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Reeling Film Festival
FtF: Female to Femme (Kami Chisholm, Elizabeth Stark)
There has been much written about, discussed, and dissected in regards to the queer femme woman. From academics to burlesque performers, from chat rooms to pride parades, there’s no shortage of allure on the topic. FtF: Female to Femme explores the variations of femme identities in classic documentary style. Short interviews with famous femmes, including Guinivere Turner, Bitch (from Bitch and Animal), and Leslie Mah (from Tribe 8) punctuate the lo-fi style of FtF with parodic self-help consciousness-raising clips interspersed throughout. Mirroring the lesbian-feminist support group, the humorous support group clips are centered on helping females transition into femmes (hence the title), with such prompts as “It’s okay to wear fragrance” and “Cleavage is certainly encouraged.” The interviews highlight each person’s coming to terms with their femmeness and offer sometimes playful, sometimes insightful windows into the myriad pools of identity. One such lively anecdote came from Bitch, who wistfully recalled how she threw away all her pants one day in order to better cope with her growing femme awareness.
Often marginalized and lacking visibility within the lesbian community (which is already marginalized enough as it is), the femmes in this documentary struggle with the seemingly inherent contradictions in the feminist/femme/female construct. Is femmeness a counterpart to butchness? Does wearing a push-up bra make one a bad feminist? Are femmes attempting to gain heterosexual privilege? Is femme just another kind of performativity, a kind of female drag? These are some of the questions FtF grapples with as it calls on artists, activists, and academics to relate their notions of femme to the larger scope of gender politics and hierarchies. The different kinds of femmes further break down the complexities of identity, with such sub-genres as the retro femme, fat femme, tomboy femme, punk femme, and high femme. It is refreshing to see a celebration of femme identity as a radical concept, something that directly confronts naturalized notions of both what it means to be queer and what it means to be a woman.
The support group parody, which is infused with go-go boot breakthroughs and childhood burlesque birthday party themes, is a campy illustration that plays on the high-maintenance stereotype of femmes. Both serious and silly, the support group exploits femme conventions at the same time that it relishes in their subversions.
What FtF lacks in flashy editing or aesthetic charm, it makes up for in intelligence and a wry confrontational sense of humor. Whether it is one woman recalling the “sea of flannel” that greeted her at every lesbian event or the sexy two-step of the Big Burlesque troupe challenging society’s doctrines of normative female beauty, FtF is a savvy, defiant documentary that’ll make you laugh, make you think and make you want to dismantle the patriarchy, while in stilettos.
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