butch(er)ing subjectivity: between masculinity and misogyny

Butch(er)ing Subjectivity: Between Masculinity and Misogynyby Kendall Joy Gerdespresented for the Rice University English Symposium“After Queer, After Humanism”September 14, 2012

"because I choose my gendered

practices, I free them from their

injurious potential."

1999 edition

• Frame

• Ticker

• Size and order of name and title

• Subtitle

To make trouble was, in the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one

should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught in the

same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle

ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble.

Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make

it, what best way to be in it.

– Judith Butler, 1990 Preface to Gender Trouble (emphasis mine)

St. Judy, from the “International Discourse TheoristColoring Contest”

Feminist anti-femininity?

Feminist anti-femininity = internalized misogyny.

Anti-femininity = misogyny.

Misogyny internalized by feminists.

Feminists = feminine?

Feminists = women?

[Martin] assumes that conformity is 'bad' and 'transgression' is

good. It is surely only within an academic discussion, however,

that conformity and transgression can be so thoroughly uprooted from daily experience. While

academics may celebrate transgression, the experience of transgression itself is often filled

with fear, danger and shame rather than heroic self-

satisfaction.

-- J. Halberstam, “Between Butches” (1998)

• Gendering renders masculinity/femininity as opposites

• Butchness is rendered as female masculinity

• Masculinity is vulnerable to the opposite it excludes

What remains unattainable in the butches’ masculinity, we might

say, is what remains unattainable in all masculinity: all ideal

masculinity by its very nature is just out of reach, but it is only in

the butch, the masculine woman, that we notice its impossibility…

The failure of ideal masculinity … must be located in the butch in order to make male masculinity

seem possible.

(After?) Butch

Works Cited

• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 1990. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999. Print.

• Halberstam, J. "Between Butches." butch/femme: Inside Lesbian Gender. Ed. Sally R. Munt. Washington, DC: Cassell, 1998. 57-65. Print.

• Halberstam, J. Female Masculinity.

• Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure.

• Martin, Biddy. "Sexualities Without Genders and Other Queer Utopias." Diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 104-121. Print.