Gender please, without the gender police: Rethinking pain in archetypal narratives of Butch, transgender, and FTM masculinity

Journal of Lesbian Studies

Volumn 10, Issue 1-2, 2006, Pages 87-105

  Detloff, Madelyn ^a  

^a MIAMI UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Butch; Coherentist assumptions; FTM; Gender policing; Lesbian feminism; Tragic narratives; Transgender politics; Violence

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; AUDIOVISUAL EQUIPMENT; FEMALE; FEMINISM; HUMAN; LESBIAN; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CONTROL; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; TRANSSEXUALISM; VIOLENCE;

FEMALE; FEMINISM; HOMOSEXUALITY, FEMALE; HUMANS; MOTION PICTURES; SOCIAL CONTROL, INFORMAL; SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION; STEREOTYPING; TRANSSEXUALISM; VIOLENCE;

EID: 80053488100     PISSN: 10894160     EISSN: 15403548     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1300/J155v10n01_05     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 10th Anniversary Ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), viii.
2. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 173
3. There are good reasons, as Prosser argues, for reading The Well of Loneliness as an early transsexual narrative. Stephen Gordon, the protagonist, identifies as an "invert," which in sexological discourse of the early 20th century would have referred to a male psyche 'trapped' in a female body. However, reading the novel as a transsexual narrative does not necessarily preclude reading it as the story of a masculine female. Jean Bobby Noble, for example, suggests that "The Well is a discursive event wherein the histories of white masculinity as male-embodied, female masculinity as butch- and lesbian-embodied, and trans-sexual masculinity as meta-embodied (and failed embodiment) all overlap" (49). We can't know whether Hall would have identified Stephen differently if different categories (FTM, transsexual, transman) were available to her. Our very inability to disarticulate the categories retroactively is perhaps a motivation for transmen such as Prosser to carefully differentiate categories in the present day. By "FTM," I mean a person who lives his life as a male, despite being assigned to the category of "female" at birth. By "transgender," I mean a person who does not live his/her life conforming to the sex category "male" or "female" assigned at birth. For the sake of this argument, I will follow Halberstam's assumption that there are a wide variety of ways to embody a transgender subjectivity. Jay Prosser, "'Some Primitive Thing Considered in a Turbulent Age of Transition': The Transsexual Emerging from The Well," in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on the Well of Loneliness, ed. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 129-144;
4. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1993)
5. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (New York: Anchor Books, 1990)
6. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998)
7. Jean Bobby Noble, Masculinities Without Men? (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004). Subsequent references to The Well of Loneliness will be abbreviated as Well and cited parenthetically in the text. Subsequent references to Stone Butch Blues will be abbreviated as SBB and cited parenthetically in the text.
8. I respect Feinberg's desire to use the gender-neutral pronouns "sie" (third person nominative) and "hir" (third person possessive), and will therefore use the pronouns to refer to Jess, Feinberg's protagonist throughout this essay. For a discussion of hir pronoun preferences, see Feinberg's "We Are All Works in Progress," in TransLiberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 1-13.
9. Esther Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays, Public Ideas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 161.
10. Many scholars of femme identities have pointed out lesbian feminism's counter identification with femme femininity as well as female masculinity. See, for example, Biddy Martin, "Sexualities Without Genders and Other Queer Utopias," Diacritics 24 no. 2-3 (1994):104-21
11. and Laura Harris and Liz Crocker, "An Introduction to Sustaining Femme Gender," in Femme: Feminists, Lesbians, and Bad Girls, ed. Laura Harris and Elizabeth Crocker (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1-12.
12. For lesbian feminist disavowals of female masculinity, see, for example, Blanche Wiesen Cook, "'Women Alone Stir My Imagination': Lesbianism and Cultural Tradition," Signs 4 no. 4 (1979):718-739
13. Deborah Goleman Wolf, The Lesbian Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979)
14. and Jennie Ruby, "Is the Lesbian Future Feminist?" off our backs, October 1996, 22.
15. The term "imagined community" comes from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991).
16. Wolf, 40-48.
17. Newton, 156.
18. Ibid., 173.
19. Henry Rubin, Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment Among Transsexual Men, (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), 64-65. (Rubin's emphasis.)
20. Newton, 156.
21. Ibid., 157. (Newton's insertion).
22. Wiesen Cook characterizes butch/femme relationships as antiegalitarian in "Women Alone Stir My Imagination," 720. While I had originally thought that lesbian feminism's quarrel with butch and FTM subjectivities was largely a historical phenomenon, it is apparently kept alive through media as the Questioning Trans Politics Website (http://www.questioningtransgender.org), and off our backs. (Thanks to the JLS anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to the Website.) For example, contemporary lesbian feminist Jennie Ruby describes her own female masculinity as "internalized misogyny" that she overcame through lesbian feminist consciousness in "Identity = Politics: A Personal Story," off our backs, April 2000, 9. antiegalitarian in While I had originally thought that lesbian feminism's quarrel with butch and FTM subjectivities was largely a historical phenomenon, it is apparently kept alive through media as the Questioning Trans Politics Website and off our backs. (Thanks to the JLS anonymous reviewer for calling my attention to the Website.) For example, contemporary lesbian feminist Jennie Ruby describes her own female masculinity as "internalized misogyny" that she overcame through lesbian feminist consciousness in "Identity = Politics: A Personal Story," off our backs, April 9
23. Janet Halley, "'Like Race' Arguments," in What's Left of Theory: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2000), 41. Halley draws on the theories of Louis Althusser to nuance the process of "interpellation" or subject-making, suggesting that it is not only "ideological state apparatuses" (dominant cultural institutions such as schools, churches, [normative] families, medical/psychiatric establishments, etc.) that "hail" or call subjects into social recognition, but also subcultural communities which may enforce norms of "acceptable" subjecthood. Routledge) Halley draws on the theories of Louis Althusser to nuance the process of "interpellation" or subject-making, suggesting that it is not only "ideological state apparatuses" (dominant cultural institutions such as schools, churches, [normative] families, medical/psychiatric establishments, etc.) that "hail" or call subjects into social recognition, but also subcultural communities which may enforce norms of "acceptable" subjecthood.
24. On "interpellation," see Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971).
25. Halley, 44.
26. C. Jacob Hale, "Consuming the Living, Dis(re)Membering the Dead in the Butch/FTM Borderlands," GLQ 4 no. 2 (1998), 330.
27. I use the term "counteridentification," a way to stake an identity position in opposition to an Other ("I am I because I am not you"), rather than the term "disidentification," which, as José Esteban Muñoz explains, is a method of "recycling" a "toxic" identification with an identity that is considered abject. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11-12. For example, a femme might disidentify with hegemonic femininity by reiterating its performance in a way that exposes or undermines hegemonic femininity's 'naturalness.' An "androgynous" lesbian feminist might, on the other hand, counteridentify with feminine subjects (hegemonic or femme) entirely, by identifying as not-feminine and similarly counteridentify with not-masculine masculine subjects (bio-males, butches, FTMs). identity position in opposition to an Other ("I am I because I am not you"), rather than the term "disidentification," which, as José Esteban Muñoz explains, is a method of "recycling" a "toxic" identification with an identity that is considered abject. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press) For example, a femme might disidentify with hegemonic femininity by reiterating its performance in a way that exposes or undermines hegemonic femininity's 'naturalness.' An "androgynous" lesbian feminist might, on the other hand, counteridentify with feminine subjects (hegemonic or femme) entirely, by identifying as not-feminine and similarly counteridentify with not-masculine masculine subjects (bio-males, butches, FTMs)
28. The L Word, dir. Rose Troche, prod. Eileen Chaiken (USA: Showtime Networks Inc. USA, 2004-2005). Halberstam critiques the series' lack of butch representation in "The I Word," Girlfriends, Feb. 2004, 18. Networks Inc. USA 2004-2005). Halberstam critiques the series' lack of butch representation in Feb. 18
29. Bolonik, Kera. "Not Your Mother's Lesbians," New York Magazine, 12 Jan. 2004. (Available at New York Metro.com http://newyorkmetro.com/ nymetro/news/features/n_9708/.)
30. Halberstam analyzes the familial dynamics and generational rhetoric implicit in "Not Your Mother's Lesbians" as well as contemporary articles on "boi" culture, asking "What are we to make of these new forms of trans and lesbian culture? Why is feminism posited as both an embarrassing mother who must be pushed aside and a humorless butch aunt who stands in the way of the pursuit of pleasure? Are there other models of generation, temporality, and politics available to queer culture and feminism?" Judith Halberstam, "Transgender Feminism and the Evolution of the Clownfish," Paper presented at the Back to the Future: Generations of Feminism Conference, The University of Chicago, February 28 2004, 1.
31. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1., Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 6.
32. Hayden White, "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1989).
33. White draws on the archetypal criticism of Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).
34. Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004)
35. Isabelle Miller, Patience and Sarah (New York: Fawcett Crest, [1969] 1973)
36. Maria Maggenti, The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, dir. Maria Maggenti (Fine Line Features, 1995).
37. Jay Prosser, for example, reads The Well of Loneliness and Stone Butch Blues as transsexual and transgendered narratives that "attest to the valences of cultural belonging that the categories of man and woman still carry in our world: What I term 'gendered realness."' Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 11.
38. Jean Bobby Noble reads The Well, Stone Butch Blues, Boys Don't Cry, and Rose Tremain's Sacred Country as exemplary narratives of female and/or trans-gendered or trans-sexed masculinities. Jean Bobby Noble, Masculinities Without Men? Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), xii. All of these narratives highlight suffering, and in three out of four (The Well excepted), physical violence is a significant plot element. and Rose Tremain's Sacred Country as exemplary narratives of female and/ or trans-gendered or trans-sexed masculinities. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press) All of these narratives highlight suffering, and in three out of four (The Well excepted), physical violence is a significant plot element
39. Kimberly Pierce and Andy Bienen. Boys Don't Cry, dir. Kimberly Pierce (Fox Searchlight Pictures: 1999).
40. Rose Tremain, Sacred Country (New York: Washington Square Press, 1995).
41. Noble, 116.
42. Hale, "Consuming the Living;"
43. Halberstam, "The Brandon Teena Archive" in Queer Studies: An Interdisciplinary Reader, ed. Robert Corber and Stephen Valocci (London: Blackwell, 2002), 159-169.
44. One could argue, as Noble does, that Stone Butch Blues ends more hopefully, with Jess's coming to consciousness as a transgender and labor activist, but if we read the temporal ending of the narrative as the beginning of the novel-Jess's long and undeliverable letter to her former lover, Theresa-the plot structure becomes much more like that of The Well, with the writing of an impassioned plaint the primary form of consolation for the suffering outcast (Noble, 140-41).
45. Wiesen Cook, 718. Catharine Stimpson, in a less condemning tone, analyzes The Well for its five-part plot structure, with "each of the novel's five sections (or acts) end[ing] unhappily," and compares The Well to the more "hopeful" lesbian novels of the 1970s. Catharine Stimpson, "Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English," in Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 249.
46. Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 5.
47. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 31.
48. D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
49. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses."
50. Evelynn Hammonds, for example, suggests that the ideological policing of working class African American women by "some middle-class black women" was a response to the racist stereotypes of the "oversexualized" black woman used "as a justification for the rape, lynching, and other abuses of black women by whites." Evelynn Hammonds, "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality" in Feminism Meets Queer Theory, ed. Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 142-143. A more disturbing example of this type of gender policing is Janice Raymond's invocation of (birth assigned) women's susceptibility to rape as a justification for her exclusionary (indeed hateful) remarks about transsexual mtfs. policing of working class African American women by "some middle-class black women" was a response to the racist stereotypes of the "oversexualized" black woman used "as a justification for the rape, lynching, and other abuses of black women by whites." ed. Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) A more disturbing example of this type of gender policing is Janice Raymond's invocation of (birth assigned) women's susceptibility to rape as a justification for her exclusionary (indeed hateful) remarks about transsexual mtfs.
51. Sandy Stone critiques Raymond's dubious claim that "All transsexuals rape women's bodies" in "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto," in Body Guards, ed. Kristina Straub and Julia Epstein (New York: Routledge, 1991).
52. Wendy Brown, "Wounded Attachments," in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).
53. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 137. Noble cites Scarry's work in a different context, suggesting that Mary/[Martin](the protagonist in Sacred Country), and Jess, the protagonist in Stone Butch Blues, are "subjects of a kind of domestic daily torture" (Noble, 116).
54. Scarry, 137.
55. Jodie Medd, "War Wounds: The Nation, Shell Shock, and Psychoanalysis in The Well of Loneliness," in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on the Well of Loneliness, ed. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 242.
56. Munt, Sally. "The Well of Shame," in Palatable Poison: Critical Perspectives on the Well of Loneliness, ed. Laura Doan and Jay Prosser (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 200.
57. Noble discusses Hall's use of masochistic tropes of Christian martyrdom in Masculinities Without Men?, 62-67.
58. Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
59. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 90.
60. My analysis here is not meant to suggest that transmen and FTMs would necessarily shun sex that involved caressing, touching breasts, penetration by a partner, etc., but rather that within the context of the film, it seems fairly clear that Lana is making love to Brandon as a woman. The scene further suggests that the rape has somehow made his sexual role more "flexible," as if the rape has been sexually liberating to him. Certainly many survivors of sexual violence have maintained active, pleasurable, adventuresome sexual lives, but within the film's narrative logic, the timing of Brandon's sudden change in sexual role seems suspect.
61. Brown, 73.
62. Bernstein, 12.
63. Teresa De Lauretis, "The Stubborn Drive," Critical Inquiry 24 (Summer 1998), 866.