Stone Butch Blues

this is the life of someone else. This is the life of Jess Goldberg, the stone butch. The novel Stone Butch Blues written by Leslie Feinberg follows the life of stone butch Jess Goldberg. To understand…

In many ways, Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues does more than explore what it means to be a part of the LGBTQ community. In many ways, Stone Butch Blues is a “how to” book just as much as it is a lifeline for the LGBTQ community. It is a “how to” book in the sense it examines how to be a member of the LGBTQ community, while at the same time revealing the follies of a definitive correct way how. In doing so, Feinberg reveals not only the performative nature of gender, but also how the concept…

civic and personal dome. Femininity and masculinity are structured and well thought-out in a divergent binary, which causes to be the mishmash of male/feminine and female/masculine “atypical” and publically obnoxious while crossing borderlines. Individuals, who don’t succeed in executing their gender accurately, have to face strong reactions of hostility, denial and discrimination everywhere, because their “odd racialism” challenges the accepted customary type of the link between male/masculine…

In Stone Butch Blues, Feinberg describes the childhood and early adulthood of its protagonist and narrator, Jess Goldberg, who “negotiates the boundaries” of sex, gender and sexuality as feminine or masculine persona creating her own world, very often confronting various violent consequences and yearning “for an abode both in body and in the commune”. (Yadav; 53-54) In the poetry book, Till the End of Her Subsistence, “this he-she ambivalence” and desire for “gender conformity” is well expressed…

In Leslie Feinbergs’s Stone Butch Blues the main character Jess struggles with many obstacles throughout her life, the hardest one being her inner conflict of who she was and who she wanted to be. Her gender identity, which is a person’s gendered sense of self, was not the same as her gender comportment or gender expression. In Threshold Concepts gender comportment/expression is defined as “bodily actions such as how we use our voices, cross our legs, hold our heads, wear our clothes, dance…

It is difficult to abandon what is has defined our very selves. Every image we see, from the moment we are born to the moment before we pass, are what create who us as individuals. This representation, as described in “Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture,” that happens without our conscious acceptance, is what gives us our perception of society and culture and tells us what emotions to apply. Though this social embodiment is hard to shake off, as can be seen in the…

A comparison of the lesbian community from the twentieth century and that which exists today shows almost no resemblance between the two. The traits that marked lesbian culture as ‘distinct’ - namely butch/femme identities - have been replaced by the modern lesbian. The butch/femme lesbian dichotomy of the early twentieth century challenged society’s definition of being female, but the rise of lesbian feminism and the “new lesbian” critiqued this traditional approach as ‘heterosexual roleplay’…

describe self-representation, feelings and opinions throughout the lifespan, including earlier identity, ‘coming out’, to current identity and possible future self. It can relate to looks, actions, feelings, opinions, and any other way an individual may express himself or herself in any given situation. My wish was to highlight some of these constructed naturalizations and see how lesbians respond to the way lesbians are represented and if it has affected their self-identity as lesbians.…

you gain insight on what makes each label different from the other. If gay and lesbian studies were taught together, you would not understand the depth of what lesbian women had to go through to be taken seriously. Most history on gay studies are told through a gay man’s perspective. This has led many women to feel like the lesbian experience is frequently presented as a pale version of the male. This, however, is not true. Lesbian women have encountered many struggles that differ from the…

studies that has room for greater exploration. Scholarship on queer parenting is burgeoning, yet, it exists in a silo, as is the current literature on lesbian pop culture representations and butch lesbian identity. The issue with the latter literature, is that much of it is out of date and requires greater analytical details, particularly intersectional analysis. Bridging these fields of study, this unique analysis discursively traces pop culture representations of butch lesbian parents.…