Customer Reviews

Femmes of Power: Exploding Queer Femininities

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This book is a phenomenal resource for anyone interested in queer femmes. The photographs are beautiful, the interviews are fascinating, and both play close attention to issues of race, class and sexuality as well as gender. *Femmes of Power* is a much needed addition to the world of queer theory and you won't be disappointed. It makes a great companion to photographer Del LaGrace Volcano's earlier work *The Drag King Book* but also stands alone. I have searched far and wide to try to build a library of books on femmes and this is the most visually beautiful one I have found.

Femmes of Power is fabulous! An absolute first of a kind-- and no doubt the first of many more femme photo books to follow. As a big femme myself, I found the book super affirming, increasing my own femme pride. Del has a great eye. I love him and his work. Ulrika's text is incisive, and penetrates deeply into the delicious, flamboyant femme mystique. She's definitely a femme who knows her power. Del queers femme up for posterity. A must for femmes, butches all other permutations, and hermutations alike.

I was hoping for a book that I could identify with. When I was in college in the early '90s, I wrote a paper on one of then-Della Grace's images. I can't recall the exact one, but they appeared in a journal called Perversity and were in B&W. When I opened "Femmes of Power," which I bought for Volcano's photography, I thought, Nan Goldin, except everyone is smiling. Volcano, no doubt, would be loathe to admit any parallel to Golden, however. I must admit that I look at the book quite often, trying to figure out what it is that bothers me about the images, as a human being, as a person, as someone one would call "femme." I did read a bit of the text, which I was forced to put down almost immediately because I was afraid it would contaminate my pure, literary mind. Take that as you will. Did the author actually write "femme witticism"? Had I simply imagined this phrase and inserted it myself? Do we really need to have every aspect of our personalities subdivided, catalogued, and now according to "butch" or "femme"? What is the difference between a femme and butch witticism? I wish someone would have explained.