This paper examines the modern condition of femme as a political and ethical problem, arguing that contemporary queer politics must begin with the question of self-ethics. While feminist and queer theory have long critiqued the devaluation of femininity, the femme remains marginalised as an actor of resistance. I argue that this impasse reveals a deeper normative failure: the absence of ethical frameworks that sustain self-definition and care as political acts. Drawing on Foucault’s late work on ethics and the “care of the self”, the paper rethinks resistance beyond aesthetic visibility or identity. For Foucault, ethical self-formation is not a retreat into individuality but a practice of freedom within power that reclaims agency through self-cultivation, pleasure, and authenticity, rather than through conformity to external norm imposition that does not serve marginalised standpoints. The norm of queer resistance that privileges masculine-of-centre resistances and modes of being can covertly reinstate the masculine centre of analysis within queer movements, leading to not only the aesthetic invisibility of femme, but its systemic and epistemic marginalisation. This paper proposes that ethical self-work functions as a counter-disciplinary practice through which the femme subject reclaims the authority to define, rather than be defined by, the norms of queerness and resistance. By conceptualising self-ethics not as withdrawal from politics but as the pre-condition of solidarity, this work situates self-ethics as a necessary prerequisite to feminist and queer collective action.
