Day Two

My Mood: insecure, overwhelmed, tired, pensive


My Look: Lesbian Librarian




My Outfit:

• Black cardi that once belonged to an ex-girlfriends Mom
• Black T-shirt made out of bamboo (strange but true)
• Plaid skirt out of the 'free' bin
• Black tights with black flat ankle boots which later became Zoe's sneakers due to my feet becoming sore
• Super fun hoop earrings with little knitted beads on them that used to belong to my sister
  
• 'Russian Red' lipstick (again)
• Red nail polish (again...but now somewhat chipped)
• 'say no to girl hate' button- seriously, do it

How do I feel in this?
Like I could sit and read Judy Butler all day and actually understand half of what she's saying. Like I can be taken seriously. Like I am keeping a secret.
 
 Some queer-ish, femme-ish things I did today:

• wore bright red lipstick to a doctors appointment at nine in the morning (my doctor literally couldn't find me in the waiting room)
• tried on three different outfits before leaving the house this morning
• was honest and open about my insecurities and put time, effort, and thought into why 
• let myself cry                                                              

Some queer-ish, femme-ish discoveries:

• I love the way red lipstick makes me feel- strong, confident, sexual- despite the fact that it gets on everything
• sneakers go best with skirts, shoes that make me uncomfortable are not part of femme for me 
• its feels good to give myself permission to do things that I might not otherwise do
  
• femme is full of attitude
  

Day Two Thoughts:
Insecurities and queering the process

So after the excitement of yesterday and the beginning of the project it was inevitable that I would come down out of the clouds and head straight towards huge feelings of being overwhelmed and insecure. I say this because this happens to me often. I get all excited that I am going to contribute in some super meaningful way that will change what I and everyone thinks of gender and sexuality and identity and then I start to get scared. Kind of like when I got to graduate school and was convinced that there had been some glitch in the system and I had accidentally been accepted. I was terrified that everyone was about to find out that I wasn't really smart and that I was just fooling everyone into thinking I was and eventually when it came time to create something I wouldn't be able to. I soon began to realize that most grad students think this way, a small comfort that did little to quell my anxiety.

Today I couldn't help but project into the future the worst-case scenario comments I would receive from readers (if I even had any), the harsh critiques of my writing, my ideas, and most of all of my self.

When I thought about this project I knew it would be a personal exploration but I neglected to really think about how vulnerable it would make me feel. I didn't think about the process and the fact that I would constantly have to out myself and admit, to myself, and to the world, that there is a lot I don't know, about queers, about femme, about anything really.

So what does this have to do with the project? Well, it got me thinking about process and about knowledge creation and if by equating a visual style with femme I'm trying to impose/force an outcome instead of trusting in the process. I also started to think about why I feel so insecure about my contributions and where my intense need to know it all right now, this instant, comes from.

Here are some thoughts.

First of all, I'm pretty sure that my insecurity about not having anything to contribute and thinking that I just need to skip the process and efficiently produce an outcome is not solely my creation and may just have something to do with the Capitalist-Patriarchal society we live in that teaches us women these very notions (just a thought... that I'm not really going to get into here, email me if you require a rant or references.)

Secondly (and here's where I bring it all back to queer femme), I feel like I am caught between imposing femme in this project as a visual image tied to identity and allowing myself to awaken femme within, organically discovering it in whichever form it comes to me. I think, like most things, I end up doing a little bit of both. Femme for me lies in the in-betweens, in the undoing of, in the process of giving the latent femme inside me a space of her own in which to play and discover and unleash. Some would call this the 'queering of' or transformation of femininity into (capital F) Femme.  The visual properties of femme help me to facilitate this process. In imposing femme as a visual representation I am able to move beyond the visual, beyond viewing my exterior image as the sole marker of identity to exploring my internal process of queering femme as an active identity.

Femme is the process. Femme is evolving in me, shifting, and growing and integrating into my thoughts, my actions, my reactions, and my politics. Femme is a political stance, an identity, and an art form. Femme is what I make it and what it makes me.