We’ve all heard of male-to-female and female-to-male gender identifications, but female-to-femme? In this era of gender exploration, filmmakers Kami Chisholm and Elizabeth Stark bring us FtF: Female to Femme (www.ftfthemovie.com), a documentary that examines lesbian femme identity as a radical gender expression.
The filmmakers say film is a response to pervasive attention to female masculinity. “In the past 10 years, a spate of films have documented the experiences, identities, perspectives, and lives of butches, bois, trans, and other masculine identified—but female born—persons. To our knowledge, there have been no feature length documentaries that explore issues of gender, sex, and sexuality in the lives of [femmes].”
FtF is part documentary and part creative license a style Stark—the author of the novel Shy Girl—labels “inventive documentary.” This approach, Stark argues, created intimacy among the film’s subjects and complimented the film’s content.
“[FtF is] a documentary in the same way that a femme is a girl. As a femme, I’m interested in the line between parody and truth, or parody and self-expression. I like to say that the combination of parody and truth is one that reflects the femme identity.”
Stark identifies with transgender individuals who felt they were born into the wrong physical bodies. “I don’t feel like a woman.” Stark explains, “And my life experiences and sense of self don’t match social expectations [of women].”
The filmmaker describes femmes as sexual and political beings: “Femmes know how to make love to other women, to butches, to transmen. In my opinion, this is an art and should not be overlooked. Femmes know how to fail and succeed at femininity at the same time. We use our flaws, our fat, our hairiness, our loud mouths, our oversized brains and our excessive accessorizing to celebrate ourselves and those we love…and to foment revolution.”
Stark co-founded the first international femme conference nearly a decade ago, now her film FtF will be screened at this year’s conference, Femme2006: Conversations and Explorations (www.femme2006.com), held in San Francisco Aug. 11-13.
Renowned femme writer Jewel Gomez, who appears in FtF (and will be the conference’s keynote speaker), contends, “To be a femme is to be a warrior in the fight for a feminist world.”
Stark agrees, saying that the FtF project is not only a feminist endeavor, its “coalitional politics.”
“[The concept of] ‘women’ is a ghetto whose boundaries are policed,” says Stark. “You can be killed for attempting to move in or out of that ghetto—and you can be killed for staying put. I’d like to build a coalition whose goal was to tear down the walls of that ghetto.”
The filmmaker insists that femmes deserve greater recognition within the LGBT community.
“Do I think femmes should be recognized as integral to the fight for a redefinition of gender as something fluid, unfixed and moveable? Darling, we’ve been at the heart of it all along. Ask Leslie Feinberg. Ask Patrick Califia. Ask Kate Bornstein.”
Stark wants her work to change how others view femininity: “As a femme, I want to complicate the ways people understand femininity and the various ways people occupy femininity, or are occupied by it. ”
Stark’s forthcoming novel, Strip, follows a straight housewife—impersonating her deceased cousin—who develops a relationship with a femme that challenges her ideas about women, friendship, and marriage. Stark’s 2000 novel Shy Girl, explored various ways of passing in the world.
Stark says she that although she identifies as femme, she doesn’t believe that femininity is a natural expression of the genitalia she was born with.
“My sexuality and desires, my sensibility and my gender expression are all going against the grain of the expected female. In fact, becoming a femme in a world that insists on a certain femininity … without taking on that enforced femininity is a delicate, powerful move; a transition indeed, that is under-investigated and overlooked. FtF begins to break that silence. And, like all silence-breakers, we’re already getting in some trouble for it.”
Trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall can be reached at jake@trans-nation.org.
