Stone Butch Blues Research Articles

Toward a Vulgar Transgender Marxism

A reading of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as a class both of “vulgar” Marxism and vulgar transgender writing. The novel is a learning text for the reader in both transmasculine life and militant working-class life. It takes the form of an autofiction, given that both militant workers and trans people need their life stories (auto) to be something other than confessional (fiction) as a matter of survival. The essay concludes by calling for a vulgar Marxist studies that attends to both the form and content of common, everyday, earthy, “vulgar” proletarian life.

Flailing at Feminized Labor: SOFFAs, 1990s Trans Care Networks, Stone Butch Blues, and the Devaluation of Social Reproduction

Around 1998, the term “significant other” or “significant others, friends, family, and allies” started to circulate in English-language trans communities to describe cis people's labor in supporting trans people through transition. One newsletter, Your SOFFA Voice, published letters, essays, and poetry by and for SOFFAs. Your SOFFA Voice could be understood as what Cait McKinney calls information activism, attempts at creating political collectivity through DIY communication and publication methods. While the poems, stories, and manifestos of Your SOFFA Voice were undoubtedly expressions of genuine experience, they also read as expressions of “bad” liberal feminism, preoccupied with the domestic and intimate and obscuring political questions other than personal identity. Historicizing the intimate, domestic themes of this 1990s archive in relation to earlier trans/butch/femme representations of 1960s bar culture and working-class solidarities—particularly in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues—helps contextualize them in relation to multiple historical events: the expansion of feminized administrative and clerical labor markets on one hand; and on the other hand, the withdrawal of the welfare state and the absorption of the radical political imagination into homonormative lesbian and gay rights organizing, and the institutionalization of 1960s-70s feminist, queer, Black, Latinx, and Indigenous campus protest into liberal diversity and inclusion initiatives in the 1990s and 2000s. This analysis helps us ask questions about trans care now: how and why intimate partnerships are made to bear such utopian desires for community building and care while also constituting a crucible for much of the mess, tension, and dysfunction of trans care, and whether understanding trans people as autonomous and self-determining is a viable alternative.

“Hasten the Revolution!”: Coalition-Building, Resistance, and Temporality in Leslie Feinberg's Fiction

Abstract This article revisits Leslie Feinberg's pioneering Stone Butch Blues alongside hir lesser known second novel, Drag King Dreams. Through a prism of well-established queer theory and emerging trans scholarship, the author seeks to demonstrate how Feinberg's political vision retained its Marxist core while adapting with the times to confront new challenges presented by neoliberism, bio/necropolitics, and imperialist warfare. Living from the mid-twentieth century to the dawn of the twenty-first, Feinberg's life spanned from an era of industrial capitalism to the apotheosis of neoliberalism. Witnessing everything from pre-Stonewall queer culture to Gay Liberation and, eventually, homonormativity, Feinberg's political commitments remained remarkably consistent. Hir life and work were anchored by a critical class consciousnesses that, in a queer vein, destabilized identity in the formation of coalitional political work and, through a transgender/Marxist line of thought, rejected binary modes of gender altogether as coercive mechanisms of capitalism. Feinberg's project is thus at once historical, yet ever contemporary, and merits renewed attention and commitment in the twenty-first century.

In Praise of Happy Endings: Precarity, Sustainability, and the Novel

AbstractOpen-endedness is one of the most pervasive and enduring values in literary studies. Critics of all stripes have condemned teleology on both aesthetic and political grounds. This essay makes the paradoxical case that in an era of mass precarity, this insistence on openness has reached its limit. It is now blocking the kinds of political action that will be necessary to slowing the pace of climate change and building material conditions for collective flourishing. This is a moment for novel critics, then, to rethink our relationship to endings. The nineteenth-century realist novel is particularly interesting in this respect, since it took the question of ongoing material survival especially seriously and used endings to mark a shift from narratable, unstable plotted action to stable routines that extend predictably into the future. In these plots of precarity, happy endings function not as closure or completion but as thresholds to sustainability. This essay ends with two twentieth-century fictions—Bessie Head's 1974 A Question of Power and Leslie Feinberg's 1993 Stone Butch Blues—that conclude by combining the pleasures of material predictability and plenty with workable models of social relations that could help to guide political action in the climate crisis.

Hard Road Ahead: Stone's Queer Agency in Stone Butch Blues

Hard Road Ahead: Stone's Queer Agency in Stone Butch Blues

Hard Road Ahead: Stone's Queer Agency in <em>Stone Butch Blues</em>

What is stone in Stone Butch Blues? This essay looks to the material properties of stone and stonelike objects to re-examine the affective and relational specificity of stone butch sexuality in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues (1993). It invokes recent ecological and new materialist critiques within queer theory to return to this monumental text for the purpose of establishing the contemporary relevance of stone butch sexuality, now an outmoded sexual orientation. By taking seriously the text's nonhuman signifiers, this essay argues that hard and obdurate materials and their inherent mutability provide a source of language and theory for the emergence of stone butch life in 1950s Buffalo. Stone's rigidity, I argue, is inherently connected to the imaginative and ephemeral possibilities of desire that mark stone butch sexuality. The material qualities of stone endow it with an expansive temporality from the deep past to the far future with and beyond human life, and this material endurance points to temporal orientations in the novel that resist historicization and insist upon a futural existence for the stone butch "yet to come." To conclude, the essay turns to Jacques Derrida's Archive Fever (1996) to demonstrate how stone, as the very embodiment of an archive, counters impulses to memorialize and charts a deviant future for the stone butch through the transformative potential of material life.

Real Domesticity

Real Domesticity

The Meaning of Queer Home

This article positions two proto-queer texts together in order to demonstrate how the development of American “queer subjectivity” arose as a discernible discursive and embodied notion related to “home.” Written before the arrival of the queer category, Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (The Crossing Press, Freedom, CA, 1982) and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (Alyson Press, Los Angeles, CA, 2003, original work published 1993) concentrate upon the home as a site conditioned by twin concerns that would become central to queer politics: “the home” as narrative metaphor and homes as real-world shelters. Queering the home stretches and scrambles the home category (“dyke bar as home,” “Black lesbian sisterhood as home,” “body as home”) while insisting upon self-defined, material structures of protection and comfort for queers. The article performs a “reading through skin” of queer scholarship and of sociological data. It argues that these queer-emergent texts helped establish notions of “queer home” via exploring metaphoric and empirical axes related to domestic space.

Queer or Cripped? An Analysis of Ability in Stone Butch Blues

The relationship between the term queer and cripped is deeply reliant on compulsory structures that sanction hetero-normative and able-bodied precedents in society. The similarities between the two terms can be seen in queer narratives (and real lives) exemplified by the character of Jess in Stone Butch Blues. In this essay, I read Feinberg’s text through a disability studies/Crip Theory lens to show the extent to which both queer and cripped individuals’ identities rely on compulsory structures in society. I cite Robert McRuer in multiple scene analyses. The sexual practices Jess participates in throughout Stone Butch Blues are very similar, if not identical, to the theories and practices Siebers writes about in his essay. For Feinberg, and Jess, the point is to show how people do not need to be fixed for there to be a happily ever after, but in fact, “the primary target for intervention should be social norms and practices rather than individuals.” **Keywords**: Queer, Crip theory, Cripped, Hetro-normative

Getting under performance's skin: epigenetics and gender performativity

This article offers a re-examination of Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity (as described in her influential 1990 work Gender Trouble) in the light of recent epigenetic discoveries. Epigenetics is the study of molecular mechanisms that modify the manner in which DNA sequences are expressed while leaving the sequence itself intact. These processes can be influenced by environmental factors, demonstrating how our environment can affect us at the cellular level with important consequences for the ways in which we think about behaviour, gender and identity. Through an exploration of a range of scientific papers (in conjunction with an epigenetic reading of Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues), this article asks if epigenetics could provide a mechanism through which gender performance achieves some degree of biological embodiment. Although current research can offer a basis for some interesting speculation, it is also clear that such a question cannot yet be answered. Fortunately, new lines of investigation could one day provide us with a clearer idea of the relationship between gender performance and epigenetics.

A Scar is More than a Wound: Rethinking Community and Intimacy through Queer and Disability Theory

While both the queer and the disabled body have been marginalized for their supposed incoherence and even immorality, Riva Lehrer’s creative non-fiction essay, “Golem Girl Gets Lucky,” and Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993) evince how these qualities are universal to all embodiment. Through these works, I destabilize the myth of the autonomous self and initiate a particularized study of queer/crip kinship patterns, improvisatory systems of connection that adhere and reform across bodily and/or psychic scars. Thus, scars become not only evidence of wounding, but also new surfaces on which to develop community and intimacy within systemic violence and oppression.

Friction in the interstices: Emotion and landscape in Stone Butch Blues

This article analyzes the role of emotion in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. Widely understood as one of the first modern transgender novels, Stone Butch Blues depicts the bodily changes of its protagonist, Jess Goldberg, from living as a “he–she,” to passing as male, to living as neither male nor female. This article analyzes how Jess's body, identity, and feelings shape and are shaped by the spaces ze encounters throughout the novel. Finding that Jess experiences emotions as bodily boundaries and metaphorical geographies, I draw from the work of Sara Ahmed to argue that Jess's decision at the novel's end not to pass as female or male is a choice to push back at the gendered norms of hir world through a body and politics shaped by emotion. Turning to contemporary trans* – transgender, transsexual, and trans – movements for social change, I argue that Jess's politics of bodily and emotional abrasion can help in the development of a trans* politics of emotion.

Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination by Nicole Seymour (review)

STRANGE NATURES: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. By Nicole Seymour. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 2013.What does it mean to practice a queer ecocriticism? Such a query animates Nicole Seymour's Strange Natures: Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination, a work as invested in lingering with the paradigms of intersectionality that such a question foregrounds as it is in developing a definitive answer to it. While Strange Natures is not the first monograph in the field of queer ecology, it is-to this reader's mind, at least-a groundbreaking book, one that carefully traces the barriers to such work (namely, queer theory's vexed relationship to nature and the two fields' ostensibly conflicting relationships to the status of futurity) in order to develop a queer ecocritical practice that engages, rather than resists, such difficulty. Indeed, Seymour's work revels in the surprising and the paradoxical; from its chosen archive to a reading practice that insists upon interrogating how conceptions of nature have been wielded to validate harm to vulnerable populations, human and non-human, Strange Natures is not necessarily what readers expect from traditional ecocriticism. And that, of course, is part of the point.Also part of the point is the book's commitment to complexity, philosophical and ethical; Seymour is not content to demonstrate how the queer and the ecological meet, but also seeks to show how a queer ecological project intersects with other political projects, including anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and anti-classism. This is perhaps the chief accomplishment of Strange Natures ', that it refuses to think queerness and environmentalism apart from questions of social justice, insisting that a queer ecological methodology, practiced well, cannot help but attune us to questions of race, class, disability, and colonialism.After a powerful introduction outlining the difficulties of queer ecological work, Strange Natures unfolds over four chapters. The first, which puts Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues in conversation with contemporaneous works of Caribbean literature (Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night), argues for an organic transgenderism, an understanding of gender transitionality that is as natural as it is cultural, that can dwell outside the medical establishment (or before medical intervention), and that contributes to an environmentalist and anti-capitalist imaginary. Conceptually, this chapter is echoed not by what immediately follows it but instead by Seymour's final chapter, which treats Shelley Jackson's novel Half Life-a sardonic depiction of conjoined twins living in the fallout of Nuclear testing-as the occasion to imagine an ethic of care that is performed irreverently, that embraces ugly landscapes and grotesque bodies (164), and that welcomes the dissolution of self-sovereignty. These two chapters are linked both by their insistence on the role of the non-normative body in queer ecological ethics (Seymour explicitly reminds us that conjoinment is not unlike transgenderism [149]), and by questions of genre (Cliff's and Mootoo's magical realism returns implicitly as a concern in Seymour's engagement with Jackson's speculative fiction). …

Strange natures: futurity, empathy, and the queer ecological imagination

In Strange Natures, Nicole Seymour investigates the ways in which contemporary queer fictions offer insight on environmental issues through their performance of a specifically queer understanding of nature, the nonhuman, and environmental degradation. By drawing upon queer theory and ecocriticism, Seymour examines how contemporary queer fictions extend their critique of categories of gender and sexuality to the nonhuman natural world, thus constructing a queer environmentalism. Seymour's thoughtful analyses of works such as Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues, Todd Haynes's Safe, and Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain illustrate how homophobia, classism, racism, sexism, and xenophobia inform dominant views of the environment and help to justify its exploitation. Calling for a queer environmental ethics, she delineates the discourses that have worked to prevent such an ethics and argues for a concept of queerness that is attuned to environmentalism's urgent futurity, and an environmentalism that is attuned to queer sensibilities.

Feminist translation and feminist sociolinguistics in dialogue

This article, focusing on Turkish and English, explores various intersections between feminist translation and feminist sociolinguistics to bring the fields into conversation and expand their intellectual and geopolitical scopes. The first section discusses the broad historical points of connection by concentrating on the critiques of sexist language. Thus, it demonstrates how the fields share a common feminist politics of language. This intersection is illustrated by an example from my Turkish translation of Hanne Blank’s Virgin. The second section explores a more specific alliance by examining feminist critiques and manipulations of pro/nominal gender systems. This discussion is supported by more examples from my translation, as well as examples from Cemile Çak?r’s Turkish translation of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. The last section provides feminist sociolinguistics and translation teachers with ideas on how interdisciplinary cooperations can expand students’ political awareness of gender/sexuality dynamics with regard to language and translation. The significance of this intersection is demonstrated by a translation experiment.

Departing shame: Feinberg and queer/transgender counter-cultural remembering

This article seeks to engage Rosi Braidotti's work on memory and Elspeth Probyn's on shame to analyse the novel Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. Probyn asserts that shame is a site of desire for connection and not solely humiliation. That queer and transgender expressions have been shamed then plays a role in how such communities are established. Braidotti analyses constructions of ‘history’ that privilege dominant subject positions (e.g. white, normatively gendered men). As a result mainstream history, or ‘memory’, is denied to those outside such privilege. Feinberg's novel serves as an alternate history for those with shamed genders/sexualities.

So Unbelievably Real: Stone Butch Blues and the Fictional Special Guest

So Unbelievably Real: Stone Butch Blues and the Fictional Special Guest

When did Indians become straight?: kinship, the history of sexuality, and native sovereignty

INTRODUCTION 1. Reproducing the Indian: Racial Birth and Native Geopolitics in Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison and Last of the Mohicans 2. Adoption Nation: Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hendrick Aupaumut, and the Boundaries of Familial Feeling 3. Romancing Kinship: Indian Education, the Allotment Program, and Zitkala- 4. Allotment Subjectivities and the Administration of Culture: Ella Deloria, Pine Ridge, and the Indian Reorganization Act 5. Finding Our History: Gender, Sexuality, and the Space of Peoplehood in Stone Butch Blues and Mohawk Trail 6. Tradition and the Contemporary Queer: Sexuality, Nationality, and History in Drowning in Fire

Queering Utopia: Deep Lez and the Future of Hope

Unca Trans sits on tree stump in the midst of viridescent Ontario field. Legs crossed, occasionally tugging at his beard, he narrates his return to the land and the agrarian revival of the 2020s. Cloud shadows pass in accelerated time and Unca Trans fidgets in his stop-animation puppetry as he describes the radical social movements of the early 2000s and how, following the success of First Nations' land claims in 20 15, he left the comfort of his urban genderqueer enclave to take over his family's farm and organize rural communities around issues of food justice and transgender health advocacy. 'Unca Trans' short film - just over five minutes, produced by Allyson Mitchell and Christina Zeidler - appears to present day audiences as Utopian fragment, at once remembering of better future and an insistence on the radical potential of our contemporary moment. film was produced in 2007, though the clip we are shown is identified through opening text as segment of recordings recently discovered in the collections held in the archives of the Canadian National Library, June 2077. interview with Unca Trans is said to have taken place in 2045 when a documentary film crew interviewed people involved in the major social upheavals that occurred at the beginning of the 21st century (Mitchell and Zeidler 2007). For its 2012 viewers, the film shows the discovery of ghost from time that has not yet come - an appearance that calls our attention to the possibilities comprising our present.When first introducing Unca Trans to multigenerational room at the Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the 1970s conference in 2010, 1 experienced an utter collapse of such present possibility. I found myself in the wreckage of social movements, far from the interlocking feminist concerns of land rights, gender and health justice. In the two panel presentations before mine - on the erotic nature of archival historiography and rereading of Stone Butch Blues - several women had stormed out of the room, each declaring loudly that such academic language was antifeminist and that the younger generation was apolitical and once yelling, 'Nonconsensual phallus!' when an image of dildo was presented in slide.1 We were the first panel after heated plenary that had erupted into debate about the exclusion of trans women from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival; we were one of few panels at the conference overtly addressing trans identities. I held my breath, waited my turn, and thought: What Would Unca Trans Do? How might he help to summon collective dialogue in this room, acknowledging the links between academic work, lived experience, and direct action? How might such an anticipatory ghost figure urge us to reexamine the necessary multigenerational relationship between feminisms and Utopian longings? I frantically searched for accessible and academically permissible words to ask, How can we begin to recognize one another as likely allies in building antiracist and trans-supportive movements?These will be my guiding questions in the exploration that follows, which I pursue in part by reading classic lesbian feminist text coauthored by one of the women who left the room that day (though perhaps not in anger) - the Radicalesbians' (1970) The Identified Woman statement - in conversation with samples of current lesbian and discourse. I draw generously from Jose Esteban Munoz s concept of queer Utopian memory, outlined as critique of the present shaped by desires for aspects of an uncertain past and longing for future (2009, 35). My analysis is also profoundly shaped by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's reparative reading, described as generous analysis of texts, which asks not what is true, but what can given interpretation do? (2003, 123). In other words, I attempt an alchemy of those seemingly irresolvable tensions between bodies and gender and generations within contemporary feminisms. …

Gender Incongruity and Trans-identity: A Reading of Leslie Fienberg’s Stone Butch Blues

The word Transgender is often used as an aggregate term for those who transgressconventional binary gender boundaries. Based on Simon de Beauvoir’s pronouncement in The Second Sex, “one is not born but rather becomes a woman” (283), Judith Butler affirms that gender is fluid. Butler, by deconstructing the binary of male-female, demonstrates that the boundary implied inside this pair is ‘inalienably flimsy.’ The perspectives of the queer community are often unheard in an atmosphere where heterosexual hegemony is active. The hostile surroundings in which the trans-people live and the traumatic experiences they undergo fill them with constant fear and anxiety in confronting their real selves and asserting their identities. People who are marginalised because of their sexuality have always had to seek mainstream acceptance to get the rights and freedoms they need for a dignified life. The purpose of this study is to explore the resistance strategies that trans-genders adopt when met with adversity and the ways in which they see their trans-identity as providing them with a form of strength and resilience. Leslie Feinberg, an American author, in Stone Butch Blues, carves out the entire existence of Jess Goldberg, a butch lesbian who undergoes physical and mental transformation.