femme fatigue
image credit: @softcore_trauma, h/t Stephanie Tillman
a short one, today. I’m writing from a cold wet October Monday in New England — the kind of dreary dampness that seeps into bones and settles in with a chill. I’m wearing many layers of my favorite worn flannel and mended wool, an oatmeal-filled heating pack in my lap, a cup of tea near to hand, and I’m still cold. After a weekend in upstate New York, foliage bright and fiery, I forgot that this too is autumn. Femme today means the slow warmth of baking, yesterday’s brothy soup reheated on the stove.
I spent this summer rediscovering femmeness, allowing it to be my healing from many kinds of fatigue. To me, femme is wild roses dripping over wrought iron, ripe homegrown tomatoes with fresh wet rolls of mozzarella di bufala and torn fragrant basil. Femme is swimming under a sunshower cloudburst, freebleeding topless in the Mediterranean Sea, hammering a trellis for the aforementioned tomatoes. Femme is three dollars for a box of Chinatown dumplings, a ripe champagne mango, a custard-filled donut, a soft serve cone sprinkled with rainbows, a ticket to Mira Nair in the ‘90s and a chat with Sarita Choudhury about sensuality in film. Femme is a practice of pleasure — re-reading adrienne maree brown and and Audre Lorde and bell hooks on the subway, writing pages at a polished bar, observing with charcoal the stretch of a body, being observed by others with charcoal, luxuriating in the gleam of freshly mopped floors and the earthy scent of creased linen sheets and washed silk on scrubbed and oiled skin. Femme flies in the face of patriarchy and cherishes healthy masculinity.
There are, of course, many more essays to write on the magic of queerness, and on the horror that patriarchy enacts on all of us — of all and any genders — but I will save those for when I’m thawed. Wishing you some femme warmth, on this cold wet October Monday.
a few medicines, or, how to find indulgence:
“when you’re the oppressed group, you know everything about the oppressor. you know things about them that they don’t even know about themselves.” Liz Plank, on masculinity and whiteness.
shockingly enough I’ve been READING again — like real books! after so long! — and it’s been such a dream. here are a few of my favorites, just for you.
“one cannot know the other or the self” and questions as “gestures of space-making.”
“when it comes to reproductive justice, if you start with the pregnancy, you’re starting at the wrong place.” — Loretta J. Ross, co-founder and godmother of the reproductive justice movement, MacArthur fellow.
hot water bottles, a love letter.
until next time.