Unauthorized Copies of Femininity

November 16, 2015 3:16 PM

"These are just a few things I think about when I think about home and love and queer girl friendships. I think about queerness as a community made from the tectonic plates of trauma—from a history/lineage of trauma, as well as formed from people who have sometimes been harmed for being queer. By strangers. By their families. I think about femininity specifically, in regards to queerness." - When Queer Girl Friendships Burn Too Brightly
posted by Anonymous (6 comments total)

Wow. What an amazing piece of writing, both in content and form. Thank you for posting this.
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:21 PM on November 16, 2015 [2 favorites]

This was beautiful, thank you. This passage, in particular, made me tear up.

The fact that my relationship with Francesca has, in a sense, ended is beside the point here, except to illuminate our celestial qualities. And it hasn’t ended, really. It’s just that we are both partnered to other people, and our intimacy funnels itself elsewhere. Which is the downfall of being two feminine, queer girls in this world: we are taught to prioritize romantic love above all else. I’m guilty of this. We are all guilty of this.

I am so grateful that most of my friends recognize this danger, and we do our best to keep our intimacy while maintaing our romantic relationships. And yet. We are all guilty.
posted by (Over) Thinking at 5:30 PM on November 16, 2015 [3 favorites]

This is beautiful, but as a queer femme, I feel this particular piece has more to do with the tragedy that is wrought upon those with a writer's temperment, dreams, and internal sensibilities to facilitate turmoil and peace all at once.

One of my queer girl friendships ended painfully last year, in flames, and we both identified as writers. Outwardly, our intersections were both at once similar and yet extremely different, and we both had different resources to access our traumas. I shot her a hello over Facebook another day, apologizing for whatever transgressed, and she said that she would be more than happy to talk to me. She has never followed up, and I am okay with it.

I have many other queer girl friendships who are not built upon such tragedy, or have been, but do not intertwine itself with such tragedy. It's mostly because we have knitted our relationships based on trust and building new spaces and new boundaries, and learning accountability for our hurts. The friendship I had with the person I mentioned above, was wrought on emotions and passion of being in turmoil, but not knowing what to do much with after that. But man, do I recognize myself in the piece above. It's all an experiment for which there are very few templates or stories shared, and we keep finding and building new tools to explore and make our relationships.
posted by yueliang at 7:39 PM on November 16, 2015 [1 favorite]

That's some righteous and honest writing, right there.
posted by newdaddy at 11:13 PM on November 16, 2015

I know July (the writer) personally, and funnily enough she was one of the people I talked to for weeks on end after a horrendous breakup. (Incidentally the apartment I moved into partly as a result of that relationship - long convoluted story - was where she stayed to deal with her own breakup before passing it on to me, so it ended up being my place to deal with my breakup too, though I avoided it for a while by spending the night anywhere and everywhere else.)

A bunch of my closest queer girl friendships were the result of that breakup, in a sense: they were also dating my ex (we're poly), I was the first breakup amongst them, and they immediately gave me a ton of support to the point that my ex got frustrated and claimed that I was "stealing her friends". Later on,they broke up with her, and I saw through their experiences and stories that all the pain I was holding and all the blame I was putting on myself for the way things ended weren't really to do with me: it was mostly her, and her inability to take responsibility for anything, and her way of lashing out at anyone that cares.

I could have been the jealous ex who cuts off everyone vaguely related to the ex, but those people turned out to be my strongest allies. They've been there for me through thick and thin, and I hope I've been just as good as them. I've spent many days and nights at their home, hours online chatting when we were far away, commiserating over anything from heartbreak to school stress. A couple were the last people I saw in the Bay Area before I left, potentially for good.

They mean the world to me.

(to be clear: july wasn't dating my ex, but they knew each other, because it's a small town)
posted by divabat at 4:04 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I love this a lot, a lot, a lot. Thank you for sharing it.
posted by Stacey at 5:53 AM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]