HOME ESSAYS

High Femme Camp

Antics
December 8, 2020   •   By Jenny Fran Davis

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High Femme Camp Antics (HFCA) of the 20th and

21st centuries include: Jennifer Tilly in Bound

slipping out of her negligée while hoarsely informing

butch Gina Gershon, “Isn’t it obvious? I’m trying to

seduce you.” Cleo’s sexy, mute girlfriend, Ursula, in
the 1996 bank-robber movie Set It Off, who performs

a lap dance to thank Cleo (Queen Latifah) for buying

her lingerie with stolen cash. Lorna Morello in

Orange Is the New Black wearing makeup in prison

and making up a fake husband to toy with Nikki’s

butch emotions. Alice B. Toklas replacing the word

“may” with “can” every time it appeared while

copyediting Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation

because Stein’s ex-lover was named May. The top-

bitch attitude of Glee’s Santana, played by the late

Naya Rivera, along with her smirky catchphrase,

“wanky.” And pretty little Ann Walker, in HBO’s

Gentleman Jack, suffering a nervous breakdown —

complete with hemming and hawing, hysterics, her

heaving bosom — when choosing between going off

with butch Anne Lister, her true love, or marrying a

man.

Things I have done to make my lesbian boyfriend’s

therapist call my behavior High Femme Camp

Antics: asking Tess questions like, “Would you have

left your ex for me?” at three or four in the morning;

calling Tess my boyfriend and using “he” pronouns to

discuss him with my friends; making Tess play a sex

game I invented called Can I Come Inside? in which

Tess would have to say, Can I Come Inside? Can I

Come Inside? to which I’d reply, No, No, No, until

she was meant to finally thrust her fingers inside me

anyway, because I wanted her to want me in a way

that was out of her control; being cruel about other

women’s looks if I was threatened by them, calling

them potato-faced, log-like, animatronic; accusing

Tess of deceit after she slept with someone else in the

pre-monogamous month of our courtship; seeing

Tess’s ex, R., at a Friday night screening of Booksmart

in Cobble Hill, taking a series of covert pictures of R.

in the row behind us, and firing off a picture to Tess

— R.’s face foregrounded by a pretty sliver of my own

— as I walked back from the subway that night,

taking care to send the crop that most distended R.’s

features.

Tess’s therapist was a shaggy blonde with an office

just north of Union Square and a specialty in feminist

psychoanalysis. Tess had shopped around for

therapists all autumn (her requirements were few —

gay, woman-identified, and not too much like her

mother), and she’d settled on Amy, decidedly femme

and a sexpot at 5’7”. Tess thought Amy would be

perfect for her transference.

I don’t remember exactly what I did to make Amy say

it: Watch out for Jenny’s High Femme Camp Antics. But
I bristled at the accusation that there was something

both scheming and malicious about my antics, whose

charm I’d always suspected lay in their impulsive

girlishness. To my mind, no one had ever been

damaged by my HFCA. Annoyed, maybe, but never

wounded. But Amy was telling Tess that my antics

might hurt her; she was telling Tess that my antics

were powerful precisely because Tess was both

enraptured and repulsed by them.

The winter we started dating, I was waylaid by a

walnut-sized cyst on my tailbone. The cyst became

infected, then it abscessed, and then it was removed

in an operating room under general anesthesia. When

I came to, I had a walnut-sized hole to the immediate

left of my tailbone. To stop the bleeding, the doctors

stuffed the hole with packing gauze, and so twice a

day I climbed into a bath filled with Epsom salt and

gingerly pulled a rope of packing gauze out of the

wound. After the bath, I lay prone on my bed while

my mother forced packing gauze back into the hole

with a pair of tweezers.

The baths gave me a lot of time to practice my script

for when I could see Tess again.

Soon you’ll be able to do whatever you want to me, but in

the meantime, I want you to ask me over and over again

if you can Come Inside. Each time you ask, I’m going to

say No. When you can’t stand it anymore, and you

absolutely must Come Inside, you’re going to force your

way inside anyway. Okay, go.

Can I Come Inside?

No.

Can I Come Inside?

No.

Can I please Come Inside?

No!

Can I Come Inside?

Tell me why you want to Come Inside.

I want to Come Inside. Let me Come Inside.

No.

Can I Come Inside? Can I Come Inside?

No! No!

I took hold of the tip of the bandage, which floated in

the salty water. I pulled gently, but nothing happened.

I pulled harder. The rope, when it emerged, was

coated in bits of debris that resembled white asphalt.

The coil was long, at least two feet, and had been

stuffed so tightly into me that it was wrinkled and

misshapen, like a shirt that had been lost in a drawer

for years.
 

In 1925, the psychologist Winifred Richmond

declared that feminine lesbians seek mother love,

crave affection and attention, and are obsessed with

beauty. “Where’s the lie?” I joked to a friend when I

read that description. I know that lesbians,

particularly femmes, have long defended themselves

against charges of immaturity, childishness, and

narcissism, and I know we’ve been long pathologized

as stunted, inverted, and backward. I also know that
Richmond’s statement does sort of describe me, as

much as I wish it didn’t.

Recently, I described my Amelia Bedelia ditz trick —

that thing I do where I pretend I can’t hang my
curtains or find my way to an event or light a match

on my own — to a small crowd of queers at a friend’s

birthday party in Bushwick.

My attraction to vintage methods of seduction —

performing weakness, preying on tropes of

midcentury femininity by acting and dressing like it’s
the 1950s — is twisted, of course, and it’s central to

the aesthetic performance of HFCA, whose mode of

camp relies on old, ingrained iconography of what it

means to be female.

Tess once described camp to me as a way of resolving

the question of what to do with the iconic. Camp

often deals with problems of representation and

authenticity via “disidentification”— José Esteban
Muñoz’s term — with mainstream cultural symbols.

HFCA is a mode of disidentification, an embrace of

feminine performance that negotiates its inclusion in

mainstream representations of women and of lesbians

by neither assimilation nor absolute opposition. It
opts instead, at least to a certain extent, to play along

with mainstream representations that have persisted

at least since the Hays Era of television (1934–1968),

when all queer characters were mandated to be

unsympathetic to viewers.

Contemporary girl-on-girl porn, for example, often

exploits the ingrained trope of female queerness as

not just divergent, wrong, and wayward, but also

scheming, wily, and calculating: good little schoolgirls

don’t do their homework but do each other instead.

In the show Glee, for a sanitized example, Britney and

Santana are lesbian cheerleaders on especially bad

behavior. Britney’s hyper-feminized dumbness and
Santana’s racialized cruelty are both versions of the

same HFCA — the HFCA of a teenaged femme

trying to survive high school. The L Word presents us

with a network of lesbians who lust after and lie to

one another almost compulsively, as though they have
no other choice. Television shows us girls-on-girls

being girlie, but in a lesbian way, which is to say that

these girls don’t just fuck each other, but more so fuck
with each other.

“It makes them feel strong,” I giggled at the

Bushwick birthday party, referring to my antics’ effect

on butches.

I cast a sidelong glance at Tess, who jokingly flexed a

bicep. A few partygoers eyed each other, startled.

Someone later described me to a mutual friend as a

“piece of work.”

I got that it wasn't really meant as a compliment, but

I’m a student of being over-the-top, unnecessary, too
much. That is, after all, the name of the game.

In those early days of winter, Tess begged to change

my wound’s packing. This meant she also offered me a

salt bath in her tub, and to lie prone on her bed while
she knelt above me with a rope of packing gauze. I

wouldn’t let her, worried that the smell and the look
of my wound would disgust her.

Tess was a performance artist and part-time jewelry

maker who now worked as a set designer. I had long

pegged her as a subterranean bachelor. She lived in a

basement apartment in Bushwick and smiled with
only half her mouth. She was broad-shouldered and
stocky and had short, thick hair and a stick-and-poke

tattoo that spelled out DYKEBALL over her left

ribcage.

The first night we spent together, I taught her to knit

— my classic seduction technique (HFCA) — and

about frisson, that carbonated feeling that

accompanies a crush. We stared at each other for a

long time, unblinking. Because I knew that this

otherwise might take forever (lesbians!), I finally

asked Tess point-blank if she felt a frisson for me

(HFCA). In response, Tess kissed me hard, with
teeth. I knew she wanted to fuck, but I pushed her

hands away dramatically when they crept under my

skirt (HFCA). I told her that I didn’t typically sleep

with people so soon (HFCA), which was true not for

any real reason but because I was privately humiliated
by my body (HFCA). Instead of letting her fuck me,

I scratched Tess’s entire torso with my long, pink

fingernails (HFCA).

“Her fingernails drifted down my neck, across my

shoulders,” Jess Goldberg, the butch narrator of Stone

Butch Blues, says of a high femme whose camp antics
thrill her. “I’d forgotten the sheer pleasure of a high

femme tease.”

“Your fingernails are full of frisson,” Tess said as

morning light began to stream in through the

window above her bed.

“I know,” I said.

I recently read a collection of funny stories by Lesléa

Newman, high-femme chronicler of dyke life in the

1990s (the materialistic, shopping-addicted Golden
Age of HFCA). In one story, a butch named Flash

arrives to pick Lesléa up and take her out to dinner.

Flash politely tells Lesléa that she looks nice.

“The average femme would have taken that to be a

compliment,” Lesléa dishes. “But this high-

maintenance femme hadn’t spent the last two weeks
shopping for the perfect outfit and the last seven

hours bathing, shaving, bleaching, filing, polishing,

combing, brushing, drying, moussing, spritzing,

spraying, and applying five pounds of makeup to have

all her efforts summed up in one little four-letter

word.”

Flash’s flimsy compliment doesn’t satisfy Lesléa’s

desires to be seen, appreciated, and worshipped, and

so Lesléa starts from the bottom and works her way

up, prompting Flash to compliment her shoes, her

miniskirt, and finally her hair in a grand, shimmering
pyramid of HFCA. But even as she performs
satiation, Lesléa is insatiable. Her antics fail at getting
her precisely what she wants from Flash, because

there’s always something unsatisfying about getting

what you want by asking for it. Lesléa’s desire glows

from within the frame of her HFCA, distilled and

exposed and unmet.

Can I Come Inside, my high-femme sex game, deals

primarily with unmet, outsourced, and

circumnavigated desire. In Females(2019), trans

lesbian critic Andrea Long Chu argues that
femaleness is a universal, existential condition rather

than a gender or a sex — a condition of being and of

consciousness that involves letting others do our

desiring for us. At stake in Can I Come Inside, as

well as in HFCA at large, is a femaleness that both

craves and rebels against its tendency to outsource

desire. In playing Can I Come Inside, I, like Lesléa,

ask Tess to do my desiring for me, and Tess in turn

defers her desire to me: The game is strictly my desire,

one that she insists she does not share. Even though
it mandates a performance of aggressive desire from

Tess, there’s no doubt that Can I Come Inside is

about my desire; it’s my game; I make the rules.

But language, the currency of HFCA, fails to satiate

my wish to be wanted; Can I Come Inside reveals a

wish to be desired, a wish that wishes so hard that it

fails. Like all antics, the game flops because of its own

unwieldiness, its own excess of desire, its own desire

so big and raw and exposed that it can’t be satiated,

but instead must get performed.

When I sent Tess the photo of Tess’s ex, R., from that

night at Booksmart, I felt giddy, shaking with gleeful

impulse. I thought Tess might be thrilled by my

description of the standoff I’d had with R. when the

movie ended. But I knew I was in trouble as soon as

Tess requested a phone call to discuss what I’d done.

On the phone, I resorted again to HFCA: when Tess

called my behavior childish and embarrassing, I said

that she didn’t understand … drama!; which was to

say didn’t understand … me!; that I sent the photo of

R. for no reason other than to show Tess what I’d

seen — R.’s face burnt by the glow of the big screen,

the orange glasses Tess used to dream about, shining

like yellow coins — and to show her who I’d been: a

sweet girl in a movie theater. I sent the photo to show

her what I wanted: Tess, and R., burning together, to

conjure that union, which I was still mad about; for

the night to be scarred by my antics, like a big rip in

the putrid sky; because these are my dykette powers,

and no they’re not supposed to work; that has never

been the point.

While monologuing, I felt like a psycho playing the

role of a psycho. I knew that my implied disavowal of

my behavior — Oh, I don’t mean it, I’m just being

crazy — actually signified, actually performed,

something true: a real lack in me that I couldn’t yet

articulate. I knew I was being ridiculous, knew that

this was just HFCA, knew that HFCA is always a

stupidly obvious overstatement, a theater designed to

expose me.

To say that all antics fail at sating desire invokes

recent queer scholarship on failure that both

acknowledges same-sex desire’s association with

“failure, impossibility, and loss,” as Heather Love puts

it in Feeling Backward, and offers up failure as a

subversive, if counterintuitive, form of resistance. In

the case of the Booksmart incident, our failure to

speak to each other was obvious. HFCA often figures

as a failure of language and a refusal to speak, to say

things outright, a wink or a dance rather than a

streamlined missive. It’s a queer mode of

communication, but it’s also an anti-communication,

a reticence; think of Ursula’s resolute silence in the

movie Set It Off. Think of the simultaneous over- and

under-announcement of these gestures, their

loudness, the matter their excesses displace.

 
At issue in HFCA is being seen, being recognized,

the long-documented struggle of the femme lesbian.

In Andrea Lawlor’s novel Paul Takes the Form of a

Mortal Girl (2018), gender-shifting Paul has a high-

femme best friend, Jane, whose antics include a

penchant for flirting with every butch she sees in

town.

At one point, Jane bemoans her invisibility in Iowa

City’s lesbian scene.

“Do I have to stomp around town in a three-piece

suit?” she asks Paul. “I will do it. I will. Who do I have

to fuck to get seen around here?”

I will do it. I will. Jane’s HFCA diatribe doesn’t just

express desire in words, but also performs it by way of

suggestive disavowal. Her hyperbolic fantasy of

prancing around in a three-piece suit (butch attire)

ironizes femme invisibility, and her insistence that she

will do it — I will do it. I will — is funny precisely

because she won’t do it, in fact has no intention of

doing it. Performances of HFCA negotiate

invisibility by going way over the top, often in speech

rather than action.

 
I am your spaniel, begins Helena’s plea to Demetrius
in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Feminine antics,

feminine ploys for attention, and feminine

performances of desire — such as what scholar Bruce

Boehrer refers to as Helena’s “orgy of debasement”

(The more you beat me, the more I will fawn on you) —

that aren’t particularly gay abound. Besides those

camp-femme early modern women, there is, for

example, every contemporary pop song in America

proclaiming Baby it’s okay as long as I’m still the best

you’ve ever had and If you want to keep me, you’ve got to
love me, love me, love me, harder, harder, harder, harder.

We might think of these antics as feminine wiles —

games that girls play to ensnare men.

This is all some form of feminine excess, of course.

HFCA is not really about being something but, as

femme studies scholar Rhea Ashley Hoskin writes,

manifests as “a radical invocation of queer femininity”

and is, at its heart, “an aesthetic, an erotic, and a

politic” rather than an identity. There’s an HFCA

sensibility, in other words, in Elle Woods, in Cher

Horowitz, in Naomi Campbell, in Lucy Liu, in

Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez and Lana Del

Rey, all of whom draw from and contribute to the

queer canon.

But the difference between HFCA and straight

feminine manipulation is ultimately a difference of
stakes, orientation, and alignment. We might locate
straight feminine antics at their most obvious, and

their most sinister, in “white-women tears” — the

insidious weaponization of whiteness that happens

when white women prosecute racialized evil in order

to maintain heterosexual desirability. Straight, white

women cry because they think, however naïvely and

desperately, that their antics might work for them,

win them something, punish someone else, yield

morality. The femme is under no such illusions.

In I’m Very into You (2015), for example, Kathy Acker

and McKenzie Wark’s email correspondence

following a brief fling in Australia in the ’90s, Acker

and Wark — both women, Acker cis and Wark trans

— take on a vibrantly butch-femme dynamic that

epitomizes HFCA’s irony. Acker’s HFCA throughout

the exchange (manifest in her overstated anxiety

about whether or not Wark is into her) gets

highlighted by Wark’s put-upon butchness.

Wark, facetiously: “I’ve only had one superfemme in

life, actually. She had to teach me how to be butch.

But unlike the really butch guys she usually hangs out

with I’ve never hit her or tortured her emotionally,

and when I got her pregnant I tried to be responsible

for that.”

Wark’s missive performs the butch eye’s response to

the superfemme’s HFCA, a butchered HFCA that

we could refer to as Hard Butch Camp Antics

(HBCA). Wark’s campy machismo spoofs 1950s

butch-femme bar culture, in which butches used

aggression to be taken seriously, and her quasi-stone

emotional persona reads as funny precisely because it

satirizes a butch-femme tradition that is always

already camping itself.

I gave Tess my copy of I’m Very into You, and she

marked it up before giving it back to me. In one

instance, Acker writes about a friend who is “so 101%

femme.”

Tess had underlined “so 101% femme” and written

Jenny! underneath.

HFCA is that extra one percent after 100 percent has

been reached. The expression “101% femme” is so

HFCA. HFCA is the work of a really good student,

one who earns 101 percent on all the tests.

I often tell Tess that I want to have her babies, that I

want her to impregnate me, that I want her to marry

me, that I want her to be my husband. Queer critic

Juana María Rodríguez notes that a femme “performs

insatiability” as she interprets and digests tropes of

straightness such as these. HFCA makes even

heterosexuality hot.
That spring, Tess sent me the lyrics to the Paula

Abdul’s “Straight Up,” guessing I’d identify with just

wanting some information, please. The question implied

in all my tests for Tess throughout the winter was

simple: Is she loyal? And it was true — information

was all I wanted, please, but I didn’t want it straight

up at all.

“She’s loyal,” I joked when Tess assured me that I was

much hotter than my ex’s new girlfriend (HFCA) or

that I was hotter than any of her exes (HFCA).

Tess went to the Russian baths with her dyke mentor,

a performance artist. They sweat onto the wooden

benches, wore men’s swim trunks and towels that

swung down around their shoulders and covered their

pecs. Later that night, Tess participated in HBCA,

texting me: dyke mentor asked me if i’m loyal. I never

asked how she’d replied.

Tess had of course told Amy, her therapist, about Can

I Come Inside, and Amy had of course said to Tess,

“You poor thing,” which of course made me seethe.

But when I worked up the nerve to confess the game

to my own gay therapist, Charlotte, she disagreed.

“You felt empowered to ask for what you wanted

from Tess,” Charlotte said. “Maybe she feels unable to

do that very thing with

you.”

I much preferred Charlotte’s explanation, which

exonerated me, but I couldn’t separate Tess’s shame

and discomfort at having been asked to play Can I

Come Inside from how badly I wanted her to play it

with me. We were using our therapists as performed

figures of the self, figures who might validate either

our deepest

shame or our deepest desire.

“How did you feel,” I prompted Tess, “how did you

feel about it.”

“It made me feel like I was taunting a sweet, hot baby

girl,” she said, laughing with half her mouth, “a girl

who just wanted to be relieved of her performance,

who was going so hard into her performance of No,

No, No but it was all because she wanted to burst out

of that performance, and the only way she could was

by me going inside and fucking her and making her

make other noises, it’s like breaking a horse, really, it’s

like taming a minxy angel.”

As a remedy, Charlotte suggested that instead of

saying, No, No, No, I should say More, More, More.
But I desired saying No, not More, and I continue to
desire it.

I’m still insatiable, still unsatisfied. I’m unsatisfied

when Tess agrees to play Can I Come Inside with me,

and I’m unsatisfied whenever Tess scores 101 percent

on my tests.

“One is often dissatisfied in proportion to the

specificity of your desire,” Andrea Long Chu said in a

recent interview, remarking on the “murderous

exactitude” of desire.

This dissatisfaction is surely at the heart of what

HFCA performs: a feminized insatiability that is

designed to fail, because it is pure desire exposed, and

because desire cannot be sated, it must get performed.

In Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, Professor

Voth, a trans man, dates a woman who lies on her

back and shows Voth her breasts first thing in the

morning (HFCA). He knows how to play this game:

the gesture means she needs to be fucked. But on

those mornings, Voth, taken by a strange quasi-cult,

must first wash his hands in both boiling and freezing

water; the girlfriend does not get what she wants,

what she needs, from Voth, and time stretches

endlessly; and she does not get fucked; and she does
not get fucked.
Sometimes the elasticity of HFCA is part of the

pleasure, of course, and sometimes it contributes to a

crisis. This has to do with communication. When the

failure of communication is a queer language game —

failure of communication mimicking the failure of

desire itself — when the failure begets a real,

unresolvable lack, a lack it cannot begin to touch:

crisis.

I told Tess that in fourth grade, a bully had taunted

me for my close friendship with another girl, calling

me a lesbian.

“You’re a lesbian, and lesbians are ugly, so that means

you’re an ugly lesbian,” my bully had reasoned.

“Not all lesbians are ugly,” my mother hastened to

reassure me when I told her that night. “You could be

a pretty lesbian.”

The pretty lesbian’s antics are ornamental — frilly, full

of excess — but also full of vulnerability — the

vulnerability of being seen, looked at, scrutinized.

Femme “makes esthetics [sic] political,” Hoskin

contends. Lesbian writer Cherríe Moraga represents

the femme body as a turtle without its shell, flipped
on its back, waiting to be penetrated. The

penetrability — the potential to be punctured — of

the femme is explicit and literal, just like the

vulnerability of a femme body always is. Can I Come

Inside is played on the back, just like Moraga’s turtle.

It is also played in bed; it is also about the endless

space between wanting and getting.

Here is one last pathetic tale of HFCA: My butch

friend E.’s girlfriend, S. lied about having a brain
tumor. S. made E. meet her every outside of Sloan-

Kettering and escort her uptown. She wrapped her

hair, divulged other patients’ prognoses; and, when E.
eventually found out that there was no tumor and no

terminal cancer, threatened to throw herself out the

window of her apartment if E. left. E. — exasperated,
manipulated, gaslit, betrayed — did leave the

apartment, saying S. could kill herself if she wanted.

E. let herself out, rushed into the silver elevator,

plowed through the silver lobby. As she walked

quickly down the street, a body pounced on her from
behind, slapping and sobbing. It was S., barefoot.

Instead of jumping off her balcony, she had run down

14 flights of stairs, in a desperate quest to
demonstrate her anger and her pain, which to her felt

like bare feet against a freezing sidewalk, the furious

heart shattering in her chest.

It was only when I heard about E.’s case that I could

see the label of HFCA breaking down, becoming the
diagnosis that couldn’t, and couldn’t, and couldn’t. I
don’t know what E.’s girlfriend was so angry and sad
about, or why she lied about having a brain tumor. I

guess the name of the game for E.’s girlfriend was

probably to secure E.’s love, or to somehow prolong
it. But I also think that it was simply to show E. her

pain in a way that was as visible as a mass on a

radiologist’s screen.

Is desire a lack or a mass? a friend once asked me. The

answer, I’m sure, is that it is both.

In early summer, finally sure that Tess loved me, I

showed up to the basement apartment in Bushwick
with the ultimate HFCA gesture. I carried in my

pink satin purse a FINAL TEST for her, a spoof on

the many tests I’d administered over the course of our
relationship. Tess, of course, got the joke. She filled

out the test, laughing at the questions. But a few

weeks later, I was mad at Tess, and so I resorted to
HFCA, telling her again that she had DECEIVED

me.

Tess, getting it, asked, Can I Come Inside?

No.
Can I Come Inside?

No.
Can I Come Inside?
Ask me again.
Can I Come Inside?
—

Can I Come Inside?

—
You know how to play this game.

I know how to play this game.

You know how to play this game.

I know how to play this game.

I know how to play this game.
You know how to play this game.

I know how to play this game.

I know how to play this game.
—

I know how to play this game.

 ¤

Jenny Fran Davis is an MFA candidate at the

University of Iowa, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow.

She is the winner of the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books

Literary Award in nonfiction and the author of the novel
Everything Must Go.

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GIVE TODAY! →
Jenny Fran Davis is an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa,
where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. She is the winner of the
2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award in nonfiction and
the author of the novel Everything Must Go. Her work is
forthcoming in the Washington Square Review, and she is at work
on a book about femme lesbian performance.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

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