Teenage tomboyism presents a problem and tends to be subject to the most severe efforts to reorient. 0000004647 00000 n Riding along with the feminist movement, there has recently been a wave of opposition against the notion that women can't have and enjoy casual sex. . . It constitutes a valuable initial challenge to those in feminism and cultural studies who conflate masculinity with maleness, and offers an inspiring start for ongoing study. She considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. It combines both disputed and human rights., Purity and virginity exhibit two characteristics expected of women in the eyes of men, and without them, are devalued and undesirable. Bringing attention to the issue of female objectification is relevant because it is still something women suffer from today and one can argue that it is a growing issue in society. , Duke University Press Books; 1st edition (October 26, 1998), Language It is M who convinces us that sexism and misogyny are not necessarily part and parcel of masculinity, even though historically it has become difficult, if not impossible, to untangle masculinity from the oppression of women. . Lesbian Masculinity: Even Stone Butches Get the Blues, 5. 0000005316 00000 n This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. A dense work that requires some knowledge of gay studies, this is recommended for academic libraries and will appeal to scholars in gay studies, gender studies, women's studies, film studies, and sociology. . 0000005953 00000 n There was a problem loading your book clubs. endstream endobj 62 0 obj << /Type /FontDescriptor /Ascent 891 /CapHeight 656 /Descent -216 /Flags 98 /FontBBox [ -498 -307 1120 1023 ] /FontName /IALJLO+TimesNewRoman,Italic /ItalicAngle -15 /StemV 83.31799 /XHeight 0 /FontFile2 81 0 R >> endobj 63 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /TrueType /FirstChar 32 /LastChar 121 /Widths [ 250 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 250 333 250 0 500 500 0 0 500 500 0 0 500 500 333 0 0 0 0 500 0 611 611 667 722 611 611 722 722 333 444 0 556 833 667 722 611 0 611 500 556 722 611 833 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 500 500 444 500 444 278 500 500 278 0 444 278 722 500 500 500 0 389 389 278 500 444 667 444 444 ] /Encoding /WinAnsiEncoding /BaseFont /IALJLO+TimesNewRoman,Italic /FontDescriptor 62 0 R >> endobj 64 0 obj 573 endobj 65 0 obj << /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 64 0 R >> stream Sex Up Your Life: The Mind-Blowing Path to True Intimacy, Healing, and Hope, Epistemology of the Closet, Updated with a New Preface, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (Sexual Cultures, 3), Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, 200 Words to Help you Talk about Sexuality & Gender, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge Classics), Burning My Roti: Breaking Barriers as a Queer Indian Woman. McCullers positions Frankie on the verge of adolescence ("when Frankie was twelve years old") and in the midst of an enduring state of being "unjoined": "She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world." Essential reading for gender studies and a lively contribution to cultural studies in general. But all too many studies that currently attempt to account for the power of white masculinity recenter this white male body by concentrating all their analytical efforts on detailing the forms and expressions of white male dominance. I begin with a consideration of definitions of the lesbian image, and I also try to present a map of recent debates within queer cinema over positive and negative images, spectatorship, and the role of feminist psychoanalytic film theory. Your purchase has been completed. This is an especially pertinent issue for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) women, for whom gender expression can be very tricky because of rigid expectations of how masculine or feminine they should be. 0000008016 00000 n Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film, 7. I'm not a big fan of Halberstam's structure of argumentation, but if you are interested in female masculinity, you need to read this book. 0000008554 00000 n 0000002517 00000 n 0000041698 00000 n

The traits associated with women need counterparts to be justified, which are qualities associated with masculinity. An Introduction to Female Masculinity: Masculinity without Men. . . Nine-year-old Fredd claimed that she was really a male and demanded that his family, friends, teachers, and other social contacts deal with him as a boy. I then offer, by way of a preliminary attempt to re-imagine masculinity, numerous examples of alternative masculinities in fiction, film, and lived experience. :gUC.YQ$9tMUg0d n>hS35jqRM"+,: _3cN]^Y^GWYOD3s`2*)1R{#bDe^wi&}yuu)"cXn="!l/S^uL*~V1C*';:+yuu`2iF;&f0$v}gZ}g~7GFRzGe %U#d>n|~#@yz# ' endstream endobj 66 0 obj 570 endobj 67 0 obj << /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 66 0 R >> stream

Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2016. Halberstam, too, does not treat masculinity and femininity as strictly polar opposites, but as a spectrum where almost everyone is accepted to be somewhere, An Introduction To Female Masculinity By Jack Halberstam Analysis. 0000001311 00000 n But really, such a frustrating elision. And Anne Lister, writing in her diaries in the early nineteenth century, comments on how she asks her lovers to refrain from touching her during lovemaking: I do what I like but never permit them to do so (No Priest but Love, 85). I believe that these accoutrements of masculine competition signified for me a way to keep adult womanhood at bay. Lesbian Masculinity: Even Stone Butches Get the Blues, 5. Stereotypes often leave femme lesbian and bisexual women feeling invisible or invalidated in their identities, while, Because she also uses words such as confidence and independence to describe butch women, reinforcing the idea of attraction to ones opposite does enforce an unintended negative attitude toward femme women. . But, obviously, many other lines of identification traverse the terrain of masculinity, dividing its power into complicated differentials of class, race, sexuality, and gender. This path-breaking collection of essays by Audre Lorde is a clarion call to build communities that nurture our spirit. 0000007323 00000 n Currently a professor of English and gender studies and director of the Center for Feminist Research at the University of Southern California, Halberstam regularly speaks on queer culture, gender studies, and popular culture, and blogs at The Bully Bloggers. You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition. 0000007344 00000 n . The message of her song Run the World (Girls) is incredibly blatant yet she is respected enough to not be labeled as a bitch for standing up for women. Her new book is a smart, entertaining and informed tour of that most threatening of cultural identities: the masculine female. Frankie in particular understands desire and sexuality to be the most regimented forms of social conformitywe are supposed to desire only certain people and only in certain ways, but her desire does not work that way, and she finds herself torn between longing and belonging. Gender conformity is pressed onto all girls, not just tomboys, and this is where it becomes hard to uphold the notion that male femininity presents a greater threat to social and familial stability than female masculinity. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Transgender Butch: Butch/FTM Border Wars and the Masculine Continuum, 6. Obviously, there is something inherently queer about "female masculinity" but as a gender theorist and a self identified masculine female who is very much sexually attracted to men, I find myself continually frustrated by the equation of female masculinity with attraction to women. . Obviously, then, No Fear is a luxury and can in no way be equated with any form of social rebellion.

After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. Masculinity, in this rather actionless film, is primarily prosthetic and, in this and countless other action films, has little if anything to do with biological maleness and signifies more often as a technical special effect. . She is the author of, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, , also published by Duke University Press, and writes a regular film review column for, Publisher McCullers's pessimism has to do with a sense of the overwhelming "order of things," an order that cannot be affected by the individual, and works through things as basic as language, and forces nonmembers into memberships they cannot fulfill. To illustrate my point that modern masculinity is most easily recognized as female masculinity, consider the James Bond action film, in which male masculinity very often appears as only a shadow of a more powerful and convincing alternative masculinity. . Women are also held at a double standard because they must assume masculine roles in order to be taken seriously, however face criticism and attacks at their character for being bitchy once they do so, or must not appear too feminine (164). When I purchased this book at amazon.com, I was worried that it would not reach me before my departure from the USA.

0000006609 00000 n . .". Because of its focus on specifically lesbian contributions to masculinity, Halberstam's book surpasses its predecessors in its special relevance to lesbian readers. Now and Always,The Trusted Content Your Research Requires, Now and Always, The Trusted Content Your Research Requires, Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2015. Halberstam (literature, Univ. Masculinity seems to extend outward into patriarchy and inward into the family; masculinity represents the power of inheritance, the consequences of the traffic in women, and the promise of social privilege. . 0000007995 00000 n I do not claim to have any definitive answer to this question, but I do have a few proposals about why masculinity must not and cannot and should not reduce down to the male body and its effects. If women chose to sleep with multiple men she would in turn be treated with less respect and deemed a whore, whereas men would actually gain respect for having slept with multiple women and have free reign. Her struggle with language, her attempts to remake herself through naming and remake the world with a new order of being, are ultimately heroic, but unsuccessful. Halberstam's writing is very clear and easy to understand while being incredibly insightful and brilliant. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is a service we offer sellers that lets them store their products in Amazon's fulfillment centers, and we directly pack, ship, and provide customer service for these products. In Goldeneye (1995), for example, Bond battles the usual array of bad guys: Commies, Nazis, mercenaries, and a superaggressive violent femme type. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness. Tomboyism tends to be associated with a "natural" desire for the greater freedoms and mobilities enjoyed by boys. Female adolescence represents the crisis of coming of age as a girl in a male-dominated society. Learn more about the program. An Introduction to Female Masculinity: Masculinity without Men. Female Masculinity's greatest strength lies in its scope. The "bad guy" is a standard generic feature of epic masculinity narratives: think only of Paradise Lost and its eschatological separation between God and Devil; Satan, if you like, is the original bad guy. 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.

"1. Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video! There are long sections detailing butch characters in film and modern drag performers, an area on which little has been written.". 0000003466 00000 n , Item Weight It is a book youll want to sit down with your friends and talk about. Because she does not desire in conventional ways, Frankie seeks to avoid desire altogether. . In her novel, McCullers shows this inadequacy to be a direct result of the tyranny of languagea structure that fixes people and things in place artificially but securely. . 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. Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. You and Your Gender Identity: A Guide to Discovery, Your recently viewed items and featured recommendations, Select the department you want to search in. Indeed, there is currently a line of clothing called Bad Boy that revels in the particular power of the bad guy and reveals how quickly transgression adds up to nothing more than consumerism in the sphere of the white male. . Female Masculinity is an immensely persuasive, powerfully-written text that imparts exciting and important theoretical ideas. 0000003975 00000 n Whether you agree or disagree with her choices, the ideas are definitely stimulating. HdR0st*bB{Z%RU&Y{k;wf^ &oVkYAuQ,vUzC{Z\Ft8 If you're a seller, Fulfillment by Amazon can help you grow your business. bc2ab84e ]@i@ *`(pjm@ 3 $ endstream endobj 83 0 obj 138 endobj 55 0 obj << /Type /Page /Parent 48 0 R /Resources 56 0 R /Contents [ 61 0 R 65 0 R 67 0 R 69 0 R 71 0 R 73 0 R 75 0 R 77 0 R ] /MediaBox [ 0 0 612 792 ] /CropBox [ 0 0 612 792 ] /Rotate 0 >> endobj 56 0 obj << /ProcSet [ /PDF /Text ] /Font << /TT2 57 0 R /TT4 63 0 R >> /ExtGState << /GS1 78 0 R >> /ColorSpace << /Cs6 58 0 R >> >> endobj 57 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /TrueType /FirstChar 32 /LastChar 151 /Widths [ 250 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 333 333 0 0 250 333 250 278 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 278 278 0 0 0 444 0 722 667 667 722 611 556 722 722 333 389 722 611 889 722 722 556 722 667 556 611 722 722 944 0 722 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 444 500 444 500 444 333 500 500 278 278 500 278 778 500 500 500 500 333 389 278 500 500 722 500 500 444 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 333 333 444 444 0 0 1000 ] /Encoding /WinAnsiEncoding /BaseFont /IALJJE+TimesNewRoman /FontDescriptor 59 0 R >> endobj 58 0 obj [ /ICCBased 80 0 R ] endobj 59 0 obj << /Type /FontDescriptor /Ascent 891 /CapHeight 656 /Descent -216 /Flags 34 /FontBBox [ -568 -307 2028 1007 ] /FontName /IALJJE+TimesNewRoman /ItalicAngle 0 /StemV 94 /XHeight 0 /FontFile2 79 0 R >> endobj 60 0 obj 608 endobj 61 0 obj << /Filter /FlateDecode /Length 60 0 R >> stream I am not sure that tolerance in such matters can be measured or at any rate that responses to childhood gender behaviors necessarily tell us anything concrete about the permitted parameters of adult male and female gender deviance. Something went wrong. I also venture to assert that although we seem to have a difficult time defining masculinity, as a society we have little trouble in recognizing it, and indeed we spend massive amounts of time and money ratifying and supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust; many of these "heroic masculinities" depend absolutely on the subordination of alternative masculinities. But what we understand as heroic masculinity has been produced by and across both male and female bodies. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. We could say that tomboyism is tolerated as long as the child remains prepubescent; as soon as puberty begins, however, the full force of gender conformity descends on the girl. A valuable resource for further study. [S]he has taken on a vast project and is clearly committed to sketching the contours of many possible approaches to female masculinity rather than dwelling on one or two . Halberstam, J.

This has been probably the most common question that I have faced over the past five years while writing on the topic of female masculinity.