I really admire your gutsy article. Props. I’m so excited to have these convos leading up to and at the Femme Conference (oh the complicatedness of centering conferences in our political/ID development .

I appreciate your breakdown of the (sometimes) invisibility of class w/in convos around femme in/visiblity (and queer communities in general!), which is totally raced, about geography, migration, etc, etc. I’m white and most of my fam is poor and working class in Michigan, tho I was raised in the Bay Area and have a lot of the social capital and class privilege of having an (absentee) rich father and ID with a mixed class background.

Anyway, all this to say, one thing I noticed is that both working class gals you quoted in the aritcle were white. I think poor and white working class folks (femme or not) often center their class ID in a way that ppl of color can’t/don’t b/c being brown is just as central. I’m just wary of creating some kind of dichotomy btwn being a femme of color and working class/poor. Certainly there are a lotta poor and/or working class femmes of color who’ve written about class who could’ve been quoted so you didn’t have to guess/summarize…. And, yeah poor and working class white ppl and communities are often invisibilized (oh, that word) and that’s real, and in my experience it’s hard to challenge that w/o (re)centering whiteness.

Just kinda stuck with me after reading your article yesterday. Srsly so many gems in here – I will be coming back to it… Look forward to all that’s gonna come of it, cuz yeah, it’s time to get the fuck away from in/visibility as some kind of arbiter of femme liberation.

Much respect n femme adoration!

“After all of this: my 20′s, this event, every conference I’ve attended and conversation I’ve had, I think this: visibility fails us as a standard to understand one another with. It fails complexity, inclusion, and intersectionality. It fails trans* femmes, poor/working class folks, sex workers, people of color, dis/abled people. FAIL. There is no totalizing Visibility, and we need to stop seeking the panopticon: the looker in our head is policing our variant and vibrant beauties. We can do WAY better than in/visibility.”