My dissertation explores the intersections of femininities and sexualities and how these intersections are made to appear natural and normal. My historical charting of queering femininities begins with different key historical and discursive moments in twentieth-century British Culture that shape how we now think about femininity. Femininity becomes a key area of contestation in early twentieth-century Britain, as Britain attempts to redefine femininity with the emergence of categories of lesbian sexuality. Because of this cultural shift in how femininity and sexuality are conceptualized, I analyze how different modernists and contemporary British literatures represent a historical trajectory of femme femininities and how this literature offers us a space to queer femininity. My dissertation project theorizes the resistant and transformative possibilities of the pleasures of femme femininities. My goals for this project are to question damaging and destructive assumptions about femininity, and then to show pleasurable resistant possibilities of queer makings of femininities to force people to confront, question, be aware, and change their preconceptions.
As my dissertation traces the intersections of femininity, lesbian sexuality, and heteronormativity, it also reclaims femininities as queer, positive, optimistic, and resistant. To reclaim femininity, I show how various queer narratives challenge dominant definitions of femininity by offering us scripts and performances of pleasurable, critical, and political femme femininities. In other words, not only do I explore what femininity might do for the individual who reclaims it, but I also explore how this reclamation can enhance all of our lives. I also reassert femmes as agents of pleasure, political, and princesses who rescue themselves. Femmes’ performances show how dangerous and damaging a dominant understanding of femininity can be; and at the same time, they show us that we are not stuck with such scripts. Stories can be rewritten offering us new queer scripts that signify femininities and femmes as intelligent, resistant, self-sufficient, strong, powerful, and assertive. It is necessary to reclaim femininities if we hope to change how gender is perceived, performed, and lived to imagine the pleasurable possibilities of femininities.