Jack Tar 207 has compiled a list of 50 Fierce Femmes and seriously, it’s the best gathering of humans you’ve ever seen. In case you’re not familiar with Jack Tar 207 yet, they’re a super cool product photography company specializing in body-positive visibility that broadens and challenges “society’s expectations and definitions of beauty.”
Jack Tar 207 prefaced their list with:
These incredible people entertain, empower, and inspire us, with their words, actions, and presence.
Unfailingly Fierce. Unabashedly Femme.
Thank you all.
The versatile list includes fashion bloggers, poets, activists and all other sorts, and in fact, we were over the moon to recognize some familiar Autostraddle faces on there!
Mey, please teach me all about your selfie game because it is always the best / via Jack Tar 207
The list has our amazingly fierce and wonderful Contributing Editor and basically everyone’s favorite human on Earth, Mey!
Aja, I want to come over and arrange flowers with you all day long / via Jack Tar 207
You might also recognize our Autostraddle contributors Aja, of Fit for a Femme fame, and Bevin, the Femmecee (credit of clever wordplay: hers) of Queer Fat Femme, featured as well!
Bevin, your shark dress is possibly the best thing I have ever seen / via Jack Tar 207
We’re so proud to have these three amazing women in our Autostraddle and queer family, and so unbelievably happy that Jack Tar 207 took the time to highlight all of these inspirational femmes in one place in order for us to learn more about the incredible work being done throughout the femme community. Everyone from Beth Ditto to Sonya Renee to Zena Sharman to Sarah Deragon to Leah Lakshmi to Lauren Zuniga to Danielle Askini is on the 50 Fierce Femmes list, and the urge to list every single one is so overpowering that I have to stop there. This list is the perfect opportunity to take some time to find out more about some fierce femmes you should be loving, too.
Awesome! And way to go.
I’m guessing Bevin was listening to Joe Jackson’s Look Shark! (Or is it Look Sharp!) with that sort of dress. ^_^
Yes! more femme things please!
Mey’s selfie game really is top notch.
Amazing! Given, Autostraddle alone could easily provide dozens more ladies for such a list, but the chosen girls represent us very fiercely. :D
HAAAWT
I’m an avid fan of Anita Dolce Vita of dapperQ and her He Said/We Said feature on Autostraddle, yet I never see her on these lists. I guess this is another glass ceiling that I need to commit to cracking! In the meantime, she can hang out on my list of friends and go to Costco with me and Sonia Sotomayor.
She’s the second one on the list itself?
Yeah, she is…what I really meant is that I thought she was one of Autostraddle’s familiar faces given her regular contributions, which is what I follow on Autostraddle.
Yours by the book tour,
Hillz
YES. I love all the ladies on the list. Mey is like my femme spirit animal.
Spirit animal? Really? Let’s not. Appropriation, much?
My sincerest apologies… I literally had no idea. Thank you for informing me, I promise not to use the term in the future. :)
Try patronus instead- it conveys the same message, minus the cultural appropriation.
Patronus? Yes, that is definitely a much better alternative. Thank you for informing me, and my apologies for using the term. I had no idea.
Ok so as a femme-identifying person lemme just say that obviously I LOVE femmes and many of the folks on this list are downright amazing humans who I am not interested in giving a hard time to. BUT, that being said, I feel like I really, really wanna move away from list-making as a means of celebrating people. For one thing, I think it’s damn near impossible to not contribute to the celebritizing of certain individuals at the expense of others; it creates unreasonable standards of what “femme” looks like; and it takes real work to cover all the bases in terms of representation that people generally don’t seem able/interested in doing, which makes me sort of feel like (generally speaking of course), lists like these tend to hurt and anger and contribute to ongoing systemic oppression within queer communities more than uplift people – which i think is their original intent. (Whew! Run-on sentence.)
So at the risk of being the party pooper, some pertinent things regarding this list I have noticed or learned about since its emergence, for context’s sake:
1. Lakshmi is Leah’s middle name. As she writes on her Facebook page, if we’re going to try to honour people, let’s do so using their actual names, even if they’re difficult to get white tongues around.
2. As much as there are some amazingly wonderful people on this list, it is problematic on a number of fronts – namely being that none of the people included were actually consulted on whether or not (or HOW) they wanted to be represented in this list, which is fairly hypocritical of an organization that claims to be “broaden[ing] and challeng[ing] ‘society’s expectations and definitions of beauty’” as they are described here.
3. There is a Real lack of diversity in the representation here. It’s not just about remedying this stuff through tokenization. It’s about recognizing that lists like these have power, and contribute to creating what “femme” looks like in such a way that a lottt of people get left out. Across the internet land (namely Facebook) I have read responses from some of the people consulted in the creation of this list, who have attributed to these oversights to the problem of community in/visibility, i.e. the ways that the work of (for example) trans femmes of colour is invisibilized because of the way that racism + transmisogyny operate to make their contributions less visible. The contributers claim to have wanted to include more trans femmes of colour and disabled femmes and people who are not women who identify as femmes and others, but struggled with this because of the way contributions to the community are less “visible” for these folks than some of the other people on the list. But the response I’ve seen in kind has predominantly been, “If you don’t see us, if we’re not visible to you, then YOU are not doing the work/connecting with people in our communities.”
I hesitate to be the first person to bring this up and don’t want to be speaking for other people BUT I wanted to add this perspective since no one has brought it up in these comments yet. The majority of these points are things I have learned from femmes like Leah, trans femmes and disabled femmes and femmes of colour and gnc femmes and femmes who hold variations of combinations all these identities, femmes who of course articulate how these kinds of lists affect their lives better than I ever will. I am grateful always to be learning about these perspectives and I am open to feedback on this post!
actually i should clarify point #2 – i can’t say for a fact that NONE of the people were consulted, but i can say that many weren’t.
Maine made it on Autostraddle!
I’M so proud to be family here. Squish-squish, Autofemmes!
It is always lovely to see femmes celebrated, especially since femme invisibility leaves so many of us feeling unseen and wanting in our own communities. Whether or not I’m included, I want every femme to feel seen!