This essay captures a specific moment in the evolution of both contemporary feminism and my own identity. It was written mainly in the late winter and early spring of 1997, when I was 44 and coming out as a lesbian. In personal terms, it traces my attempts to rethink myself in relation to sexuality, but also in relation to various conceptions of femininity and to the feminist theories through which I had understood my own position during the previous 20 or 25 years. The essay mirrors the process of this rethinking. In fact, it was the main vehicle through which I experienced the theoretical aspect of the process, and is thus in many ways itself a site of (r)evolution. In particular, it traces the changes in my thinking about Afemme,@ a term that has had quite different meanings to me as an ostensibly straight woman and as a lesbian.

In more conventional historical terms, this essay also reflects my experience of both feminism and feminist theory in a particular series of historical moments. I grew up in the 1950s and >60s, and for me, as for many U.S. women my age, those decades= dramatic changes in notions of appropriate and acceptable feminine self-presentation and behavior had highly personal significance, and framed the ways we worked out how Afemininity@ might be performed. Our adolescences took place during an especially intense era of cultural and political transition, and we experienced much of it in terms of style.

To emphasize style may seem to trivialize the other political concerns of the era, but anyone who lived through the rigid dress codes with which we began school--codes that mandated not just that girls wear skirts, but the precise skirt lengths permitted--knows the degree to which cultural and political expressions were both regulated and resisted through clothing, hair, and makeup. I think that the effects of school dress codes, and of their end, is in some sense unimaginable for younger women who grew up without them. Their abolition seemed to promise total liberation, and despite the fact that we now recognize it to have been a false promise, history and personal experience have made it impossible for some of us to untangle even now the tidy analogy of skirt:pants::oppression:freedom.