Lesbian Culture

Butch and femme is a "way to organize sexual relationships and gender and sexual identity". It is sometimes assumed by scholars to be solely a lesbian dyadic system, with the individual identities of butch and femme dependent on each other for their existence; but this denies the personal experiences of many women in butch-butch and femme-femme relationships. The individual gender identities of butch or femme are terms used in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and cross-dressing subcultures to ascribe or acknowledge a masculine (butch) or feminine (femme) identity with its associated traits, behaviors, styles, self-perception and so on. Both the expression of individual lesbians of butch and femme identies and the relationship of the lesbian community in general to the notion of butch and femme as an organising principle for sexual relating have varied over the course of the 20th century. Some lesbian feminists have argued that butch-femme is simply a replication of heterosexual relations whilst other commentators argue that, whilst it resonates with heterosexual patterns of relating, butch-femme simultaneously challenges it. Research in the 1990s in the United States showed that "95% of lesbians are familiar with butch/femme codes and can rate themselves or others in terms of those codes, and yet the same percentage feels that butch/femme was "unimportant in their lives". butch lesbian