Femme Literary Meme

We deserve a meme of our own!

Best all-around femme self-help book  Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life.  A fountain of wisdom.  The book includes gems such as: 

• “Never forget that only you can ever fully appreciate your own true beauty.” 
• “The essence of managing money is managing to have enough of it.”
• Miss Piggy on choosing a career:  “Does your chosen career offer an opporutnity fo genuine fashion growth?”

Butch literary crush  (character, not author) Beebo Brinker by Ann Bannon

Femme literary crush  (character, not author) See my post Delta of Venus for answer 😉

Favorite femme author Amber Hollibaugh, My Dangerous Desires

Book you’d like to see turned into a movie  Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues

Best lesbian vampire of all time  Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (literature) and Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger (film)

Favorite femme fatale  Norma Desmond from the film Sunset Boulevard of course!

Butchest book you own  Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity

Femmest book you own  Helena Rubenstein, My Life for Beauty

Favorite genderqueer book Read My Lips:  Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender by Riki Wilchins

Bizarre conversation starter  William Burroughs, Naked Lunch  (also qualifies as one of the butchest books I own).  Causes straight guys who would ordinarily never speak to me think we have something in common.  Sorry, dude, we don’t.

What author do you own the most works by?  Literature:   Virginia Woolf ; Theory:  I own tons of Freud and Marx.

Favorite magazine  Allure.  If only they would make me an honorary beauty reporter!

Go-to beauty book  Kevyn Aucoin, Making Faces.  This is why they call them makeup artists.

Favorite biography (queer)  Tie!  The Scars of Sweet Paradise:  The Life and Times of Janis Joplin by Alice Echols and Holy Terror:   Andy Warhol Close Up by Bob Colacello

Lesbian classic you want to encourage more people to read Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.  Not an easy read, but the prose is gorgeous.

Hottest thing you’ve ever read  Carol Queen, The Leather Daddy and the Femme

True Confessions: I Heart Teaching

Even on my bad days–when I’m frustrated by naughty students who obviously haven’t done their reading or feeling less than inspired–even on those days, I can’t help but fall in love with teaching the minute I enter a classroom. I almost always leave class feeling more energized than when I entered it, not only because I appreciate the intellectual exchange that happens in my classrooms but also because I genuinely love opening up new worlds to students. I’ve taught for many years and I can honestly say that I’m still delighted when I look out into the classroom and see students looking back with bright eyes, their faces illuminated in that moment when new ideas seem to suddenly take flight.

Really good teaching, according to Mark Edmundson, is “about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call ‘counterintuitive’ but to the teacher means simply being honest… Good teachers perceive the world in alternative terms, and they push their students to test out these new, potentially enriching perspectives.”

In my view, being a good teacher means asking hard questions and refusing to accept easy answers. We–and I say we because I’m proud of being a good teacher–challenge our students to approach issues and problems from new angles. In other words, we encourage queer ways of seeing.

So, you’re wondering, what do I teach? Sublime Femmeness, of course!