Viola

Name: Viola

Location: Boston, MA

Personal Website: Find me on Fetlife as “WritingAsViola”

Biography: Viola is a queer femme dyke with a penchant for pearls, thick leather-bound books, and the current state of queer theory. Her first kinky experience was in the 4th grade, when she developed a literary crush on Miss Trunchbull, the headmistress in Roald Dahl’s Matilda. This sapphic revelation caused pigtails to be her hairstyle of choice for much of her young life, as well as the cultivation of a desire for strong women wielding riding crops. She has a passion for butch dykes and other masculine-identified queer females of that ilk.

While she isn’t geeking out over intellectual property law or being spanked by her partner, Viola enjoys reading memoirs that turn the inane into hilarity without being nauseatingly self-indulgent.

Viola ascertains that she doesn’t fly her “freak flag” because it’s at the dry cleaner.

Specialties: wearing red lipstick, brewing coffee, literary criticism, spanking, identifying sexual innuendo in the works of John Milton.

About my column…

“My Freak Flag is at the Dry Cleaners” is a monthly column written by a queer femme 20-something as a close examination of gender identity and sexuality within the queer and kink communities. Because she is femme and looks sweet and innocent, Viola is often mistaken for a straight vanilla chick at kink events, an experience that continues to fuel her desire to write about femme and kink invisibility, performative gender, and the cultural appropriations of leather and kink.