There’s an enviably large body of work and writing out there on butch lesbian identity, sexuality, gender, and history. At its best, this writing makes it possible to see lesbianism as something far vaster than women loving women. As Dear Diaspora beautifully puts it, butch is a “cartography” that changes the meaning of the female body, makes it inhabitable and ownable as something reassuringly masculine, allows one to “travel back” to it. Butch is also a socially crafted, recognizable, and legible form of female masculinity with a long history behind it. However much it is stereotyped, misrepresented, and maligned, everybody, even the most homophobic cissexual straight person, knows at least something about what it means: lesbian, for one, masculine, even transgressively so, and likely attracted to feminine women. Navigating one’s gender variance is always an anxious, trying, and lonely endeavor, and butch is no exception to this, but at least butch exists as a legible social identity associated with certain ways of dressing and courting, certain sets of skills and behaviors, and a specific configuration of sex/gender/sexuality. If you are a masculine female who is attracted to feminine women, claiming a butch identity is a way to project this out into the world. If your butch presentation is convincing, when you walk into the queer club, femmes will look your way and see you as a potential sexual partner, understand you in your masculinity, your femaleness, and your attraction to them. You will be legible, and your gender variance, as well as your sexual orientation, will be socially recognized and livable.
Like butch, female faggotry is a type of female masculinity that involves a certain recartography of the female body, its sites of pleasure and desire. However, female faggotry has no history, no body of writing, no online discussion site that I know of. As a gender, female faggotry is constantly misread. Gay men have the freedom to don feather boas, glitter, and make-up, to swish as they walk, gesture with limp wrists, and speak with a wide range of vocal inflections. They are still seen as men expressing an alternative masculinity that marks their attraction to men. For female faggots, any of these behaviors might be misread not as an expression of your faggotry, but as an expression of your femininity, which is assumed to flow irrepressibly from your female body. If you perform the opposite behaviors – emotional stoicism, speaking in a monotone, striding purposefully and efficiently – your masculinity will be recognized, but your sexuality will be misread. Everybody will assume that you are a lesbian, and masculine-identified people will never think to hit on you. Presenting as a female faggot is like walking a tightrope. For the performance to work, you have to present a convincingly masculine appearance – hair, body shape, clothing – combined with just the right touch of swishy faggotry. Even then, you run the risk of being seen as a failed butch, someone whose “feminine” behaviors belie her “butch” presentation, more proof that “They just don’t make butches like they used to”. When you walk into the club, you will be incoherent. Femmes might be attracted to your masculine presentation but turned off by your lack of butchness. Butches will be uncomfortable and confused. If your presentation is particularly convincing, gay men will be attracted to you at first glance, but likely turned off by your femaleness. Or they may not see you at all. Other than the occasional unicorn, genderqueers and transpeople will be the only folks who really understand you. Are you condemned, when trying to catch they eye of people you like, to forever seeing them looking past you at someone else; to discovering that they are only interested in you because they thought you were something other than what you actually are? Female faggotry is a shaky home for your gender dysphoria. Unlike lesbian butchness, it has no common code, no identifiable set of behaviors, clothing, and hair that will communicate to both hostile and appreciative audiences: “I am female; I am masculine; I am attracted to masculinity”. To survive as a female faggot, you must be OK with at least one of these messages falling by the wayside most of the time. Which are you willing to drop first? Your femaleness, your masculinity, or your sexual orientation? How do we survive in such a constrained and nebulous space? Who is our community; and do they recognize us as community?
Sometimes, to me, this territory feels impossible, uninhabitable, illegible, crazy.
If butch is a solid home for gender dysphoria, and female faggotry a shaky shack, are female faggots more likely than butches to transition for reasons of social (and sexual) recognition? Can I make a home here, that will last a lifetime, without transitioning?
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