Top Quotes: “Female Masculinity” — J. Jack Halberstam
Introduction
“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. Gender conformity is pressed onto all girls, not just tomboys, and this is where it becomes hard to uphold the notion that male femininity presents a greater threat to social and familial stability than female masculinity.”
“The women in the restroom, furthermore, are depicted as spiteful, rather than fearful. They toy with Jess by calling into question her right to use the restroom and threatening to call the police. As Jess puts it; “They never would have made fun of a guy like that.” In other words, if the women were truly anxious for their safety, they would not have toyed with the intruder, and they would not have hesitated to call the police. Their casualness about calling security indicates that they know Jess is a wornan but want to punish her for her inappropriate self-presentation.”
“The frequency with which gender deviant “women” are mistaken for men in puble bathrooms suggests that a large number of feminine women spend a large amount of time and energy policing masculine women. Something very different happens, of course, in the men’s public toilet, where the space is more likely to become a sexual cruising zone than a site for gender repression. Lee Edelman, in an essay about the interpenetration of nationalism and sexuality, argues that “the institutional men’s room constitutes a site at which the zones of public and private cross with a distinctive psychic charge.”The men’s room, in other words, constitutes both an architecture of surveillance and an incitement to desire, a space of homosocial interaction and of homoerotic interaction.
So, whereas men’s restrooms tend to operate as a highly charged sexual space in which sexual interactions are both encouraged and punished, women’s restrooms tend to operate as an arena for the enforcement of gender conformity. Sex-segregated bathrooms continue to be necessary to protect women from male predations but also produce and extend a rather outdated notion of a public-private split between male and female society. The bathroom is a domestic space beyond the home that comes to represent domestic order, or a parody of it, out in the world. The women’s bathroom accordingly becomes a sanctuary of enhanced femininity, a “little girl’s room” to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair. The men’s bathroom signifies as the extension of the public nature of masculinity – it is precisely not domestic even though the names given to the sexual function of the bathroom – such as cottage or tearoom – suggest it is a parody of the domestic. The codes that dominate within the women’s bathroom are primarily gender codes; in the men’s room, they are sexual codes. Public sex versus private gender, openly sexual versus discreetly repressive, bathrooms beyond the home take on the proportions of a gender factory.”
“It is remarkably easy in this society not to look like a woman. It is relatively difficult, by comparison, not to look like a man: the threats faced by men who do not gender conform are somewhat different than for women Unless men are consciously trying to look like women, men are less likely than women to fail to pass in the restroom. So one question posed by the bathroom problem asks, what makes femininity so approximate and masculinity so precise? Or to pose the question with a diferent spin, why is femininity easily impersonated or performed while masculinity sense indeed quickly collapses?”
“Masculine women have played a large part in the construction of modern masculinity.”
“The connection between prostitute and masculine woman seems quite common in the nineteenth century, and we might read this synonymous connection as a function of the nineteenth century tendency to categorize women in relation to marriageability. The prostitute and the masculine and possibly predatory woman both exhibit extramarital desires and have aggressive sexual tendencies.”
“Anne’s discomfort in this scene suggests why so many working class masculine women would have had to go undercover and pass as men. Anne, in a sense, can live near the contradiction of female masculinity because she is upper-class.”
“George Chauncey specifically comments on the transition that leads to the construction of transsexualism, the move, in other words, from a model of sexual inversion to a model of homosexuality, from gender role to object choice. He finds that the medical interest in female inversion in the early twentieth century comes at a time when male masculine supremacy was being challenged politically by the rise of a women’s movement, domestically by a huge population of unmaried women, and in the workplace by changing notions of gendered labor. “The sudden growth in the medical literature on sexual inversion, I would argue, was part of the general ideological reaction by the medical profession to women’s challenge to the sex/gender system during this period.””
“Stephen literally redresses the wrongs of her embodiment by taking on male clothing, meticulously tailored and fashioned to fit her masculine spirit. What she confronts, then, in this crucial mirror scene is not the frustrated desire for femininity or her hatred of her body but her disidentification with the naked body. Stephen’s repudiation of nakedness or the biological body as the ground for sexual identity suggests a modern notion of sexual identity as not organically emanating from the flesh but as a complex act of self-creation in which the dressed body, not the undressed body, represents one’s desire.”
“Indeed, the ties of naked union is, to begin with, a modern notion shaped by 1960s-era notions of openness and literally fueled by the invention of such things as central heating. In early eras, simply put, nakedness would not have meant what it means today, and consequently we must not simply equate the naked with the sexual.”
“In some bulletins, transsexual men send each other tips on how to pass as a man, and many of these tips focus almost obsessively on the care that must be taken by the transsexual man not to look like a butch lesbian. Some tips tell guys to dress preppy as opposed to the standard jeans and leather jacket look of the butch; in other instances, transsexual men are warned against certain haircuts (punk styles or crew cuts) that are supposedly popular among butches. These tips, obviously, steer the transsexual man away from transgression or alternative masculine styles and toward a conservative masculinity.”
“Bloom reflects on her meetings with these handsome transsexual men as follows:
I expected to find psychologically disturbed, male-identified women so filled with self-loathing that it had even spilled into their physical selves, leading them to self-mutilating, self-punishing surgery. Maybe I would meet some very butch lesbians, in ties and jackets and chest binders, who could not, would not accept their female bodies. I didn’t meet these people. I met men.
What a relief for Bloom that she was spared interaction with those self-hating masculine women and graced instead by the dignified presence of men!”
“From 1932 to 1963, the Hays Hollywood Production Code banned the representation of “sex perversion” and insisted that “no picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience shall never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.” This censorship measure ensured that between 1934 and 1962, representations of gays and lesbians would always appear under the cover of strict and often almost impenetrable codes.”
“Their love life, according to the size queen Muf, lacks only a good hard dick. Only too eager to please, Moe uses her lottery prize money to go out and purchase the real thing. Moe, tragically, discovers her inner man and her outer dick, or wang, only to generate disgust and loathing from the lovely Muffy. As usual in John Waters’s films, these characters represent not simply camp versions of some recognizably queer types but the absolute extreme of that type, and they tip all too often into shock value. In Desperate Living, Moe represents not only unapologetic butchness but also the site of transsexual aspiration. Waters plays with penis envy by giving Moe a penis and then forcing her to castrate herself. The final shot in this scene, of a dog eating the discarded penis, explodes notions such as castration anxiety and turns castration itself into comedic horror.”
“Ultimately, an independent lesbian cinema proved to be disastrous for images of masculine women in lesbian visual contexts. Indeed, it is still quite rare to find a truly overt butch image in contemporary lesbian film.”
“Much of what we understand to be original about female femininity has already has been channeled through queer male bodies. The startling image of a drag queen teaching female models how to walk the catwalk in Paris is Buming perhaps provides the best example of the lack of originality that we associate with female femininities. Another example of this would be recent films abou young women such as Clueless (1995) and Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion(1997). In both films, the spectacle of exaggerated femininity creates a kind of heterosexual camp humor that depends totally on a prior construction of femininity by drag queens. This is particularly true in Romy and Michelle’S High School Reunion, in which Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino, as the two women preparing for their reunion, present a spectacle of loud and outrageous femininity that is only made more camp and more evocative of a drag queen aesthetic because they are both very tall and tower over their classmates. Finally, the British TV show Absolutely Fabulous completely appropriates camp and drag queen motifs to portray the humorous lives of two middle-aged women in the design business. In all of these representations, humorous femininity is relayed through a gay male aesthetic. By way of comparison, it would be almost impossible to imagine a mainstream depiction of masculinity that acknowledged that it had been routed through lesbian masculinity.”
“Diane Torr is a New York-based performance artist who, as Danny Drag Queen, runs a workshop in which women can become men for a day. Torr’s workshop ad tells potential participants that they can ‘explore another identity — you will learn the basic male behavioral patterns. How to walk, sit, talk and lie down like a man.’ In the workshop, which has been written up in many different magazines and newspapers and filmed for the BBC, Torr instructs her students in the manly ways of taking up space, dominating conversations, nose picking and penis wearing, and she gives them general rudeness skills. Torr’s students become men for the day by binding and jockey stuffing, and then she shows them how to apply facial hair and create a credible male look. Finally, Torr takes her charges out into the mean streets of New York City and shows them how to pass. Torr herself articulates no particular masculine aspirations; she, like many of her workshop participants, avows over and over that she has no desire to be a man; she just wants to pass as a man within this limited space of experimentation. Torr says that her reasons for cross-dressing are quite clear; she wants to experience “male authority and territory and entitlement.” Many workshop women discuss the feeling of power and privilege to which the masquerade gives them access, and many are titillated by the whole thing but relieved at the end of the day to return to a familiar femininity.”
“Part of what happens at the Drag King Workshop is that women learn certain things: we don have to smile, we don’t have to concede ground, we don’t have to give away territory.” In this way, the workshop functions rather like a feminist consciousness-raising group but seems to have very little to do with the reconstruction of masculinity.”
“Perhaps femininity and its accessories should be chosen later on, like a sex toy or a hairstyle. In recent years, I believe that society has altered its conceptions of the appropriate way to raise girls; indeed, a plethora of girl problems, from eating disorders to teenage pregnancy to low intellectual ambitions, leave many parents attempting to hold femininity at bay for their young girls. Cultivating femininity in girls at a very early age also has the unfortunate effect of sexualizing them and even inducing seductive mannerisms in preteen girls. The popularity of the tomboy is one indication that many parents are willing to cultivate low levels of masculinity in their female children rather than undergo the alternatives.
If masculinity were a kind of default category for children, surely we would have more girls running around and playing sports and experimenting with chemistry sets and building things and fixing things and learning about finances and so on.”
“To recognize how completely we have ignored female masculinity as a culture, consider the following: Why is there no word for the opposite of “emasculation”? Why is there no parallel concept to “effeminacy”? (In fact, these words mean exactly the same thing!) Why shouldn’t a woman get in touch with her masculinity? Why does female masculinity remain such a stigma that many women, even lesbians, will do almost anything to avoid the label “butch?” Why ate we comfortable thinking about men as mothers, but we never consider women as fathers? Gender, it seems, is reversible only in one direction, and this must surely have to do with the immense social power that accumulates around masculinity. Masculinity, one must conclude, has been reserved for people with male bodies and has been actively denied to people with female bodies.”
“In her excellent book on gender, sexuality, and women’s sports, Susan Cahn reaches the conclusion that although one in America today can find many competitive opportunities, there are still many obstacles. She insists: “Women’s athletic freedom requires that certain attributes long defined as masculine — skill, strength, speed, physical dominance, uninhibited use of space and motion — become human qualities and not those of a particular gender.” The only way to extend such attributes to women, I argue, is not simply to make them “human” but to allow them to extend to women as masculinity. I do not believe that we are moving steadily toward a genderless society or even that this is a utopia to be desired, but I do believe that a major step toward gender parity, and one that has been grossly overlooked, is the cultivation of female masculinity.”
