Female Masculinity

Hardcover, 360 pages

English language

Published Jan. 9, 2019 by Duke University Press.

ISBN:
978-1-4780-0127-0
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OCLC Number:
1343701998

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4 stars (1 review)

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 …

11 editions

Academia ruining lesbian aliens for us all, since 1998

4 stars

Female Masculinity has become a classic, the kind of book that gets reprinted for its 20th anniversary, with a new preface. And yet, somehow the notion of female masculinity still remains relatively marginal and provocative, certainly in the mainstream, but even within queer circles. At least, this is how it feels to me, even as a (somewhat) masculine woman. What does it mean for women to express masculinity in ways that are original rather than derivative? How does the category of 'masculine' reshuffles division between, on the one hand, dykes and straight (masculine) women and, on the other hand, dykes and trans men? What are the politics of performing masculinity, vs rejecting any stable gender position, vs becoming male? and are these even political practices, or expressions of some inner identity, or both?

Halberstam explores these questions by analysising different cultural artefacts: artistic photos of butches and trans people, the …