Butch and femme are masculine (butch) or feminine (femme) identities in the lesbian subculture which have associated traits, behaviors, styles, self-perception, and so on. This concept has been called a "way to organize sexual relationships and gender and sexual identity". Butch–femme culture is not the sole form of a lesbian dyadic system, as there are many women in butch–butch and femme–femme relationships.
Femme is a term traditionally used to describe a lesbian woman who exhibits a feminine identity or gender presentation. While commonly viewed as a lesbian term, alternate meanings of the word also exist with some non-lesbian individuals using the word, notably some gay men, bisexuals, non-binary, and transgender individuals.
Cherríe Moraga is a Xicana feminist, writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English since 2017, and in 2022 became a distinguished professor. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Xicana Indígena, which is network fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights. In 2017, she co-founded, with Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Las Maestras Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought, Art, and Social Practice, located on the campus of UC Santa Barbara.
Boi is slang within gay male and butch and femme communities for several sexual or gender identities. In some lesbian communities, there is an increasing acceptance of variant gender expression, as well as allowing people to identify as a boi.
A soft butch, or stem (stud-fem), is a lesbian who exhibits some stereotypical butch traits without fitting the masculine stereotype associated with butch lesbians. Soft butch is on the spectrum of butch, as are stone butch and masculine, whereas on the contrary, ultra fem, high femme, and lipstick lesbian are some labels on the spectrum of lesbians with a more prominent expression of femininity, also known as femmes. Soft butches have gender expressions of women, but primarily display masculine characteristics; soft butches predominantly express masculinity with a touch of femininity.
Sue-Ellen Case is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the Theatre Department in the School of Theater Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Joan Nestle is a Lambda Award winning writer and editor and a founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, which holds, among other things, everything she has ever written. She is openly lesbian and sees her work of archiving history as critical to her identity as "a woman, as a lesbian, and as a Jew."
Eli Erlick is an American activist, writer, academic, trans woman and founder of the organization Trans Student Educational Resources.
Split Britches is an American performance troupe, which has been producing work internationally since 1980. Academic Sue Ellen Case says "their work has defined the issues and terms of academic writing on lesbian theater, butch-femme role playing, feminist mimesis, and the spectacle of desire". In New York City Split Britches have long standing relationships with La Mama Experimental Theatre Company, where they are a resident company, Wow Café, which Weaver and Shaw co-founded, and Dixon Place.
Kim Katrin is a Canadian American writer, multidisciplinary artist, activist, consultant, and educator. She was formerly credited as Kim Crosby and Kim Katrin Milan. She speaks on panels and keynotes conferences nationally, and facilitates radical community dialogues. Her art, activism and writing has been recognized nationally.
Lindsay Clare McIntyre was a British playwright and actress. She was among the feminist playwrights who contributed to the deconstruction of traditional forms of female representation. She debuted on the British feminist theatre scene as an actress in the 1970s, and emerged as a writer with allegiance to feminist issues a decade later.
Blair Imani is an American author, historian, and activist. She identifies as queer, Black, bisexual and Muslim. She is a member of the Black Lives Matter movement, and is known for protesting the shooting of Alton Sterling and Executive Order 13769.
Jess Imme is a Salvadoran-American singer and musician from Los Angeles, California.
Jocelyn Bioh is a Ghanaian-American writer, playwright and actor. She graduated from Ohio State University with a BA in English and got her master's degree in Playwriting from Columbia University. Jocelyn's Broadway credits include The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. She has performed in regional and off-Broadway productions of An Octoroon, Bootycandy and For Colored Girls. She has written many of her own plays that have been produced in national and collegiate theaters. Some of her more well-known works include Nollywood Dreams and School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play. Bioh is a playwright with Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC) and Atlantic Theater Company, is a resident playwright at Lincoln Center and is a 2017-18 Tow Playwright-in-Residence with MCC. She is a writer on the Hulu show Tiny Beautiful Things.
Queer fashion is fashion among queer and nonbinary people that goes beyond common style conventions that usually associate certain colors and shapes with one of the two binary genders. Queer fashion aims to be perceived by consumers as a fashion style that focuses on experimenting garments based on people's different body shapes instead of following the restrictions given by gendered clothing categorization.
Rebecca Leah"Bekah"Brunstetter is an American writer. Her published plays include F*cking Art, which won top honors at the Samuel French Off-Off-Broadway Short Play Festival, I Used to Write on Walls, Oohrah!, Be a Good Little Widow, Going to a Place Where You Already Are, and The Cake, a play inspired by events leading to the US Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. She is a founding member of The Kilroys, which annually produces The Kilroys' List. Her television work includes writing for I Just Want My Pants Back, Underemployed, Switched at Birth, and American Gods, and both writing and producing on This Is Us.
Lesbian erasure is a form of lesbophobia that involves the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or reexplain evidence of lesbian women or relationships in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources. Lesbian erasure also refers to instances wherein lesbian issues, activism, and identity is deemphasized or ignored within feminist groups or the LGBT community.
Hansol Jung is a South Korean translator and playwright. Jung is a recipient the Whiting Award in drama and three of her plays were listed on the 2015 Kilroys' List. Jung is a member of the Ma-Yi Theater Writers' Lab and was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. In addition to writing several plays, Jung has also written for the television series Tales Of the City.
Dainty Smith is a Toronto-based actor, playwright, and burlesque performer. She is the founder of Les Femmes Fatales: Women of Colour Burlesque Troupe, Canada's first burlesque troupe for Black women and women of colour, femmes and gender non-conforming persons. Her interdisciplinary work engages themes of glamour, afrofuturism, queer thriving, body positivity, and Blackness.
Devyn Galindo is a two-spirited non-binary photographer known for their work with various fashion brands, editorial magazines, brands, companies and their documentary style photography that primarily focuses on highlighting the LGBTQIA+ community.
