This dissertation will focus specifically on queer deployments of femininity. I use queer here in two registers: both to refer to one’s nonnormative relationship to gender and/or sexuality and to how people are “made queer” by virtue of their shared subordination in relation to power (Ahmed, 2006; Cohen, 1997). In particular, Blackness, transness, and engagement in sex work are all made queer in relation to dominant cultural norms embedded in white supremacy, cisnormativity, and sex negativity. The vast majority of what we know about the valuation and devaluation of femininity relies on a tacit assumption of cisness and a presumed coherence between gender identity and gender performance. The operation of femmephobia—the repudiation of femininity and its social consequences—effects people of all genders, but to different degrees and consequences depending on who is its target. In this dissertation, I am interested in mapping on to each other both conceptualizations of “queer”—that is, as a gender and/or sexual identity and as a relation to power to analyze femmephobia across domains. For example, looking at the “feminine failures” (Hoskin, 2017; 2021) of those who do—or don’t do—femininity in ways that violate our cultural expectations can help tease out the value (or penalty) of its performance. Specifically, this dissertation seeks to answer the following questions: Is the experience of femininity dependent its wearer? Who “wears” femininity, and how? How do race, gender, and sex assigned at birth affect how it is valued, used, and assessed? Using ethnographic and interview data, this dissertation will consider three case studies in queer femininity across embodiments and social contexts. Specifically, the data includes 16 in-depth interviews with trans masculine and non- binary sex workers who embody femininity for work, 72 in-depth interviews with women who primarily date women and lesbians of all genders, and twelve months of virtual and in-person ethnographic observations across a variety of queer parties, bars, and events.

Contemporary Western feminist scholarship fails to explore the backdrop to the naturalization of feminine subjugation. By analyzing the structures, histories, and theories of gender relations, this study dislocates femininity from its ascribed Otherness and, in doing so, demonstrates how empowered femininities have been overlooked or rendered invisible within gender studies. Femme, as the failure or refusal to approximate the patriarchal norms of femininity, serves as the conceptual anchor of this study and is used to examine how femmephobic sentiments are constructed and perpetuated in contemporary Western feminist theory. In part, this perpetuation is achieved through the pedagogical and theoretical exclusions from the texts chosen for gender studies courses, revealing a normative feminist body constructed through the privileging of identities and expressions. Privileging of identities is demonstrated through the designation of literary space and in an overview of dominant theories, such as how the feminine subject is maintained as the object of critique and as not able to be “properly” feminist. This assessment of gender studies course texts reveals a limited understanding of femme and femininity that maintains these identities as white, middle-class, normatively bodied, and without agency. Feminist theory demonstrates an embedded normative feminist subject, one marked by whiteness and body privileges. By deconstructing the privileging of theories of the normative feminist subject, this study argues that gender studies has replicated feminist histories in which the politics and concerns of the white socially privileged subject are the first to be addressed. While white femininity is present in hir Otherness and in critiques of hir femininity, the racially marked femme does not exist, even in absence. The femme—as a queer potentiality—offers a way of thinking and re-thinking through the limitations of contemporary Western feminist theory and the paradoxical preoccupations with the absented femme. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2013-09-09 19:36:29.903

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