DU Women's Conference Presentation

I have presented this, so if you are interested in "borrowing" my ideas then u need to site me. Kathryn Hobson, 2009 Women's Conference, University of Denver.


Femme Drag Performance

How do you read my body?
My tall, slender, white body.
My hips, my stomach, my breasts...
How do you read the eyeliner, the lipstick, the earrings?
the skirt?
Don't lift it up you might be scared by my hairy legs
(no I don't shave them)
Is this the queer part of me?
Is the eyeliner?
Or is it queer because they both exist on the same body

When you see me
do you see those who came before me
walk with me
live in my house and
teach me

When you read me do you see
my great grandmother's hands
do you see that she lives in my heart?
that I can do nothing without thinking about her
that I am nothing without her
that I hear her bellow in the night
-Kathy-
even though she is long gone

When you read me do you see
that I live in a constant state of pain
that my ovaries and uterus will be removed
is this too much information for you?
is this where the queerness lies?
in the fact that “biologically” I will
no longer be female?

but no matter what happens to my parts
I will always be
Femme
a femme
in drag
a femme
in everyday drag
a femme dressed in everyday drag
looking like a girl
and yet desiring other girls
Is this where the queerness lies?

When you see my body
My tall, white, slender, queer, female body
my hips, eyeliner, and breasts
juxtaposed with another female body
a female body that looks like a male body
sometimes brown and sometimes white
sometimes with a tie, long shorts, and mohawk
sometimes but not always
Is that where the queerness lies?
In the juxtaposition?

When you see my body
When you read my body
do you see my skepticism about
myself
do you see my whiteness
I'm sure you do
even if you do not assess it the meanings of privilege
it deserves
but doesn't receive
do you see my contradiction?
Is this where the queerness lies?
in the contradiction?

When you read my body
do you see the fragments
the parts that don't know anything?
The parts
that question everything
from the eyeliner, the white hips and breasts
the mohawk, the masculine femininity,
the privilege
the juxtaposition
the contradiction
the queerness
the beginnings
the endings
that go on
that never begin and never end
--

“Hey Jill, How do I look — I have a presentation tomorrow?”

“You look good, you look like Bette Porter. If I could just relate all of your outfits to L Word characters I think we would do much better when you ask me this question.”

“Ok well Bette Porter’s good, but what about the shoes are the shoes good?”

“The shoes are fine baby.”

“And my hair, how does my hair look-is it too red?”

“No, you look good Kathryn.”

“But does my body speak? Does it tell a story? I want to tell a story with my body? I want to tell a story with no beginning and no ending a story that goes on even when we’ve left? I want to tell a story without constraints without limits – a story that speaks to people. I want my body to speak. Does it speak baby?”

“Oh yeah it speaks. A little too much maybe.”

“Haha very funny. And I can’t do it-I can’t do it all-I can’t write and say everything, some things will be left out and lost-how can I write a story when I can’t tell it all?”

“You’ll know what to write and you’ll know what to say. You just have to tell it, that’s all you can do.”

“One more question though-this is the important one… Do I look gay? Do I look gay enough? Do you think they’ll know I’m gay?”
--
I wake up in the morning and I put on my gender and sexuality identity. Everything I do in the morning while habitual is done with intent. The eyeliner I put on my top lid, lining it with careful precision, the grey ankle boots I place on my feet-they are intentional choices. How am I going to put on my white, femme, lesbian self today? You see I need my eyeliner and boots in this crazy world we live in because for a femme lesbian they are both my resistance and my protection. They are my defense against the world. They are my resistance and my empowerment. I live in a world where I need my eyeliner and my boots because they are my survival. You see they are my resistance, my armor against being called a dyke and queer (and not in that good way.) I wear them to encounter all the many places where I feel resistance — resistance to my queer positionality, my queer body. I have had to put them on, from all the times I have had to wear them. I wear them to work, sometimes at home, when I go out, and when I enter the classroom.

Although the classroom as a microcosm of the academy, is supposed to be a safe space it isn’t always, in fact sometimes it is downright painful. Sometimes I need them in the academy more than I need them in a straight bar, my small homophobic town, or anyplace I go holding hands with a member of my same sex.
“I do not see the connection between gender, sexuality, and power,” a colleague once says during a heated debate around queer theory. Ouch, I think, in that moment my life, my history, my narrative has been erased, made insignificant. I do not have my boots on today and I am made vulnerable, again singled out, the only out student in the classroom.
I walk through my life with the benefit of “looking” straight as if straightness were something possible to decipher. My body is read as a straight body because it is a supposed gender normative straight body. Some people call this “cis gendered” my biology matches up with my gender identity. But I find this a much too limited term because I am more than feminine, which matches my “biological parts” soon to be removed (and then what I ask?) But I camp up my femininity, I consciously put it on-it doesn’t just match, it’s my choice to put on this feminine appearance everyday. I call it femme drag because it’s important to note how our bodily performances create our identities and present ourselves to others. And this doesn’t involve false eyelashes or corisettes (all the time), but femme drag is the way I negotiate my gender and sexuality everyday. It is my way of subverting a dominant normative, white, hetero patriarchal paradigm.

And this is a privileged negotiation, not only born out of privilege but creating privilege as well. I have white skin, which, normalizes my entire performance of white femininity-femme lesbian or not. And I am able to perform this white femininity because of a certain level of class privilege that I have. I can buy the stuff to make me look and perform femininity quite well. I have to make conscious choices to do my hair myself and not shave my legs in order to subvert some of the normative patriarchal assumptions of femininity-however, these are things most people won’t ever know unless I tell them. My race and class produce my lesbian femme body in a certain way so that without the consciousness I bring to my gender/sexuality performance I walk around with straight, white, middle-class, heterosexual privilege.

But I’m a lesbian. A dyke, a muff muncher, a lezzy, a queer.

And isn’t that just a little bit radical? Maybe I am laughing at my own joke here but isn’t it a little bit queer to perform femininity and do it for the purpose, no not the purpose the desire of other women-preferably those already lesbian (but that’s always negotiable.) And what about performing it for women who don’t look like women at all? Basically I say eff the patriarchy the system that tells me my eyeliner and my boots can’t be my resistance that these things normalize instead of queer me.

Usually I am QBA: queer by association.

I will be with my girlfriend Jill and we’ll be out at a restaurant and the waiter will come and say “What would you like Ma’am” and I’ll say my order and the waiter turns, “And for you sir?” She laughs a bit and begins to order-her voice is a dead give-away that no matter how she looks, she is not a sir. “Oh my gosh I am so sorry,” the waiter says obviously embarrassed. He has obviously made the connection, this masculine person is a woman (most likely a lesbian) so I am guessing this feminine person is also a lesbian, and oh my gosh they are on a date. “It’s fine it happens all the time.” And it does happen all the time and we pretty much laugh it off-laugh away some of the hurt it has caused for both of us the hurt she feels existing as an outwardly non-gender normative person and the pain I feel for her in that situation. But there is also pain in knowing that I wasn’t read as a lesbian until my partner was. Personal pain, selfish pain, possibly even narcissistic pain.

But my queerness…I want it to stand on it’s own.

My femme drag performance is enough to cast me in the role of lesbian, of queer, of gender norm defying queer.

Because everything I do is with intention.
This outfit
This eyeliner
These shoes
This hair
This femme identity
Is my subversive performance
Because I can wear this, I can do this
I can perform this identity

And yet I can desire women.

And isn’t that just a little bit queer?