Femme Politics: Freedom, Affect, and Eros

What is “femme”? Is it better understood as an identity, or an affinity; and what distinguishes it from femininity? Originating initially in working-class lesbian bars as a name for women who love butch women, “femme” has evolved over the past eight or nine decades to become, on the one hand, a far more expansive queer badge, and on the other, a fully fledged anticapitalist analysis hinging on the denaturalization of reproductive labor. “Femme” theory has thus inspired and “educated the desire” of an expansive constellation of self-described “dykes” as well as all manner of other laboring populations, including lumpenproletarian sex workers, straight trans women, bodyworkers of all genders, and myriad drag queens. But how does a left politicization of femininity overcome its traditional association with the manners and mores of female subordination? How, by (re-)claiming “femme,” can we destroy the unfreedom—not the eros?

In this course, we will investigate the distinction between femme and femininity, and explore the anticapitalist dimensions of the former. We will see what it means to consider the “feminine” in its joy-oriented solicitousness and relational self-pleasuring, as the domain not only of oppression and stricture but of love, gratuitousness, and excess. And we will ask, how can non-feminine people of all genders relate to “femme” politically? Authors likely to be assigned include: Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift, Cosima Bee Concordia, McKenzie Wark, Emma Heaney, Heather Berg, Savannah Shange, R. A. Hoskin, Treva Ellison, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Lisa Duggan and Kathleen McHugh, Eileen G’Sell, Amber Musser, Raechel Anne Jolie, Amber Hollibaugh, Joan Nestle, Jewelle Gomez, Ashley Coleman Taylor, and Sophie Lewis (it is likely that we’ll consider passages from Lewis’s Femmephilia (Haymarket 2026) directly).