Butch(er)ing Subjectivity: Between Masculinity and Misogyny
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Transcript of Butch(er)ing Subjectivity: Between Masculinity and Misogyny
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Butch(er)ing Subjectivity: Between Masculinity and Misogynyby Kendall Joy Gerdespresented for the Rice University English Symposium“After Queer, After Humanism”September 14, 2012
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"because I choose my gendered
practices, I free them from their
injurious potential."
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1999 edition
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• Frame
• Ticker
• Size and order of name and title
• Subtitle
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To make trouble was, in the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one
should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught in the
same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle
ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble.
Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make
it, what best way to be in it.
– Judith Butler, 1990 Preface to Gender Trouble (emphasis mine)
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St. Judy, from the “International Discourse TheoristColoring Contest”
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Feminist anti-femininity?
Feminist anti-femininity = internalized misogyny.
Anti-femininity = misogyny.
Misogyny internalized by feminists.
Feminists = feminine?
Feminists = women?
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[Martin] assumes that conformity is 'bad' and 'transgression' is
good. It is surely only within an academic discussion, however,
that conformity and transgression can be so thoroughly uprooted from daily experience. While
academics may celebrate transgression, the experience of transgression itself is often filled
with fear, danger and shame rather than heroic self-
satisfaction.
-- J. Halberstam, “Between Butches” (1998)
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• Gendering renders masculinity/femininity as opposites
• Butchness is rendered as female masculinity
• Masculinity is vulnerable to the opposite it excludes
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What remains unattainable in the butches’ masculinity, we might
say, is what remains unattainable in all masculinity: all ideal
masculinity by its very nature is just out of reach, but it is only in
the butch, the masculine woman, that we notice its impossibility…
The failure of ideal masculinity … must be located in the butch in order to make male masculinity
seem possible.
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(After?) Butch
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Works Cited
• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. 1990. New York, NY: Routledge, 1999. Print.
• Halberstam, J. "Between Butches." butch/femme: Inside Lesbian Gender. Ed. Sally R. Munt. Washington, DC: Cassell, 1998. 57-65. Print.
• Halberstam, J. Female Masculinity.
• Halberstam, J. The Queer Art of Failure.
• Martin, Biddy. "Sexualities Without Genders and Other Queer Utopias." Diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 104-121. Print.