Femme

BE A GIRL

Rewarded for the feminine mystique in a beauty contest

A femmenist manifesto (to be)

»Refusing the fate of Girl-by-Nature, the femme is Girl-by-Choice. Finding in androgyny (the rejection of all femininity) too much loss, too little pleasure, and ugly shoes, the femme 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«. - Brazen Femme

»The reform movement in clothing supported by various parts of the suffragette movement attempted to eradicate this evil through a type of clothing that was intended to be 'naturally' attractive to women. This clothing, which sought in the name of the natural to avoid any suggestion of the erotic, was supposed to allow women to dissolve into the collective of men in unmarked sexuality. These efforts were not crowned with success. For it is true here as well that, in an oppostition of two terms, the one, here authenticity, remains dependent upon the other, inauthenticity, and both terms function only in and as an oppositional relation. The inauthenticity of women is the necessary condition for the authenticity of men. Formulating itself as a discourse in clothes about clothes, as a kind of commentary, the direction followed by fashion has been the exact opposite of that taken by the reform movement in clothing. Rather than unmarking sexuality, it has marked and overmarked sexuality. On the trail of the vicissitudes of desire, it can do nothing but mark sexuality as paradox. On the one side, it establishes the division of the genders 'feminine'/'masculine' — that is to say, marked vs unmarked sexuality, 'inauthentic' vs 'authentic' — by making the division visible; at the same time however, it disrupts the constitutive opposition. It is self-deconstructive, undermining what it constitutes. (...)« - Barbara Vinken i Fashion Zeitgeist

»femme as a gender experience is never tied to biological sex.« - Rose & Camilleri

Är det femme att...

femme in not so many words kan röra sig kring inautencitet, agens, konstruerande, dekonstruerande, motstridighet, pleasure, icke-heterosexualitet... und so weiter