Why femme stories matter: Constructing femme theory through historical femme life writing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We argue that historical femme life writing forms a rich resource for femme theory that contributes to, challenges, and extends contemporary academic femme literature. We focus on the experiences of femmes during the second-wave feminist movement, specifically within the context of 1970s and 1980s U.S. lesbian feminism. The texts we examine include My Dangerous Desires by Amber Hollibaugh (2000 Hesford, V. (2013). Feeling women’s liberation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), A Restricted Country by Joan Nestle (1987 Mishali, Y. (2014). Feminine trouble: The removal of femininity from feminist/lesbian/queer esthetics, imagery, and conceptualization. Women's Studies International Forum, 44, 55–68. doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2013.09.003[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), Minnie Bruce Pratt’s (1995 Pratt, M. B. (1995). S/he. New York, NY: Alyson Books. [Google Scholar]) S/he, and selections from The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Nestle (1992 Nestle, J. (1987). A restricted country. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press. [Google Scholar]). Informed by Clare Hemmings’ (2011) and Victoria Hesford’s (2013 Hemmings, C. (2011). Why stories matter: The political grammar of feminist theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) critiques that past feminisms are often retold using reductive narratives, we (re)read this femme life writing to foreground the ways in which femmes have historically troubled and resisted monolithic accounts of lesbian feminism, lesbian identities, femininity, and sexuality. By centering queer feminine voices from this period to highlight major themes of this life writing, and drawing on Andi Schwartz’s (2018 Schwartz, A. (2018). Locating femme theory online. First Monday, 7(2)doi:10.5210/fm.v23i7.9266[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) positioning of femme cultural production as a basis for theory, we argue that earlier iterations of queer femininities are relevant to and important for contemporary femme theory. Ultimately, we analyze what historical femme life writing reveals about the place of femininity within the lesbian and feminist communities of their time, how these dynamics inform current perceptions of queer and femme politics, and how femmes resist their cultural and critical marginalization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.031 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".