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Judith Halberstam : Female Masculinity
Masculinity without men. Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of
male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct
alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Halberstam catalogues the
diversity of gender expressions among masculine women form nineteenth-century
pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. She considers the
enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within
lesbian communities. She also explores issues of transsexuality among
"transgender dykes" - lesbians who pass as men - and female-to-male transsexuals
who may find the label of lesbian a temporary refuge. Illustrated with with
nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king
performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of
female masculinities.
Judith Halberstam : Female Masculinity
Masculinity without men. Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of
male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct
alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Halberstam catalogues the
diversity of gender expressions among masculine women form nineteenth-century
pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. She considers the
enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within
lesbian communities. She also explores issues of transsexuality among
"transgender dykes" - lesbians who pass as men - and female-to-male transsexuals
who may find the label of lesbian a temporary refuge. Illustrated with with
nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king
performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of
female masculinities.
12 σχόλια:
Judith Halberstam, Female masculinity (Duke University Press Durham and London 1998)
Most people will acknowledge that masculinity has become somewhat of a favoured topic in the last ten years or so, but what about masculinity without men?
There continues to be chapters in essay collections by the usual suspects -- Eve K. Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, for instance -- yet Judith Halberstam's Feminine masculinity is the first full-length study of masculine women.
Halberstam is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego and is also the author of Skin shows: gothic horror and the technology of monsters.
While queer discussion about masculinity is more likely to extend beyond the male body and not use the term as a synonym for men or maleness anyway, Female masculinity covers a vast amount of ground well beyond this. Halberstam scrutinizes the politics of butch/femme in lesbian communities, transsexuality among transgender dykes, as well as looking at Hollywood butches, drag kings and women and boxing.
Halberstam details ways in which female masculinity has been ignored, and rather than conceptualising masculinity without men, she compiles the myths and fantasies about masculinity that make masculinity and maleness difficult to pry apart then offers examples, mostly queer and female, of alternative masculinities in fiction, film and lived experience. Halberstam's methods are interdisciplinary, using what she calls a queer methodology ("a scavenger methodology" or that which "betrays a certain disloyalty to conventional disciplinary methods.)
The premise of book is that female masculinity "is a specific gender with its own cultural history rather than a derivative of male masculinity" and points out how psychoanalytic approaches that assume that female masculinity mimics male masculinity are not particularly helpful and certainly not insightful.
The book begins with textual readings of two examples of female masculinity from 19th century literature, Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The well of loneliness.
Halberstam uses Lister's diaries to put together a same sex desire structured by "unequal desires, sexual and gender roles, ritualised class relations and an almost total rejection of sexual sameness" and then puts The well of loneliness forward to emphasise the ongoing construction of modern lesbian identity.
Paraphrasing Eve K. Sedgwick, Halberstam asks what makes it so difficult not to presume an essential relationship between masculinities and men, and then proceeds to journey between male and female and within queer and straight space, but while "thinking in fractal terms and about gender geometries." Fasten your seat beats, you're in for a scenic but bumpy ride.
When dealing with the stone butch, for example, Halberstam points out how very different identifications between sexuality, the body and gender emerge -- the sexually untouchable woman complicates the idea that all lesbians share sexual practices or even that women share female sexual desires.
Halberstam also looks at the history of butch women in film and goes beyond the discourse of positive and negative images. She sees queer cinema "with its invitations to play through numerous identifications within a single sitting" as creating a place for the reinvention of ways of seeing. A consideration of Valerie Traub's proposition of using lesbian and heterosexual as adjectives rather than nouns is used as a challenge to the usual binary code of visual texts used by film theory. Halberstam points out that positive images can be no less stereotypical, in so far as they are not necessarily more realistic. She looks at a number of old "negative" images including The killing of sister George (1968) and The children's hour (1961) and then discusses the geneology of the butch in film history to show that negative images may also provide a history of representation of sexual minorities as well as access to the history of looking butch.
The chapter on drag kings provides a foray into something which became something of a phenomenon in New York in the 1990s. The fact that in the theatre of mainstream gender roles, femininity is often presented as simply costume whereas masculinity manifests as realism or as a body, makes for interesting added value to Halberstam's thesis.
Indifference to feminine masculinity, Halberstam argues, has "ideological motivations and has sustained the complex social structures that wed masculinity to maleness and to power and domination."
In the texts covered, Halberstam has attempted to restore some of the complexity lost within the usual rigid binary definitions. She shows how certain identities tend to be exceedingly specific, and that it is important to recognise the many distinctive types of masculinity in women as well as, and to do so in place of using catch-all phrase of lesbianism.
She steers herself admirably between the subtle and not so subtle interactions between the personal and the theoretical.
It is important to do so, she argues, in order for an understanding of minority gender categories that incorporates rather than pathologises them.
This study is well on the way to helping create such acceptance.
Millissa Deitz
TROUBLING TAXONOMIES
In the first sentence of the preface to her book, Female Masculinity
(1998), Judith Halberstam clearly articulates one of the central
problems of her project. She states, "There is something all too
obvious about the concept of 'female masculinity'" (xi). Indeed,
when I read this statement and turned back to the front cover of the
book, I knew that what I was about to read was a book about the
experiences of Euro-American, biologically-born females who identify
as masculine. What I had hoped to read was something less obvious—a
cross-cultural critique of masculinity and gender performativity, or
perhaps a discussion of gender as it relates to broader categories,
such as race, class, religion, marriage and labor. Finally, I hoped
to read an analysis of masculinity that embraced the female, but
that did not need to be qualified by the term female. This was not
the book I read, however.
In her book, Halberstam seeks to demonstrate that female masculinity
is "a specific gender with its own cultural history" (77) rather
than "an imitation of maleness" (1) or "a pathological sign of
misidentification and maladjustment" (9). The evidence for her
argument stems primarily from literary and dramatic sources—novels,
diaries, film and theatre—and is arranged by what she calls "a logic
of embodiment," that is, by how the individuals presented in these
genres position(ed) themselves within the gender discourses of their
day (41). The first two examples she presents are from the
nineteenth century—the court case of two schoolteachers, Jane Pirie
and Marianne Woods, and the diaries of Anne Lister. Next, she
explores the facts and fictions of John Radclyffe Hall's life and
its relation to Havelock Ellis's sexological analyses and the
prevailing notions of "sexual inversion" at that time. Following
these chapters, Halberstam fast-forwards to the second half of the
twentieth century, where she explores stone butch fiction, the
"border wars" of butches and female-to-male transsexuals, butches on
film, and finally, butches on stage.
Throughout her book, Halberstam emphasizes the need for a new
language, a new "taxonomy" to more accurately describe the many
forms and varieties of female masculinity. She asserts that terms
such as "tribade," "androgyne," "hermaphrodite," "female husband"
and "lesbian" are discursive, not descriptive; they are mired in
historical contexts that have lost their meaning in today's
complicated gender arenas. Philosophers Michel Foucault and Judith
Butler are frequently invoked by Halberstam to assist in her claim
that a new language is warranted in order to more accurately
articulate today's same-sex desires and practices. In explaining the
limitations and the historicity of language, Foucault seems useful
for her arguments, but Butler perhaps less so. As an example, in one
passage, Halberstam quotes Butler in order to demonstrate the
inefficacy of the term, "lesbian." Halberstam states:
Many writers have recently commented on the damage done by
labeling diverse forms of cultural production and representation
as 'lesbian' or 'gay.' [...] Judith Butler writes, 'I'm
permanently troubled by identity categories, consider them to be
invariable stumbling-blocks, and understand them, even promote
them, as sites of necessary trouble'[.] Identity, it seems, as a
representational strategy produces both power and danger; it
provides both an obstacle to identification and a site 'of
necessary trouble.' As such, the stereotype, the image that
announces identity in excess, is necessarily troublesome to an
articulation of lesbian identity, but also foundational; the butch
stereotype, furthermore, both makes lesbianism visible and yet
seems to make it visible in nonlesbian terms: That is to say, the
butch makes lesbianism readable in the register of masculinity,
and it actually collaborates with the mainstream notion that
lesbians cannot be feminine (176-7). (Note 1.)
χεχε.....
Φίλε μου Erva βγάλτη αυτή τη φωτογραφία γιατί θα το βλέπω εφιάλτη στον ύπνο μου.
Ε, καλά τώρα...
Ο δικός σου εφιάλτης μπορεί να είναι το υγρό όνειρο της άλλης.
Έτσι είναι η ζωή.
Δε με καταλαβαίνεις φίλε μου. Εγώ μιλάω με το αντρικό γούστο που τους αρέσει το ωραίο.
Δεν έχει σημασία εαν λίγοι άνθρωποι έχουνε υγρά όνειρα με ανθρώπους που δεν είναι κατάληλλοι για να σε κάνουνε να έχεις υγρά όνειρα. Αμα σκεφτόμαστε έτσι τότε να λέμε ότι έτσι είναι η ζωή όταν μερικοί έχουνε υγρά όνειρα με παιδάκια. Μετά τα έχουμε δει τα αποτελέσματα πολλές φορές.
Προφανώς δεν συμφωνώ στο ότι η αντίληψη περί ωραίου είναι κοινή σε όλους ή ότι υπάρχει ΕΝΑ μόνον αντρικό γούστο.
Άλλωστε εδώ μιλάμε για γυναίκες που αρέσουν σε άλλες γυναίκες. Επομένως...
Το ωραίο είναι ωραίο και το γούστο για το ωραίο το έχουνε όλοι οι φυσιολογικοί. Επειδή εγώ είμαι γκέϊ δε θα πει ότι πρέπει να βρίσκω ωραία τα τέρατα της φύσεως.
Αμα δε στo έχει πει κανένας ότι είναι γυναίκα δε μπορείς να το καταλάβεις. Πιο πολύ φαίνεται για άντρας.Εσένα θα σου άρεσε να πας μαζί του?
χεχε..... Αμα υποννοείς ότι οι γυναίκες δεν έχουνε ωραίο γούστο δε διαφωνώ :):):)
Ε, καλά ανώνυμε και εμάς μπορεί φέρει πειν, να μην μας αρέσουν οι παραφουσκωτοί χλεχλέδες που κυκλοφορούν ως τα υπέρτατα γκέυ πρότυπα ομορφιάς, αλλά δεν το κάνουμε και θέμα!
...άλλωστε it's a matter of gender, που έλεγαν και οι associates.
Εγώ δεν είπα ότι οι φουσκωτοί άντρες είναι ωραίοι. Εσύ φίλε μου θα πήγαινες με αυτό το φουσκωτό τέρας της φωτογραφίας?
Ο erva στο τελευταίο του post είναι αρκετά σαφής. Μας ρωτάς αμφότερους το ίδιο πράγμα.
Αν και δεν είναι αυτό το θέμα
θα σου απαντήσω. Το εν λόγω άτομο ("τέρας" όπως το αποκαλείς) θα μου
έκανε τόσο κούκου όσο και μιά femme
...και δη, όχι πολύ κούκου.
Κερνάω κολοκυθόπιττα. Ενδιαφέρεται κανείς;
Διαβάστε επίσης: Thomas Xomeritis: Η κολοκυθόπιτα του Gary Bradshaw
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