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obligatorilypretentious · 3 years

Text

queer classic book recs!!

Image description under the cut! Please tell me if I did something wrong and I will gladly change it!

The other recs will be in the reblog!

[Each slide excluding the title screen includes 3 photos relating to the book, largely alternative covers of each in a small grid format.]

Slide One: In the center is a box with interior text reading "13 lgbtq classics and 1 “modern” classic. Recs in the comments welcome!" The top left corner includes an image of a calligraphy quill. Underneath this is text that reads "Disclaimer! The beginning of this list is.. Very White, but don't worry it gets more diverse as the books get more recent!!" In the top right corner is a text box reading "Look up trigger warnings or I’ll steal your gender! … or give it back!!" under this is a picture of an open book displayed in the foreground and another stack of books in the background.

Slide Two: Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

1872

Lesbian/wlw but written by a man

vampires!

“Following a near-fatal carriage collision, the beautiful young Carmilla is taken in by the narrator Laura and her father.”

While this book plays into the stereotype of the “monteress, seductive lesbian,” it is one of the oldest and most famous classical texts depicting a lesbian relationship. Toxic AF.

Slide Three: The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

1890

not explicitly queer (subtext)

but gay (mlm) tho

“Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, indulging his desires in secret while remaining a gentleman in the eyes of polite society. Only his portrait bears the traces of his decadence.”

This book contains Anti-semitism, Racism, Sexism and is honestly a product of its time. Oscar Wilde is certainly a character.

Slide Four: Orlando by Virginia Woolf

1928

sapphic/gender exploration

“The novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost.”

Main Character is racist and anti-Semitic. While her writing is incredibly important and impactful as a queer figure, she will always be white before she is queer.

Slide Five: The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall

1928

lesbian/wlw

originally banned

“Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents—a fencer, a horse rider, and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer, and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions.”

This book contains racism, use of the N-word, sexism, homophobia & lots of outdated ideas in general.

Slide Six: Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

1956

gay/mlm

“In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself. After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two.”

OMG! A classic on this list in which I can't find any evidence of racism or antisemitism! /srs. Imagine that- it's almost like POC classical authors are important to teach about! /hj

Slide Seven: Maurice by E.M. Forster

1971

gay/mlm

fluffy, but homophobia exists in the story as well.

“Maurice is heartbroken over unrequited love, which opened his heart and mind to his own sexual identity. In order to be true to himself, he goes against the grain of society’s often unspoken rules of class, wealth, and politics.”

This book contains the use of the g slur. Please tell me if I missed something!

Slide Eight: HERmione by H.D.

1981

queer/sapphic woman author

poetry

so mf sad bro I mean look at that blurb

“An interior self-portrait of the poet H.D. (1886-1961) is what can best be described as a 'find', a posthumous treasure. ‘I am Hermione Gart, a failure' -she cried in her dementia, 'I am Her, Her, Her.”

To my knowledge, this book isn't problematic- please tell me if it is though!!

Slide Nine: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde

1982

lesbian/wlw

A staple of lesbian lit from before the peak of an activist’s career. Great read.

“From the author's vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde's work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her.”

Once again to my knowledge, this book isn't problematic

Slide Ten: The Color Purple by Alice Walker

1982

features queer women

has a movie adaptation!

“Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance, and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery, and Sofia and their experience.”

Once again to my knowledge, this book isn't problematic

Slide Eleven: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

1985

lesbian/wlw

“This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home, and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy, and tender.”

Once again to my knowledge, this book isn't problematic- but warning, there are quite heavy themes!

Slide Twelve: Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel

1986

lesbian/wlw

a classic comedy comic + a really good insight & look into lesbian culture

“Grin, giggle, and guffaw your way through this celebrated cartoonist's graphic commentary of contemporary lesbian life.”

Once again to my knowledge, this book isn't problematic*

*contains d-slur used by lesbians in a non-offensive way

Slide Thirteen: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

1993

lesbian/gender identity around lesbianism

“Woman or man? This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the pre-Stonewall gay drag bars of a blue-collar town. Stone Butch Blues traces a propulsive journey, powerfully evoking history and politics while portraying an extraordinary protagonist full of longing, vulnerability, and working-class grit.”

Once again to my knowledge, this book isn't problematic

Slide Fourteen: Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters

1998

lesbian/wlw

historical romance

“Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser, and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-hall stars in an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins.”

Once again to my knowledge, this book isn't problematic

Slide Fifteen: Under the Udala Trees By Chinelo Okparanta

2015

lesbian/wlw

modern classic imo, look into the coexistence of native Nigerian culture & queerness

“Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does; born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child, and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. When their love is discovered, Ijeoma learns that she will have to hide this part of herself. But there is a cost to living inside a lie.”

Once again to my knowledge, this book isn't problematic

#queer books #lgbtq books #classic books #classic literature #lgbt books #book recommendation #classics #books #literature #poetry #lgbtq #queer #diverse books #diverse reads

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rapeculturerealities · 4 years

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“BUTCH” HAS LONG been the name we’ve given a certain kind — that kind — of lesbian. The old adage applies: You know her when you see her. She wears men’s clothing, short hair, no makeup. Butch is an aesthetic, but it also conveys an attitude and energy. Both a gender and a sexuality, butchness is about the body but also transcends it: “We exist in this realm of masculinity that has nothing to do with cis men — that’s the part only we [butches] know how to talk about,” says the 42-year-old writer, former Olympic swimmer and men’s wear model Casey Legler. “Many people don’t even know how to ask questions about who we are, or about what it means to be us.”

Many of us wear the butch label with a certain self-consciousness, fearing the term doesn’t quite fit — like a new pair of jeans, it’s either too loose or too tight. The graphic novelist Alison Bechdel, 59, doesn’t refer to herself as butch but understands why others do. “It’s a lovely word, ‘butch’: I’ll take it, if you give it to me,” she says. “But I’m afraid I’m not butch enough to really claim it. Because part of being butch is owning it, the whole aura around it.”

What does owning it look like? Decades before genderless fashion became its own style, butches were wearing denim and white tees, leather jackets and work boots, wallet chains and gold necklaces. It isn’t just about what you’re wearing, though, but how: Butchness embodies a certain swagger, a 1950s-inspired “Rebel Without a Cause” confidence. In doing so, these women — and butches who don’t identify as women — created something new and distinct, an identity you could recognize even if you didn’t know what to call it.

By refuting conventionally gendered aesthetics, butchness expands the possibilities for women of all sizes, races, ethnicities and abilities. “I always think of the first butch lesbian I ever saw,” says the 33-year-old actor Roberta Colindrez. “This beautiful butch came into the grocery store and she was built like a brick house. Short hair, polo shirt, cargo pants and that ring of keys … It was the first time I saw the possibility of who I was.” And yet, to many people, “butch style” remains an oxymoron: There’s a prevalent assumption that we’re all fat, frumpy fashion disasters — our baseball caps and baggy pants suggest to others that we don’t care about self-presentation. But it’s not that we’re careless; it’s that unlike, say, the gay white men who have been given all too much credit for influencing contemporary visual culture, we’re simply not out to appease the male gaze. We disregard and reject the confines of a sexualized and commodified femininity.

ETYMOLOGICALLY, “butch” is believed to be an abbreviation of “butcher,” American slang for “tough kid” in the early 20th century and likely inspired by the outlaw Butch Cassidy. By the early 1940s, the word was used as a pejorative to describe “aggressive” or “macho” women, but lesbians reclaimed it almost immediately, using it with pride at 1950s-era bars such as Manhattan’s Pony Stable Inn and Peg’s Place in San Francisco. At these spots, where cocktails cost 10 cents and police raids were a regular occurrence, identifying yourself as either butch or femme was a prerequisite for participating in the scene.

These butches were, in part, inspired by 19th-century cross-dressers — then called male impersonators or transvestites — who presented and lived fully as men in an era when passing was a crucial survival tactic. We can also trace butchness back to the androgynous female artists of early 20th-century Paris, including the writer Gertrude Stein and the painter Romaine Brooks. But it wasn’t until the 1960s and early 1970s that butches, themselves at the intersection of the burgeoning civil, gay and women’s rights movements, became a more visible and viable community.

From their earliest incarnations, butches faced brutal discrimination and oppression, not only from outside their community but also from within. A certain brand of (mostly white) lesbian feminism dominant in the late ’70s and early ’80s marginalized certain sorts of “otherness” — working-class lesbians, lesbians of color and masculine-of-center women. They pilloried butchness as inextricably misogynist and butch-femme relationships as dangerous replications of heteronormative roles. (Such rhetoric has resurfaced, as trans men are regularly accused of being anti-feminist in their desire to become the so-called enemy.) Challenged yet again to defend their existence and further define themselves, butches emerged from this debate emboldened, thriving in the late ’80s and early ’90s as women’s studies programs — and, later, gender and queer studies departments — gained traction on North American and European college campuses.

The ’90s were in fact a transformative decade for the butch community. In 1990, the American philosopher Judith Butler published her groundbreaking “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” and her theories about gender were soon translated and popularized for the masses. In her academic work, Butler argues that gender and sexuality are both constructed and performative; butch identity, as female masculinity, subverts the notion that masculinity is the natural and exclusive purview of the male body. Soon after, butch imagery infiltrated the culture at large. The August 1993 issue of Vanity Fair featured the straight supermodel Cindy Crawford, in a black maillot, straddling and shaving the butch icon K.D. Lang. That same year, the writer Leslie Feinberg published “Stone Butch Blues,” a now classic novel about butch life in 1970s-era New York. In Manhattan, comedians such as Lea DeLaria and drag kings such as Murray Hill took to the stage; it was also the heyday of Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For,” the serialized comic strip she started in 1983. In 1997, Ellen DeGeneres, still the most famous of butches, came out. Two years later, Judith “Jack” Halberstam and Del LaGrace Volcano published “The Drag King Book” and the director Kimberly Peirce released her breakthrough film, “Boys Don’t Cry”; its straight cisgender star, Hilary Swank, went on to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon Teena, a role that still incites contentious debates about the nebulous boundaries between butch and trans identity. These artists and their legacies are the cornerstones of our community. As Legler says, “This is where we’ve come from, and the folks we look back to. If you identify with that lineage, then we’d love to have you.”

LIKE ANY QUEER subculture, butchness is vastly different now than it was three decades ago — though the codes have been tweaked and refined over the years, younger butches continue to take them in new and varied directions: They may experiment with their personas from day to day, switching fluidly between masculine and feminine presentation. There are “stone butches,” a label that doesn’t refer to coldness, as is often assumed, but to a desire to touch rather than to be touched — to give rather than receive — and is considered slightly more masculine than “soft butch” on the Futch Scale, a meme born in 2018 that attempted to parse the gradations from “high femme” to “stone butch.” (“Futch,” for “femme/butch,” is square in the middle.) And while there remains some truth to butch stereotypes — give us a plaid flannel shirt any day of the week — that once-static portrait falls apart under scrutiny and reflection. Not every butch has short hair, can change a tire, desires a femme. Some butches are bottoms. Some butches are bi. Some butches are boys.

Different bodies own their butchness differently, but even a singular body might do or be butch differently over time. We move between poles as our feelings about — and language for — ourselves change. “In my early 20s, I identified as a stone butch,” says the 45-year-old writer Roxane Gay. “In adulthood, I’ve come back to butch in terms of how I see myself in the world and in my relationship, so I think of myself as soft butch now.” Peirce, 52, adds that this continuum is as much an internal as an external sliding scale: “I’ve never aspired to a binary,” she says. “From day one, the idea of being a boy or a girl never made sense. The ever-shifting signifiers of neither or both are what create meaning and complexity.”

Indeed, butch fluidity is especially resonant in our era of widespread transphobia. Legler, who uses they/them pronouns, is a “trans-butch identified person — no surgery, no hormones.” Today, the interconnected spectrums of gender and queerness are as vibrant and diverse in language as they are in expression — genderqueer, transmasc, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming. Yet butches have always called themselves and been called by many names: bull dyke, diesel dyke, bulldagger, boi, daddy and so on. Language evolves, “flowing in time and changing constantly as new generations come along and social structures shift,” Bechdel says.

If it’s necessary to think historically, it’s also imperative to think contextually. Compounding the usual homophobia and misogyny, black and brown butches must contend with racist assumptions: “Black women often get read as butch whether they are butch or not,” Gay says. “Black women in general are not seen, so black butchness tends to be doubly invisible. Except for studs: They’re very visible,” she adds, referring to a separate but related term used predominantly by black or Latinx butches (though, unsurprisingly, white butches have appropriated it) who are seen as “harder” in their heightened masculinity and attitude. Gay notes that “people tend to assume if you’re a black butch, you’re a stud and that’s it,” which is ultimately untrue. Still, butch legibility remains a paradox: As the most identifiable of lesbians — femmes often “pass” as straight, whether they want to or not — we are nonetheless maligned and erased for our failure of femininity, our refusal to be the right kind of woman.

ANOTHER LINGERING stereotype, one born from “Stone Butch Blues” and its more coded literary forebears, particularly Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” (1928), is the butch as a tragic and isolated figure. She is either cast out by a dominant society that does not — will not — ever see her or accept her, or she self-isolates as a protective response to a world that continually and unrelentingly disparages her.

When a butch woman does appear in mainstream culture, it’s usually alongside her other: the femme lesbian. Without the femme and the contrast she underscores, the butch is “inherently uncommodifiable,” Bechdel says, since two butches together is just a step “too queer.” We rarely see butches depicted in or as community, an especially sobering observation given the closure of so many lesbian bars over the past two decades. But when you talk to butches, a more nuanced story emerges, one of deep and abiding camaraderie and connection. Despite the dearth of representation, butch love thrives — in the anonymous, knowing glances across the subway platform when we recognize someone like us, and in the bedroom, too. “Many of my longest friendships are with people who register somewhere on the butch scale,” Peirce says. “We’re like married couples who fell in love with each other as friends.”

Legler, for their part, recognizes a “lone wolf” effect, one in which some young queers initially love “being the only butch in the room.” In organizing the group portrait that accompanies this essay over the past months, Legler was curious “what it would be like for butches to just show up together and to be able to display all of their power, all of their sexiness, all of their charisma, without having it be mitigated in some way.” And not only for butches of an older generation, but for those still figuring things out, transforming the scene in ways that both defy and inspire their elders. “It’s been centuries in the making, the fact that we are all O.K.,” Legler adds. “That our bodies get to exist: We have to celebrate that. You can do more than just survive. You can contribute.”

#trans #transgender #butch #gender roles #Gender essentialism #gender binary #LGBTQIA

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star-anise · 5 years

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do you have any sources on the claims you made? im always willing to change my stance if you have legitimate backing for it haha

So first, I’m sorry for blowing up at you the way that I did. I’m not proud that I reacted in such a kneejerk, aggressive fashion. Thank you for being open to hearing what I have to say. I’m sorry for mistaking you for a TERF, and I’m sorry my response has caused other people to direct their own hostility towards you.

So, here’s the thing. “You can’t call bi women femmes” is pretty intrinsically a radfem thing to say, and I am deeply opposed to letting radfems tell me what to do. I’m trying to write this during a weekend packed with childcare and work. I’ll try to hit all the high notes.

The one thing I am having trouble finding is the longass post I talked about in my reply, that was a history of butch/femme relationships in lesbian bars, which had frequent biphobic asides and talked about “the lesbophobic myth of the bi-rejecting lesbian”; the friend who reblogged it without reading it thoroughly has deleted it, and I can’t find it on any of the tags she remembers looking at around that time. If anyone can find it, I’ll put up a link.

As far as possible, I’m linking to really widely accessible sources, because you shouldn’t intrinsically trust a random post on Tumblr as secret privileged knowledge. People have talked about this at length in reputable publications that your local library either has, or can get through interlibrary loan; you can look up any of the people here, read their work, and decide for yourself. This is a narrative of perspectives, and while I obviously have a perspective, many people disagree with me. At the end of the day, the only reason I need for calling bi women femmes is that You Are Not The Boss Of Me. There is no centralized authority on LGBT+ word usage, nor do I think there should be. Hopefully this post will give you a better sense of what the arguments are, and how to evaluate peoples’ claims in the future.

I looked up “butch” and “femme” with my library’s subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary because that’s where you find the most evidence of etymology and early use, and found:

“Femme” is the French word for “woman”. It’s been a loanword in English for about 200 years, and in the late 19th century in America it was just a slangy word for “women”, as in, “There were lots of femmes there for the boys to dance with”

“Butch” has been used in American English to mean a tough, masculine man since the late 19th century; in the 1930s and 1940s it came to apply to a short masculine haircut, and shortly thereafter, a woman who wore such a haircut. It’s still used as a nickname for masculine cis guys–my godfather’s name is Martin, but his family calls him Butch. By the 1960s in Britain, “butch” was slang for the penetrating partner of a pair of gay men.

Butch/femme as a dichotomy for women arose specifically in the American lesbian bar scene around, enh, about the 1940s, to enh, about the 1960s. Closet-keys has a pretty extensive butch/femme history reader. This scene was predominantly working-class women, and many spaces in it were predominantly for women of colour. This was a time when “lesbian” literally meant anyone who identified as a woman, and who was sexually or romantically interested in other women. A lot of the women in these spaces were closeted in the rest of their lives, and outside of their safe spaces, they had to dress normatively, were financially dependent on husbands, etc. Both modern lesbians, and modern bisexual women, can see themselves represented in this historical period.

These spaces cross-pollinated heavily with ball culture and drag culture, and were largely about working-class POC creating spaces where they could explore different gender expressions, gender as a construct and a performance, and engage in a variety of relationships. Butch/femme was a binary, but it worked as well as most binaries to do with sex and gender do, which is to say, it broke down a lot, despite the best efforts of people to enforce it. It became used by people of many different genders and orientations whose common denominator was the need for safety and discretion. “Butch” and “femme” were words with meanings, not owners.

Lesbianism as distinct from bisexuality comes from the second wave of feminism, which began in, enh, the 1960s, until about, enh, maybe the 1980s, maybe never by the way Tumblr is going. “Radical” feminism means not just that this is a new and more exciting form of feminism compared to the early 20th century suffrage movement; as one self-identified radfem professor of mine liked to tell us every single lecture, it shares an etymology with the word “root”, meaning that sex discrimination is at the root of all oppression.

Radical feminism blossomed among college-educated women, which also meant, predominantly white, middle- or upper-class women whose first sexual encounters with women happened at elite all-girls schools or universities. Most of these women broke open the field of “women’s studies” and the leading lights of radical feminism often achieved careers as prominent scholars and tenured professors.

Radical feminism established itself as counter to “The Patriarchy”, and one of the things many early radfems believed was, all men were the enemy. All men perpetuated patriarchy and were damaging to women. So the logical decision was for women to withdraw from men in all manner and circumstances–financially, legally, politically, socially, and sexually. “Political lesbianism” wasn’t united by its sexual desire for women; many of its members were asexual, or heterosexual women who decided to live celibate lives. This was because associating with men in any form was essentially aiding and abetting the enemy.

Look, I’ll just literally quote Wikipedia quoting an influential early lesbian separatist/radical feminist commune: “The Furies recommended that Lesbian Separatists relate “only (with) women who cut their ties to male privilege” and suggest that “as long as women still benefit from heterosexuality, receive its privileges and security, they will at some point have to betray their sisters, especially Lesbian sisters who do not receive those benefits”“

This cross-pollinated with the average experience of WLW undergraduates, who were attending school at a time when women weren’t expected to have academic careers; college for women was primarily seen as a place to meet eligible men to eventually marry. So there were definitely women who had relationships with other women, but then, partly due to the pressure of economic reality and heteronormativity, married men. This led to the phrase LUG, or “lesbian until graduation”, which is the kind of thing that still got flung at me in the 00s as an openly bisexual undergrad. Calling someone a LUG was basically an invitation to fight.

The assumption was that women who marry men when they’re 22, or women who don’t stay in the feminist academic sphere, end up betraying their ideals and failing to have solidarity with their sisters. Which seriously erases the many contributions of bi, het, and ace women to feminism and queer liberation. For one, I want to point to Brenda Howard, the bisexual woman who worked to turn Pride from the spontaneous riots in 1969 to the nationwide organized protests and parades that began in 1970 and continue to this day. She spent the majority of her life to a male partner, but that didn’t diminish her contribution to the LGBT+ community.

Lesbian separatists, and radical feminists, hated Butch/Femme terminology. They felt it was a replication of unnecessarily heteronormative ideals. Butch/femme existed in an LGBT+ context, where gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people understood themselves to have more in common with each other than with, say, cis feminists who just hated men more than they loved women.

The other main stream of feminist thought at the time was Liberal Feminism, which was like, “What if we can change society without totally rejecting men?” and had prominent figures like Gloria Steinem, who ran Ms magazine. Even today, you’ll hear radfems railing against “libfems” and I’m like, my good women, liberal feminism got replaced thirty years ago. Please update your internal schema of “the enemy”

Lesbian separatism was… plagued by infighting. To maintain a “woman-only” space, they had to kick out trans women (thus, TERFs), women who slept with men (thus, biphobia), women who enjoyed kinky sex or pornography or engaged in sex work (thus, SWERFS) and they really struggled to raise their male children in a way that was… um… anti-oppressive. (I’m biased; I know people who were raised in lesbian separatist communes and did not have great childhoods.) At the same time, they had other members they very much wanted to keep, even though their behaviour deviated from the expected program, so you ended up with spectacles like Andrea Dworkin self-identifying as a lesbian despite being deeply in love with and married to a self-identified gay man for twenty years, despite beng famous for the theory that no woman could ever have consensual sex with a man, because all she could ever do was acquiesce to her own rape.

There’s a reason radical feminism stopped being a major part of the public discourse, and also a reason why it survives today: While its proponents became increasingly obsolete, they were respected scholars and tenured university professors. This meant people like Camille Paglia and Mary Daly, despite their transphobia and racism, were considered important people to read and guaranteed jobs educating young people who had probably just moved into a space where they could meet other LGBT people for the very first time. So a lot of modern LGBT people (including me) were educated by radical feminist professors or assigned radical feminist books to read in class.

The person I want to point to as a great exemplar is Alison Bechdel, a white woman who discovered she was a lesbian in college, was educated in the second-wave feminist tradition, but also identified as a butch and made art about the butch/femme dichotomy’s persistence and fluidity. You can see part of that tension in her comic; she knows the official lesbian establishment frowns on butch/femme divisions, but it’s relevant to her lived experience.

What actually replaced radical feminism was not liberal feminism, but intersectional feminism and the “Third Wave”. Black radical feminists, like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, pointed out that many white radical feminists were ignoring race as a possible cause of oppression, and failing to notice how their experiences differed from Black womens’. Which led to a proliferation of feminists talking about other oppressions they faced: Disabled feminists, Latina feminists, queer feminists, working-class feminists. It became clear that even if you eliminated the gender binary from society, there was still a lot of bad shit that you had to unlearn–and also, a lot of oppression that still happened in lesbian separatist spaces.

I’ve talked before about how working in women-only second-wave spaces really destroyed my faith in them and reinforced my belief in intersectional feminism

Meanwhile, back in the broader queer community, “queer” stuck as a label because how people identified was really fluid. Part of it is that you learn by experience, and sometimes the only way to know if something works for you is to try it out, and part of it is that, as society changed, a lot more people became able to take on new identities without as much fear. So for example, you have people like Pat Califia, who identified as a lesbian in the 70s and 80s, found far more in common with gay leather daddies than sex-negative lesbians, and these days identifies as a bisexual trans man.

Another reason radical feminists hate the word “queer”, by the way, is queer theory, which wants to go beyond the concept of men oppressing women, or straights oppressing gays, but to question this entire system we’ve built, of sex, and gender, and orientation. It talks about “queering” things to mean “to deviate from heteronormativity” more than “to be homosexual”. A man who is married to a woman, who stays at home and raises their children while she works, is viewed as “queer” inasmuch as he deviates from heteronormativity, and is discriminated against for it.

So, I love queer theory, but I will agree that it can be infuriating to hear somebody say that as a single (cis het) man he is “queer” in the same way being a trans lesbian of colour is “queer”, and get very upset and precious about being told they’re not actually the same thing. I think that actually, “queer as a slur” originated as the kind of thing you want to scream when listening to too much academic bloviating, like, “This is a slur! Don’t reclaim it if it didn’t originally apply to you! It’s like poor white people trying to call themselves the n-word!” so you should make sure you are speaking about a group actually discriminated against before calling them “queer”. On the other hand, queer theory is where the theory of “toxic masculinity” came from and we realized that we don’t have to eliminate all men from the universe to reduce gender violence; if we actually pay attention to the pressures that make men so shitty, we can reduce or reverse-engineer them and encourage them to be better, less sexist, men.

But since radfems and queer theorists are basically mortal enemies in academia, radical feminists quite welcomed the “queer as a slur” phenomenon as a way to silence and exclude people they wanted silenced and excluded, because frankly until that came along they’ve been losing the culture wars.

This is kind of bad news for lesbians who just want to float off to a happy land of only loving women and not getting sexually harrassed by men. As it turns out, you can’t just turn on your lesbianism and opt out of living in society. Society will follow you wherever you go. If you want to end men saying gross things to lesbians, you can’t just defend lesbianism as meaning “don’t hit on me”; you have to end men saying gross things to all women, including bi and other queer women. And if you do want a lesbian-only space, you either have to accept that you will have to exclude and discriminate against some people, including members of your community whose identities or partners change in the future, or accept that the cost of not being a TERF and a biphobe is putting up with people in your space whose desires don’t always resemble yours.

Good god, this got extensive and I’ve been writing for two hours.

So here’s the other thing.

My girlfriend is a femme bi woman. She’s married to a man.

She’s also married to two women.

And dating a man.

And dating me (a woman).

When you throw monogamy out the window, it becomes EVEN MORE obvious that “being married to a man” does not exclude a woman from participation in the queer community as a queer woman, a woman whose presentation is relevant in WLW contexts. Like, this woman is in more relationships with women at the moment than some lesbians on this site have been in for their entire lives.

You can start out with really clear-cut ideas about “THIS is what my life is gonna be like” but then your best friend’s sexual orientation changes, or your lover starts to transition, and things in real life are so much messier than they look when you’re planning your future. It’s easy to be cruel, exclusionary, or dismissive to people you don’t know; it’s a lot harder when it’s people you have real relationships with.

And my married-to-a-man girlfriend? Uses “butch” and “femme” for reasons very relevant to her queerness and often fairly unique to femme bi women, like, “I was out with my husband and looking pretty femme, so I guess they didn’t clock me as a queer” or “I was the least butch person there, so they didn’t expect me to be the only one who uses power tools.” Being a femme bi woman is a lot about invisibility, which is worth talking about as a queer experience instead of being assumed to exclude us from the queer community.

#cherryhearrts #staranise original #answered asks #ranting in bisexual #lgbt discourse #terf shit #exclusionist shit #radfem shit #apologies to my girlfriend for not including carole queen in this post #she just didn't fit baby

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sapphicscholar · 6 years

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hi so I didn't know who to ask but in my psych class we're learning about adolescent psychology, & there was this unit on developing interest in relationships. It went way into detail on how the brain changes during that time, which was interesting, but ofc my gay ass couldn't relate. at the end all it said was 'it's different for homosexuals.' I guess I'm wondering if you know of any way to learn about psychology relating to LGBT people? srsly im thirsty for anything in academia I can relate to

(same psych anon) that was a pretty specific question so I guess like do you have any info or know of any links/ websites/places to learn about lgbt history and lives and stuff like that in an academic way? bc I love school & learning but I’ve always wanted to learn more about myself and people like me, but they never teach that in schools.

Oh my gosh SO MANY THINGS! Okay, so, the psych stuff is pretty outside of my knowledge but I asked my gf (she does the science in this relationship while my gay ass just reads a whole lot of books), and she recommends Helen Fisher and looking at the researchers at the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality or the Kinsey Institute, as well as The Sage Encyclopedia of LGBTQ Studies (it’s an online resource a lot of universities subscribe to). But I’d also say that as far as thinking about developmental narratives, LGBTQ memoirs are a great place to start, especially since so many of them go through their own experiences of having to confront this heteronormative, cis-centric narrative that just doesn’t fit them and their lives.

So some good queer history authors are: John D’Emilio (comprehensive, if a bit male-centric), Lillian Faderman (writing all about lesbian history, including more recent history; very well-respected; she’s got some issues in her scholarship that by no means discount it as a whole, but I’m happy to talk more about if you want), Michael Bronski (his Queer History of the United States is really accessible), George Chauncey (it’s just of NYC, but still fun), Estelle B. Freedman, Foucault (though it’s not quite “history,” it’s a kind of history meets theory of regimes of power and how sexuality got tied up in that), Martha Vicinus (I adore her), Valerie Traub (goes all the way back to the early modern period), and so many others who really focus more on niche history, so I won’t list them here. There are some web resources, but I know a lot of them are databases that are subscription-based. I’ll see what I can’t dig up in the next couple of days as far as free websites. I know they exist; it’s just a matter of having the time to look…

Okay, you didn’t specifically say you were interested in literature but bc I taught literature and think it’s a great way to learn about the history of a group, I’m gonna list some anyway and you can feel free to disregard!

Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (or Carol, depends on the year it was printed) – you can also check out the movie! I find the two to be complementary (the book gives you Therese’s POV almost exclusively, whereas the movie shows much more of Carol’s story)

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home is her graphic novel/memoir that’s really excellent, but the comic strip that sort of launched her as a public persona (at least within the lesbian community) was Dykes to Watch Out For, quite a bit of which is available for free online

Henry James, The Bostonians – one of the first recognizable depictions of a queer female character in literature (not really…I’d trouble that as a professor, but that’s how it gets taught in general, and it was one of the first books where even contemporary reviewers were quick to note that there was something “wrong” or “morbid,” which was 19th C. code for what would come to be understood as lesbian sexuality, about Olive Chancellor) – free online, though it’s James at his most….Jamesian, which means it’s not that accessible

The poetry of Emily Dickinson! It’s all free online. There’s a ton of it, though much of it isn’t obviously queer

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room – gets into bisexual identity in a way a lot of works don’t do; on the sadder side…fair warning

Virginia Woolf! Especially Orlando or Mrs. Dalloway – the former has been called “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature” (to Woolf’s longtime friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West) and deals with the fluidity of gender and time; the latter has quite a few flashbacks to the brief childhood romance of the protagonist and her friend. Both of them are great, but Woolf, as a modernist, can have a writing style that’s difficult to get into at first (for instance, time really isn’t stable or linear, which is something I adore about her, but definitely takes some getting used to). They’re both available free online through Project Gutenberg

Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness – it’s a classic, in the sense that it’s one of those books people sort of expect you to have read if you do lesbian literature. It’s certainly an interesting story and told well, but it’s not even close to a happy ending and is rather conciliatory to prevailing norms (though even still it was taken to the courts under the obscenity laws) - free online, though!

Sarah Waters – a contemporary novelist who writes almost all historical fiction about queer women! Some of her stories are better known (e.g. Tipping the Velvet), but they’re pretty much all great. Varying degrees of angst, but definitely an accessible read

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts – sort of experimental in form (it’s fiction with footnotes!); it deals with a lesbian woman coming to terms with her partner’s transition and her own identity during the process

E.M. Forster, Maurice – even though it was first drafted in the 1910s, Forster edited it throughout his life, and, given the subject matter, which was also autobiographical, and the prevailing attitudes at the time, the book was only published posthumously in the 70s

Colette’s Claudine series – it’s long (multi-volume) but sort of a classic – they’re all old enough to be free online, though the English translation is harder to come by

Eileen Myles – lesbian poet and novelist – I’d recommend Inferno but some of her poetry is free online

Rita Mae Brown – Rubyfruit Jungle and Oranges Are not the Only Fruit are both quite good, though, especially the latter deals with religiously-motivated homophobia, so I know at least my girlfriend, who dealt with a lot of that from her family, opted not to read it for her own mental health.

Tony Kushner, Angels in America – this two-part play deals with the AIDS crisis in America – it’s been turned into a TV miniseries, a Broadway play, and a movie, some of which are available online

Really anything by David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs – both are gay authors who deal a lot with short stories (a ton of memoir/autobiographical stuff) – the former is a bit funnier, but they both have enough sarcasm and dry wit even in dark situations to make them fast reads

Alan Ginsburg’s poetry

Walt Whitman’s poetry (though it can be really fucking racist)

Binyavanga Wainaina, One Day I Will Write About This Place – does deal with issues of sexual abuse as a warning

Anything by Amber Hollibaugh (she writes a lot about class and butch/femme dynamics – quite a bit of her stuff has been scanned and uploaded online)

Michelle Tea – was a slam poet; recovering alcoholic; fantastically funny and talented author and delightful human being if you ever get the chance to meet her or go to one of her readings

Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On – more a work of investigative journalism than anything, the work is a stunning indictment of the indifference of the US government during some of the worst years of the AIDS crisis, but it also provides a good bit of gay history

Terry Galloway Mean Little Deaf Queer – deals with one woman’s experience of losing her hearing and navigating the world and the Deaf and deaf communities as a once-hearing person – she’s sort of acerbic and always funny;

Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex – grapples with intersex identity in a way that’s still far too rare in literature

Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreem – just rediscovered about two years ago, this is one of the few pretty happy gay novels from the nineteenth century! Free online!

Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues – pretty clear from the title, but deals with a butch character’s struggles with gender identity (takes T to pass for a while, but then gets alienated from the lesbian community; eventually stops taking T, but still struggles with what that means for her) – Feinberg’s wife made it free online for everyone after Feinberg’s death (the book had a limited print run, which made finding copies both hard and expensive)

Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilogy – trilogy later adapted for film about an effeminate gay man (who also performs as a drag queen) and his life and family

Oscar Wilde – his novels aren’t explicitly gay, but they often dance around it thematically, at least; his heartbreaking letter, De Profundis, which he wrote to his lover while imprisoned for “gross indecency,” is available online

Anything by Dorothy Alison

Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - great as a memoir and a cultural history

There’s so many more but this is so my jam I suspect I’ve already rambled too long

If you’re interested in film, here are a few:

Paris Is Burning (a film about drag ball culture in NYC)

Fire – Deepa Mehta (it’s on YouTube in the US)

Boys Don’t Cry – there is a lot of homophobia and transphobia in the film, so it’s definitely one you’ll want to be in the right mindset to watch (I, for one, have only watched it once)

But I’m a Cheerleader – over-the-top mockumentary-esque film that satirizes conversion therapy and the Christian “documentaries” that claimed to showcase their successes (RuPaul is in it as well)

Desert Hearts – one of the earliest films to leave open the possibility of a happy ending for the lesbian couple

Hedwig and the Angry Itch – deals with gender identity and feelings of not belonging (also a fabulous musical)

Philadelphia – about one man’s experience of discrimination while dying of AIDS

There are plenty of lighter films, but I figure these tend to also talk more seriously about some issues as well

I don’t know if anyone but me made it to the end of this post, but there’s also so much fun queer theory out there that I won’t get into here, but I’m always up for giving more recommendations!

#ask me #anon #professor rambles #lgbtq history #lgbtq literature #book recommendations #film recommendations

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