English
femme
Pronunciation Noun

femme (plural femmes)

  1. A woman, a wife; (now, chiefly, North America) a young woman or girl. [from 19th c.]
    • 1885, Richard Francis Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Night 18:
      Then I turned to him and said, "O my lord, I have that to propose to thee wherein thou must not cross me; and this it is that, when we reach Baghdad, my native city, I offer thee my life as thy handmaiden in holy matrimony, and thou shalt be to me baron and I will be femme to thee."
    • 1983, Variety's Film Reviews: 1964–1967:
      Theodore J. Flicker and George Kirgo have penned a good script in which Elvis is played off against four femmes […].
  2. (LGBT) A lesbian or other queer woman whose appearance, identity etc. is seen as feminine as opposed to butch. [from 20th c.]
    Synonyms: fem
    • 2013, Michelle Gibson, ‎Deborah Meem, Femme/Butch, p. 103:
      I love butches, though. I dated a femme once. That was wrong on so many levels.
    • 1997, Bi Academic Intervention, Bisexual Imaginary: Representation, Identity, and Desire, A&C Black (ISBN 9780304337453), page 207:
      Given the myth that lesbian femmes will eventually leave their butches for men, there is an understandable unwillingness to acknowledge bisexual femmes, who really might do it — as indeed they have every right to.
  3. (LGBT, less common) A person whose gender is feminine-leaning, such as a feminine non-binary person.
    • 2018, Queer Magic: Power Beyond Boundaries (Lee Harrington, Tai Fenix Kulystin), page 79:
      The same is true of Goddess Spirituality spaces which are predicated on Radical Feminist rhetorics about Nature and the embodied experience – even those spaces which are open to trans women and nonbinary femmes may still fall back on language about the womb [...]
    • 2019, The Lemonade Reader: Beyoncé, Black Feminism and Spirituality (Kinitra D. Brooks, Kameelah L. Martin):
      […] there is no story of Black pain deeper than that of Black fat women and femmes. […]
      1 Gender expansive for women, femmes, and nonbinary folks.
    • 2019, Black Girl Magic Beyond the Hashtag (Julia S. Jordan-Zachery, Duchess Harris), page 21:
      Jordan-Zachery offers two dominant scripts that are often written onto Black women's, femmes', and girls' bodies: The Ass and Strong Black Woman scripts.
    • 2019, Kristen J. Sollee, Cat Call: Reclaiming the Feral Feminine, page xvii:
      [...] and any person who might partake in feminine expression (cis and trans women and men, nonbinary femmes...).
Antonyms Adjective

femme

  1. (chiefly, North America, journalism, entertainment) Pertaining to a femme; feminine, female. [from 20th c.]
    • 2009, Jeff Apter, Fornication: The Red Hot Chili Peppers Story:
      Admittedly, Kiedis was concerned about the lack of femme rockers on the bill: the only women featured were in British band Lush, who would open each day's festivities before a few hundred curious onlookers.
    • 2019, Summer Brennan, The Guardian, 20 March ↗:
      High heels are something like neckties for women, in that it can be harder to look both formal and femme without them.
  2. (chiefly, derogatory) Effeminate (of a man). [from 20th c.]
  3. Characteristic of a feminine lesbian or queer woman. [from 20th c.]
    Her style was more femme than butch.
    • 1992, Deneuve:
      "We want to base our relationships on who we are now, not who we once were" says radical femme bisexual Linda Moore.
    • 2007, Beth A. Firestein, Becoming Visible: Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan, Columbia University Press (ISBN 9780231137249), page 305:
      In comparison to butch bisexual women, it may be easier for femme bisexual women to locate male and female dating partners […]
Antonyms

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