This dissertation concerns how lesbians narrate butch and femme as parts of self and as means to participate in communities and disrupt institutions. It begins with the assumption that butch and femme are narrative resources for storying selves. Drawing from a constructionist perspective, the project is concerned less with what butch and femme are, than with how they are used to make sense of lesbian lives. Hence, butch and femme are understood as useful ideas emergent from the local experiences of women with non-normative sexual interests living in a heterosexist, deeply gendered everyday world. The project is based on focus groups and couples and individual interviews with lesbians in and around a suburban, university town. It is argued that the notions of butch and femme tell us as much about the world in which we all live as about the individual lesbians themselves. Butch and femme are produced through the process of making sense of nonconformity in a heteronormative world. This is an interactional and interpretive process narrated as reality. Butch and femme derive from the limited and limiting discourses available for storying women's sexuality coherently, yet they are actively produced as resistant to those discourses and specific to lesbians. The results of my project suggest three important findings. First, often the coherences to which others hold us accountable are at least as salient in the production of self and personhood as are our own ideas of ourselves. Second, the heteronormative paradigm remains the only coherence system for understanding sexuality and gender. Third, the voices of individuals in their everyday lives illuminate the advancements of feminist politics and an understanding of the meaning of time. Ultimately, this project is a testament to the importance of narrating self as a means for individuals to actively participate in the production of making sense of the world.