Femme interiorities: A provocation

Abstract

Femme interiorities is a series of provocations and essays – methodological, creative, and theoretical – devoted to thinking about femininity and its multiple interior forms, iterations, and archives. How do we tell the story of femininities, take it back, tell it anew, from feminist, queer, raced, diasporic, decolonial modes of being? Femme, as we define it, assembles and fissures an irreverent and fugitive femininity, and in so doing, gestures to femininity’s oblique relation to the libidinous, to immodesty, to eroticism, to sensation, and to flesh just as it too signals to other knowledges, memories, stories, hapticities, hauntings, and socialities. We find interiorities to be a compelling spatial metaphor because, on the one hand, it gestures to that which is inside, enclosed, private, hidden, inaccessible, and introspective, while on the other hand, it signals to the very act(s) of penetrating/entering the femme. At its core, then, this special forum considers the question: What does it mean to be inside the femme?