Full Description
In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack 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 centuries. Demonstrating how female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.
Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. He rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity; considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities; and 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. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators.
Featuring a new preface by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition of Female Masculinity remains as insightful, timely, and necessary as ever.
Contents
Illustrations ix
Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition xi
Preface xxiii
1. An Introduction to Female Masculinity: Masculinity without Men 1
2. Perverse Presentation: The Androgyne, the Tribade, the Female Husband, and Other Pre-Twentieth-Century Genders 45
3. "A Writer of Misfits": John Radclyffe Hall and the Discourse of Inversion 75
4. Lesbian Masculinity: Even Stone Butches Get the Blues 111
5. Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum 141
6. Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film 175
7. Drag Kings: Masculinity and Performance 231
8. Raging Bull (Dyke): New Masculinities 267
Notes 279
Bibliography 307
Filmography 319
Index 323
