Femme is Fierce: Femme Queer Performance in Photography

Jess T. Dugan; Francis Bruguiere; Andy Warhol; Catherine Opie; Jefferey Silverthorne; Laura Aguilar; Darryl DeAngelo Terrell; Leonard Freed; Kali Spitzer; unknown

Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH • October 1 - December 17, 2022

This exhibition celebrates femmes. As a queer identity, femme undermines the strict binary between masculine and feminine by bringing together signs and symbols designated feminine without conforming to traditional gender roles. Femme manifests in numerous ways, commonly through a person’s visual presentation, such as clothing or mannerisms. Aspects of being femme can help express a person’s relationship to gender, sexual orientation, or other facets of their identity. Femme is an embodiment of a person’s right to use signs of the feminine to their own ends.

The photographs in this exhibition capture different ways in which femme is performed and presented publicly. Moving across genders, queer orientations, races, ethnicities, and time, each individual embraces femme as an aspect of their self-representation: some subtly, others boldly.