Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (book review)

Gabriel Chen

At first glance, Stone Butch Blues might appear to be a straightforward narrative fiction that follows the sexual travails of lesbian Jess Goldberg. However, this compelling novel is startlingly rich in theory in the sense that it foregrounds the interrelationship of class structures and gender constraints. By chronicling pre-Stonewall working-class transgendered, gay and lesbian life, and struggles in the urban Northeast, Feinberg forces a debate about whether society’s strict gender categories are truly necessary. Haunted by her difference, beaten by her father, and raped by her high school’s football player, Jess leaves home in search of others like herself, the “he-shes” she once saw as a child. By meeting other butch women in the factories, Jess comes of age, and learns about love from high-toned femme prostitutes and about survival from her older butch lovers. However, there is no security in her new home, as vicious policemen raid the gay bars regularly, and throw butches and drag queens into jail. As Rubin (1982) pointed out, starting from the late 1940s until the early 1960s, erotic communities whose activities did not fit the postwar American dream drew intense persecution. Homosexuals were, along with communists, the objects of federal witch hunts and purges.

Jess believes the only way out of her plight is to take concrete steps to define her gender. Venturing into new territory, Jess takes male hormones and undergoes breast reduction surgery. Finding a job becomes easier, but instead of making it possible for Jess to live an open life without deceit and lies, the sex-change further distances her from the life she truly wants – a yearning for a class status that might afford her more breathing room as a transgendered person. In presenting Goldberg’s life as the personal side of political history, Feinberg demonstrates that sexual identity and gender are constituted as social constructs, evident in the series of brutal and humiliating punishments that Jess and her transgendered friends are subjected to for failing to conform to society’s expectations.

Jess identifies with the men she works alongside in the factories and warehouses, rather than with the middle-class feminists who exclude butch and femme lesbians from their organizations. Jess also befriends members of other oppressed groups, including drag queens and African-American students in her high school. By calling attention to their amicable coexistence, Feinberg is undoubtedly trying to interrogate the relationship between racism, sexism and revolutionary class consciousness. Like gender and sexuality, such a relationship is political and organized into “systems of power,” where some individuals and activities are rewarded and encouraged, while others may be punished and suppressed (Rubin, 1982, p.34). If the butch threatened to move lesbianism in the direction of a “male-identification,” then femmeness would threaten to move lesbianism in the direction of heterosexual betrayal. This would result in both the butch and femme threatening to keep lesbianism aligned with class specificities (Martin, 1994, p.108). Throughout the novel, Feinberg renders situations where Jess sees her identity as fixed and essential, whilst at the same time, she is engaged in the “process of practicing acts and relationships which deny this possibility” (Rahman, 2000, p.56). I argue that Jess has tapped onto these “systems of power,” using her identity as a “necessary fiction” in the social negotiation of the world, to give herself the courage to disagree with a man-made institution – compulsory heterosexuality. As Rich (1986) writes, “Despite profound emotional impulses and complementarities drawing women toward women, there is a mystical/biological heterosexual inclination…which draws women toward men” (p.232). I theorize that these “systems of power” can be further broken down into at least three subcategories: commodity lesbianism, erotic identity, and the notion of a homosexual body. These subcategories, which have been thoroughly exploited by Jess in the novel, overlap one another in an intercausal, fluid and dynamic way.

Before I delve deeper into the subcategories, let us first distinguish briefly between the butch and the femme. The butch is the lesbian woman who proudly displays the possession of the penis, while the femme takes on the “compensatory masquerade of womanliness.” The femme, however, foregrounds her masquerade by playing to a butch, another woman in a role (Case, 1989, p.300). Feinberg explores this nature of intragroup power relations between the butch and the femme, and then examines the limited possibilities for resistance outside a supportive community. Even as Jess struggles alone to construct a self amid a social milieu dominated by alienation, fragmentation and loneliness, she discovers that resistance to oppression and the refashioning of a resisting self is a losing battle outside a resistance community. Freud, for example, regarded lesbians as immature, as they do not accept their lack of a penis and so pretend to be men (Rahman, 2000, p.60). Undoubtedly, heterosexuality has been both forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere, women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty (Rich, 1986, p.241). Thus, there needs to be a continued and relentless unified resistance among transgendered subjects. As Frye (1983) argued, “Total power is unconditional access; total powerlessness is being unconditionally accessible” (p.95). Only by a shared and coordinated effort to “manipulate and control access can power be created and manipulated,” so as to surmount the substantial obstacles to unity among transgendered subjects.

Lesbians have a long tradition of resisting dominant cultural definitions of female beauty and fashion as a way of separating themselves from heterosexual culture politically, and as a way of signaling their lesbianism to other women in their subcultural group (Clark, 1991). More specifically, the butch has this phobic reputation of being some brawny specimen dressed in leather and chains. Yet, can we not consider the possibility that the butch chooses her clothing very carefully because she is more aware than most of us of its cultural meaning? It is compelling that when a butch’s erotic dress code is combined with certain maneuvers, it exerts a kind of ‘presence’ to the opposing party. The way Jess walks, her voice, the way she holds her body, all attract attention because they are perceived as violating gender norms. Her dress and demeanor signify class as much as they do gender. For example, Joan Nestle, the founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York, described her experience in the Greenwich Village bars about how she could “spot a butch 50 feet away and still feel the thrill of her power” as she saw “the erotic signal of her hair at the nape of her neck, touching the shirt collar; how she held a cigarette; the symbolic pinky ring flashing as she waved her hand” (Case, 1989, p.300).

In Stone Butch Blues, the funeral scene illustrates Nestle’s point about the power of the dress, but presents the idea in a wryer tone, and in so doing, highlights the constructedness of gender and the extent to which clothes make the man [or woman].

Wearing dresses was an excruciating humiliation for them. Many of their dresses were old, from another era when occasional retreats were still necessary. The dresses were outdated, white, frilly, lace, low-cut, plain. The shoes were old or borrowed: patent leather, loafers, sandals. This clothing degraded their spirit, ridiculed who they were. Yet it was in this painful drag they were forced to say their last goodbye to the friend they loved so much.

… [Butch Ro] lay in the casket next to her, laid out in the pink dress and holding a bunch of pink-and-white flowers (Feinberg, 1993, p.116-117).

Jess arrives to the funeral wearing a suit, in flagrant and deliberate violation of the dresses-only injunction. The funeral home director catches a glimpse of her and immediately calls the viewing to an abrupt halt. By wearing the suit, Jess is signifying gendered power and upper-class status. Just like the first time Jess cross-dresses in her father’s suit and stands before a mirror, the suit represents not just a gendered self-expression, but also of Jess’s unconscious yearning for a class status that might afford her more breathing room as a transgendered person (Moses, 1999). In the context of commodity lesbianism today, the lesbian community, or more broadly the gay and lesbian community, has been considered by many to be an untapped goldmine. Businesses targeting gays and lesbians have expanded beyond clubs and bookstores to comprise virtually a full-service market that includes media, merchandise catalogs, vacation companies, and legal, medical, financial, and communication services. Images suggesting homosexuality have appeared fairly extensively in mainstream fashion advertising for brands such as Calvin Klein, Benetton, and Banana Republic. Furthermore, the coming-out episode of Ellen was groundbreaking, as it was the first time advertisers used primetime network TV to reach out to gay and lesbian viewers (Burnett, 2000).

When Jess comes of age, she starts to see her body as a battleground – a site of oppression, resistance, and contestation. Using rage as an energizer to situate blame for material imbalance, oligarchy and fear, Jess begins to discover the erotic in female terms, that which is “unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself.” Lorde (1984) described it as an energy that is omnipresent in “the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional [and] psychic.” It is this empowering joy that makes one “less willing to accept powerlessness… resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial” (p.339-343). As Jess recollects, “It was the next Friday night that we fought so bitterly. I don’t even remember what started it. It doesn’t really matter. What mattered was that it was the kind of fight that’s so painful it takes the top layer of skin off your heart” (Feinberg, 1993, p.111). Invariably, one feels the gentleness in her words that contrasts unexpectedly with the chaos of her suffering. This uncertainty correlates strongly with what Rich (1986) calls the lesbian experience: “a profoundly female experience with particular oppressions, meanings and potentialities we cannot comprehend as long as we simply bracket it with other sexually stigmatized existences” (p.239).

The final subcategory of the “systems of power” that Jess has drawn upon is the notion of a homosexual body. According to Watney (1987), the very notion of a “homosexual body” only exposes the more or less desperate ambition “to confine mobile desire in the semblance of a stable object.” The homosexual body would thus constitute a contradictio in objecto, an objective contradiction (p.207). In the context of our butch-femme analysis, such a contradiction is easily seen in the images that pepper collections of photography, magazines, and books. The images include visibly athletic--muscular or engaged in sports--women clad in motorcycle jackets, with certain hair styles, accessories or jewelry, body styling (e.g. tattoos) and postures. Indeed, butch presentations tend to be more visible than other varieties of lesbian presentation these days. For example, participants in a study by Kanner (2002) agreed considerably that short hair [as a visual image] rated consistently high on the ‘degree of butchness,’ i.e. the overall impression of butchness. The connection between bodybuilding and butch lesbianism is also not surprising. In the novel, Jess wills herself every morning to workout in the gym. Clark (1991) rationalized that this bodybuilding subculture, where flexing is encouraged and admired, is merely an avenue for the “political flexing” of lesbians. Here, physical strength is “valorized as a new form of femininity,” and lesbians engage in their own form of flexing within lesbian subcultures by “refusing to pass as straight” (p.198).

Yet, instead of thriving on this form of flexing, Jess comes to see the pumping of her muscles as merely a tool to vent her tension, frustration, rage and fear. As Jess expresses in her insecurities, “…the men around me came to exercise their bodies; I came to exorcise my demons” (Feinberg, 1993, p.210). For Jess, the emotional complications of changing her sex [and hence her identity] catches up with her, and she ceases to take her hormone shots because she now sees herself as a negative – neither a man nor a woman.

As much as I loved my beard as part of my body, I felt trapped behind it. What I saw reflected in the mirror was not a man, but I couldn’t recognize the he-she. My face no longer revealed the contrasts of my gender. I could see my passing self, but even I could no longer see the more complicated me beneath my surface (Feinberg, 1993, p.221-222).

Jess’s performance as a man is parodic and unfulfilling. Feinberg privileges “the expression of a self outside of gender, not the subversive performance of gender.” It is implied that Jess will achieve fulfillment only when “the performance of gender and the expression of self coincide.” The constraints of class are the primary obstacle to this desired intersection of self and gender. If Jess did not have to worry constantly about getting or keeping a job, “the cusp of gender and self” would be more accessible to her (Moses, 1999, p.85). However, not all butches choose to dissociate themselves from their bodies or work their muscles lean and hard to escape the pain and humiliation. Some have instead adopted a distinct fashion style over time. Newton (1990) observed a large influx of women pouring into Cherry Grove, a summer community in the New York Metropolitan area, during the late 1980s. Unlike members of the preceding generations, the younger women especially looked “quite different.” Newton (1990) noted:

No hard defensive look like Lyn Hutton and I have. No beefy body that says fuck you to men and I can take anything you can dish out… They look a lot like smaller, softer versions of men in GQ; in other words like young gay men in the Pines (p.533).

Although Stone Butch Blues is centered much on an era in which police systematically used sexual torture against working-class gender traitors, the novel’s time bracket is expansive: it begins in the late 1940s and ends in the late eighties. Therein lies the chief weakness to Feinberg’s text, as Feinberg does not mention or address the emergence of AIDS as a devastating disease that threatens not only lesbian and gay male communities, but also the entire public. The lesbian and gay community members encountered the threat of AIDS just as the homophobic Reagan/Bush era began. It was in this political environment, where “cries of family values and cultural decay not only impacted political debate but substantially influenced public policy.” Homosexuality was represented as a threat to the health, protection, and structure of the “general public.” As a result, public officials, religious leaders and citizens called for the quarantining and random HIV-testing of lesbians and gays (Cohen, 1997, p.587). Frye (1983) cited ostracism, harassment, and job insecurity or joblessness as examples of “penalties” for being a lesbian. However, she leaves out AIDS from the list. I argue that for the people who came of age during Stonewall and encountered the epidemic in their prime, AIDS should definitely be viewed as a grave “penalty” since it represented not just the loss of lives, but also the loss of an entire sexual culture: “back rooms, tea rooms, bookstores, movie houses and baths; the trucks, the pier, the ramble, the dunes” (Kim, 2002, p.29).

Indubitably, some of Feinberg’s (1993) questions posed in the novel are thought-provoking, as they leave no straight-forward “right” or “wrong” answers. I have chosen a particular issue that is worth reflecting on. In this scene, Jess helps her femme lover paint the living room.

She kissed my lips. “Thank you for helping me paint my living room.”

I smiled and shrugged. “What are butches for?” …

“Oh no,” Edna said, shaking her head slowly. “Butches are wonderful about lending a hand. But that’s not all you’re good for. Butches have moved my world. They’ve made me feel beautiful when the world took that away from me. It’s butch love that’s sustained me” (p.215-216).

What exactly are the roles of butches vis-à-vis their femmes? Can butches supplant men’s position by being the legitimate masculine authority in such households or are they whimsically shooting for an implausible outcome? This difficult issue has two contrasting views. On one hand, Bensinger stresses the political significance of displacing “traditional heterosexual postures” of masculinity and femininity from their supposedly natural home on the heterosexual couple’s bodies to the lesbian couple’s bodies. In a lesbian context, this would “denaturalize the illusion of a ‘natural’ heterosexuality” (Calhoun, 1994, p.571). Given this view, the butch lesbian would invariably perform masculinity and desire for women through a female body. However, Wittig (1992) would probably disagree with this interpretation; she reiterates that even if a woman would like to become a man, she cannot, with all her strength, become a man. As Wittig argues, “For becoming a man would demand from a woman not only a man’s external appearance but his consciousness as well.” She concludes that a lesbian [butch] has to be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society (p.105).

Can you recall the recent release of the steamy video clip All the Things She Said, which audaciously portrayed the duo of Julia Volkova and Elena Katina from the Russian pop/rock group T.A.T.U. as a loving lesbian couple? There was much controversy over whether these young teens should have depicted graphically what many would deem as an adult topic. It is not my duty to pass a judgment over whether the video clip should have been released. Instead, I urge you to try draw parallels between the public outrage over T.A.T.U.’s video clip and the “penalties” imposed on Jess in the novel. On the eve of queer liberation, Jess is finally able to speak openly about her life and of her dichotomized self. Just as Jess’s story ends on a hopeful note, I am optimistic that our future generations will reexamine gender definitions and question the treatment of gender and of women. Lesbians and gay men must likewise work together in alliance. By collective action and coalition-building, these communities can become a more cohesive and cogent unit.