Abstract
Sarah Murray reflects on the radical potential of public negotiations of identity. On the surface, Murray’s piece proposes the possibility of revisionist feminine heterosexuality as a queer femme experience, asking questions about accessing a specific femininity through queer space. However, within each piece of her textual collage, she also submits herself as subject and attempts to create a piece of queer literature that struggles with a “straight” privileged identity coming to terms with femininity. In other words, “in its most simple terms,” Murray explains, “this is the story of how a straight girl tries to say ‘thank you’ to the queers who brought her home.”
Title engendered by S. Bear Bergman’s Butch Is a Noun.
Note: This chapter was composed when the author was 21 years old and no longer accurately reflects the views of the author, who never had authority over the text’s signification anyway.
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Notes
- 1.
The author still believes in the essence of this, which is the desire for queerness and the dismantling of the Gender Police, but would like to state that it is problematic to invite yourself into someone else’s house (I’m looking at you, Rachel Dolezal).
- 2.
The author is demisexual these days.
- 3.
Bornstein visited Arizona State University’s Tempe campus in March 2010 to discuss and present on gender anarchy and, at the time, her upcoming memoir, A Queer and Pleasant Danger (2012).
- 4.
4.
- 5.
Part of what made this so painful was being asked to confront my cis privilege at a time when I still hadn’t come to terms with what it meant to be female in American society. Unpleasant but necessary. Currently, the author is working through what it means to be brown and femme in the Cheeto Age (also while maintaining many privileges), which is likewise unpleasant and necessary.
- 6.
124.
- 7.
Queer Tip: Learning to sew is part of the resistance.
- 8.
The author acknowledges this moment as Fragile Heterosexuality.
- 9.
Coyote performing at Speak Up! on April 10, 2010.
Works Cited
Bergman, S. Bear. 2010. Butch Is a Noun. 2006. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Print.
Bornstein, Kate. 2012. A Queer and Pleasant Danger: A Memoir. Boston: Beacon. Print.
Butler, Judith. 1993. Gender Is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion. In Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge. Print.
Coyote, Ivan. 2010. To All of the Kick Ass, Beautiful Fierce Femmes Out There…. YouTube, Uploaded by Pancake Heart, 12 Apr 2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q7IzwUa_kI
Feinberg, Leslie. 2003. Stone Butch Blues. New York: Alyson. Print.
Wilchins, Riki. 2004. Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer. New York: Alyson. Print.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. 1992. Lesbians Like This and That: Some Notes on Lesbian Criticism for the Nineties. In New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings, ed. Sally Munt, 1–16. New York: Columbia University Press. Print.
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Murray, S. (2018). Femme Is a Verb: An Alternative Reading of Femininity and Feminism. In: McNeil, E., Wermers, J., Lunn, J. (eds) Mapping Queer Space(s) of Praxis and Pedagogy. Queer Studies and Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64623-7_11
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