Female Masculinity Quotes

“Before there were lesbians, there were butches. The masculine woman prowls the film set as an emblem of social upheaval and as a marker of sexual disorder. She wears the wrong clothes, expresses aberrant desires, and if often associated with clear markers of a distinctly phallic power.

She may carry a gun, smoke a cigar, wear leather, ride a motorbike; she may swagger, strut, boast, flirt with younger and more obviously feminine women; she often goes by a male moniker: Frankie, George, Willy, Micky, Eli, Nicky. She is tough and tragic, she was a tomboy, and she expresses a variety of masculinities.”
― Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity

“In an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 2016, Alison Bechdel, who appeared in the photograph accompanying the piece dressed in a very smart tailored suit, was asked: “In Fun Home, you wrote about becoming a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age. Today a young person like you would be more likely to identify as transgender than gay. Is the butch lesbian endangered?” “Well, first of all, great question!! Second, wow, in the New York Times? Really? Third, well, is the butch endangered?” Bechdel answers adroitly: “I think the way I first understood my lesbianism, before I had more of a political awareness of it, was like: Oh, I’m a man trapped in a female body. I would’ve just gone down that road if it had been there. But I’m so glad it wasn’t, because I really like being this kind of unusual woman. I like making this new space in the world.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity

“Who, we might ask, can afford to dream of a right body? Who believes that such a body exists?”
― Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity