Female Masculinity

by J. Jack Halberstam

many of these "heroic masculinities" depend absolutely on the subordination of alternative masculinities.

In other words, female masculinities are framed as the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing.

This widespread indifference to female masculinity, I suggest, has clearly ideological motivations and has sustained the complex social structures that wed masculinity to maleness and to power and domination.

masculinity represents the power of inheritance, the consequences of the traffic in women, and the promise of social privilege.

This study professes a degree of indifference to the whiteness of the male and the masculinity of the white male and the project of naming his power:

there's something curiously lacking in Goldeneye, namely, credible masculine power.

In Goldeneye it is M who most convincingly performs masculinity, and she does so partly by exposing the sham of Bond's own performance.

The gay masculinity of Agent Q and the female masculinity of M provide a remarkable representation of the absolute dependence of dominant masculinities on minority masculinities.

today's rebel without a cause is tomorrow's investment banker,

male rebellion tends toward respectability as the rewards for conformity quickly come to outweigh the rewards for social rebellion.

we tend to believe that female gender deviance is much more tolerated than male gender deviance.

as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl.

The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers,

her status as "unjoined" marks her out for all manner of social violence and opprobrium.

Frankie thinks that naming represents the power of definition, and name changing confers the power to reimagine identity, place, relation, and even gender.

we are supposed to desire only certain people and only in certain ways, but her desire does not work that way, and she finds herself torn between longing and belonging.

Because she does not desire in conventional ways, Frankie seeks to avoid desire altogether.

as a longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach.

Frankie Addams, for example, constitutes her rebellion not in opposition to the law but through indifference to the law: she recognizes that it may be against the law to change one's name or add to it, but she also has a simple response to such illegal activity: "Well, I don't care."

Because masculinity in the 1990s has finally been recognized as, at least in part, a construction by female- as well as male-born people.

The continued refusal in Western society to admit ambiguously gendered bodies into functional social relations

is, I will claim, sustained by a conservative and protectionist attitude by men in general toward masculinity.

If you are a white man, it is probably extremely difficult to talk about either race or masculinity let alone both at the same time. But, of course, race and masculinity,

protofascist masculinities produced by male sports fans.

Ambiguous gender, when and where it does appear, is inevitably transformed into deviance, thirdness, or a blurred version of either male or female.

the policing of gender within the bathroom is intensified in the space of the airport, where people are literally moving through space and time in ways that cause them to want to stabilize some boundaries (gender) even as they traverse others (national).

Their casualness about calling security indicates that they know Jess is a woman but want to punish her for her inappropriate self-presentation.

one must be readable at a glance.

women's rest rooms tend to operate as an arena for the enforcement of gender conformity.

Sex-segregated bathrooms continue to be necessary to protect women from male predations but also produce and extend a rather outdated notion of a public-private split between male and female society. The bathroom is a domestic space beyond the home that comes to represent domestic order, or a parody of it, out in the world.

bathroom problem is much more than a glitch in the machinery of gender segregation and is better described in terms of the violent enforcement of our current gender system.

we do not name and notice new genders because as a society we are committed to maintaining a binary gender system.

what makes femininity so approximate and masculinity so precise? Or to pose the question with a different spin, why is femininity easily impersonated or performed while masculinity seems resilient to imitation?

why is it, in the case of the masculine woman in the bathroom, for example, that one finds the limits of femininity so quickly, whereas the limits of masculinity in the men's room seem fairly expansive?

when and where female masculinity conjoins with possibly queer identities, it is far less likely to meet with approval.

very often the unholy union of femaleness and masculinity can produce wildly unpredictable results.

Art of Gender

Shaw moves easily back and forth between various personae: she is the fighter, the crooner, the soldier, the breadwinner, the romeo, the patriarch. In each of these roles, she makes it clear that she is a female-bodied person inhabiting each role and that each role is part of her gender identity. To play among a variety of masculine identifications, furthermore, Shaw is not forced to become her father or to appropriate his maleness; she is already "just like" her father, and their masculinities exist on parallel plains.