More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sterile but virile, damned but noble, the manly woman was a creature born of the wasteland.
In a way, gender’s very flexibility and seeming fluidity is precisely what allows dimorphic gender to hold sway. Because so few people actually match any given community standards for male or female, in other words, gender can be imprecise and therefore multiply relayed through a solidly binary system.
Phoebe liked this
the transvestite, as interloper, creates a third space of possibility within which all binaries become unstable.
The human potential for incredibly precise classifications has been demonstrated in multiple arenas; why then do we settle for a paucity of classifications when it comes to gender?
what makes femininity so approximate and masculinity so precise?
From drag kings to spies with gadgets, from butch bodies to FTM bodies, gender and sexuality and their technologies are already excessively strange. It is simply a matter of keeping them that way.
Because modern femininity has depended on all kinds of unnatural measures and unhealthy practices, many women over time must have rejected conventional femininity in favor of healthy bodies. For this reason, the female athlete almost inevitably becomes the object of intense gender scrutiny and surveillance.
Anne’s discomfort in this scene suggests why so many working-class masculine women would have had to go undercover and pass as men. Anne, in a sense, can live out the contradiction of female masculinity because she is upper-class.
the psychoanalytic system is ultimately hostile to truly enriched understandings of female masculinity in particular because female sexual and gender behavior in general is already understood to be derivative of male identity.
Inversion as a theory of homosexuality folded gender variance and sexual preference into one economical package
Medical experts, in other words, tried to force multiple expressions of sexual and gender deviance into a very narrow range of categories and tried to explain a huge array of physicalities in relation to the binary system of sexual difference that they were absolutely committed to bolstering and preserving.
As we saw in the case of Anne Lister, identities do not suddenly emerge from some protean slime at the appropriate time; the possibility of a sexual identity or category is in fact years in the making and depends on all kinds of other factors in the culture at large.
What it does signify, however, is an elaborate system of desire in which mutuality is not a principle and in which giving on the part of the lover does not signify her own depletion or her beloved’s inadequacy, or her own morbidity and her beloved’s desperation.
“It is simply not true that all lesbians are equally ‘invisible.’ Black lesbians, working class butches, and lesbian prison inmates pay a very high price for their extraordinary visibility.”
when white lesbians continue to invest exclusively in this construction of lesbian sex as elusive, apparitional, silent, and intangible, other hyper-visible lesbian sexualities with highly complex relations to silence and exposure are totally discounted.
Prescribed sexual behavior along lesbian feminist lines enacts a form of cultural imperialism and ignores the specificities of different sexual cultures.
The stone butch has the dubious distinction of being possibly the only sexual identity defined almost solely in terms of what practices she does not engage in. Is there any other sexual identity, we might ask, defined by what a person will not do? What does it mean to define a sexual identity and a set of sexual practices that coalesce around that identity within a negative register? What are the implications of a negative performativity for theorizing sexual subjectivities? Furthermore, could we even imagine designating male sexual identities in terms of nonperformance? Many men do not invite
...more
why should we necessarily expect butches suddenly to access some perfect and pleasurable femaleness when everywhere else in their social existence they are denied access to an unproblematic feminine subjectivity?
words, the stone butch manages the discordance between being a woman and experiencing herself as masculine by creating a sexual identity and a set of sexual practices that correspond to and accommodate the disjuncture.
gender is always a rough match between bodies and subjectivities;
While it would be inaccurate to claim that all transgender butches are erstwhile lesbians, it would be equally absurd to claim that there is no relation between some transgender butches and a broader definition of lesbian.
a strange struggle between FTMS and lesbian butches who accuse each other of gender normativity.
the ways in which butch and FTM bodies are read against and through each other for better or for worse.
Billy’s experience testifies to the ways in which masculinity within some lesbian contexts presents a problem when it becomes too “real,” or when some imaginary line has been crossed between play and seriousness.
there are many butches who pass as men and many transsexuals who present as gender ambiguous and many bodies that cannot be classified by the options transsexual and butch.
(142). In Emergence, lesbianism haunts the protagonist and threatens to swallow his gender specificity and disallow his transsexuality.
“high intensity transsexualism.”
I was born black. I don’t expect people to like me, to accept me. Some transsexuals, especially the white MTF’S—they’re in shock after the transition. Loss of privilege, loss of status; they think people should be thrilled to work side by side with them. Well, people do not go to work in mainstream America hoping for an educational experience. I didn’t expect anyone to be happy to see me—I just expected, I demanded a little tolerance. (49)
There are many histories of bodies that escape and elude medical taxonomies, of bodies that never present themselves to the physician’s gaze, of subjects who identify within categories that emerge as a consequence of sexual communities and not in relation to medical or psychosexual research.
It is true that many transsexuals do transition to go somewhere, to be somewhere, and to leave geographies of ambiguity behind.
the spaces between genders, which some queer theory claims, do not represent giddy zones of mobility and freedom but represent lives reconciled to gender queerness and bodies committed to making do with the essential discomforts of embodiment.
“She leaves the familiar and safe home ground to venture into the unknown and possibly dangerous terrain. This is her home / this thin edge / of barbwire.”
gender variance, like sexual variance, cannot be relied on to produce a radical and oppositional politics simply by virtue of representing difference.
Radical interventions come from careful consideration of racial and class constructions of sexual identities and gender identities and from a consideration of the politics of mobility outlined by that potent prefix “trans.”
alternative masculinities, ultimately, will fail to change existing gender hierarchies to the extent to which they fail to be feminist, antiracist, and queer.
The image of the black or Latina butch may all too easily resonate with racial stereotyping in which white forms of femininity occupy a cultural norm and nonwhite femininities are measured as excessive or inadequate in relation to that norm; however, the butch of color may also be an image with the power to defamiliarize white masculinity and make visible a potent fusion of alternative masculinity and alternative sexuality. Because black female sexuality, in particular, has historically been measured through and against a fantasy of white womanhood, this history should warn us to be careful in
...more
Ultimately, androgyny always returns us to this humanist vision of the balanced binary in which maleness and femaleness are in complete accord. Of course, the image of the blatant butch upsets such a balance and offers no hope of temperate gendering; to really explore the power of visual images of female masculinity, we have to leave the androgyne behind and grapple with the implications of butch and transgender realness.
The difference between men performing femininity and women performing masculinity is a crucial difference to mark out: the stakes in each are different, the performances look different, and there is a distinct difference between the relations between masculinity and performance and femininity and performance.
masculinity does not belong to men, has not been produced only by men, and does not properly express male heterosexuality.
The butch resists the position of becoming an object of scrutiny and returns the stare with hard resolve.
