Butch-Femme Relationship Essay Example

her new home, as vicious policemen raid the gay bars regularly, and throw butches and drag queens into jail. Jess believes the only way out of her plight is to take concrete steps to define her gender.

Venturing into new territory, Jess takes male hormones and undergoes breast reduction surgery.Finding a job becomes easier, but instead of making it possible for Jess to live an open life without deceit and lies, the sex-change further distances her from the life she truly wants a yearning for a class status that might afford her more breathing room as a transgendered person. In presenting Goldberg’s life as the personal side of political history, Feinberg demonstrates that sexual identity and gender are constituted as social constructs, evident in the series of brutal and humiliating punishments that Jess and her transgendered friends are subjected to for failing to conform to society’s expectations.Jess identifies with the men she works alongside in the factories and warehouses, rather than with the middle-class feminists who exclude butch and femme lesbians from their organizations. Jess also befriends members of other oppressed groups, including drag queens and African-American students in her high school. By calling attention to their harmonious coexistence, Feinberg is undoubtedly trying to interrogate the relationship between racism, sexism and revolutionary class consciousness.

Like gender and sexuality, such a relationship is political and organized into systems of power, where some individuals and activities are rewarded and encouraged, while others may be punished and suppressed (Rubin, 1982, p. 34). If the butch threatened to move lesbianism in the direction of a male-identification, then femme’ness would threaten to move lesbianism in the direction of heterosexual betrayal. This

would result in both the butch and femme threatening to keep lesbianism aligned with class specificities (Martin, 1994, p. 08).

Throughout the novel, Feinberg renders situations where Jess sees her identity as fixed and essential, whilst at the same time, she is engaged in the process of practicing acts and relationships which deny this possibility (Rahman, 2000, p. 56). I argue that Jess has tapped onto these systems of power, using her identity as a necessary fiction in the social negotiation of the world, to give herself the courage to disagree with a man-made institution compulsory heterosexuality.As Rich (1986) writes, Despite profound emotional impulses and complementarities drawing women toward women, there is a mystical/biological heterosexual inclination which draws women toward men(p.

232). I theorize that these systems of power can be further broken down into at least three subcategories: commodity lesbianism, erotic identity, and the notion of a homosexual body. These subcategories, which have been thoroughly exploited by Jess in the novel, overlap one another in an inter causal, fluid and dynamic way.Let us now distinguish briefly between the butch and the femme. The butch is the lesbian woman who proudly displays the possession of the penis, while the femme takes on the compensatory masquerade of womanliness. The femme, however, foregrounds her masquerade by playing to a butch, another woman in a role (Case, 1989, p.

300). Feinberg explores this nature of intragroup power relations between the butch and the femme, and then examines the limited possibilities for resistance outside a supportive community.Even as Jess struggles alone to construct a self amid a social milieu dominated by alienation, fragmentation and loneliness, she discovers that resistance to

oppression and the refashioning of a resisting self is a losing battle outside a resistance community. Freud, for example, regarded lesbians as immature, as they do not accept their lack of a penis and so pretend to be men (Rahman, 2000, p.

60).Undoubtedly, heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere, women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty (Rich, 1986, p. 241). Thus, there needs to be a continued and relentless unified resistance among transgendered subjects.

As Frye (1983) argued, Total power is unconditional access; total powerlessness is being unconditionally accessible (p. 5).Only by a shared and coordinated effort to manipulate and control access can power be created and manipulated, so as to overcome the substantial obstacles to unity among transgendered subjects. Lesbians have a long tradition of resisting dominant cultural definitions of female beauty and fashion as a way of separating themselves from heterosexual culture politically, and as a way of signaling their lesbianism to other women in their subcultural group (Clark, 1991).More specifically, the butch has this phobic reputation of being some brawny specimen dressed in leather and chains. Yet, can we not consider the possibility that the butch chooses her clothing very carefully because she is more aware than most of us of its cultural meaning? It is compelling that when a butch’s erotic dress code is combined with certain maneuvers, it exerts a kind of presence to the opposing party.

The way Jess walks, her voice, the way she holds her body, all attract attention because they are perceived as violating gender norms.Her dress and demeanor

signify class as much as they do gender. For example, Joan Nestle, the founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York, described her experience in the Greenwich Village bars about how she could spot a butch 50 feet away and still feel the thrill of her power as she saw the erotic signal of her hair at the nape of her neck, touching the shirt collar; how she held a cigarette; the symbolic pinky ring flashing as she waved her hand(Case, 1989, p. 00). In Stone Butch Blues, the funeral scene illustrates Nestles point about the power of the dress, but presents the idea in a wryer tone, and in so doing, highlights the contractedness of gender and the extent to which clothes make the man Jess arrives to the funeral wearing a suit, in flagrant and deliberate violation of the dresses-only injunction.

The funeral home director catches a glimpse of her and immediately calls the viewing to an abrupt halt.By wearing the suit, Jess is signifying gendered power and upper-class status. Just like the first time Jess cross-dresses in her father’s suit and stands before a mirror, the suit represents not just a gendered self-expression, but also of Jess’s unconscious yearning for a class status that might afford her more breathing room as a transgendered person (Moses, 1999). In the context of lesbianism today, the lesbian community, or more broadly the gay and lesbian community, has been considered by many to be an untapped goldmine.Businesses targeting gays and lesbians have expanded beyond clubs and bookstores to comprise virtually a full-service market that includes media, merchandise catalogs, vacation companies, and legal, medical, financial, and

communication services.

Hence , in conclusion we can say that this book represents not only the transformation of the life of the protagonist, but of many individuals working to articulately address the complexities of both sexuality and gender presentation.From the first publication of Stone Butch Blues to its current reissue, the novel has become akin to a new generation's Stonewall, in defining truth of self and building community allegiance. Highly recommended for anyone--straight, queer, or other--who wishes to comprehend the greater nuances of sex and gender. A cornerstone achievement in literature.