, the woman who says no or yes in her own voice” (“I’ll Be,” 113). Reading the work of Nestle and Johnson as examples of a sensibility of hunger show us a shared analysis of how heteronormativity is a form of sexual terrorism. In this way, both femme and third wave sexual politics posit heteronormativity as a repressive social structure that should be challenged by pursuing desires and relationships which fall outside of heteronormative possibility. Yet, unlike radical cultural feminists, who have made similar arguments about the structural violence of heteronormative sex and relationships,28 third wave and femme feminists don’t reject the desires bound up with the risks women negotiate. Be it the desire to be submissive, or feminized, or heterosexual desire, third wave and femme feminists refuse to discard such 67 risky yet potentially meaningful desires. Furthermore, these writers also reject the notion that doing so would offer a means of protection from violence.

For example, even while Johnson maintains that radical cultural feminists like

Andrea Dworkin or Shelia Jefferys are “bold and insightful […] bad-asses, and brilliant social analysts” who accurately diagnose how heteronormativity functions, she rejects their assessments of heterosexual desire as the same as the structural violence of heteronormativity. Referring to Jefferys and Dworkin, Johnson argues, “[T]hey don’t say much about what to do in the face of their crippling critiques, what to do besides turning off heterosexuality completely or turning away from feminism into complicity. These are not adequate choices” (“Fuck You” 46). Johnson wants to imagine a politics of women’s pleasure and sexual agency that can critique heteronormative sexual scripts without viewing heterosexuality as inherently toxic.

Significantly, in order to call for more feminist and queerer constructions of heterosexuality, Johnson paraphrases Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga’s highly influential dialogue about butch-femme sexuality, “What We’re Rollin’ Around in Bed

With.” In a small part of this discussion, Moraga and Hollibaugh frame heterosexuality as a desire and heteronormativity and/or heterosexism as a form of oppression. 29 In language strikingly similar to Moraga and Hollibaugh, Johnson asserts that heterosexual women’s desires will not be adequately addressed unless heterosexuality is extricated from heteronormativity, stating, “We must begin to imagine heterosexuality without heterosexism” (“Fuck You” 46). Hunger, then, is feeling the complexity of desires like heterosexuality, and acknowledging that such complexity should lead us to rethink any simplistic rendering of these desires as either purely denigrative (by cultural feminist 68 standards) or purely normative (by patriarchal standards). Hollibaugh, Moraga and

Johnson suggest that if we honestly acknowledge the energy, excitement, and agency we take from our problematic desires, we will have to reconceptualize how these desires function. It is these largely unacknowledged and implicit contacts with femme (or butch- femme, in this case) writing that I isolate in third wave sexual politics, because these moments offer a fleeting look at an alliance being made with femme icons and femme analyses of sexuality.

Tracing hunger in not-explicitly-queer third wave sexual politics is tricky, because hunger surfaces in subtle but significant ways in third wave theory. For instance, in “Pearl Necklace: The Politics of Masturbation Fantasies,” Johnson calls on

Hollibaugh’s theories of sexual risk when she recounts the feeling of sharing her fantasy of forced submission with two people at a party. She states, “I was risking something and my body felt this risk intensely. (‘[W]e live terrified,’ as Amber Hollibaugh has written,

‘that other people will discover our secret sexual desires.’)” (326). In this brief passage,

Johnson explains the risk of expanding notions of female and/or feminist pleasure by drawing a connection to Hollibaugh’s analysis of how women struggle to claim their desires. Hollibaugh’s theorization of the dialectical relationship between women’s sexual empowerment and sexual risk exemplifies the significance of risk to a femme understanding of desire. Yet Hollibaugh’s analysis also speaks to a larger audience of women beyond those who are femme-identified, and she argues that all women are made to feel afraid of their sexual selves. Johnson borrows Hollibaugh’s femme-defined understanding of risk and applies it to her own theorization of a third wave sexual politics which would broaden notions of feminist pleasure despite these risks. Moments like these 69 in third wave sexual politics illustrate how femme sensibilities and femme icons are upheld by non-queer-identified third wave feminists as profound sources for making sense of sexuality and desire.

As we shall see, hunger is not only a rejection of a one-dimensional analysis of sexual risk, but also a rejection of one-dimensional feminist analysis of pleasure. In the next section, I focus more specifically on the space of literary publics and how looking at these kinds of femme-third wave crossings on the page reveals an affinity between how these two groups value contradiction.

Reading in between the Lines: Literary Publics as Sites for Affinity

Mapping hunger between these literary publics can show us how femmes and third wave feminists reject simple affirmations of pleasure in favor of feminist sexual politics that realistically account for the contradictions feminists feel in their desires. I turn to literary publics as a site where affective affinities between femme and non-queer- identified third wave feminists become visible via implicit contacts and passing references. While such connections are fleeting, they offer us glimpses of where these two groups that generally speak separately from each other converge. An example of this kind of easy-to-miss femme-third wave crossing is Johnson’s telling decision to align her vision of third wave sexual politics with the work of celebrated femme writer Dorothy

Allison. Johnson introduces her anthology, Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of

Feminist Desire, by invoking the story of Bone—the enthralling protagonist of Allison’s novel about queer trauma and identity formation, Bastard Out of Carolina. As a response to “the critique or the clit” impasse, Johnson’s anthology features writings on female 70 sexuality by heterosexual and queer feminists who explore practices which have been ignored or rendered problematic within feminist sexual politics. These practices include the aggressive sexuality of prepubescent girls, violent sexual fantasies, penetration, cutting, submission, sex work, and transvestic fetishism. Johnson aligns herself with

Allison’s autobiographical novel about incest as a way to understand how feminists might assert their desires without having to either disavow the “unfeminist” feelings that inform their sexual subjectivities—feelings like shame, traumatic remembering, or desire for submission—or uncritically embrace all desire as always already feminist.

Johnson offers Bone up as an icon of contradiction because Bone’s violent fantasies appropriate from her real-life abuse and “what she wants and what she doesn’t want get twisted together in startling configurations” (“Jane Hocus” 7). Johnson describes the tension between trauma and pleasure that Bone represents:

Bone’s story…is about more than abuse, invoking the transformative power of

the erotic imagination to turn elements of an abusive environment into materials

for escape: fantasy, masturbation, orgasm […] Allison insists that a space must be

made for women’s wants—even when they are ugly, inexplicable, frightening—

and I believe her. (“Jane Hocus” 8)

Johnson articulates a vision of third wave sexual politics which creates space for feminists to engage with trauma, risk, and desire. The contradiction at play here is creating a body of pleasure and fantasy from such disempowering sources as abuse and trauma. Johnson values Allison’s gusty resolve not to desexualize trauma; instead,

Allison stresses how experiences of trauma and oppression become interwoven into our 71 sexual selves, including those places of agency and empowerment like “fantasy, masturbation, [and] orgasm.”

Hence, if Bone’s experience is about “more than abuse,” it is also about more than just pleasure or agency. Methods for “escape” like “fantasy, masturbation, and orgasm” are “transformative” but not transcendent forms of healing. Hunger, then, is an ethos for erotic empowerment, but not one which promises a day when we will ultimately move on from our hurt. Similarly, Johnson puts forward a feminist sexual politics which acknowledges that women in a misogynist and anti-queer culture will have “wants” that are “ugly,” “inexplicable,” and “frightening” because our “wants” are informed by the full complexity of our experiences, including those experiences which conflict with our notions of feminist empowerment. Therefore, what connects the sexual politics of Allison and Johnson is a sensibility of hunger which allows for contradiction in feminist erotic expression.

The sexual modality Johnson advocates resonates with Cvetkovich’s description of how butch-femme literary publics produce sexual politics that “celebrate the hard-won experience of sexual pleasure without denying its roots in pain and difficulty” (4).

Cvetkovich argues, “Dykes writing about sexuality and vulnerability have forged an emotional knowledge out of the need to situate intimate lives in relation to classism, racism, and other forms of oppression” (4). By “situat[ing]” butch-femme sexual dynamics and pleasure within the pain and trauma of living in a hierarchal culture, these writers acknowledge that sexual identity and desire are formed in part by shared experiences of oppression. This tension between pleasure and trauma is what Johnson values in Allison’s writing, and she is drawn to it as a model for understanding third 72 wave sexual politics. Johnson christens her collection with Allison’s figure of conflicted sexual agency, stating, “We press forward with this improper feminism in the spirit of

Bone, the fictionalized but familiar girl-child inside us all who combats the abuse heaped on her body with stories of her own desire” (“Jane Hocus” 9).

Johnson articulates Allison’s particularly femme sensibility of hunger as representative of a sexual politics that leaves room for contradiction between one’s feminism and one’s felt desires. Therefore, hunger as a sensibility doesn’t suggest that desire is a realm of pure agency where we can disabuse ourselves of all troubling or

“inexplicable” wants, yet also doesn’t frame those problematic desires as impulses that one needs “move on” from. For example, even though Johnson repeatedly underscores the multiple ways in which heteronormative scripts systematically do violence against women, she refuses to attempt to divest herself of eroticisms which play with gendered power hierarchies. In response to bell hooks’ argument that heterosexual feminists need to dismantle their attractions to hegemonic masculinities, Johnson asserts,

I understand on an intellectual level that many women are conditioned to desire

many things that are not good for us, but I balk at the idea of wrenching fantasy

free of the power underpinnings that drive it, make it sing, zing with that

mercurial membrane lining the big “O.” I won’t do it. (“Pearl Necklace” 319-

320).

Johnson is more than willing to admit that some of her desires are predicated on the same patriarchal “conditioning” she critiques. However, problematic as these wants may be,

Johnson claims these desires as legitimate pieces of her erotic identity and her experience, and, as such, she isn’t willing to exile them. Therefore, what makes hunger 73 an “improper feminism” is the way which hunger eschews the either/or nature of sex- positive/sex-negative politics, and provides a much more complicated notion of agency, pleasure, and trauma.

I focus on the space of literary publics and the exchanges that happen within them because, at the moment, the kinds of affective affinities between femmes and non-queer- identified third wave feminists I’m underscoring are more visible in this space than in the face-to-face interactions between these groups in feminist and queer communities. The intimacy and candidness of written spaces provides an opportunity to see affinities between people we might not have seen before. For example, in the introduction to her anthology, Sex and Single Girls: Straight and Queer Women on Sexuality, third wave writer Lee Damsky explains how she found in gay and lesbian literature stories about sexuality which resonated with her based on sensibilities that connected her to the author via affect, not necessarily through a shared experience. Damsky states, “Here I can find examples of the kind of writing I am looking for: honest, personal, adventurous, feminist, telling it like it is. (For the most part, this genre of sex writing does not exist by and for heterosexual women, and Bridget Jones’ Diary isn’t doing it for me.)” (xv). Damsky’s story recalls the ethic of surprise in Muñoz’s theory of queer relationality. Illustrating the strange crossings in queer relations, Damsky has difficulty finding connection with writing that she is “supposed” to share affinity with based on her experiences (writing on sexuality “by and for heterosexual women”), and instead finds a meaningful spark of affiliation within writings by gay men and lesbians about their sexual experiences. In this way, literary publics become spaces to create queer coalition—queer in the sense of

Muñoz’s queer utopia where the differences rather than the sameness in a coalition are 74 stressed, and the potential for people to come to partial and negotiated points of affiliation is celebrated.30

For instance, even if a sensibility of hunger links femme and third wave figurations of desire, an affiliation based on these links would have to account for the specificities of how queer and heterosexual people experience heteronormative oppression differently. So, while Johnson clearly outlines how her relationships with men are informed by repressive social structures, she doesn’t address the feelings of internalized homophobia, queer shame, or violence directed at queer people which femmes in an anti-queer culture negotiate. Alternatively, femme configurations of hunger are largely theorized in the context of lesbian relationships, and, hence, don’t speak to the challenges women who partner with men face in their efforts to dismantle heteronormative dynamics. For instance, if men are privileged in heteronormative sexual hierarchies, how will feminists who have sex with men meet their male partners’ resistance to restructuring such relations? While I don’t argue that hunger is a sensibility that is contingent upon having a female partner who has also experienced misogynist and homophobic oppression (after all, not all femmes are lesbian-identified), these kinds of questions illuminate some particularities between femme and third wave notions of hunger. As Hollibaugh notes, women’s experiences of sexual oppression are formed by their particular social positions. Hollibaugh states, “Women in this culture live with sexual fear like an extra skin. Each of us wears it differently depending on our race, class, sexual preference, and community, but from birth we have all been taught our lessons well” (“Desire for” 94). I argue that a sensibility of hunger accounts for this kind of diversity of experience in how individuals are “taught” their “sexual fear[s]” and 75 repressions. So while both femme and third wave feminists employ a sensibility of hunger in order to theorize sexual risk, that does not mean that all women’s/feminized people’s risks are identical.

I imagine a coalition based around the sensibility of hunger as the potential for a diversity of feminists to organize around the denigration of femininity and violence towards women/feminized people, and for the creation of a nuanced feminist sexual politics which values contradiction. Currently, such a coalition is only suggested in writing. Yet literature can present us with ways to imagine “real life” differently. Muñoz argues that often the only way we can imagine queer utopia is in the space of art, performance, and literature. He states, “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, and indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic” (Cruising Utopia 1).

The basis for queer relation, then, can be found in “glimpses” of connections located in literature that would appear to be insignificant and forgettable if we weren’t looking for them. Muñoz argues that in the space of the aesthetic we can “propos[e] and promis[e]” new “world[s]”—as in new ways of relating, new contacts with each other, and a broader range of feelings. Similarly, Johnson celebrates the coalitional potential of literary publics, stating, “I’m the absolute worst at making human connections in real life, but here, in writing, I am able to speak—forthright and raw—to forge connections with others and beckon them to follow with stories of their own intricate unique ‘sex prints’”

(“Pearl Necklace” 326). For Johnson, writing does what face-to-face interaction cannot

(at least initially)—communicate people’s deep, affective perspectives with a clarity that can touch others. Therefore, literary publics call queer relationships into being, because 76 writing allows us greater access to each other and our most intimate thoughts and desires.

This kind of exchange allows for more surprise than the ways in which we interact with each other from our static and codified positions in face-to-face exchanges.

Seeing the “fem place”: Coalitions Rooted in a Shared Understandings of Desire

In, “Performing Feminist Theory,” a lecture on merging feminist theory and practice, Ellen Berry argues that the first step of any feminist action is the struggle to find affinity (Berry). As such, I offer up these fragmented and largely unacknowledged affective overlaps between the literary publics of third wave and femme sexual politics as the site for a struggle to find more forms of affinity between feminists. The affinity I see here is a shared investment in feminine gender expressions, including feminized modes of desire, and the resolve to challenge the policing of women’s sexuality, be it by patriarchy or dominant feminisms. Hunger as a resonating sensibility between these groups illustrates that feminists can share how they feel their desires even if they have different sexual partners, sexual practices, and/or are involved in different sexual counterpublics. The struggle then becomes how to start a dialogue across lines of identification about what affective affinities these two groups share despite their lived differences from each other.

By positing that there is affective overlap in femme and third wave sexual politics

I have in no way resolved significant historical tensions between queer and heterosexual feminists. Therefore, it is important to specify the conditions and constraints of this relationship so as not to ignore the very real challenges faced by feminists attempting to create coalitions. At the moment, the crossings I’m tracing are mostly inter-generational 77 as opposed to inner-generational. Johnson (and non-queer-identified third wavers in general) draws alliance with second wave femme icons like Hollibaugh or Allison, but calls upon the work of third wave femmes/younger femmes much less often.

Furthermore, second wave femmes like Nestle, Cruikshank, and Hollibaugh seem relatively open to the idea of coalescing with heterosexual women who challenge heteronormative expectations, but third wave femmes like Albrecht-Samarasinha and

Gottlieb seem more invested in distancing femme subjectivity from heterosexual women’s femininity. Considering these tensions and limitations, I wonder how my recognition of hunger as a shared sensibility could be developed into a larger alliance.

What would it take to start a more explicit conversation between femmes and non-queer- identified third wave feminists about these partially shared feelings around desire? What would the implications of such a dialogue be?

I see such initial coalitional work as possible only if we begin to turn away from well-worn narratives about the insurmountable differences between femme and heterosexual feminists. In an interview with Bitch Magazine, trans femme activist Julia

Serano argues that positioning femmes as antithetical to heterosexual feminine women reinforces sexist assumptions in queer and feminist communities. She asserts,

Anyone who’s been in the queer community or who’s been involved in feminism

knows that some people have a really condescending attitude towards straight

people, and straight women in particular. And I do not understand how people

can self-rationalize that kind of behavior with any kind of ending of [societal]

sexism [sic]. (4) 78

Serano argues that femmes feel the need to assert their queerness because of the ways that femmes have been marginalized within queer communities. Serano critiques this common rhetorical move in femme discourse, stating that it ennobles femme identity at the expense of heterosexual women’s agency, and, in effect, sanctions sexism within communities of individuals who are supposedly working toward gender justice.

Instead, Serano advocates that femmes should counter femme invisibility by challenging the misogynist devaluation of femininity in queer and feminist communities.

She states, “As someone who is a femme dyke, I would argue that we’d be better off calling out people who dismiss femmes for their hatred of femininity than trying to frame our femininity in this gender-transgressive way that insinuates straight women’s femininity is reinforcing sexist norms” (4). In this way, Serano argues that the marginalization and oppression femmes face stems not just from homophobia, but a ubiquitous “hatred of femininity” throughout society, even in more progressive enclaves.

Hence, Serano envisions a queer politics for gender justice that would fight for greater respect of femininity and feminine people in general, rather than uphold femme femininity as exceptionally radical. Such a coalition would add power and numbers to those who strive for a diversity of feminist and queer expressions of femininity.

Therefore, rather than femme and non-queer-identified third wave feminists working separately for a recognition of femininity and feminized modes of desire as potentially subversive expressions, what kind of larger political/cultural shifts could happen if both of these groups joined efforts based on their contingent and partial affinities?

I introduced my thesis with the idea of Nestle’s “fem place” (“I’ll Be” 113) because I believe Nestle provides a model for what an initial coalition based in a shared 79 sensibility of hunger would look like. Nestle argues that her writing attempts to create a

“connecting link” between feminists by including a “sense of respect for straight women’s desire” and that such mutual respect will “create a sexual politics [that] create[s] spaces for sexual desire” (“I’ll Be” 113). Nestle’s vision of coalition is based in the respect of diverse desires and a shared understanding of desires across difference.

This alliance allows people to maintain their own sense of identity while seeing some kind of recognition between themselves and those with different life experiences. Nestle expands this idea by explaining that feelings of desire have been points of connection between her and heterosexual women who do not share her experience as a lesbian or as a femme. She states,

The risk of desire has been a shared bond with some of my straight women

friends […] especially the women who are looking for a touch they desire. I don’t

assume that because I have one world of erotic realness, that it has to be every

woman’s. But I think perhaps straight women, in their own desire, experience

their version of what is my fem place. (“I’ll Be”113)

This “fem place” that Nestle identifies is a space of feeling informed by categories of identity, but not particular to these identities. Hence, the “fem place” is the feeling of being a “[woman] […] looking for a touch [she] desire[s]” in a misogynist culture. The

“fem place” is both the excitement of that desire and the “risk” of pursing desires in a society which punishes women for wanting. However Nestle doesn’t collapse all women’s wants and sexual experiences into a monolith; instead, she carefully maintains the distinction between her “erotic realness” and heterosexual women’s “version” of her

“fem place.” Hence, the concept of the “fem place” allows us to imagine ways to find 80 relation with like-feeling others who do not necessarily share the same identifications or exact experiences as ourselves.

Therefore, we can understand our identities in the context of sexual identification, but we can also start to recognize that even the most “essential” pieces of ourselves, like desire, are not so individualized that we cannot recognize some affinity with those who identify differently. So, when Johnson longs for a heterosexual “eroticism” which is

“experienceable from within rather than merely performable from without”(“Fuck You”

48-49), this is a “fem place.” When Johnson wants to experience the unknown potential of sexual relations and to approach “fucking as wet clay” (“Pearl Necklace” 324), this is a

“fem place.” What draws Johnson’s longings into alliance with Nestle’s experience of femme eroticism is a sensibility of hunger—the pursuit of desires beyond heteronormativity and the reimagining of feminized sexualities in these efforts.

Therefore, the “fem place” illustrates the kind of affective affinity which might draw feminists together across difference.

So, what if we took the “fem place” seriously as a place of coalition? What if we understood “women who seek a touch they desire,” or “feminists who want a sexual politics based on an ethos of contradiction,” or “feminists who are attracted to feminized sexual modalities” as categories of feminist affiliation? The affective connections I’ve outlined in femme and third wave sexual politics are already functioning, and, as such, recognizing them offers us the possibility to break stagnant patterns of feminist organizing. In order to do so, those of us who work for gender justice need to expand our conceptions of alliance and community in order to account for the ways that shared 81 feeling collectivizes us, and the ways that shared feeling is not limited to our relations with those most like ourselves.

82

CONCLUSIONS

This study is less about engendering queer relationships between formerly opposed groups of feminists and more about recognizing that queer relations already occur within contemporary feminist spaces and discourse. Therefore, even if we talk about feminists in terms of third/second wave or femme/heterosexual, we are ignoring the affective elements of these identities and how they are related to each other. Despite the shift away from identity politics in both queer and feminist organizing, we still interact with each other based in simplistic renderings of age and sexuality (you’re either this or that). Yet the overlaps and confusions I have explored belie the notion that these categories are as absolute as the stories we tell ourselves about feminists would suggest.

If we continue to think about these categories of identity as closed monoliths, we will not see them with their full affective complexity, and feminist organizing will continue to replicate stagnant patterns. I argue that thinking about these shared sensibilities like irony and hunger provides a more accurate rendering of how feminists are positioned to each other.

When I say that this project is about seeing feminists and their relation to each other with more accuracy, I aim to show how affective affinities exceed the boundaries of community we generally apply to contemporary feminist organizing. For instance, some venues are marked as either queer or heterosexual-dominated spaces; alternatively, cultural production is seen as speaking to either third wave feminists or second wave feminists. However, contemporary feminist spaces are inflected by more diversity and have a broader audience than we generally see. For instance, Kennan asserts that in third 83 wave subcultural spaces, like burlesque shows or punk concerts, femmes performing in these venues are often misread as heterosexual. Kennan states,

At times, the straight punk-and indie-rock subcultures, which have employed

femme women as go-go dancers and cabaret and burlesque performers as well as

rock musicians, render their queer sexualities invisible, as they dance, strip, and

play music alongside their straight counterparts in venues that cater to

heterosexual audiences. (391-392)

Keenan underscores how the problem of femme invisibility extends to “punk-and-indie rock subcultures,” some of which are third wave feminist venues like Ladyfests, neo- burlesque scenes and alternative cabarets. My study attempts to address this kind of marginalization of femme identity in feminist communities. If we began talking about the overlaps in the performances of femininity by femme and heterosexual women in such venues, we then have the opportunity to talk about the particularities of such performances. Hence, if we acknowledge the affinities between queer femme and non- queer-identified third wave femininities, we can begin to recognize the influence of femmes in the production of third wave cultures/third wave notions of ironic femininity.

It might seem counterintuitive to argue that viewing femme and third wave femininities in constellation to each other would provide more visibility for femmes rather than further erasure. But this would only be true if one understands the slippages between femme and third wave feminists as evidence of their sameness. Affective affinity provides us with a model of coalition that can maintain the specificity of particular lived experiences. Throughout this project I have tried to note the ways that specific identities will have some bearing on these expressions of femininity and female 84 sexuality. Affinity is not sameness because it allows us to articulate both what is shared and the limitations of that sharing in such affective overlaps. For example, in Chapter

One I noted that ironic femininity in a femme context is often connected to an erotic identity, whereas ironic femininity in a not-specifically-queer third wave context is connected to a political identity. Hence, as Kennan suggests, the kinds of ironic femininities on display at a burlesque show will be performed with different intents depending on the sexual identification of the performer, even if all the performers involved value irony as a method for expressing unnatural feminized gender.

I envision affective affinity as a way to accurately account for the confusions and the differences between categories of femme and third wave in contemporary feminist spaces. Just as I want to challenge Gottlieb’s impulse that “straight girl[s] [who] dress like dyke[s]” are clearly doing something different than femme gender subversion, I also want to challenge the impulse to ignore the presence of femmes in third wave cultural spaces like the neo-burlesque movement or riot grrrl music scenes. Furthermore, such affinities give us the chance to expand what these categories might mean. Recognizing the overlapping experiences or spaces that these groups share opens up the potential to access attractions, connections and pleasures we haven’t thoroughly conceptualized yet.

For instance, if we understand an affinity between queer and heterosexual feminists who are attracted to ironic femininities, we might see an expansion of heterosexual-identified women’s capacities to desire other women, or an expansion of femme-identified women’s capacities to be attracted to other feminine presenting women. Currently, both of these potential women are derided as apolitical and problematic in feminist communities—the femme who desires other feminine women is dismissed as a “lipstick 85 lesbian,” and the heterosexual-identified or perhaps bisexual-identified woman who has sex with women is rendered as duplicitous. But recognition of affective affinity could give us new language to describe how sometimes our desires might surprise us, certainly they might change, and that these shifts and crossings do not invalidate what we felt before or what we will want in the future.

While this study has more often focused on the connections between feminists of varying sexual identifications, this model of affective affinity also offers a more accurate way to conceptualize feminist organizing across generations. Feminist relations between older and younger feminists as we currently describe them crystallize “second wave feminists” and “third wave feminists” into identities defined by the false assumption that historical positioning is destiny in terms of political consciousness. Hence, all too often

“second wave feminists” are rendered as still stuck in the political climate of the 1970s and third wave feminists are rendered as exploring new feminist frontiers by themselves

(either languishing in political inefficacy or charting unknown territory in the fight for gender justice, depending on the storyteller). This narrative of feminist progress is not a new phenomenon. In the introduction to her anthology, No Permanent Waves: Recasting

Histories of U.S. Feminism, Nancy A. Hewitt argues that these “script[s] of feminist history” (4) have been with us throughout modern feminist organizing. Hewitt states that

“second wave” feminists distinguished themselves from “first wave” feminists by

“insist[ing] that they were broader in their vision, more international in their concerns, and more progressive in their sensitivity to race, class and sexual politics than early feminists” (2). Similarly, Hewitt notes that “third wave” feminists distinguish their efforts from “second wave” feminists by “consider[ing] themselves broader in their vision, more 86 global in their concerns, and more progressive in their sensitivities to transnational, multiracial, and sexual politics than earlier feminists” (2). Hewitt argues that such

“scripts” overlook the diversity of feminist activism occurring at any moment—for example, the international coalitions created by female abolitionists or efforts by U.S. feminists in the 1970s to create global alliances (5). Of course, feminist movements will be impacted by the political climate of the particular historical moment they emerge from, but we also need to consider formulations of feminism that don’t fit into these tidy narratives of progress and evolution.

If we looked at affective connections between feminists, we could begin to see particular lines of affiliation that would encompass feminists of varying ages. Carol

Siegel articulates this kind of affective disruption of age-based feminist organizing when she discusses how the third wave could be conceptualized outside of a generational definition. Remarking on the ways she has felt “alienated” in several manifestations of feminist community since the 1970s, Siegel states that the most recent formations of feminism have felt more comfortable for her particular brand of radical feminist politics.

In third wave feminism, Siegel sees an expansion of genders and an infusion of subculture, youth movements, and new activist practices into academic feminisms. She states, “Lately, among some of the self-described third-wave feminists, I have finally started to feel, once again, at home in feminism. Could feminism’s third wave be my wave?” (3). Rather than rendering the “third wave” as simply a consequence of temporal progression, Siegel argues that the third wave might be untethered from such a generational definition. Instead, she suggests that the third wave could be a sensibility, a particular “wave” of politicized feelings and attractions that speak to a diversity of 87 feminists, not just young ones. When Siegel asks, “Could feminism’s third wave be my wave?” she compels her reader to consider how affect intersects generational positioning.

Perhaps this latest moment of feminism is especially receptive to ironic femininities or to the reclamation of feminized modes of desire, but that’s not only an outcome of the work which young feminists have done. Instead, we find ourselves in this third wave moment and the sensibilities that it represents because of the agitation by

“second wave” femmes and other radical feminists around the areas of gender and sexual expression. Furthermore, the efforts of such feminists continue to shape feminist sexual politics. If we can see a broad generational alliance between feminists who are attracted to ironic femininities or feminized sexual modalities, how might that change our conception of third wave cultural production, for instance? If we acknowledge that forms of media and entertainment typically associated with younger feminists (punk and electronica music, independently made queer and feminist pornography, roller derbies, burlesque shows, feminist magazines and blogs, crafting cultures, etc.) have a broader range of producers and audiences in terms of age than we generally admit, how might that shift our conception of “feminism’s third wave”?

I am self conscious that my affective mapping between femmes and non-queer- identified third wavers still doesn’t account for someone like Siegel—a heterosexual- identified, “second wave” (in terms of generational positioning) feminist whose work complicates and queers conceptions of heterosexuality and femininity. Yet I would like to think of this study as an initial exercise in imagining expansive and queer feminist organizing around affect. If we can think of categories of affiliation such as “feminists who are attracted to ironic femininities” or “feminists who want a sexual politics based in 88 contradiction,” who else besides femmes and third wave feminists might be included in these figurations? How might affective affinity be a way to unite people who don't fit neatly into categories based on age and/or sexual identification?

The driving ethos of this study is that if we honor the complexity of our lived experiences, we will inevitably recognize how contingent and fragile categories of identity are, even if such categories remain meaningful to us. Frankly, how we feel our sexual and political identities, our gender expressions, and our desires are more changeable and complex than any single, coherent identification could account for.

Therefore, while I use the terms “femmes” and “non-queer-identified third wave feminists” as way of making sense of identities with particular historical, social, and culture specificities, I realize that discussing these groups as two “camps” is a tricky matter. As the affective affinities I explore here demonstrate, these categories of identity are not always mutually exclusive, and certainly we should expect individuals to move between such categories over the course of their lives, or that people will highlight one aspect of their identity over another depending on the context. This study, then, would like to employ affective affinity as a tool for imagining a more expansive spectrum of feelings than most current scholarship about contemporary feminisms reflects.

Merri Lisa Johnson again becomes an apt example of the complexities of these potentially shifting and overlapping sensibilities. While I have used Johnson as a representative of a “non-queer-identified” third wave feminist, I have done so because the essays I look to here are generally devoted to her experiences in heterosexual relationships and her vision for how to restructure such relationships. However,

Johnson’s sexual identification has fluctuated over the course of her writing. In “Fuck 89

You and Your Untouchable Face: Third Wave Feminism and the Problem of Romance,” she speaks largely from the position of a heterosexual feminist attempting to

“collaboratively shift the terms of heterosexual partnerships” (47) and reimagine heterosexuality as the “yet unarticulated possibility of women and men as social, political, economic, and sexual allies […]” (50). However, in “Pearl Necklace: The

Politics of Masturbation Fantasies,” an essay in the same anthology, she complicates the notion that being “heterosexual-identified” suggests that one only has desires for partners of the “opposite sex.” In this essay, she describes herself as a “heterosexual-identified bisexual woman: fucking men, fantasizing about women, and thus far primarily fucking women in the hetero-normative context of heterosexual couples […]” (325). Johnson expands the conception of heterosexuality to include bisexual desires and practices.

Therefore even as I uphold Johnson as a voice for third wave heterosexual identity (and even as these works position her thusly) her range of desires and experiences don’t fit neatly into the category of “heterosexual” or “non-queer-identified.”

To complicate matters further, in Johnson’s 2010 memoir, Girl in Need of A

Tourniquet: Memoir of a Borderline Personality, Johnson identifies as a lesbian and discusses her shift into exclusively partnering with women. Speaking of her first serious love affair with a lesbian-identified woman, Johnson contextualizes her new relationship within her history of feeling sexually disenfranchised within heterosexual relationships.

She notes,

Sex with a lesbian is better than sex with straight girls. It is also better (for me)

than sex with men. In bed with Emily my body becomes a field of delight instead

of the problem men marked it—Woody Allens, all of them, complaining in unison 90

about sore jaws […]. […] I learn[ed] what straight girls everywhere need to learn.

Getting a girl off isn’t that difficult. And if his jaw hurts from how long it takes

for you to get there, he’s doing it wrong. Or possibly you are gay. (71)

Johnson describes coming into a lesbian identity as a kind of crucial realignment in her life. She suggests that the overriding issue within her sexual relationships with men was that she was a “gay” woman trying to maintain heterosexual partnerships. However she also implies that her experience of sexual frustration wasn’t wholly contingent on the fact that she may be best suited to having sex with women. Johnson notes that “straight girls everywhere” should reconceptualize their bodies in their sexual relationships. Instead of internalizing the notion that women are “difficult” to please, and that they cause

“problem[s]” by not responding to a heteronormative eroticism which marginalizes women’s pleasures, Johnson suggests that heterosexual women would benefit by seeing their bodies as spaces for expansive pleasures and not-yet-known “delight[s].” Therefore, her analysis of how heterosexual women are disenfranchised in sexual and romantic relationships remains the same—that women’s bodies and wants are “marked” as

“problem[s]” within heteronormative scripts that privilege men’s pleasure. Yet her solution in her personal life is no longer to work towards restructuring heterosexual relationships. Instead, Johnson states that within her relationships with women, she feels at home in her body and her erotic identity, and enthusiastically “explor[es] the subtle power dynamics of being a femme top” (71).

One way to read Johnson’s shift into a lesbian femme identity would be that

Johnson was lesbian and/or femme all along, and hence the affective overlaps I see between her work and femme theory are simply an exchange of shared sensibilities 91 between queer femme writers. After all, Johnson herself retrospectively looks back at her relationships with men as something of a mistake. However I think Johnson’s decision to partner with women could also be an example of the ways these affective overlaps and slippages expose the complexities of living. If we read Johnson as “femme this whole time,” how do we account for the fact that her writings on heterosexuality speak to systemic problems and ubiquitous experiences of heterosexual-identified women? Are we to believe that all women in heterosexual relationships who feel the pressures of heteronormativity are actually lesbians and should divest themselves from heterosexuality completely? Alternatively, if we read Johnson as a queer femme who now “correctly” understands her sexual identity, what happens if Johnson starts dating a man tomorrow? Do we then render her a “hasbian,” or as closeted about her “true” identity, or as never “really” lesbian to begin with?

While Johnson has the right to claim whatever identity feels most fitting and genuine to her, I don’t find it productive to think of identifications like “heterosexual,”

“lesbian,” “femme,” or “non-queer-identified” as absolute positions. Furthermore, it’s not accurate to do so because of how individuals live these identities and travel between and around such identities over the course of their lives. Therefore, the affective affinities I explore in this study demonstrate this kind of crossing between identities, and corrupt notions of a “true” identity. We might use identifications based on sexual identity or age in order to be socially legible, but when we rely on these categories of identity to speak to the fullness of our experience, they are simply not up to the task. Hence, when I say that I want to use affect in addition to categories of identity to describe this moment of feminism, I do so with the hopes that how feminists identify and how they organize will 92 broaden, open up, and begin to reflect the confusions, instabilities, and crossings which we all experience (if we look at our lives honestly, at least).

The immediate, concrete implications of these affective affinities are fairly open- ended, but promising none the less. The most significant potential outcome of recognizing these partially shared sensibilities would be a greater acknowledgement of each other in contemporary feminist spaces. Rather than femmes being subsumed into third wave subcultural spaces, or heterosexual third wavers being read as simply

“straight,” we could begin to recognize the particular radical and queer(ed) efforts of these feminists as they labor and play alongside each other. Furthermore, we could start talking about how feminists of different ages sometimes innovate gender politics together, and not always in a hierarchal manner. Essentially this would mean no longer expecting to find affinity with someone merely based on their similar age or sexual identification, and being less quick to dismiss someone based on these factors. While this might appear a small shift, it remains significant because it opens up more possibilities for our desires and connections to surprise us. Such a move makes feminism about the expansion of feeling and experience, not the codifying of position. In this context, the story of someone like Merri Lisa Johnson might not seem so provocative. Rather than relying on the narrative that someone like Johnson was “lesbian all along,” we could create more language for articulating experiences of crossing, blurring, and shifting identification.

In regards to what these affective overlaps might mean for contemporary feminist relations, my study is largely a speculative one, but I see that as one of its strengths rather than a weakness. The ability to speculate and imagine beyond the current state of things 93 is a profoundly feminist and queer practice. In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz figures queerness as the impulse to want more, to believe otherwise, and to struggle for something different. He argues, “Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there” (1). Muñoz states that the “here and now”—the state of things we have come to accept as reality—is not inevitable. Therefore, queerness is that critical “desiring” to know a different life, to be a different person, and to “feel beyond the quagmire of the present.” Exploring affective affinities is my method for seeing around the “quagmire” of feminist relations as they have been organized. Rather than continuing to believe and reenact strict narratives which “total[ize]” how we expect feminists to be and how we expect feminists to interact with each other, I want to think that there is some way to loosen the rigid borders and assumptions at play in feminist communities. I argue that looking to the affective slippages in feminist discourse and our everyday lives will produce speculations about other ways to be feminist and other methods for forging feminist communities. This speculative feeling is the first step towards forging connections and living lives we formerly thought were impossible.

94

Notes

1 By femme and third wave theory, I mean work that speaks explicitly from a “”femme” or “third wave” position (though, it is important to recognize that these are not excusive to each other), generally theorizing about the particularities of these identifications. 2 See Harris and Crocker, Brushwood and Camilleri, Volcano and Dahl, Munt, and FtF: Female to Femme for examples of such work. 3 A note on terms: In this study, I will consider the work of third wave writers who do not explicitly identify as femmes or lesbians in their work, whom I refer to as “non-queer-identified” and, when appropriate to the specific writer or context, “heterosexual.” Some of the writers in question might identify as bisexuals or heterosexuals who are interested in queering different-gender partnerships. Furthermore, it should be expected that a writer’s sexual identification might change over time. For example Merri Lisa Johnson has positioned herself as heterosexual, bisexual, “heterosexual-identified bisexual” (“Pearl Necklace” 325), and lesbian across the scope of her writing thus far. Therefore, when I refer to Johnson as “heterosexual” or “non-queer-identified,” I mean that in the text in question she is considering heterosexual desire and partnerships, and is identifying (at least ambivalently) as heterosexual. This is not to suggest that this term adequately summarizes her sexual identity as she might currently describe it. 4 For an example of such a theory of how affect produces community, see Muñoz’s “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect in Ricardo Bracho’s ‘The Sweetest Hangover (And Other STDs).’” Muñoz puts forward an analysis of Latino/a identity that reads ethnic identity as affective rather than biological or purely cultural. He states, “In lieu of viewing racial or ethnic difference as solely cultural, I aim to describe how race and ethnicity can be understood as ‘affective difference,’ by which I mean the ways in which various historically coherent groups ‘feel’ differently and navigate the material world on a different emotional register” (70). Muñoz’s use of affect relies on relational theories like Raymond William’s “structure of feeling” and Norma Alarcón’s “identity in difference,” in order to highlight how racial difference is felt and lived via specific performances of shared affects (66-67). 5 In the introduction of the 1983 anthology, Powers of Desire, Snitow et al describe the hostility towards butches and femmes in feminist communities in terms of class norms. They state, “Liberal feminists, with whom lesbians first associated politically, tended to a moderated sexual style, which, in the middle-class manner, downplayed both sexual presence and traditional gender characteristics. This subdued approach was not congenial to those bar and street lesbians whose tradition of erotic rebellion involved, in contrast, flamboyantly elaborating the gender paradoxes of lesbian life. Liberal feminists […] dismissed such women as male-identified” (31). 6 Examples of such work start in the 1980s when femme writers such as Hollibaugh and Nestle speak from within butch-femme communities/dyads in order to claim femme as a feminist identification. See Nestle’s The Persistent Desire, Hollibaugh’s “Femme Fables,” and Newman for examples of such work. Starting in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, there is a shift to speaking about femme as an independent and queer (as opposed to strongly lesbian-identified) gender identity. See Harris and Crocker, Brushwood and Camilleri, Volcano and Dahl, and FtF: Female to Femme for examples of this kind of work. 7 Currently, this author publishes under the name Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. I have used her former name here to avoid confusion because it was the name the essays in question were published under. 8 I use the term “feminized person” here and throughout this thesis because so much contemporary femme theory draws alliances with femmes who are not biological females, including effeminate gay men, drag queens and feminine but non-female/woman-identified trans folk. Even though more femme theory emerges from the experiences of biological females, I want to be sure to stress that femme identity is rendered as connected to female biology/identity less and less these days. 9 For example, in an interview with Bitch Magazine, trans femme activist, writer, and spoken word poet Julia Serano explains the ubiquity of these arguments: “A lot of femmes tend to frame the situation this way: We’re femme, but we still challenge heterosexism because our feminine gender expression subverts the patriarchy or the dominant paradigm, or gender binary norms. The implication of that is that feminine women who aren’t queer reinforce those things. So not only does it implicitly suggest that straight women are enabling their own oppression—which I think is pretty fucked up—is also makes the femme experience about being queer, rather than framing it as wrong that society, including queer community, is dismissing them because they’re feminine (4). 95

10 Girlie feminism is defined in Baumgardner and Richards’ Manifesta as “[A]dult women, usually in their mid-twenties to late thirties (and increasingly, forties and fifties), whose feminist principles are based on a reclaiming of girl culture (or feminine accoutrements that were tossed out with sexism during the Second Wave), be it Barbie, housekeeping, or girl talk” (398). 11 See Gerhard for an analysis of such early sex radical feminist movements. 12 For example, in “The Missing Links: Riot grrrl, feminism, lesbian culture,” Mary Celeste Kearney cites Val Phoenix’s comparison of riot grrrl movements and lesbian separatist movements. Of Phoenix’s analysis, Kearney states, “As she notes in her article, ‘From womyn to Grrrls: Finding Sisterhood in Girl Style Revolution,’ both the riot girl and lesbian womyn’s communities advocate and practise: an assertive pro-female stance; a radical opposition to patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia; the creation of safe havens where girls and women can gather and express themselves; grassroots organizing strategies; and alternative forms of production strongly informed by the DIY ethos” (218). 13 See Reger and Hewitt for examples of such work. 14 Note on terms: from this point on in the thesis, when I use the term “third wave feminist/ism” I mean in a not-specifically-queer context. This is not meant to suggest that third wave feminist thought doesn’t encompass queer and/or femme identity. 15 Spillers states, “[B]lack women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb” (74). According to Spillers, black women’s sexual marginalization is directly related to the fact that non-fiction texts are recognized as the “empowered” form of feminist writing on sexuality (74), which ignores black women’s efforts to articulate their own sexual politics in fiction and music. 16 While I agree with Jane Gerhard that the 1982 Barnard conference signaled a shift in feminist organizing away from an attempt to unify women based on sameness and towards a politics of difference (189), I wonder how much has changed in the production of feminist sexual politics since Spillers’ 1984 essay. Even as contemporary feminist discourse gives voice to a rhetoric of intersectionality, the perspectives and experiences of white women still dominate most feminist writings specifically about sexuality, pleasure, and sexual practices. 17I borrow this term from Elizabeth Groeneveld. 18 For a discussion of third wave feminist engagement with femininity, see Munford, Baumgardner and Richards, and Buszek’s Pin-Up Grrrls. For a discussion of contemporary femme identity practices, see Brushwood Rose and Camilleri, Volcano and Dahl, Burke, and Harris and Crocker. 19 For example, when discussing riot grrrl appropriations of all things “girl”— “thiftstore dresses,” “baby barrettes,” nail polish, etc—Stoller calls these feminine accoutrements, “ultrafemmey fashion” (46). 20 For instance, straight mothers are commonly upheld as high femme icons in femme literature (see Nestle’s “My Mother liked to Fuck,” the documentary FtF: Female to Femme, and a photo in Hollibaugh’s My Dangerous Desires where the caption reads, “My mother and I ‘do’ femme” (31). In third wave contexts, relatively apolitical pop culture icons are commonly upheld as evocative of third wave political consciousness. 21 For instance, in her essay, “How We Knew Nancy: Remembering the Bad Daughter We Always Wanted to Be,” McClure argues that there are clear limitations to celebrating a figure such as Nancy Spungen (the notorious punk rocker girlfriend of Sid Vicious), but, that, at least as an adolescent, Spungen represented a refusal to model good and compliant heteronormative girlhood (Aug/Sept 2009). 22 See FtF: Female to Femme and Brushwood Rose and Camilleri. 23 For an example of such an argument, see Johnson’s “Ladies Love Your Box: The Rhetoric of Pleasure and Danger in Feminist Television Studies.” 24 See Baumgardner and Richards' chapter, “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” in Manifesta. 25 While this term is used ubiquitously in femme theory, my research suggests that femme writer Madeline Davis first used the term “hunger” in writing to describe this erotic sensibility. See Davis, “Roles? I Don’t Know Anyone Who’s ‘Playing’: A Letter to My Femme Sisters.” 26 I use Johnson’s writing as representative of a particularly third wave sexual ethos because she has already become an iconic scholar of third wave sexual politics. Johnson has devoted her career to theorizing sexuality, pleasure (both erotic and consumerist), and the politics of desire within this particular moment of feminism. Her significance as a scholar of third wave sexual politics is demonstrated by her inclusion in Heywood’s The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism. 96

Tellingly, Johnson is responsible for the entries for “sexuality,” “desire, feminist,” and “pro-sex feminism” in this volume. 27 Obviously not all third wave feminists express a feminized gender, and not all femmes express a kind of femininity that is recognizably so by heteronormative standards. In the context of my thesis, I’m considering those feminists who do share an interest in feminized gender and certain forms of sexual expression. 28 For a discussion of the violence inherent within heterosexuality, see Dworkin. 29 In the preface to the transcript of their conversation, Hollibaugh and Moraga discuss the failures of feminist theory to address heterosexuality as a sexual desire and not solely as a structure of oppression. They assert, “By analyzing the institution of heterosexuality through feminism, we learned what’s oppressive about it and why people cooperate with it or don’t, but we didn’t learn what’s sexual. We don’t really know, for instance, why men and women are still attracted to each other, even through all that oppression […]. There is something genuine that happens between heterosexuals but which gets perverted in a thousand different ways. There is heterosexuality outside of heterosexism.” (“What We’re” 63). This sentiment, as a direct quote or as a rough paraphrase, resurfaces within third wave writings on sexuality with some frequency. 30 For example, In Cruising Utopia, Muñoz discusses guerrilla stickering and wheatpasting done in New York City by a queer group that changed its name with every campaign. Some of the names the group goes by include, “ ‘r.h.q.’ […] ‘resist the heterosexualization of queerness,’” “ ‘f.a.g.’ […] ‘feminist action group,’” and “ ‘f.t.m.’ […] ‘fear the mayor’” (60-61). Muñoz argues that the shifting identity and issues of this group demonstrates how they “attemp[t] to imagine and enact a mode of queer publicity that is calibrated to be responsive to modalities of difference that include race, class, gender, and sexuality” (61). Therefore, Muñoz’s model of queer coalition stresses how a diversity of identities and issues need to be addressed in coalitional work, rather than one or two overriding identities determining the dynamics and goals of the group. 97

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