Jenny Fran Davis’s Dykette Is a Feat of Femme Angst

In Jenny Fran Davis’s novel Dykette, protagonist Sasha guards her high-femme identity so jealously from her rival and frenemy Darcy, it feels for all the world as if a gender quota has been issued on the Hudson, New York weekend estate where they find themselves.

The upwardly mobile queer and trans world that Davis portrays is not necessarily the one most affected by the anti-LGBTQ+ culture war currently raging across America, but a kind of anxiety pervades the book’s pages nevertheless: Sasha is constantly keeping score of who, between herself and Darcy, is “ahead” in terms of seduction, silliness, and general femme-tinged high spirits. (Her stress over maximizing her femme potential recalls the idea that, as Joey Soloway wrote in their 2018 memoir She Wants It, “being a woman is something you can win at.”)

Vogue recently spoke to Davis about the book’s mix of clever camp and millennial ennui, taking inspiration from generations’ worth of writing about butch-femme dynamics, and the real-life trip upstate that became a creative springboard; read the full interview below.

Vogue: How did your idea for this book start to take shape?

Jenny Fran Davis: The book actually started as an essay collection. I was sort of planning to do a bit of investigative journalism and also more autobiographical writing when I was stuck at home, just thinking about other worlds and characters. Creating characters—instead of, like, creating a world—sounded a little bit more fun than going out into the world at that moment, so I decided to sort of turn the project on its head and make it a novel. As soon as I decided to do that, I felt so much freedom and it sort of came together pretty quickly after that. Another major thing that sort of shaped the book in its early stages was actually going on a trip upstate with a group of friends; we didn’t go anywhere or do anything, we just stayed in this very fancy Airbnb that was actually owned by restaurateurs in New York. There wasn’t quite the same degree of drama and lies and jealousy, but that was a major turning point in terms of choosing the week upstate as the container for the book.

How does it feel to be publishing a book with the word “dyke” in its title when things are...as bad as we both know they are for the LGBTQ+ community?

It kind of feels crazy; like, it’s an objectively crazy time with all this book-banning and the headlines of it all. I feel really lucky that in my immediate world, I feel nothing but support and excitement. I know that what’s to come later will be a different journey and I’m not expecting this protected time to last forever. 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. And I’m also trying to take it as it comes. I’m trying to really stave off the dread and the fear as long as I can. It might be a little bit inevitable to confront homophobia and transphobia and all of the things that are definitely coming, so it’s scary, but it’s also exciting and fun.

Are there other books that depict queer friendship and community in ways that helped to inspire Sasha’s world?

Oh, yeah, all the way back to the ’40s and ’50s, with the depictions of the working-class butch-femme community in Buffalo; Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold, Stone Butch Blues, and then this anthology called The Persistent Desire, which is also about mid-century butch-femme relationships and community. Those depictions, which are sort of a mix of fiction and nonfiction, really inspired me; I’m rediscovering books from the 1970s like Ruby Fruit Jungle, and authors from the ’80s and ’90s like Michelle Tea, and even more contemporary ones, like Sarah Thankam Mathews’s book All This Could Be Different. I’m really excited for Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst, and Couplets by my friend Maggie Milner was huge for me also. It’s exciting to be part of a cohort of queer writers, and I feel all of us are sort of drawing on the past in really different ways. Recently, I started reading Sarah Schulman’s book Let the Record Show, which is all about being queer in the 1980s and confronting AIDS as queer people who were unified in some important ways but who also came from vastly different lived experiences and had really different needs. I’m learning so much with every page I read.

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?

That’s a good question. Inherent in the way I think about femmeness is that it’s so dynamic and always shifting and moving around based on the emotional and political landscape of the day. I guess there’s, like, a personal edge to that question, which is like, What does femme mean for me in particular?, and then there’s the more broad or political use of the term, which has been something I’ve been interested in for a while, and have been learning more about in the past few years. Personally, the meaning or importance of that word is that it affiliates me with people who sort of share this way of being in the world, of seeing the world, [and] being experienced by the world as frilly, girly, accessorized, frivolous, superficial. All of these words are super-charged, and I’ve worked to embrace those parts of myself. 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. I think it’s really interesting to learn how much “femme” means to different people in all sorts of different ways, but I do think that a thread that I’ve found that unifies a lot of femmes is sort of the embrace of joy and humor and coyness. It’s super shifting, though, and there are sad parts of it, too; there's a range of emotional experiences within femaleness.

Dykette

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