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Conflict and Historical Memory in the Making of Butch and Femme Identity

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Conflict and Historical Memory in the Making of Butch and Femme Identity Too Radical or Too Retrograde: Conflict and Historical Memory in the Making of Butch and Femme Identity Kira Hamilton Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in American Studies under the advisement of Paul Fisher May 2021 © 2021 Kira Hamilton Hamilton ii Table of Contents Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... II Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... III Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 ....................................................................................................................................... 9 Chapter 2 ..................................................................................................................................... 25 Chapter 3 ..................................................................................................................................... 52 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................ 84 Hamilton iii Acknowledgements The 2020-2021 pandemic-shaken school year was never how I expected to be writing my senior thesis, to say the least. I am immensely grateful to my advisor Paul Fisher, who was patient and flexible as we adjusted to all sorts of new normals. His guidance and insight made this project not only possible, but a genuine joy. Additionally, I’d like to thank my committee—Octavio González, Brenna Greer, Genevieve Clutario, and my visitor and longtime mentor, Olga Shurchkov, for their time and feedback. I am also immensely grateful for the support of Samuel and Hilda Levitt, whose generous fellowship made this project financially feasible for me as a first-generation college student. This project is a capstone of my four years at Wellesley, and there are so many fantastic professors that I’ve been fortunate enough to learn from. In particular, I’d like to take a moment to thank Steve Marini, whose fantastic Ethics course set me down the path to American Studies and truly changed my life. Thank you to Leigh Gilmore, as well, whose Politics and Sexuality course was where I first began formulating the ideas that would ultimately become this thesis. Some personal notes of thanks are also in order. To my family—your love and support, even from 4000 miles away, is always felt. Thank you for trusting me to venture so far from home. To my dear friends—thank you for bearing with me when I began far too many sentences with “well, in my thesis…” and completely derailed a conversation with a tangent about lesbian history. To Ky, in particular—my favorite butch, without whom this thesis would remain untitled. And to my girlfriend, Francesca—your love and humor has sustained me in this tumultuous year. I could not have done this without you. Finally, I owe the deepest debt of gratitude to the subjects of this thesis, historical and present. When I was first coming into my own identity as a lesbian, I spent hours researching and reading the stories of butches and femmes. The resilience and inventiveness of their love, their genders, and their communities resonated with me deeply. So many queer stories have been lost to the sands of time, through neglect or malice or simply because they never got the chance to be written. I feel immeasurably lucky to have been able to encounter some small fraction of them over the course of this project. Hamilton 1 Introduction Butch and Femme are ubiquitous and complicated concepts within the LGBTQ community. They are historical artifacts, they are contemporary identities, they are adjectives. I found myself fascinated by this contradiction: these words carried enough meaning to be a legible reference within and outside of the queer community, yet the identities themselves remain deeply subcultural. Butches and femmes are everywhere and nowhere. To even define butch and femme is a complicated task. Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy provide a good, simple working definition in their oral history of butch/femme culture in Buffalo, NY in the 1940s and 50s. They describe the roles that emerged in the working- class lesbian bars in the city, where “the butch projected the masculine image of her time period— at least regarding dress and mannerisms—and the fem, the feminine image; and almost all members were one or the other,” and “butch-fem roles not only shaped the lesbian image, but also lesbian desire, constituting the base for a deeply satisfying erotic system.”1 Yet, this definition raises almost as many questions as it answers. What, exactly, is the masculine or feminine image of one’s time period? Is one still butch or femme if they don’t participate in the dyadic sexual pairing of one butch and one femme? And what becomes the definition of these terms when the bars disappear, when the time period changes? In this thesis, I attempt to take up some of these questions. I am motivated by two questions. First: how has the definition of butch and femme changed over time, and how has conflict around butch and femme identity informed those definitions? Second: how are the histories of butch and femme utilized and interpreted in the constructions of the identities themselves, and in wider 1 Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeleine D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 5. Hamilton 2 debates in lesbian and queer politics? Notable femme, author, and archivist Joan Nestle, writing in the 1992, asks another version of these questions: “does the longevity of butch-femme self- expression reflect the pernicious strength of the heterosexual gender polarization—or is it, as I would argue, a lesbian-specific way of deconstructing gender that radically reclaims women’s erotic energy? Are femmes and butches dupes of heterosexuality, or are they gender pioneers with a knack for alchemy?”2 I share in Nestle’s assessment that butches and femmes have a “knack for alchemy”—these terms were in flux when Nestle was writing in the 1990s (a period I explore in chapter two), and have continued to find relevance since, even in a present moment that is deeply interested in deconstructing binaries. Part of the reason butch and femme have endured is in the complexity of the form. As feminist scholar Sally R. Munt explains, “butch/femme is a way of being, sometimes a lesbian ontology, played consciously, but often skipping out on forms too quick to catch. It is now and then too close to call, too subtle to name directly, a localized culture, actualizing in the discrete specificities and corporealities of our lives.”3 Butch and femme are both intrinsic, and adopted; they are made manifest in the direct and the indirect. It was the harmony in this contradiction that drew me to this project in the first place. These forms are powerful: whether in support or opposition, in jest or in complete and utter sincerity, butch and femme is there. In a personal example: when reading Sara Crawley’s 2002 sociology dissertation, “Narrating and Negotiating Butch and Femme: Storying Lesbian Selves in a Heteronormative World,” I was struck by a particular anecdote by some of her narrators. Crawley was studying attitudes toward and manifestations of butch and femme in her southern Florida lesbian community, and some of her 2 Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston: Alyson Publications, 1992), 14. 3 Sally R. Munt, “Introduction,” in Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, Lesbian and Gay Studies (Cassell, 1998), 3, https://books.google.com/books?id=1G5M13Xida0C. Hamilton 3 fieldwork brought her to a meeting of a local lesbian discussion group, where they were playing a game where members would rank each other on a scale of 1-10 on their relative femmeness or butchness.4 I was struck—I had played this exact game with my friends at one of our own gatherings in a dorm room, hundreds of miles away, nearly twenty years after Crawley’s experience in that discussion group. Like the members of the group Crawley studied, we sat one another in a “hot seat,” and then discussed where the person in question ought to be marked on a butch-femme scale that we hung on the back of my friend's door. In our iteration, we also ranked along "top" and "bottom"—indicative, certainly, of the decoupling of butch and femme roles from a strict erotic form. People still play this game online—a popular internet meme from around that time was ranking not just one another, but just about everything on a "futch scale": from Monopoly pieces to Pokemon characters to pasta.5 Something about these terms demands attention, decades after they emerged, in forms almost completely alien to their first iterations. Of course, complexity also invites misinterpretation, especially when a butch/femme pairing appears at first glance to be easily recognizable as heterosexual, or something akin to heterosexual presentation. Lesbian historian Lillian Faderman, whose pioneering work I do draw on to construct some of the historical context around butch and femme, is certainly guilty of documenting butch/femme while also misconstruing it. She writes: Perhaps it was not so much that most butches desired to be men. It was rather that for many of them in an era of neat pigeonholes the apparent
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