Katrina Fox chats with seminal US writer Joan Nestle

"One of the main aspects of my life's work is to demystify the fem," Joan Nestle tells me. She spells it that way because for a working-class Jewish lesbian from the Bronx, the French spelling "femme" would be "an affectation, not a reflection of my history." The 63-year-old writer, who spends half the year in New York and the other half in Melbourne with her Australian partner, is heading the bill of The Femme Mystique, an evening of spoken word, poetry, music and film exploring the "femme" identity, in Sydney later this month.

Nestle has spent her life fighting for those living on the margins of society. In the 1960s she travelled to the Deep South of America to fight for the rights of black people to vote. In the 1970s and 1980s she incurred the wrath of radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon and Sheila Jeffreys because of her support of sex workers, BDSM and transgender people. Her most famous work, A Restricted Country, a collection of essays and stories, caused an outcry in 1987 in feminist circles.

When asked to define what "femme" means for her, Nestle says, "Being a fem started with an appetite, a desire, a yearning - and that was to be fucked by butch women. It never meant weakness, but in bed under the hands of a butch lover I could let go. Being a fem for me meant being comfortable with sexuality, feeling sometimes more political connection to whores than to respectable feminists. It meant being comfortable with seduction, lust, flirting - being flamboyant and loud. All of this was to get me into trouble with the anti-pornography contingent - but I knew from my mother's life and my own, the complexity of lesbian desire, of woman's undomesticated desire. In more abstract ways, I have said the butch-fem encounter was an early way of having a multigendered discussion in one gender."

Historically femmes are the most invisible and most dismissed people in queer and straight deviant history, Nestle observes and is working on what she thinks will be her last words on the subject - the femme as the unimagined being. "Masculinity as a sign of lesbianism has always been the marker," she says. "A fem by herself has not been seen as a subversive image. I think nowadays fems are organising or becoming aware of their own complexities, and there's so many questions to ask. For example - can straight women be fems? I think they can, even though they have a different history. I think for all women, for all gender discussions, unlocking this puzzle of the fem - the woman who looks like a woman, who consciously inhabits the space of womanness that she uses - are really important for all our understandings of sex and gender."

So has there been any meetings of minds between the radical anti-porn brigade of the 1980s and the sex positive feminists, such as Nestle, who came into their own during the 1990s? Nestle believes not. "I don't think I even register on Dworkin's or MacKinnon's radar screen," she says. "But my rejection of their politics, their empowering the state to police sexual deviants, their McCarthy tactics in the 1970s and 1980s, their dishonesties - none of it has modified in me. We are not all sisters and some differences are really important. I think the issue of trafficking in women is the new victim territory of many of the women who believed in the anti-porn movement. Here in Melbourne, Sheila Jeffreys still embodies all the intellectual ugliness of the old battles and I gather many students want to march under her 'purity' banner."

According to Nestle, the trans movement has had an important impact on gender discussions. "It's very hard to use the words 'man' and 'woman' in the western world today with any surety of what they mean," she explains. "Feminism is challenged by these refusals of biological certainties, but our resulting feminisms will only be the stronger for it." With the proliferation of trans and queer theory, Nestle admits to using terms such as "lesbian" and "queer" strategically. "I don't want to betray any one of my identities. I used to say in the 1950s I was queer in the traditional sense, in the 1960s I was lesbian and by the beginning of the 1970s I was a lesbian feminist. But I was a fem before I was anything else - it's a layer of selves and none exists at the betrayal of the other."

Nestle, who plans to continue writing and protesting against the "right wing ugliness that is spreading across the world," believes it is more interesting to live on the margins of life than in the centre. "We are boring when we are not very involved in our own lives," she asserts. "I do think the marriage, child bearing, religious yearnings of many gay people will change and is changing how societies will have to view their queer citizens. These are not choices that interest me but I have no fear that authentic moments of rebellion - sexual, gender and political - will continue to call to the young and hopefully to the rest of us as well."

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