1. Ethnography’s often include patterns of narration (story) or description. You set the scene, but in many cases I couldn’t picture the place or surroundings. Situate your reader. In this space below, consider drawing a map of the place you describe to allow yourself to see it better. Could you describe the scene to a blind person?
On the right, as we came into the Kitty Kat Klub, and after our eyes had adjusted to the darkness inside (even though it was night, the neon lights and street lights outside gave a massive brightness to the streets), we saw two women sharing a barstool, and taking people's cover charge money, then stamping a black fleur-de-lis on the backs of patrons' hands. The stamp felt like it was moving my tendons around as one of the women crushed it onto my hand and rolled it across my skin. We stood a little while in the foyer, taking in the scene of women coming up and down the stairs with their arms around other women, chatting, drinking, and talking. Sounds of the dj spinning hiphop and techno thudded across our bodies, and lights flashed in time with it, illuminating settees and low sofas for flickers of an instant. She went to use the restroom, and I wandered around. A butch girl wearing a tie and glasses eyed me. (Actually, she kind of eyed me throughout the night) She came back, and we ordered drinks at the bar just a little deeper into the club. White wine for me, since I didn't want to be influenced by the alcohol as I tried to observe femmes in their natural habitats. Then we followed the bar around a little way to the left, and came out on the dance floor. Women were grinding on each other, swaying by themselves, and pop-and-lock style dancing on a dais that was close to the dj's setup. The dj was an attractive, youngish butch woman, wearing massive headphones and an ironic t-shirt I couldn't quite make out. The crowd was attractive, too. Unlike LUSH and the Town House, the women were younger. I guess there was a woman with spiked grey hair who looked like she was pushing 50, but she was the only one. The rest were college aged, about. And the women who looked femme were really beautiful--long hair, pretty, swingy, flirty dresses, short skirts, high heels and ankle boots and lots of trendy jewelry. Groups of women were together, dancing individually while gathered in loose circles. My smooth-soled stiletto platrform heels slid on the dancefloor, making it really easy to spin, but it made it really difficult to keep my balance as I tried to dance and crane my neck around to observe everyone. Mirrors with Louis XIV-style ornamented frames hung off the walls around the sofas and tables. It was easy to feel comfortable in a place like that. We're going back next month--apparently, it'll be the last-ever Twilight event, so it should be good.
2. Incorporate research into your writing. Use research to provide background, develop a larger sense of the group, its history and purpose. We have the observations and primary sources, but secondary sources need development in many cases. Without background we don’t have perspective. Find two online sources. Take time to explore our databases at Normandale.
I found several online sources for the essay. I found the article by Lehner, and the one by Smith, in which they detailed their struggles in a straight world, as femme lesbians. I also found a scholarly article in which data were given to show how small a minority the LGBTQ population really is, compared with the straight population.
3.Provide a day in the life. Put us right into a moment in time. Describe the place, the people, their way of speaking.Here is an area of key weakness. There just isn’t enough dialogue in these pieces.
Example: The group prayed—should be: Jack led the group in prayer. When he bowed his head, his black hair fell in front of his eyes. Everyone joined hands in a circle and some began to sway like trees in a forest when the wind moves among them. Jack was quiet for a long time before speaking. “Lord,” Jack began…After the prayer he read from Psalm 121, which begins….Find one key area where your paper needs work and expand it.
I took my day (as a femme, I felt it was the best thing I could do--the closest I could come), and made it into little vignettes--me going through the motions of daily life like grocery shopping, and going to school and work, and then expanding little parts of it to show how I fought the invisibility I live in for the majority of my day. I spent a lot of time describing the attempts other femmes made throughout their lives to show their love for their spouses (like Lehner wearing a wedding band, and a labrys), and to show who they are (like SBJ, who always has photos of herself with "Tomboy," her girlfriend, in her blog).
One place where I really needed work was in the areas of narrative--I needed to really set the scene in the Kitty Kat Klub, because that was really the most important night of research for me. So, I collected my memories of the night, and really tried to give as much detail as possible about finally feeling visible, and wondering about the lives of the other femmes after they left and resumed their daily grind, and feeling happy that I had Her with me, to snuggle on one of the Victorian-looking couches with. I also wanted to give greater detail about Krista Burton's blog, and how she's essentially telling me my life every time she posts something. True story: when She showed me Effing Dykes, I read a couple of posts and said "bitch done stole my blog!" I love it, even though she's really writing about my life and not hers. Just sayin.' :P
4. Be self reflective. What were you thinking and feeling while you were watching this moment? In many cases I wasn’t sure what compelled the writer to explore this area of research. I didn’t know their preconceptions, what they thought would happen versus what actually did. I didn’t know what most of you were feeling.
I was thinking and feeling, as She and I were out at bars and clubs, looking at femmes and butches and studs, that I was lucky to have Her. She's a prince. She really loves me, She's not some drunk slob at a bar, and She's willing to do things She'd rather not do, just to help me. I looked around, especially at the Town House, where we met Cory and Mary, another butch/femme couple, and wondered how these people found each other in the real world, or if they only found each other by being openly available in darkly-lit, dirty-looking bars. If that was the only safe place. I kept thinking, as we danced and my ears pounded with the sounds of bass and of people shouting, that there had to be a place in the daylight where queer women hung out--we couldn't be confined to the nightclubs. We had to be visible during broad daylight, able to hold our heads up and make our way through life without having to skulk off into the corner until dark, to finally be free for a few precious hours, then slink away quietly as the sun came up on another uncertain day.
5. Make sure to incorporate observations of rituals, artifacts, and interpretations. Some of this you may need to supplement with research. Again, dialogue is a key because it shows insider language. Always use specifics.
I suppose getting ready for a night out is a femme ritual; I described it in the beginning of my paper, because it was an important part of the night. Before war, always apply warpaint. It's like putting on armor before battle--there is a depth that it gives to the experience if there is some meaning to the actions even if no one else knows about them. I put on false eyelashes after I did my eyes in a smoky blue-purple-pink-grey-navy-black mosaic, and practiced narrowing my eyes seductively in the mirror, sort of gearing myself up for a night of essentially being in both cahoots and competition with all the other femmes who would be at the Twilight event. I needed to be beautiful, sure, but I also needed to be just a little intimidating--able to stare down anyone I caught looking at Her. As in, "bitch, back up off--She's mine." I'm the jealous type.
Some artifacts of the femme lesbian community include the HRC logo, the labrys, the rainbow--essentially the same as the LGBTQ community at large. We rely on these a little more heavily than women who are clearly gay do--to identify ourselves, to make ourselves feel included in the community, to assert our queerness to men, who think every woman is attracted to them (unless the woman happens to be a very obvious butch lesbian).
My favorite part of this community is that everyone--*everyone*--has a label. You can't just be queer. You have to be "bisexual" or a "stud" or a "butch" or "andro" or "femme" or "stem" or "trans" or "stone femme/butch" or "futch" or a "lipstick." The words we use are definitely a marker of the queer community. We describe people based on their "role." A "top" or a "bottom" or a "switch" is how people label their personalities in bed, and even in life in general. A "top" is the boss. She likes "femme tops." I like "butch tops." We both identify as "switches." Naturally, we have some decision-making problems when it comes to what to do on a day off ("i dunno--whatever you wanna do, babe" gets repeated ad nauseum, and nothing gets done). But we also have a word for straight people: "breeders." I defined these words (except for "top," "bottom," and "switch," since I felt they had little to do with the femme aspect of quieer women, and I wanted to keep a sense of focus within the essay), since I was trying to give an outsider an inside look at the words we use among ourselves, and the ways we size each other up from the very beginning.
Interpretations. Hmm. Tricky. I think I mostly focused on the interpretation of the femme's general appearance as straight, and how that is really hard to fight against (especially because the LGBTQ community is so small anyway, it's damn near impossible to tell how many women are femmes from within that narrow a minority with any kind of accuracy), and how femmes have tried to swim upstream against that presumption.
6. What did your adventure teach you? Why does such a group exist? What does it say about our society? Effective Conclusions:
- How will you wrap your paper up?
I wrapped up my paper with a reiteration of my paper's main points--there weren't any warnings I felt I needed to give, or anything like that, but I also chose to make my point by describing how I had found love and been able to find a meaningful love at that, even though I had to fight my invisibility as a femme to do it.
Femmes really exist because we were "born this way." Nothing we can really do about it--we like to look like girls and be feminine and adorable, but we were never really given a choice whether or not to be attracted to the same sex and be able to love members of the same sex romantically. Sort of like we weren't able to choose our ethnicity or whether we are right- or left-handed.
What we say about society....hm. There's a lot there. We seem to be a product of the largely male-determined ideal of female beauty in society, made manifest and put out in the world. We're queer, so we represent a part of society which is still sort of shameful to be a part of (and even to admit the validity of--look at how many states are trying to ban us from getting married to members of the same sex, and how many churches out there are trying to "fix" homosexuals and bisexuals), but is gaining respect and a place at the table--albeit at a snail's pace,. and with some full stops and backsliding just for fun along the way. The fact that we are invisible in society (femmes, that is) maybe says that society in general has a narrow idea of what "gay" is supposed to look like, and maybe that's why lesbians are sort of chilly toward us at first--we are incongruent with even their definition of what is queer-looking. Society at large has decided that women are for looking at and that our primary value is in being prett and sexually attractive to the opposite sex. Women who aren't looking for approval from the opposite sex tend to look different--they aren't going to follow rules set out by men, because they want nothing to do with men, romantically/sexually. So, the inference is often made by both hetero men and homo women that a woman who adheres to the traditional, heteronormative standard of beauty for women, is obviously looking for approval and/or advances from men--and the further assumption is made that that desire for men is exclusive--that the women who look the way men want them to are ONLY interested in women. I think that says a lot about the presumptions our society makes about women based solely on our looks. Our words are even negated by our looks, sometimes. So strange. Seems like we still have a way to go before we "get it."
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