Soft Femme Theory: Femme Internet Aesthetics and the Politics of “Softness”

Abstract

Twenty years ago, the figure of the femme appeared on a book cover wielding a knife; more recently, the femme has appeared on Instagram crying in a Polly Pocket skirt. Online, femme is increasingly called “tender,” “radically vulnerable,” and “soft.” In this article, I examine soft femme digital culture on Instagram, and argue that the discourse of “softness” is used to articulate belonging and to resist neoliberal, masculinist logics. Through an analysis of Instagram images and interviews with femmes, I develop an understanding of softness as a combination of emotionality, vulnerability, relationality, and hyperfemininity. I argue that soft femme is an aesthetic form and a theoretical position that expands the category of femme to be more inclusive of diverse subjects. Soft femme theory fills the gaps in femme theory left by critiques of existing femme identity theory that centers performance, irony, and the figure of the hard femme. Through the discourse of softness, femme becomes something one can be like, rather than something one just looks like.

Introduction

In literature of the late 1990s and early 2000s, femme was described as “a bad girl” (Crocker & Harris, 1997), as “brassy” and “ballsy” (Albrecht-Samarasinha, 1997), and as “brazen” (Brushwood Rose & Camilleri, 2002). More recently, on Instagram, femme has been described as “tender,” “radically vulnerable,” and “soft.” Femme is a queer, feminine identity with roots in the US working-class lesbian bar culture of the 1940s and 1950s (Nestle, 1992b), as well as drag and ball culture, beginning in 1960s Harlem (Bailey, 2014). Across queer subcultures, femme is understood as a mode of interpreting femininity queerly. Femme has been conceptualized as a sexual style, often erotically paired with the butch lesbian in lesbian culture (Hollibaugh & Moraga, 1992; Nestle, 1992b). Femme sexuality has also been understood as a source of empowerment or healing, especially for women who have experienced sexual trauma or have been urged to repress their (queer) sexual appetite under heteropatriarchal rules (Albrecht-Samarasinha, 1997; Cvetkovich, 2003). Femme has also been theorized as a gender identity or presentation that embraces feminine aesthetics, particularly those that have been deemed oppressive or normative by some feminists (McCann, 2018b; Nestle, 1992a; Walker, 2012), as well as a gender presentation that subverts or resists cis- and heteronormative feminine scripts (Bailey, 2014; Brushwood Rose & Camilleri, 2002; Duggan & McHugh, 1996; Hollibaugh, 2000). Femme’s ability to blur boundaries between normative (appearing feminine, straight, or cis) and subversive (while being feminist, queer, or trans) has rendered it a beguiling and resistant political figure (Brushwood Rose & Camilleri, 2002; Duggan & McHugh, 1996; Galewski, 2005; Hemmings, 1999; Hoskin & Taylor, 2019; Lewis, 2012).

Femme is known for mixing and matching masculinity and femininity (McCann, 2018b; Nicholson, 2014), and has appeared on book covers this way: in tight clothing that reveals feminized flesh while simultaneously wielding a dagger, in one instance (Brushwood Rose & Camilleri, 2002). Recently, however, femme has started to appear differently on many Instagram accounts. Scrolling through the social media platform reveals a slightly different version of femme: still queer, still nonbinary, still hyperfeminine, but also appearing “soft.” In this article, I examine soft femme digital culture on Instagram, and argue that the discourse of “softness” is used to articulate belonging and to resist neoliberal, masculinist logics.

While softness certainly surfaces in offline femme culture, I focus here on the soft femme digital culture on Instagram. Technology, perhaps especially social media, has had a great impact on cultures of gender and sexuality. Platforms that are based around user-generated content, like Tumblr and YouTube, have enabled the increased visibility of trans and queer communities (Connell, 2013; Nicholson, 2014; Fink & Miller, 2014), and the labeling or tagging practices on Tumblr have been the grounds on which the “terminology revolution” around gender and sexuality has unfolded (Oakley, 2016, p. 1). Furthermore, specific cultures of femininity have become visible on Instagram, including entrepreneurial femininity (Duffy & Hund, 2015), aging femininities (Tiidenberg, 2018), “empowered femininity” negotiated by female bodybuilders (Marshall et al., 2019), and progressive/pious femininities (Baulch & Pramiyanti, 2018). Social media has given rise to new cultures of gender and sexuality, as well as increased the visibility of marginalized genders and sexualities.

How online communities, including those based around particular genders or sexualities, engage with the specific features of a given platform is often what leads to defining the bounds of that community and the norms of its digital culture (see, for example, Baym, 2000). For example, Kanai (2019) studied a series .gif-based Tumblr blogs, a popular format on the platform that posits a scenario followed by the user’s reaction illustrated through a .gif—typically one that has little literal relevance to the scenario in question, which has a humorous effect. Kanai (2019) found that, through engaging with the platform in this way, young women created their own digital culture with its own norms, norms that include humorously expressing one’s minor failures at neoliberal femininity, among others. Femme digital cultures contain their own norms and expectations, such as celebrating fat fashion or “fatshion” (Connell, 2013) and enacting politically inflected expressions of grief to mourn a femme community member (Schwartz, 2018). In this article, I investigate “softness” as another component of femme Internet culture through a study of images posted on Instagram and interviews with femme Instagram users.

I understand softness as a combination of emotionality, vulnerability, relationality, and hyperfemininity, a conceptualization that developed from my own analysis as well as from the explicit usage of the terms “soft” and “softness” in femme Internet culture. Vulnerability has been taken up in femme literature, often in discussions of sexuality (Albrecht-Samarasinha, 1997; Hollibaugh & Moraga, 1992), but also more recently in discussions of platonic femme intimacies and attachments (Dahl, 2017; McCann, 2018a). Softness is further anchored in femme literature through my conceptualization of softness as a theoretical position, one that marks a shift in existing femme theory.

Key concerns in femme theory have so far included femme (in)visibility, or not being legible as queer due to one’s gender presentation and/or race (Hemmings, 1999; Lewis, 2012; Story, 2017), femmephobia, or the prejudice against feminine objects and subjects that exists in both queer and straight cultures (Brightwell, 2017; Hoskin, 2017), and the resistive potential of queer femininity. I understand soft femme theory as a necessary extension and development of the critique of existing femme theories that locate femme’s primary political contribution in its subversion of, resistance to, and ironic performance of femininity (Albrecht-Samarasinha, 1997; Brushwood Rose & Camilleri, 2002; Duggan & McHugh, 1996; Hollibaugh, 2000). Several scholars have been critical of this position because it works to create a hierarchy between femme and femininity, and inadvertently privileges masculinity (Galewski, 2005; Martin, 1996; McCann, 2018b; VanNewkirk, 2006; Walker, 2012). In embracing and utilizing feminized or soft traits like emotionality, vulnerability, and relationality, rather than seeking to subvert or resist them, I argue that soft femme theory offers a more nuanced and capacious understanding of the political potential of femininity. I argue that an orientation toward softness shifts the parameters through which we understand femme: it makes femme a more inclusive category, one better able to encompass the diverse and intersectional lives and bodies that dwell within it. Charting this discourse through Instagram, a platform that is visual and interactive, makes apparent that softness is both a politically informed aesthetic and a code of conduct in femme Internet culture.

Method

For this article, I conducted an online ethnography of femme Internet culture on Instagram. My interest in this research project began with my own participation in femme Internet culture on various platforms, a digital culture that I grew to understand as a rich space of knowledge and cultural production. My goal for my overall project is to take femme Internet culture seriously to theorize its contributions to femme theory.

There are many pre-existing strategies to take seriously the knowledge produced outside the academy: Weston (1995) distinguishes between “straight theorizing” and “street theorizing”; Muñoz (1999) understands cultural workers as theory producers; Nyong’o (2005) proposes a “punk or punk’d theory”; and Halberstam (2011) borrows “low theory” from Stuart Hall. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam (2011) uses “low theory” and “popular knowledge” to seek alternatives to neoliberal ideologies and “to look for a way out of the usual traps and impasses of binary formulations” (p. 2). Utilizing low theory as a framework enables me to take the Internet—and femme—seriously as a site of cultural and knowledge production.

As I seek to attend to the social relations of a particular group (femmes) and situate these relations in a broader context, ethnography becomes the most appropriate approach (Buch & Staller, 2014). My method is informed by Dahl’s (2011) femme-inist ethnography and Hine’s (2017) methodology for online ethnography. Dahl (2011, p. 10) argues that studying one’s own community (in my case, femmes) queers the traditional notions of being “home” in the academy and “away” in the ethnographic field. In the ethnographic tradition, distance signals “objectivity” which renders the research “scientific” (Dahl, 2011, p. 5). Closing the psychic gap between researcher and informant by doing a study of one’s own community is part of the necessary queer challenge to notions of what “counts” as theoretical work. Femme-inist ethnography also enables collaborative methods, which question the hierarchy between the researcher and their informants (Dahl, 2011). Collaborative methods mean understanding subjects not just as informants, but as experts and co-producers of theory (Dahl, 2011). As a longtime participant in femme Internet culture, I am aware that femmes’ vast cultural outputs continue without researcher observation, but my training as an academic does enable me to describe and translate the significance of femme culture for the academic community, which I believe is a worthwhile project.

As a queer, femme-identified person, I am positioned as an insider in the culture I am studying. Blurring the lines between researcher and participant is not unusual in studies of queer subcultures (Halberstam, 2008) or in online ethnographies (Hine, 2017, p. 10). Hine (2017) outlines multiple ways to conduct online ethnographies, emphasizing a “multimodal approach” (p. 3) which contextualizes the online world in a broader cultural context and considers the Internet as more than just a textual media. The multimodal approach described by Hine is useful to frame my study, which considers Instagram—a visual and textual platform. While I frame softness as an organizing component of femme digital culture, I also endeavor to show its value as a theoretical position given the broader social context.

Data Collection

To conduct my study, I created a researcher account on Instagram (which stated my intent to research the community and included my contact) and spent a period of 6 months following other (public only) femme accounts, liking and commenting on posts, making my own posts, and taking notes and screen captures. I collected three types of data: notes on my observations, screen captures of posts, and interviews with seven femme Instagram account operators that I solicited through my researcher account.

Online researchers have developed nuanced guidelines to navigate Internet privacy. Eynon et al. (2017) emphasize being sensitive to the values, aims, and expectations of privacy in the specific online context of study. Although users may not use technological means (such as passwords) to keep their posts and conversations hidden, this does not necessarily negate the expectation of privacy. In contexts where there is a higher expectation of privacy, the more like human subjects the online representations should be treated (as opposed to treating them as texts); conversely, the more public the online representations and expressions are, the more the posters and posts can be treated as authors and texts, rather than as human subjects. Lee et al. (2017) advise seeking informed consent in instances of high expectations of privacy. Since I follow Dahl’s (2011: 10) methodology that conceives of participants as co-producers of theory and adds the third version of “citing” to the feminist ethnographic principles of “siting” and “sighting”, my approach is more in line with treating online representations as authors and texts, though I did seek informed consent to conduct interviews for the purposes of this study. However, as some of my participants wanted to remain anonymous, and others have since changed their usernames, I have assigned pseudonyms to my interview participants here, since I am unable to cite them properly.

Results

Below, I offer a close reading of three images from my study. Through sharing my findings, I show how softness is a strategy used to engage in the femme negotiation of vulnerability, to create a discourse of healing, and to pose a challenge to masculinist and neoliberal norms. I will then discuss how the discourse of softness in femme Internet culture creates a more capacious definition of femme and, through reclaiming feminized traits beyond the ornamental, makes a significant contribution to femme theory.

(Re)Negotiating Vulnerability Through Soft Aesthetics

What I have come to term “softness”—a combination of hyperfemininity, emotionality, relationality, and vulnerability—shows up in femme Internet culture in a number of ways, including as an aesthetic sensibility. As an aesthetic, softness employs hyperfeminine or “girly” symbols (like bows, flowers, pastel colors, and baby animals) frequently organized in a visually soothing manner. Soft aesthetics are visible in selfies, photographs, illustrations, and other graphics that are all common to femme Instagram. In selfies and other photographs of people, soft aesthetics are further identified by displays of physical and emotional vulnerability, meaning certain ways of revealing parts of one’s femme body, including baring skin, displaying body fat or body hair or body scars, casting the eyes down or otherwise away from the camera, and posing with flowers or other soft symbols. Soft aesthetics also look like displaying emotional reactions, like taking a photo while crying or embracing the self or another person. Here, however, I focus on non-selfie images.

The first image in discussion shows black text on a white background that reads, “You gonna cry about it or boss up?” On a new line, the text continues, “First of all imma do both.” The image employs a soft aesthetic sensibility: the simple Serif font is the sole focus of the image and the ample negative space is visually underwhelming rather than overwhelming. The message in the text dispels the myth that crying and toughness are mutually exclusive, which emphasizes the acceptability of emotionality and resists the disavowal of emotional sensitivity dictated by neoliberal, masculinist logics. This type of soft image stands in contrast to past images of femme alluded to above, such as the cover of the well-known femme anthology Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity (Brushwood Rose & Camilleri, 2002). The cover image is a photograph of a femme sitting on a chair, wearing tight, black clothing, and stabbing a knife into the seat between her legs. The figure is cast in dark shadows and the image itself is sharp and highly contrasted. This iconic cover illustrates the classic femme negotiation of vulnerability, or the question of how to combine both hardness and softness: the knife and tough-looking black clothing contrast the abundance of exposed flesh, the particularly vulnerable inner thighs and particularly feminine cleavage. The soft image from contemporary femme Internet culture still negotiates vulnerability, albeit a different kind: the vulnerability that comes with displays or admissions of emotional upset.

The proliferation of soft aesthetics in femme Internet culture matches general trends across the platform; Leaver et al. (2020, p. 72) identify “muted pastel palettes and washed-out backgrounds” and “flatlay still lifes” as two of many common “tropes, templates and clichés” of Instagram aesthetics. Considering the context of Instagram’s aesthetic culture reveals that softness is a femme digital culture shaped by the technological affordances (such as filters) and broader culture of its particular platform: Instagram.

The Discourse of Healing

Softness is an aesthetic feature of femme Internet culture, but femme Internet culture is also structured by thematic elements I understand as soft. One such element of soft femme digital culture is healing. The theme of healing reveals itself in another image: a multi-panel image of white text on alternating pastel-colored backgrounds in pink, peach, green, blue, and purple. The similarly alternating white text reads, “You are loved. You are important. You are beautiful. You are worth it,” repeating each phrase twice. This image is aesthetically soft: the colors are pastel, the contrast is low so the letters are almost indistinguishable against the background, and the text is repeated, like a mantra. The use of blank or negative space increases the soothing quality of the composition. In addition to soft aesthetics, this image demonstrates a discourse of healing which is central to soft femme digital culture.

Femme identification has already been understood as mode of healing (Cvetkovich, 2003; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2002), but the performance of vulnerability enabled by Instagram, particularly by posting selfies and sharing details of one’s life, experiences, and feelings, has exploded the potential to heal through embracing feminized behaviors and traits, like sharing difficult emotions. According to Illouz (2007), the ability to communicate one’s emotions and recognize the emotions of others is the emotional style of modernity (fostered by the needs of capitalism). Similarly, Turkle (2011) has observed that younger generations who have “grown up tethered”—meaning grown up with the level of connectivity made possible and normalized through mobile devices and social media—will share emotions, usually through text message or social media, before they are fully formed or felt. Indeed, sharing and even oversharing are the norms of social media (Kennedy, 2018). The turn to softness, coded in part by emotionality and relationality, in femme digital culture, then, is enabled by the technological affordances and culture of Instagram (including image sharing, image filters, pastel palettes, minimalist design, social networking through comments, likes, and follows), as well as trends in (digital) culture more broadly (such as over/sharing).

Healing one’s relationship to the self or the perception of the self after having gone through something traumatic, like sexual assault, or experiencing the ongoing trauma of enduring sexism, homophobia, ableism, or racism, or living with chronic illness or disability is a common theme among posts that address healing in femme Internet culture. Online, healing often takes the form of self love, seen through the spread of affirming messages, like those in the image described earlier: “You are loved. You are beautiful. You are important. You are worth it.” But healing is not only centered on the self: one of my interviewees, Jaye, often posts videos in which they recite affirmations, or selfies with captions that serve as affirmations, such as,

[ . . . ] Thank you, (yes, you, humxn/being reading this) babely babe, for being yourself and living so vibrantly. You light up my world. You are invaluable and your worth is not defined/determined by your productivity. Stay dreamy and tender [ . . . ]

Jaye says these affirmations emerged out of a personal goal to locate their sense of worth, value, and attractiveness in how they perceive and treat themselves, rather than how others react to or perceive them, and now they offer these affirmations to themselves and to others by posting them publicly.

In soft femme digital culture, the focus on emotionality and healing is framed as a mode of resistance to neoliberal calls for rationality and a certain kind of productivity. However, it is worth noting that these types of phrases—“You are worth it”—also show up in neoliberal marketing that works to emphasize self-care and self-regulation as ways to encourage productivity, consumption, and individualism over collective responses. In this way, soft femme digital culture does not exist outside of neoliberalism or perhaps even in full resistance to its forces; these tenets of soft femme digital culture can be understood as evidence of the ongoing negotiation of neoliberalism, feminism, and queer resistance undertaken by femmes in digital culture.

Femme as a Healing Gender: Undoing Exclusion, Embodying Authenticity

The theme of healing in soft femme digital culture opens up the category of femme to more capacious interpretations. In this sense, femme embodiment or identification is taken up as a mode of healing one’s relationship to harmful ideals of femme-ininity; softness becomes a mode of femme identification. For example, my interviewee Jaye is committed to affirming themselves and other femmes, but in doing so resists focussing on how “beautiful” or “sexy” femmes look to avoid further objectifying or dehumanizing them, or reifying a femme ideal that is based on the thin, White, European, able-bodied norm of femininity. They say,

You know, when you are femme and you don’t look the way you’ve been told femme is supposed to look, it’s hard to feel attractive and valuable. [ . . . ] It’s hard because no matter how much movement there is, we’re still in a place where femme looks a certain way. And so with that I think that there are a lot of femmes that I follow [on Instagram] that are nonbinary, and it’s really awesome and affirming to see other people identify as femme and not experience that identity as a performance, but something really authentic and genuine to who they are. And also, it takes it out of this really, kind of essentialist notion that to be femme is to be a woman.

While I would complicate the binary set up here between authenticity and performance—and to do so sufficiently is beyond the scope of this article—I understand the intention of this comment as an attempt to view certain traits and characteristics, like vulnerability and emotionality, as sufficient ways of performing femininity to expand the notion of “femme” to include more marginalized bodies and subjects, including those who are racialized, disabled, fat, trans, or nonbinary. Doing so has been affirming for Jaye, who is White, nonbinary, and femme, as well as Instagram user and interviewee Danielle, who is a Black, femme, trans woman. For Danielle, shifting her ideas of femme, like Jaye, from “looking” femme to “being” femme meant finding a sense of inner peace and belonging. She said,

For me at first it came from a place of longing. It was so cool for me finally to be able to identify as [femme] and not feel any strings attached to it. It wasn’t like, “I have to fill this kind of a space up, and I have to look a certain kind of way, and I have to like . . . ” you know what I mean? “Be this person who is all pretty and done up.” [ . . . ] It was crazy seeing all this beauty and all this glamour [on Instagram], which is what I love, but it was fucking my head up because I can’t look like that every day, you know, so it was fucking me up. But I came to a place now where I feel like, you know, this is where I am, this is what I bring. Femme is me. Femme is self identification. It’s autonomy, being able to feel like even if you don’t fit the cis-normative or, like, white-centric view of what a femme is, what that entails, you don’t have to adopt that. It’s an innate thing. It’s an innate thing. It’s been innate in me since forever. And I just tap into that energy, you feel me? I tap into that femme goddess energy that’s inside of me.

Danielle’s narrative shows that the affirmations found across femme Internet culture are not just aesthetic; femmes internalize the messages encountered on Instagram, like “you are enough,” “you are important,” and “you are worth it.”

For Danielle, doing this healing work prompted a shift in how she conceptualizes not her own identity, but in how she conceptualizes femme identity as a whole; affirming her femme identity despite being unable to attain an idealized standard of femme-inine beauty meant conceptualizing femme as an innate way of being—an energy—rather than a way of presenting. Femme, then, becomes something one can feel like, rather than something one must look like.

Softness as Resistance

In femme Internet culture, softness is posited as a form of resistance to neoliberal and masculinist ideals. The idea of softness as resistance is taken up in many ways across Instagram, but here I focus on a photograph of a collage-style diary entry that reads, “Being soft is an act of resistance.” A diary is a feminized symbol, one most often associated with girlhood. The collaged entry is made of hand-drawn flowers, a pasted-on doily, and a combination of hand-drawn and magazine-clipped letters. Although this image is visually “busier” than the others described here, the collage style harks to childhood arts and crafts, a pastime associated with girlhood or recommended for stress relief, and thus, the sensibility is feminized and soft. The message of the text itself, like the other images collected here, refutes the assumption that softness is weakness, and in fact, takes this sentiment further by calling softness an act of resistance. What is being resisted is unclear, although the image was posted by an Instagram account that focuses on femme healing, which suggests softness might be a way to resist further traumatization; it might be a way to recover, or a mode of survival.

The images in soft femme digital culture share a number of soft visual strategies, like ample negative space, pastel colors, and low contrast. They also share symbolic references of softness, like flowers and girlhood, which solidify the relationship between softness and femininity. For all of its gentleness, the turn to softness is framed as a radical movement, a movement to reclaim feminized qualities (like softness, vulnerability, and emotionality) and feminized subjects (like femmes) as valuable—a quintessentially femme movement. Racialized women, especially Black women, have historically been excluded from the Western definition of womanhood and femininity (Collins, 2004, A. Davis, 1983; hooks, 1981), so for racialized and Black femmes (not all of whom identify as women), claiming softness is an especially radical move. Significantly, the images described here were posted by both White femmes and femmes of color, signaling that despite how softness or femininity may be culturally coded, it is accessed by both racialized and White femmes.

The masculinist status quo is also resisted through the discourse of softness. Many images in femme Internet culture declare similar messages: “being soft is an act of resistance,” “do not mistake sensitivity for weakness,” “radical vulnerability as a weapon,” and “there is so much strength in this softness that I have found” are all phrases that I encountered in images on Instagram. The interest in redefining softness (also sometimes coded as “emotions,” “tenderness,” “vulnerability,” and “sensitivity” in other images) as strength can be understood as a rejection of masculinist ways of thinking. In soft femme digital culture, sensitivity, emotionality, vulnerability, and interdependence are recoded as expressions of strength, marking an alignment with feminized qualities and traits that have been disparaged by a masculinist society. Circulating the discourse of softness on Instagram is one way femmes demonstrate the prioritization of feminized perspectives or theorizing over masculinist modes of thought. There is a theoretical component to softness as well as an aesthetic component, which can be read through visual cues as well as the use of text.

Discussion

Feeling Femme: Softness and Authenticity

McCann (2018b) is critical of the focus in femme literature on agency and empowerment as the primary ways femme identity is activated. She urges a shift in focus away from the “meanings” of experiences and toward the “feeling” of femme, which she says enables a way around categorizing feminine expression as either “good” (meaning “resistant”) or “bad” (meaning “capitulating”), and, further, enables femme’s possibilities to be located in joy, desire, and pleasure rather than political representation. For McCann (2018b), “feeling” encompasses both the sensate and affective dimensions of femme embodiment, which also arise in discussions within what I have been calling soft femme digital culture. In particular, softness has been framed as a way of feeling femme.

In discussing softness, vulnerability, and tenderness through my interviews, the word “authentic” was so often repeated it is worth paying attention to. There has been anxiety around authenticity and the Internet since the Internet was invented (Oakley, 2016; Turkle, 1997), and femininity has always been deemed inauthentic or fake, especially in relation to naturalized masculinity (Dahl, 2012; Hoskin, 2017). It is interesting, then, that being tender, soft, or vulnerable—in other words, embodying or enacting feminine traits—online is seen by my interviewees as an authentic way of being, especially an authentic way of being femme.

Bialystok (2013) says authenticity can apply “compellingly” (pp. 122–123) to sex/gender identity. She argues for a qualified embrace of essentialism—understood as identity traits rather than a gender binary (Bialystok, 2013). Through her study of trans-identified folks, Bialystok (2013) argues that it is possible to have a true identity, and that sex/gender can be essential without being confined to a binary or other mandatory expression. Following Bialystok, it is possible to conceptualize femme identity as something authentic or essential to the self, and this understanding enables a widening of femme identity to include those who may not look femme, but feel femme.

Under the turn to softness in femme Internet culture, femme also becomes something one can be like. The “longing” to be like others that is articulated by femmes like Danielle represents a kind of vulnerability. Dahl (2017) argues that there is vulnerability in wanting to be like others, to be with others, to be understood by others, and to be respected by others. In other words, we become vulnerable when we seek intimacy, connection, and community. Vulnerability—the risk of seeking to belong and be seen—becomes the thing that holds femme communities together, what Dahl (2017) calls “the glue of techne and soma emerging as a shape” (p. 44). For Danielle, this kind of vulnerability led to a shift in conceptualizing femme. For Jaye and others, being tender or radically vulnerable online creates femme connection and community. The turn to softness in femme Internet culture shifts the conceptualization of femme toward a way of feeling or being that is “authentic.” This shift deemphasizes an aesthetic understanding of femme that has been quite exclusionary, perhaps especially for trans, nonbinary, and racialized femmes.

It is not a coincidence that these shifts are happening online. Recent Internet studies contrast the past anxieties about online authenticity: Hart (2018: 178) has found that Tumblr is perceived as a space of both emotional and embodied authenticity, and Favaro’s (2017) study of online women’s magazines framed online content as more “authentic” and “real” than print (notwithstanding the critique that this turn to authenticity is part of a branding strategy). Similarly, Kanai (2019) argues that articulating minor failures or struggles with attaining neoliberal, postfeminist expectations is how young women present themselves as “relatable,” a key component of young women’s digital culture. The postfeminist logics that structure this online space, however, demand that these minor failures be framed as individual rather than systemic, and that they are presented in a detached way, like through humor, or the maintenance of “coolness” (Kanai, 2019, p. 168). There is, then, an affective difference in the presentations of authenticity across different digital cultures. In soft femme digital culture, authenticity, vulnerability, and emotionality are embraced and expressed earnestly and without irony, which challenges neoliberal and postfeminism imperatives of self-regulation that structure other digital cultures of femininity (Kanai, 2019). Regardless of how it is presented, however, the discourse of authenticity is enabled, and even demanded, by digital culture.

Softness as Political Intervention

While soft femme digital culture shares aesthetic and discursive components with other digital cultures, the focus on resistance is distinctive. Kanai (2019) argues that the young women’s digital culture created through the .gif-based blogs she studied “operates within a juxtapolitical space” (p. 157), a term that comes from Berlant’s (2008) work on intimate publics. Berlant (2008) writes of “women’s culture” as the first mass cultural intimate public, which was marked by cultural commodities that simultaneously presumed and created a sense of a common women’s experience. While intimate publics are “juxtapolitical”—meaning they thrive “in proximity to the political, occasionally crossing over in political alliance, even more occasionally doing some politics, but most often not” (p. x)—they remain seductive because “they magnetize optimism about living and being connected to strangers in a kind of nebulous communitas” (p. xi.) Being with similarly oppressed others offers us a relief from feeling oppressed, a relief that is pleasurable and comforting enough to foreclose more active political engagement.

Berlant’s concept of intimate publics has been frequently applied to the digital world (Andreassen, 2017; Dobson et al., 2018; Favaro, 2017; Kanai, 2017), while femme blogs have been conceptualized as other kinds of publics (Connell, 2013; Schwartz, 2016). Elsewhere, Kanai’s (2017) study of digital negotiations of intimate publics through a framework of “girlfriendship” (p. 298) demonstrates the key differences of digital intimate publics, particularly the labor of Do-It-Yourself participation and the discernment and skill required to be successful in this realm. Kanai says this required savvy and discipline contrasts the escapism that Berlant assigns to intimate publics, a contrast that allows me to remain convinced that, unlike Berlant’s juxtapolitical intimate publics, femme Internet culture is political and politically mobilizing, despite its pleasures and comforts (Schwartz, 2016). In fact, I argue, in femme Internet culture, affective states and labor are both claims of belonging or sameness, and politicized acts.

While “sentimentality” and “complaint” structure women’s culture (Berlant, 2008) and postfeminism structures young women’s digital culture (Kanai, 2017), femme Internet culture is structured by the politicized turn to softness. As mentioned, “oversharing” and “authenticity” are typical of all digital cultures, and this becomes politicized in femme Internet culture under the rubric of recuperating the feminine. The emphasis for soft femmes in healing and affirming themselves and other femmes is the realization of Dahl’s (2017) call for an analysis of vulnerability in spaces beyond “the bedroom”; they connect and support each other—even just by offering their stories or acting as a kind of “role model”—through their performance of vulnerability online. As soft femmes emphasize the importance of affirming other femmes, they continue the project engaged by Brushwood Rose and Camilleri (2002) and others of uncoupling butch and femme identities, and explore other forms of queer connection and solidarity. In femme Internet culture, an emphasis on vulnerability enables a shift toward a more capacious femme identity and a plurality of queer alliances.

Soft Femme Theory: Propelling Critical Femininity Studies Further

The authenticity discourse that often accompanies soft femme culture, or the online performance of tenderness or vulnerability, marks a departure from past femme aesthetics discussed earlier, but also from past political and theoretical emphasis on hardness, irony, and a particular flavor of performativity that has marked much of femme theory. Duggan and McHugh (1996) wrote,

Fem(me) science questions the dignity and wisdom of anyone who would wear pink without irony [ . . . ] Fem(me) science considers femininity a debased and fallen form of itself—a (pre)historic faux pas, an inexplicable lapse into a morass, a swamp of sincerity and sentimentality. (pp. 156–157)

Contemporary femme philosophies clearly have a different take on sincerity and sentimentality. The soft femme appears in the spaces that have been opened up by critiques of hard or high femme, the figure which has so far dominated femme theory. One major critique of existing femme theory is the tendency to create a binary between queer and straight femininity, or as Walker (2012) puts it, between “radicalized bad girls” and “debased good girls” (p. 800), which she says contributes to the construction of heterosexual femininity as victimization. Martin (1996), too, is critical of how gender and sexuality have been theorized in postmodern theory. She writes,

I am particularly interested, here, in a resistance to something called “the feminine,” played straight, and in a tendency to assume that when it is not camped up or disavowed, it constitutes a capitulation, a swamp, something maternal, ensnared and ensnaring. (Martin, 1996, p. 73)

VanNewkirk (2006, p. 76) also writes of “queering femininity” as a curiosity, “as if femininity is manifested in a fixed and natural state that must then be modified or ruptured by the abnormal and therefore defiant queer impact”. These theorists call into question the assumed difference between straight and queer femininity, particularly that one is chosen and therefore radical while the other is assumed to be adopted uncritically. While this construction may be useful to position femme as subversive and radical, it is at the expense of other femininities and still assumes that some kind of natural femininity exists.

Furthermore, Walker (2012) is critical of the tendency in femme theory to privilege an ironic, campy, or otherwise highly visible or visual version of femme, an impossible standard to maintain for an aging femme. She writes,

Lately, the playground of consumer culture was becoming a minefield: shimmery eye shadows emphasized fine lines; matte red lipstick suddenly looked too brash; vintage clothes looked suspiciously like I might have bought them new. I had always been a conservative dresser, but now it seemed less a choice than a requirement. What, I wondered, was a middle-aged femme to do? What, indeed, did a middle-aged femme look like? (p. 796)

This quote points to a sense of rigidity within femme identity theory. There seems to be only one version of femme identity, one that is youth-centered, campy, and ironic.

Ideals of femme-ininity are similarly difficult for mad, sick, and disabled femmes to achieve. In an essay in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) responded to odes to femmes penned by butch or masculine queers that revere perfect eyeliner or five-inch heels. Piepzna-Samarasinha (2018) asked, “But what about when you’re a femme and you’re too depressed and fucked up to perfect that eyeliner wing? What about when you’re femme and suicidal and you’ve been in the same sleep pants that smell bad for weeks?” (pp. 196–197). These questions intentionally reveal the labor behind the beloved femme presentation, a gesture of vulnerability that is similarly replicated online, and demonstrate one of the ways a shift toward vulnerability and softness in femme discourse presses at the edges of the femme category, making it capacious enough to include femmes with disabilities, chronic or mental illness, or trauma who may not always look the part.

The figure of the soft femme moves the understanding of femininity as a whole away from the narrative of victimization; in fact, it routes around questions of victimization by refuting the equation of vulnerability with shortcoming or potential victimization (Butler, 2004; Drichel, 2013), and rather positions it as necessary and enabling. Soft femme, then, theorizes feminized traits, like vulnerability, as sources of strength and sites of connection. Soft femme theory presents femininity as more than an oppressive set of aesthetics women have been duped into adopting, and femme as more than a resistance, subversion, or rejection of these women. An understanding of femme that marks emotionality, vulnerability, and other so-called “weaknesses” (like disability, neurodivergence, or being a survivor of sexual violence) as points of pride, is perhaps the antidote sought by critical femme scholars who have worried about living up to high femme’s highly performative standards.

Conclusion

My analysis of images from femme Internet culture and interviews with Instagram femmes reveal a turn to softness in femme culture. Softness is a combination of emotionality, vulnerability, relationality, and hyperfemininity that shapes aesthetics and conduct in femme Internet culture. The turn to softness has been enabled by trends on Instagram specifically, such as pastel palettes, as well by trends in an increasingly digital culture, like (over)sharing emotions online. Softness, then, is a structuring element of femme Internet culture. In fact, enacting and embodying softness is a strategy utilized by femmes seeking belonging in femme community and culture, especially those that do not embody norms of feminine beauty or acceptability that are structured by neoliberalism, racism, cissexism, and heteropatriarchy.

As have many other digital cultures in recent years, the soft femme digital culture developed around negotiations of femininity online. While soft femme digital culture shares tendencies with other digital cultures of femininity, it is unique in its resistance to masculinist and neoliberal logics that seek to cast out emotionality, vulnerability, and interdependence in favor of rationality, humor, and individualism. The embrace of these highly feminized traits—emotionality, vulnerability, relationality, and hyperfemininity—is the distinguishing mark of soft femme digital culture, and of soft femme’s contributions to femme theory. Femme theory seeks to frame femininity as valuable, and has so far made these theoretical claims through an emphasis on subversion, irony, and agency. As I detailed earlier, several femme scholars have been critical of this theoretical strategy, arguing that it privileges masculinity and perpetuates the notion of femininity as victimization. The soft femme appears in the spaces opened up by these critiques, ready to carry forward the femme project of recuperating the feminine, particularly its weakest parts, the girlish, emotional, and pathologized parts that have yet to be sufficiently reclaimed. Through an insistence on softness, earnestness, and vulnerability, the femme continues to expand, to be more emotional, to wear more pink, and to further resist masculinist ideals.