Femme (/fɛm/pronunciationⓘ;[1] French: [fam], literally meaning 'woman') is a term traditionally used to describe a lesbian woman who exhibits a feminine identity or gender presentation.
[7] Scholars Heidi M. Levitt and Sara K. Bridges state that the terms butch and femme are derived from the 1940s–1950s American lesbian communities following World War II "when women joined the work force and began wearing pants, creating the possibility for the development of a butch aesthetic and gender expression within gay women's communities."
[6] Nestle states that they publicly declared same-sex love between women at a time when there was no liberation movement to support or protect them, and adds that "in the 1950s particularly, butch–femme couples were the front-line warriors against sexual bigotry.
The irony of social change has made a radical, sexual, political statement of the 1950s appear today a reactionary, non feminist experience.
Black lesbian feminist poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote in Tar Beach that "butch and femme role playing was the very opposite of what we felt being gay was all about – the love of women".
[8] In 2005, preliminary research conducted by Levitt and Bridges indicated that lesbians are more likely to identify as butch and have a more masculine gender expression than bisexual women.
Levitt and Bridges theorized that "this finding may be in part due to the different aesthetics that are available and popular within lesbian and bisexual communities.
[18][19][20][21] The postmodern queer conception of femme is a femme-identified person who does not always dress or act in a "traditionally feminine" (meaning a feminine aesthetic, such as wearing makeup, heels, and numerous accessories) way, but who expresses femme identity through feminine-associated behaviours, interactions and political views.
Connecting cisgendered male violence to toxic masculinity, they believe that patriarchy not only negatively affects female-identified people but men as well.
Today, however, especially on social media, the word "femme" is used to describe the "soft, sad girl" trope that is commonly seen online and in trending fashions.
While Schwartz offers a critique of this aesthetic and the erasure of pre-internet femme identities, she also considers how "performing softness" as an identifier for femininity, both on and offline, can be effective in transgressing hegemonic gender norms.
The term coined for a feminine bisexual woman is “doe”, while “stag” signifies masculinity and “tomcat” represents androgyny.
[42] These neologisms quickly fell out of favor with some in the bisexual community in online discourse, particularly with women of color and other BIPOC, as many found the animal-based terms to be demeaning, dehumanizing, and historically fraught.