Day Four

My Mood: creative, pretty, dedicated, motivated

My Look: Urban Country Pin-Up

The Outfit:
•    Flower print     shirt-dress
•    Cute navy short shorts
•    Black leggings and leg warmers
•    Black tie-up boots
•    Dangly earrings
•    Black smokey eye make-up
•    Extremely chipped red nail polish



How I feel in this:
Super creative. I put this outfit together this morning and I have to say I am proud of myself. I love this shirt! It makes me feel happy and colourful and pretty. The boots give this girlie look a little toughness as does the black eye make up- which I also love. After my red lipstick rant yesterday I thought I’d try out something different today.



Some queer-ish, femme-ish things I did today:
•    Went to work, as a nanny for a 10 month old, in this outfit
•    Got baby-food and formula all over said outfit
•    Didn’t participate in other people’s drama, stayed true to my values/principles
•    Watched some seriously strange children’s programming- so queer.
•    Cooked until 2:30 in the morning while compulsively watching Arrested Development- Portia DeRossi makes anything femme!

Some queer-ish, femme-ish discoveries I had today:
•    It takes a lot of effort to put together ‘outfits’ every morning as opposed to just throwing on jeans and a t-shirt
•    I like being creative with what I wear and this project has given me an outlet for adding some creativity to my life
•    The best outfits are created when most of my clothes are dirty
•    Being conscious and aware of exploring femme daily has given me excitement and joy and something to think about but I still have a hard time being in the process instead of having a clear cut definition of what femme is/means/consists of for me. I am finding it difficult to just go with what I’m feeling (or not feeling) without thinking about the reactions of others.

Day Four Thoughts:
Femme in the home

Tonight as I got home from work from my part-time nannying job and as I finished creating the joy that is my butternut squash/pumpkin/pear curry soup, I started to think about the fact that I was in full-out traditional, care-giving, cooking, cleaning, woman in the home mode. Not that there is anything wrong with this role, its just not one I thought I would ever take on. Strangely enough, I find a huge amount of satisfaction and comfort in taking care of the sweetest little boy in the universe and spending my Wednesday evening chopping vegetables until I literally cannot feel my fingers (maybe I'm doing it wrong?).


But there was definitely a time (circa second year university) when I purposely avoided doing things that would label me as 'typically female'. I was just coming out and learning about feminism and reframing my entire life and I was no longer going to stand for the oppressive nature of 'women's work' (including clearing the table at any family gathering). The idea that there could be any joy or comfort or independence or satisfaction in this work or that a woman would actually choose to participate in it was baffling to me.

Today I see things a little differently and the traditional roles of women often empower me and help me connect with and learn from all sorts of other women, rather than isolate and oppress me. Somehow I think that my reclaiming of traditional women's work, from knitting to spending all day cooking, helps me connect to that part of my identity as femme that both honours the women who have come before me, and creates an alternative, revived and revamped version of the 'feminine role'. I try to piece together parts of knowledge that have been passed down to me by other women with my own understandings of what it means to be a woman, to be a femme, in order to create an identity that is a unique representation of all of these parts, an identity that is mosaic in nature, all parts of a whole. What that means is although I like to cook, I choose to cook, for myself and others I love, and perhaps I'm really good with kids but I'm not really sure if I ever want to have them, but hey, I'll baby-sit yours!

Trying to compartmentalize and understand gender roles/sexuality/identity in this way can be so very tiring. Never-mind the fact that I'll probably wake up tomorrow morning and read this and not have a clue about what I was trying to get across but I'll stop being so self-deprecating (I at least know that femmes are not this...) and say that I'm just happy to be here on this journey and to have fantastic readers like you who make it all way to the end of my posts.

Good Night!