#Jack halberstam

[trans-androgyne]

People have insisted to me that masculinity is not punished in women/"women" because tomboys are accepted. This excerpt from Female Masculinity puts my thoughts on it into words really well:

Tomboyism may even be encouraged to the extent that it remains comfortably linked to a stable sense of a girl identity. Tomboyism is punished, however, when it appears to be the sign of extreme male identification (taking a boy's name or refusing girl clothing of any type) and when it threatens to extend beyond childhood and into adolescence. Teenage tomboyism presents a problem and tends to be subject to the most severe efforts to reorient. 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...for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression. It is in the context of female adolescence that the tomboy instincts of millions of girls are remodeled into compliant forms of femininity...as even a cursory survey of popular cinema confirms, the image of the tomboy can be tolerated only within a narrative of blossoming womanhood.

-- Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (1998)

Yes, it does look different from the way "boys" are punished for expressing femininity regardless of age or context. But tomboyish girls being accepted in some contexts does not mean we don't still get the gender non-conformity beat out of us when it can no longer be considered some girlish phase. And it certainly doesn't speak to how masculinity is treated in adult "women." All I'll say is I got called a dyke at age 11 and I still get called one now.

[queeraroace]

Some of my favorite pictures from The Drag King Book by Del LaGrace Volcano and J. Jack Halberstam

[cruisingxdystopia]

"All Property is Theft," ©Leigh Phillips / Cruising Dystopia

[fleshadept]

female masculinity by jack halberstam is a very interesting book. dense but i accidentally got like 40% through it in one evening. very illuminating about how there were distinct subcultures of masculine women and women who slept together for at least the past 200 years, enough so that there are a multitude of stories of women having loads of female partners. i knew that these women existed, but halberstam makes a convincing case for prominent cohesive subcultures with their own signifiers and ways of knowing and identifying each other as far back as the early 1800s. also a fascinating look at the range of relationships women have had with masculinity and their own womanhood or non-womanhood. definitely a necessary documentation

[fanboy-feminist]

Here are some of my favorite graphics from the new Contrapoints video

[dutifullysuperpeach]

"Masculinity, of course, is what we make it; it has important relations to maleness, increasingly interesting relations to transexual maleness, and a historical debt to lesbian butchness."

-Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam

[honeysound]

Snow and desire.

Ink-Light - Natalie Diaz // Simon Beck // Female Masculinity - Jack Halberstam // Lovers Walking in the Snow (Crow and Heron) - Suzuki Harunobu // Snow - Mary Ruefle

[magicspeedwagon7]

of course there's a difference between historical terfs (cf. janice raymond and friends) and the professional transphobes funded by christians nationalists that we have today but don't act like there was no correlation at all and dworkin and rich would be trans allies nowadays. you're embarrassing yourself...

radfems been calling butch lesbians and transmasc people "self-hating women" since radical feminism existed. search "sex wars" on google scholar. this sex-negative and anti-butch period of radical feminism is well documented by Jack Halberstam ('Female Masculinity' (1998)), Pat Califa (cf 'Public Sex: The radical culture of radical sex' (1994)) and Gayle Rubin. like, in general, listen to transmasc people who've been there back in the days.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[trans-androgyne]

An excerpt from Female Masculinity about butches' and other gender diverse people's experiences in women's restrooms when they fail to meet standards of femininity:

"Ambiguous gender, when and where it does appear, is inevitably transformed into deviance, thirdness, or a blurred version of either male or female. As an example, in public bathrooms for women, various bathroom users tend to fail to measure up to expectations of femininity, and those of us who present in some ambiguous way are routinely questioned and challenged about our presence in the ‘wrong’ bathroom…having one's gender challenged in the women's rest room is a frequent occurrence in the lives of many androgynous or masculine women...queer literature is littered with references to the bathroom problem, and it would not be an exaggeration to call it a standard feature of the butch narrative."

The author also shares his experiences with being challenged in bathrooms, with security being called on him in an airport on two different occasions. Personally, I've only gotten funny looks when entering and exiting both binary bathrooms. There are a lot of stories out there about transfem experiences in bathrooms, but would any other trans men, transmascs, butches, or anyone with similar experiences by willing to share their stories of using public restrooms--men's, women's, or otherwise?

[fragbot]

"the temporal paradox of the butch" - s/he is out of time and ahead of his/her time and behind the times all at once ... The uncanny, uncertain, dislocated and indefinable terrain of the butch competes with our sense of the stubborn, recalcitrant, unmoving, and unmoved essence of the butch. Butch was supposed to fade away as a category precisely because it encapsulated the ugly, the dowdy, the backward, and the tragic, but its calcified intransigence may actually have equipped the category for survival!

- from preface to the Twentieth Anniversary edition of Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam

[fourdramas]

hm, i think a lot of the kink-discoursers on here could benefit from reading j. halberstams essay on homosexuality and fascism, “the killer in me is the killer in you”. halberstam asks the question why we cannot tolerate the linking of our desire to politics that disturb us and then comtemplates over this theme.

[back-on-my-bullsh-again]

I'm reading Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam and there's a point where he's talking about masculine straight women. He uses cowgirls and women athletes as examples. It got me thinking back to last night when I was watching a replay of the Women's Hammer Throw finals. Those women are so amazing to me. They are so strong and masculine in various ways. Some of them have to be lesbians, right? But several of them are probably straight. Being a masculine straight woman is probably so fucking hard. So many straight men seem unable to handle anything even slightly masculine about their woman partner. I mean, I saw a post on Facebook recently by a man was talking about a woman he knew who her cut hair short. He proceeded to say that he would never let his wife do that to herself (this isn't even getting into the controlling nature of that comment). As if a woman cutting having short hair in and of itself is masculinizing. So if a lot of straight men can't even handle short hair, what kind of shit are these women athletes dealing with when trying to date? Straight masculine women are so, so strong. I hope yall find yourselves straight men who are secure enough in their masculinity that they aren't out there trying to feminize you.

[rincewindsapprentice]

(from Jack Halberstam's "Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity")

[hoorayiread]

"Butch is always a misnomer-- not male, not female, masculine but not male, female but not feminine, the term serves as a placeholder for the unadmissable, for that which remains indefinable or unspeakable within the many identifications that we make and that we claim."

-Female Masculinity by Jack Halberstam

[sontagspdf]

you know, a lot of the book female masculinity is outdated (mostly in language) but it’s such a careful considerate and lovely in depth analysis of masculine women