FtF: Female to Femme: aGLIFF Brings the Documentary

Elizabeth Stark’s and Kami Chisholm’s feature-length primer FtF: Female to Femme, sponsored by IDKE 8, brings us closer to understanding a culture within a culture within a culture—the world of the lesbian Femme. Largely marginalized within a marginalized community, the Femme is a woman who embraces, through modes of dress, a femininity that is comfortably familiar to those who are not lesbian. Always intelligent and often funny, Stark and Chisholm interview artists, activists, and intelligentsia in an attempt to grasp that “which does not invert,” the Femme.

Scene: A group of women are seated in a small but comfortable-looking living room. The ground rules are set for those gathered to participate in the FtF support group, “You can wear fragrance. You can have cleavage.” The camera pans as each woman discusses the pivotal moment in female to Femme transformation. Push-up bras, high-heeled shoes, make-up--topics that might otherwise seem absolutely natural in any other gathering of women--are the causes of consternation, embarrassment, and humiliation for the assembled group. As lesbians, these Femmes have risked the possibility of ostracization from their social support for daring to embrace the unattainable patriarchal construct that is femininity in the name of individual expression.

The lines get blurred. What then, does it mean to be feminist? Does being feminist require comfortable shoes? Does being lesbian demand that one eschew all that smacks of “girlishness”? Is a lesbian who chooses to present herself as female attempting to “pass”? Is it empowering or demeaning to emulate a Bettie Page aesthetic?

In FtF: Female to Femme, Stark and Chisholm succeed beautifully in examining the possibilities while considering the complex contradictions inherent to feminism in the 21st century.