Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

brownfemipower has a question about butch identity, http://flipfloppingjoy.com/2009/05/22/what-is-butch/

the whole conversation just rubs me the wrong way. it really irritates me when i see the binary of supposedly natural butchiness (just me in my sweats and comfortable shoes; i.e., not actively performing gender) shoved up against shiny and polished butch which implies that somehow too much thought and effort and performance is going into butch and, thus, it’s not as authentic as the “just lil ol’ me in my sweats and comfy shoes” butch.

i can say this, from my own experience growing up with butch women: please spare me. just as much thought and effort goes into throwing on a pair of painter’s pants and a t-shirt, and actively avoiding anything girly as it does anything ostensibly more polished and involving supposedly more effort and active thought about performing gender identities.

a couple of months ago, i unearthed an old copy of Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers and immediately sat down and read it again. put it this way: there just isn’t some narrative that makes it all work out into some smooth (polished!) trajectory of moving from a supposedly more authentic gender presentation to a place where it’s become inauthentic because exposed to … style, to consumption, to fashion, to media, to advertising — or whatever the bogeydewd of the day is. as if people are victims of some cultural pressure to conform and that, were it not for this horrible pressure on them, their natural selves would bloom forth and we could be who we were Rilly N. Trooly meant to be. Whee!

I look at the old, washed out reprint of a photo of Ralph Kerwinico who was born Cora Anderson, a native american woman. she’s wearing a three piece suit and tie and, no doubt, there’s a pocket watch somewhere, not to mention the totally comfortable looking shoes.

Or Mary Fields, a slave who, in 1932, wore the clothes typical of men in her work as a stagecoach driver.

Need i go on? There’s the photo of the 1944 of lesbians in San Francisco. A group of women sitting around, four of whom are dressed to the nines: one in a pin stripe pant suit, no tie; another in uniform; another in swank skirted suit, white tie; another in a wool jacket and cotton slacks, shirt collar loose. In the middle is a very femme woman wearing a classic 1940s style suit, wide shouldered, her hair in a classic up-do from the era, all blonde and high femme.

speaking of softball dykes — several photos of them. but there’s also the phys ed dykes — very familiar *wink* (personally, I have a thing for dykes in golf coulottes, sneaks and peds). in the book, there’s a photo of two black lesbians from Cathy Cade’s A Lesbian Photo Album with a capition stating that styles for black women were “diverse”. But anyway, above that, there’s a photo that, from a distance, you’d swear it was men and women. But it’s actually a photo from a 1930s era drag prom that phys ed majors held at the University of Texas

further along, two latina lesbians, in their 60s, taken in 1980 and included in Cathy Cade’s Lesbian Photo Album, 1987. The two elderly latinas look like my grandma and aunt jean — what my mother always fondly called the barrel on toothpicks look. they’re both holding each other, overseeing a table filled with what looks like baked goods. One has on an apron and what looks like one of those christmas sweaters great granny gets from grandkids. the other: polyester collared blouse and polyester slacks.

well, yeah. it just irritates that there is this assumption that, somehow, gender presentation was “more natural”. that somehow, we’ve fallen from grace. that, today, it takes work and effort to appear to be anything and that all of it’s tied up in the horror of consumption, of fakery, of the great put on, the grand performance, and if we could just get back to the golden olden daze when butches, you know, just threw on a tee shirt, an unbuttoned flannel shirt, corduroys, and shitkickers and hot damn, that would be some *real* butch action.

fuck that noise.

it annoys because i can remember when, as a kid, hanging out with townie lezbos at my dad’s place (dad happened to be partial to women in flannels and cords and, among the women he slept with while married to mom, one was a dyke who apparently tried dad on for size for awhile. much to my little sister’s bemusement when she discovered a woman we thought was gay buried under the bedcovers, sleeping off a hangover when she went to dad’s for a weekend visit.

she was a little traumatized by the whole thing and, apparently, picked up on a conversation my mom had with friends in which my mother railed about it. something on the order of: ‘my god. if he’s going to have an affair, you’d think it would be with some pretty young thing, not some she-man with the body of… a man!’

i mean, mom was doing the same thing i did when i discovered the wasband had left me for a woman with fat calves who wasn’t younger or prettier than I. we’d assumed that people left you because they found a newer, prettier, younger, better looking model. when you learn that’s not the case, it kind of blows your mind. partly because then you can’t fall back on your looks and have to ask about what it is about your personality or something that seemed to have drove them away.

but anyway. that was a ramble, huh?

anyway, one of the things i remember was that, at the time, the townie lesbians i hung with were rather annoyed by the campus lesbians who were all into the whole 80s androgyny thing. the campus lesbians were upset with the “roles” and looked down on the butches and femmes. they saw them as wayward women who just didn’t get that they were simply re-enacting het gender stereotypes. the thing to do, they thought, was to go for an androgynous appearance, to resist the gender binary of hetlife.

well, that’s just displacing the binary, you know?

and as i explained in that old post on queer dewd, there was a strong, stinky stench of elitism, something that Faderman writes about in Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. Campus-type lesbians, influenced by feminism, looked down on butches and femmes because they saw this as lower class, uneducated, parochial — small town. to them, the butch /femme roles evidenced a kind of backwardness, of not knowing any better, of thinking that there was no other way to be than to behave *as if* they were heterosexual.

all of which is nicely undone, also, in George Chauncey’s Gay New York. While Chauncey’s focus is gay men in NYC, because he needed to focus and narrow down what is a huge topic, this social history can draw out some useful ways of thinking about — and undermining — this binary: authentic because not about style and conscious gender performance versus inauthentic because about style and conscious performance.

feh!

Here’s some more of that icky, 20th century natural dykeness lacking all of that style and polish:

double feh!