Dykette: A Novel

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This sexy, at times silly, and wonderfully searing romp through our masquerades of identity, love, art, entertaining, and social maneuvering is a deeply observed novel of manners for today.

In a big way, it’s been a journey of learning to love the fluffiness of being femme and also knowing that it’s not just an aesthetic; it’s also a political and rhetorical identifier that many people find a lot of meaning in. The farther you zoom out, the scarier it gets; I’m definitely worried and afraid about what’s going on in the world and feel absolutely a part of it. At heart a love story, Dykette seductively examines themes like queer nonconformity and its place in a heteronormative world. Her lesbian boyfriend, who is on T and uses he/him and she/her pronouns interchangeably, is at the whims of Sasha's projections, that range from strict gender roles, to non-consensual-roleplay during sex.I’ve dated lost bois who aren’t looking for a girlfriend or even a wife, but a mother figure to cook and clean and organize their lives for them while they fuck other people on the side. Even if the trip includes a third couple-Jesse's best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy-whose It-queer clout Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants. The games these people play with each other are weird, but not impossible to imagine, until it escalates into painfully absurd territory. In the queer world, where language, concepts, and terms describing sexuality and gender are both supremely important and constantly in flux, new additions to the lexicon are lapped up feverishly. I loved the book’s – for lack of a better term – femme dialectics, and was wondering: What does the term “femme” mean to you today?

But, the author nails it with the revelation that many relationships are predicated on shaky ground, where each person is acting to present the best, most attractive version of themselves, like an image filter. indeed, i kind of despised this book from the first page, and yet I slogged my way through it because as a Literary Lesbian I felt like I had to.There’s a growing academic field, Femme Studies, that defines femmephobia as the devaluation and marginalization of any sort of alternative femininity. I'd gladly recommend this book and can't wait for publishing to give us more of these queer stories that aren't focused on the cis-hetero gaze. But I don't care what happens to these characters and it is asking a lot for readers to hang in there until then.