Straight people are going to be downright confused by a lot of this book and queer people are probably going to fight about it.

What most impressed me about this work is that it feels written for queer readers and doesn't shy away from more nuanced aspects of queer identity and culture; it's rare to see a he/him butch in traditional publishing, for example, but it works so well here. The book was an easy, beachy kind of read even though it's set between Christmas and New Year's Day. I’m asking the same question through literature: how can something be meaningful and serious without being a cliché of seriousness? Dykette dangles perilously from the fine line between fetishizing normativity in subversive ways and merely reifying — or at least submitting to — an oppressive status quo. 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, accessorised, frivolous, superficial.what little there exists of a plot mostly revolves around the dynamics between the protagonist, histrionic high-femme Sasha, and her stoic butch bf. There was so much detail for such meaningless things and it dragged on and on (I don't care about every detail of each characters' outfit and what brands they are wearing, etc). The Big Chill goes gay in Davis’s raunch-com about six queer Brooklynites spending the holidays at a Hudson farmhouse. i really hope we get to see more lesbian lit that openly embraces butch femme culture, not in just historical fiction where there’s the whole “oh forbidden! I really loved the explorations of kink and sex and consent, and especially liked how intimately social media and being "canceled" online appeared in two generations of queer people in different circumstances.

The precursor to Dykette is Davis’s 2020 essay for Los Angeles Review of Books, “ High Femme Camp Antics,” a manifesto and polemic that announced a new kind of lesbian archetype, an over-the-top femme who, when their desire is too big or complicated or unsavory to be satisfied, performatively acts out excessive femininity. This is not my problem with the book, though it sometimes read like the internal argument one has with their imaginary enemy. The color it cast over Sasha’s flesh was nauseating, the nipples sprouting pathetic tufts of kelly-green fur.And Sasha always wore a bootleg green Chanel ribbon around her neck or in her hair, its tendrils curling around her shoulders or between her collarbones. There is gender diversity here that feels actually accurate, with a masc nonbinary person and a butch who uses he/him pronouns along with she/her and still identifies as a lesbian. There’s a growing academic field, Femme Studies, that defines femmephobia as the devaluation and marginalization of any sort of alternative femininity. If you’re in the mood for a sexy novel that explores the messiness of queer relationships, Dykette should be on your list. In relaxed setting of the sleepy time between Christmas and New Years Sasha is constantly tense, constantly overanalysing everything, constantly plotting how to be in the center of attention.

Even that I could have let go, having read JFD's other work and other works of the same ilk, were it not for the book's insistence on how groundbreaking and profound the narrator's internal life was. I couldn’t really bring myself to care about the Dykette Subjectivity nor the brooklyn lesbian Scene presented here. It’s through Dykette’s Sasha, an insufferably needy high femme in her mid-20s (think Girls’ Hannah Horvath if she wore vintage pink nighties and was “straight for butches”) that Davis lays out her curiosity with queer domesticity. Vanity Fair: So much of queer fiction seems to be acutely sincere, or only about oppression and hardship.Though, there was some shocking, graphic torture and maybe that was the climax of all the buildup considering the sex scenes were all sort of bland and lacking excitement or detail that may have been expected with all of this tension building throughout the vacation - very anticlimactic.

Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Maybe I just don't understand this side of queer culture (I am queer myself), but I could not relate to any of these characters and felt very much like an outsider, looking in on a secret queer club I'm not allowed to be in (and frankly wouldn't want to be). Jenny Fran Davis shows up to our interview with, as promised, a prime piece of book swag: a white baseball cap with Dykette, the name of her forthcoming novel out May 16, in hot pink cursive along the front.For a lot of queer people, especially those of us who experienced trauma in childhood, romance can feel like our best hope for love, stability, and safety. But in Dykette, Sasha seems mostly uninterested in friendship, or at least in the kind of multigenerational queer community that Jules and Miranda might fold her into. I almost DNF because it was so bizarre and arbitrary but there was just enough curiosity in me that wanted to find out what the point of all of it was.