Female Masculinity Book

Wow, fifteen years old. In many ways it's kind of depressing that, in general, our culture hasn't moved beyond a gender binary.

I always had three main peeves with Halberstam. One is zir insistence that "masculinity" is not a synonym for "men or maleness" (p. 13). Well, yes it bloody is. No matter how much we want to challenge language and forge reclaimings, masculinity is, in our culture, a synonym for maleness. Therefore as soon as one talks about female masculinity, one is talking about women/transgendered/butches/men/whoever behaving in a way that is (in our culture) manly. Throughout the book Halberstam discusses behaviour as feminine and masculine. I would be happier renaming behaviours in a way that is separate from gender, rather than trying to reframe masculinity (which seems akin to banging a head against a brick wall).

Secondly, hear my hollow laughter as Halberstam discusses the gendering of children.

"I believe that society has altered its conception of the appropriate was 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 pre-teen 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 alternative."

Even back in 1998 it seemed to me to be incredibly naive to believe that little girls were being raised in a more gender-neutral way, and that this trend would intensify. I'm sure Halberstam too is choking on zir words when zie watches Dance Moms (watch the routine in the second video down. If you can stomach it**).

Thirdly, and most relevantly to this book, I utterly refute Halberstam's assertion that:
"Female masculinity seems to be at its most threatening when coupled with lesbian desire" but "hetero female masculinity . . . represents an acceptable degree of female masculinity."

Halberstam's examples of hetero female masculinity are Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, and Sigourney Weaver in Alien/s. It's a goddamn superpower: watch Halberstam sweep aside challenging hetero female masculinity in less than a paragraph. Zie picks here very specific forms of "female masculinity:" ones that explicitly do not threaten because they are still feminine enough (I mean, they're ones created by Hollywood: you don't get much more manufactured and appropriately consumable than that). There's no need to divide and conquer, Halberstam, there's quite enough disapproval to go around female masculinity of all sexual orientations.

What's even more annoying is that having made this distinction, Halberstam accuses others of mis-aligning female masculinity with lesbianism: "by making female masculinity equivalent to lesbianism . . . or by reading it as proto-lesbianism awaiting a coming community, we continue to hold female masculinity apart."

With all these criticisms, this was an important book, that all interested in gender should read (although I liked the suggestion of one reviewer on GR, that it's better cited than read).

If there's one thing I'm grateful to Halberstam for it is critiquing the 1990s framing of identifying as transgender as "being in the wrong body." Halberstam states,"The idea that only transsexuals experience the pain of a 'wrong body' shows an incredible myopia about the trials and tribulations of many varieties of . . . embodiment. It . . . efficiently constructs a model of 'right body' experience that applies, presumably, to [other people]."

"If the borderlands are uninhabitable for some transsexuals who imagine that home is just across the [gender] border, imagine what a challenge they present to those subjects who do not believe that such a home exists, either metaphorically or literally. [Gender theorist Jay] Prosser's cartography of gender relies on a belief in the two territories of male and female, divided by a flesh border and crossed by surgery and endocrinology . . . Some bodies are never at home, some bodies cannot simply cross from A to B, some bodies recognize and live with the inherent instability of identity."

It's why I get annoyed by Halberstam for talking about gender territories "in between" and "geographies of ambiguity" at the same time as saying things like "the category of stone butch lies on the boundary between lesbian and transgendered." I don't find categories and boundaries a very useful way of re-envisioning gender.

Still, a great re-read.

**Bonus creep factor: check out the male judge getting a camera out to take photos at 00:40.