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16 Q Q As a girl in the Dominican Republic, I remember the powerful women in my family teaching me to embody femininity. As young as five, I vividly remember slouching comfortably over a chair watching cartoons and my madrina (godmother ) straightening me out. “No te conviene andar con la espalda jorobada. Tienes que sentarte derecha con las piernas cruzadas. Así es que se sientan las señoritas.” (It’s not in your best interest to go around with your back hunched over. You have to sit up straight with your legs crossed. That’s how young ladies sit.) I consistently received messages such as this one from the women whom I respected the most and thus learned very early on how much femininity mattered . I took these experiences with me to the field when conducting interviews with sexually nonconforming Latinas. I soon found how similar the participants’ childhood experiences were to my own. Their experiences revealed a recurring tension in the family regarding femininity and sexual conformity, a tension that played out most profoundly between mothers and daughters. In this chapter, I explore why proper socialization of femininity was so important to the study participants and their families. By femininity I refer to the characteristics, physical appearances, and behaviors or mannerisms that these women and their families associated with appropriate womanhood. In looking at both the study participants’ physical presentations of self and the behaviors they associate with a coveted femininity, I begin to disentangle the correlation that these women and their families made between sexual conformity, outward physical appearance, and femininity. For the study participants, doing femininity was central because they believed that gender conformity through their embodied physical appearance and their behaviors sent messages to others about their identities and their families’ social status. Given this, how these women deployed femininity was a cause of constant tension in their families of origin. Familial concerns c h a p t e r 1 “As Long as You Wear a Dress” gender conformity and sexuality Gender Conformity and Sexuality 17 regarding femininity deployment are intertwined and cannot be extracted from the reservations those families of origin had regarding their children’s alternative sexualities. Together, these tensions add a layer of complexity to our understanding of familial “acceptance” in these Latinas’ homes. In a theoretical piece on gender hegemony, Mimi Schippers (2007) argues that there are multiple and hierarchal femininities. Pariah femininities, she offers, are those that, when embodied by women, challenge the hierarchal and complementary relationship between masculinity and femininity. Those who are promiscuous, hold erotic feelings for other women, or are sexually aggressive embody pariah femininities. Those whose behaviors subscribe to stereotypical “womanly” characteristics and maintain a hierarchal and complementary relationship with hegemonic masculinities embody hegemonic femininities. Justin Charlebois (2011) adds oppositional and dominant femininities to this hierarchy. Oppositional femininities are those that resist hegemonic femininities but that are not necessarily deviant or stigmatized, as is the case with pariah femininities . Dominant femininities are those that are widely accepted and celebrated in a given context but that do not complement or support the ascendancy of hegemonic masculinities. Charlebois’s work (2011) allows for an analysis that recognizes that individuals can embody more than one of these femininities simultaneously . They may embody an oppositional femininity through their behaviors or sexual practices while also embodying a dominant femininity through their physical appearance. By virtue of their relationships with and erotic desires for other women, the participants in this study embodied pariah femininities. Their awareness of the stigmas inherent in these embodied femininities fueled their desires to simultaneously adopt an outward appearance of dominant femininity . For the study participants, the desire to exude dominant femininities came from an understanding that “appropriate” gendered presentations of self could afford them opportunities in the social world. Their mothers were most committed to this display after their daughters entered relationships with other women. This, I argue, is because they wanted to minimize stigma for their daughters and for their presentation of self to signal their womanhood to others. Most of the LBQ Latinas in this study, then, embodied femininities that were simultaneously dominant and pariah. Most embodied an outward presentation of self that to varying degrees fit societal expectations for gender conformity while simultaneously engaging in behaviors that defied heterosexual norms. Both the study participants and their mothers used physical appearance to cover the stigmas associated with their or their daughters’ erotic desires. By maintaining an outward appearance of dominant femininity, the study participants can...

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