Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature Hana Kulhánková Validity of Butch and Femme Gender Identities M.A. Major Thesis Supervisor: doc. PhDr. Tomáš Pospíšil, Dr. 2008
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. Author’s signature
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Motto Are you butch or femme? If you don’t know by now, ask me and I’ll set you straight!
Suzanne Westenhoefer Acknowledgement I would like to thank my parents for their patience and for not giving up on me. I would like to thank my brother Vítězslav for his support and understanding who I really am. I would like to thank my boss Igor for allowing me to take time off work to finish this thesis. I would like to thank my supervisor Tomáš Pospíšil for his flexibility and advice. I would like to thank Alexandra, Erika, Hannah for proofreading the thesis. I would like to thank most of all to Lucie, my inspiration for this thesis, who shared her queer life with mine for four years.
3 Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 5
1. Butch and Femme Identities – A Historical and Theoretical Overview ...... 9 1.1. Working Class Butch Femme Bar Culture of the 1940s and 1950s ...... 10 1.2. Woman Identified Androgynous Lesbian Feminists of the 1970s ...... 15
2. Butch and Femme Identities in Lesbian Independent Films ...... 23
2.1. Queer Theory ...... 26 2.2. New Queer Cinema and Lesbian Independent Film ...... 28 2.3. Performance of Gender and Performance of Queerness ...... 34 2.4. Robin’s Hood – Butch and Femme as an Inseparable Couple ...... 39 2.5. Itty Bitty Titty Committee – Is Feminism More Important than Lesbianism? .... 46 2.6. Butch Jamie – Redefinition of the Female ...... 55
3. Conclusion...... 62
4. Summary ...... 65
5. Works Cited ...... 66
4 Introduction
Contemporary society is still divided into two polarized worlds based on sexual difference – the world of males and the world of females. This heteronormative dichotomy of a masculine active male and a feminine passive female operates according to prescribed gender roles and sexual desires. According to traditional gender division, male features are associated with rationality, activity, independence, assertiveness and physical strength, while on the other side, female features are associated with emotions, passivity, dependence, obedience and physical weakness. As Judith Halberstam notes:
More women, perhaps, feel able to push at the limits of acceptable femininity, and more men, maybe, find ways of challenging dominant forms of masculinity, but the effects of even gentle gender bending have not been cataclysmic. We still script gender for boys and girls in remarkably consistent and restrictive ways, and we continue to posit the existence of only two genders. ("Female" 118) However, there exist instances which complicate the whole binary picture, especially when biological sex does not conform to gender differences and gender roles which are linked to these differences, as is the case of lesbian relationships based on butch and femme identities and roles.
A simplified definition of butch and femme identities from the encyclopedia of
Lesbian Histories and Cultures states, "When seen through outsiders’ eyes, the butch appears simplistically 'masculine,' and the femme, 'feminine,' paralleling heterosexual categories" (Zimmerman 138). Butch and femme identities and butch femme relations form the core interest of this thesis and as will be elaborated on further, especially in regards to how butch women act in a masculine way, and were and now are able to explicitly display the existence of lesbian identities. By doing so, they resist the dominant heterogendered norms related to female identities, unlike femme lesbians whose visibility was, and still is questioned for their often small difference from
5 heterosexual women. According to Zimmerman, "butches and femmes transformed heterosexual elements, such as gender attitude and dress, into a unique lesbian language of sexuality and emotional bonding" (138). Throughout history, butches and femmes were seen as inseparable couples that were easily recognized and very often viewed as the most characteristic representatives of lesbianism, which made lesbian identities visible. The central questions to which we will try to find answers are: 1) whether butch femme couples are simple replicas of heterosexual relationships or whether they subvert heterogendered norms; and 2) whether butch femme couples are still the most visible representatives of lesbianism in contemporary society or their validity is insignificant to lesbian subcultures. Historical and theoretical texts and contemporary lesbian films will be used for this thesis.
The thesis is divided into two main chapters. This chapter is focused on a historical and theoretical overview of the development and understanding of butch and femme gender identities and related roles from 1940s until 1970s. A historical perspective is a crucial point in addressing butch femme issues because we cannot analyze contemporary lesbian identities without examining the historical and social circumstance when such identities were formed. The thesis will document that throughout history; butch and femme women were oppressed and positioned within the binarised categories of sexual preferences and gender roles, with masculinity and femininity attached to them. We will start with the 1940s when butches were more visible in a butch femme couple through their dress and manner, and served as the most explicit example of female sexuality and lesbian identity. Between the 1940s and 1960s butch femme couples created early lesbian communities mainly in lesbian bars which were established in big cities. Thanks to the visibility and bravery of butch and femme
6 women of that era, it was possible to create a basis for the lesbian feminist movement and the gay liberation movement in the 1970s.
The second part of the first chapter will deal with the radicalized lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. This movement which attacked the institution of heterosexuality itself, critiqued sexist and patriarchal division of gender roles in the society, and as a result, butch femme couples were criticized for adopting and imitating heterosexist gender roles based on power and domination. As a consequence of such criticism, butch femme couples either adopted a "politically correct" androgynous identity, or ceased from the movement. This was not the end of butch femme gender identities though, because from the middle of the 1980s, a large number of scholars and researchers who self identified as butch or femme began to explore these identities trying to re define lesbian histories and validate the existence of butch femme identities today.
The second chapter analyzes three contemporary American lesbian films. They are, Robin’s Hood (directed by Sara Millman, 2003), Itty Bitty Titty Committee (directed by Jamie Babbit, 2007) and Butch Jamie (directed by Michelle Ehlen, 2007). All of them were directed by lesbians, were made in independent productions, were shown at dozens of film festivals worldwide and are or will be distributed on DVD. The chapter will start with an introduction of the queer theory, which is trying to denaturalize heteronormative understanding of sex, gender and sexuality. Many theorists blamed advocacy of queer theory for blending and dissolving all gender identities, and therefore, (according to queer theory) butch femme identities are no longer essential for lesbian identities. Also, we will put these films in the context of lesbian independent cinema and the New Queer Cinema. The thesis will also employ theories of gender and queer performance to demonstrate the ways in which the butch femme queer women
7 shown in these three films express their gender identities and how these identities are understood by other film characters in the diegesis; we will look for clues of butch and femme identities and butch femme gender roles as well. By using the narratives of the films, one of our main aims will be to present the major issues that concern contemporary lesbians or lesbian communities, and continue to explore whether butch and femme identities are still valid nowadays.
8 1. Butch and Femme Identities – A Historical and Theoretical Overview The following chapter will present opposing views on butch and femme gender identities and butch femme couples from the 1940s until the 1980s. There were significant disagreements among historians and scholars who regarded butch femme relations either as replicas of heterogendered norms or as identities that could subvert such norms. Therefore, butch and femme identities and butch femme couples were defined and redefined according to the political, social or political discourse of the given era. Amy Goodloe warns that there is a danger of taking re definitions of identities for granted since historically only, "dominant groups have had the power not only to construct their own identities ... but to construct the identities of groups the dominant group has a vested interest in marginalizing" and postmodern theorists who want to create, "a counter ideology, which has as its aim the liberation and de objectification of marginalized groups [can] in the attempt to give voice to those historically silenced and oppressed … run the risk of re inscribing oppression along very different lines" (1). Goodloe takes the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s and its criticism of the lesbian identity based on butch femme role playing as a historical example of such an attempt:
The dominant form of feminist discourse has, in attempting to 'liberate' lesbian identity from patriarchal control, instead imposed its own identity politics on the lesbian community, with the result that those lesbians whose behaviors or 'styles' do not conform to the feminist agenda have been doubly oppressed – once by the dominant patriarchal culture, and again by the movement that claimed to seek the liberation of all women. (Goodloe 1)
9 1.1. Working Class Butch-Femme Bar Culture of the 1940s and 1950s This part of the thesis will focus on the development of butch femme identities in lesbian communities during the 1940s and 1950s United States of America, when butch and femme identities were practiced within strictly binary gender roles, heavily based on sexuality. Also during this era, the butch became the most visible and stereotyped model for the lesbian identity. The femme was, on the other hand, was disregarded for her considered invisibility and unimportance.
World War II offered many women opportunities which they had never had before. Many of them moved to cities to find work, and many of them joined the army.
These women were living in all female environments which tolerated their lesbian sexual activities. According to John DʼEmilio, "For a generation of Americans, World
War II created a setting in which to experience same sex love, affection, and sexuality, and to discover and participate in the group of gay men and women" (459). After the war, many of the lesbians decided not to return home and stayed in cities. As Miller argues, "For many gay and lesbian GIs, the 'coming out' experience that was the War made it difficult to return home and face familial and social expectations. They swelled the population of port cities like New York, Chicago, and San Francisco:, places where gay and lesbian subcultures were already well established" (238 9). But, the relative freedom for sexual expression was soon to end by the 1950s, as " a dark curtain was about to fall. A country and a culture desperately coveting 'normalcy' after the uprooting effects of the War began to put great pressure on its citizens to marry and raise families"
(Miller 239). Faderman agrees with the situation in post war society, "The years after became an age of authority, in the hope that authority would set the country back in balance" ("Odd Girls" 139). Though the situation was very repressive, it also had a positive effect on strengthening the gay and lesbian communities. As D’Emilio writes,
10 "repression in the postwar decade highlighted consciousness of belonging to a group"
(459).
In the 1940s and 1950s, the white and black working class lesbian communities were predominantly structured around the butch femme relationships. Due to womens’ economic and social independence, a large number of butches and femmes came together and created exclusively homosexual spaces in the bars which were developing in major cities. The bars, "became the single most important public manifestation of the subculture for many decades," according to Faderman ("Odd Girls" 80).
Davis and Kennedy’s research of the 1950s working class lesbian community in
Buffalo urge for historical reconstruction of the importance of butch femme relationships. They argue that, "butch fem roles created an authentic lesbian sexuality appropriate to the flourishing of an independent lesbian culture" and that, "lesbians actively pursued rich and fulfilling sexual lives at a time when sexual subjectivity was not the norm for women" (431). In the following decades, as will be presented in the upcoming part of the thesis, feminist politics criticized butch femme role playing as nothing more than imitation of binary heterosexual pattern, but Davis and Kennedy reevaluated the significance of butch femme roles as a "powerful code of behavior"
(431) which shaped lesbians’ relationships within the lesbian community and opposed to the heterosexual society. According to their research, most butch femme women recognized their own gender role via, "two underlying determinants: image, including dress and mannerism, and sexuality" (Davis and Kennedy 432). Though some of the butches and femmes disagreed with this assumption of easily recognized butch femme identities:
One never really knew a woman’s role identity until one went to bed with her. 'You can’t tell butch femme by people’s dress. You couldn’t even really tell in the fifties. I knew women with long hair, fem clothes, and found out they were
11 butches. Actually I even knew one who wore men’s clothes, haircuts and ties, who was a fem'. (Davis and Kennedy 432)
However, long before the gay liberation movement and the lesbian feminist movement, it is possible to value butch femme role playing as a resistance to the dominant heterosexual ideology, mainly in the realm of sexuality. Joan Nestle notes that butch femme couples created a distinguished "personal style" mainly by their choice of clothing and attitude, though simplistically they were sometimes understood as replicas of heterosexual roles. In fact, they were radically re modifying them to signify their same sex desire for each other (235). Moreover, "Being a butch … was an assertion of strength against very narrow conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.
Wearing a leather jacket and slicking back short hair wasn’t simply an experiment with style it was an embrace of one’s 'true nature' in the face of dominant culture’s notions of what it meant to be a woman: feminine and coy" (Stein 86). Nevertheless in the post war years, butch femme as a sexual couple were often read as stereotyped, "the butch with her dildo or penis substitute, trying to imitate a man, and the simpering passive fem who is kept in her place by ignorance" (Davis and Kennedy 432). Yet there was a difference between a male role in a heterosexual relationship and the butch lesbian whose "foremost objective was to give pleasure to a fem; it was in satisfying her fem that the butch received fulfillment" and as for the female role in heterosexual relationship there is also a difference, "the fem … not only knew what would give her physical pleasure, but she also knew that she was neither object of not receptacle for someone else’s gratification" (Davis and Kennedy 432). Butches’ particular style was used "to signal to other women what she was capable of doing taking erotic responsibility" (Nestle 235). As opposed to the heterosexual gender roles, it was the femme’s role to require and receive sexual pleasure, which is and was usually associated with masculine sexual activity (Davis and Kennedy 433). Moreover, femmes
12 who dressed in more "feminine" style were criticized for attracting the attention of men and of "pass[ing] over into enemy lines" (Nestle 236). But what was ignored by such criticism was the fact, that by doing so, femmes could economically support their butch lovers because they could find jobs easily being regarded heterosexual females.
Therefore, butch femme relationships should gain more respect for its empowering potential in this "erotic conversation between two women" (Nestle 236).
Many butches chose their identity and social role consciously based on socially accepted values of hetero patriarchal culture linking masculinity to power, therefore created more respect within the butch femme community, "Maleness was equated with power, strength, pride and freedom. Femaleness was equated with weakness, dependency and obedience. Female images were used in ways that were shameful and degrading" (qtd. in Jeffreys 165). In this regard, femme women experienced more harassment within the butch femme community due to their lower status as feminine:
Fems were deeply cherished and yet devalued as well. There were always fem put down jokes going around the bar, while at the same time tremendous energy and caring was spent courting the fem women. We were not always trusted and often seen as the more flighty members of the lesbian world, a contradiction to our actual lives where we all knew fems who had stood by their butch lovers through years of struggle. We were mysterious and practical, made homes and broke them up, were glamorous and boring at the same time. (Nestle 237)
In the 1950s, contrary to the generally working class background of most butch femme couples, there existed an organization called The Daughters of Bilitis which was founded by four middle class lesbian couples. The organization was more of a social club that served as an alternative to the lesbian bar culture of that era. The Daughters of
Bilitis were an assimilationistic group that wanted to show to the heterosexual world, that lesbians were just like any other heterosexual people. This group also, "disapproved of the visibly butch stylings of that culture, and its association with menial factory work. They advocated instead a more assimilationistic set of values, recommending that
13 lesbians dress in recognizably feminine ways in order to increase their chances of better employment" (Jagose 27). According to their practices, lesbians will be successful if their "lesbianism remains a secret" (Jagose 27). The assimilationistic groups assumed that highlighting differences of butch femme identities were against the social betterment of lesbian lives, therefore they advocated normalizing strategies based on sameness rather than on differences, which made lesbians almost invisible.
Although Rita Laporte, one of the presidents of The Daughters of Bilitis, dramatically changed her view on butch femme couples and in 1971, she proposed it necessary to "separate female from feminine and male from masculine" (357).
Moreover, Laporte defended masculine butch lesbians: "… desirable qualities as courage, strength, ambition, leadership, aggressiveness, and mental brilliance are said to be masculine … The Lesbian is living proof that these qualities can just as well belong to the female, that they are, in short, human qualities" (357). Though her argument reflects the feminist politics of the 1970s, Laporte, as most of the theorists kept a butch and a femme as an inseparable couple: "A butch is simply a Lesbian who finds herself attracted to and complemented by a Lesbian more feminine than she," as if separated they would loose all their identity, "A butch needs and seeks a femme for her completion" (357, 363).
To conclude, most of the texts used in this part were written in the 1980s and were based on the researchers’ own butch or femme gender identity: "They were not only adopting roles cheerfully but reclaiming role playing in lesbian history as well as the lesbian present as revolutionary and positive" (Jeffreys 158 9). Therefore it is improper to argue that butch femme gender roles in the 1940s and 1950s imitated heterosexuality, because they were mostly played and created within emerging lesbian communities and were structured by lesbians who bravely displayed their desires and
14 sexual identities thus opposing the dominant society. However, it is possible to argue that butch femme couples experienced hierarchy based on the socially excepted hetero patriarchal values, which preferred masculinity to femininity, therefore butches acquired a higher social status as leaders in the butch femme relationships. Femme women were, on the other hand, presented as not "real" lesbians – marginal and passing to the heterosexual world. But still butches and femmes were beginning to shape what was later to become the gay liberation movement:
The strengthening of lesbian culture and the concomitant repression of gays in the fifties led the community to take a more public stance. This shift toward public confrontation subsequently generated enough sense of pride to counter the acknowledged detriments of gay life so that members of the community were willing to instruct newcomers both socially and sexually. (Davis and Kennedy 440)
1.2. Woman-Identified Androgynous Lesbian Feminists of the 1970s
The following part will deal with the 1970s feminist and lesbian feminist politics and their relations to the existence of butch femme couples. Though it seemed from the post war era that working class butch femme women established exclusive sexual dynamics and the basis for development of lesbian subcultures, there was a backlash against butch femme lesbians in the 1970s. Due to the lesbian feminist insistence on absolute equality freed from any role playing, butch femme women began to be moved to the margins of lesbian communities. Lesbianism in the 1970s was regarded as a political stance more than a sexual identity: "For a woman to be a lesbian in a male supremacist, capitalist, misogynist, racist, homophobic, imperial culture, such as that of
North America, is an act of resistance" (Clarke 565). We will present opposing theories dealing with lesbianism as political and sexual activity.
Jagose argues that during the gay liberation of the 1970s, "homosexuality was represented as an identity repressed by heterosexist power structures which privilege
15 gender asymmetry, sexual reproduction and the patriarchal nuclear family" (36). One of the goals of gay liberators was to refuse such a discriminatory system and to create a gay identity as "a revolutionary identity" without marginalizing or pathologizing
(Jagose 37). This identity was recognized by using "the ethnic model" which established gay identity as "a legitimate minority group, whose official recognition would secure citizenship rights for lesbian and gay subjects" (Jagose 61). As Seidman points out, "by the end of the 1970s the gay and lesbian movement had achieved such a level of subcultural elaboration and general social tolerance that a politics of cultural and social mainstreaming far overshadowed both the defensive strategies … and the revolutionary politics of the previous decades" (qtd. in Jagose 37). Although a lot of heterosexual women and lesbians were part of the gay liberation movement, it was misleading to consider that gay men and lesbian women shared the same homosexual identity, as
Jeffrey Weeks comments, "Lesbians and gays are not two genders within one sexual category … They have different histories, which are differentiated because of the complex organization of male and female identities, precisely along lines of gender"
(qtd. in Jagose 44). Though many lesbians moved to the feminist movement instead, they had to deal with both their position within the movement and with their political position as lesbians. There was a lot of institutionalized sexism and homophobia inside the feminist movement because an open and official support of lesbianism and questioning of lesbian issues could "damage what was seen as the more fundamental project of securing equal rights for women" (Jagose 45). Lesbians who lived in butch femme couples found no understanding within the issues that the feminist movement was involved in.
The feminist thinking of the 1970s and early 1980s became more focused on the differences between sexes and genders a strategy of woman identification as a central
16 way of resisting a patriarchal or male identified society was created. One of the first texts which tried to articulate the position of lesbians within the feminism movement was a text called "The Woman Identified Woman" written by Radicalesbians. For
Radicalesbians, lesbianism was a political position rather then a sexual identification:
"A lesbian is the range of all women condensed to the point of explosion" (1).
Radicalesbinas used lesbianism as a concept to prove that because of patriarchy, all women are being discriminated:
Lesbianism … is a category of behavior possible only in a sexist society characterized by rigid sex roles and dominated by male supremacy. Those sex roles dehumanize women by defining us as a supportive/serving caste in relation to the master caste of men, and emotionally cripple men by demanding that they be alienated from their own bodies and emotions in order to perform their economic/political/military functions effectively. (Radicalesbians 1 2)
Radicalesbians believed that it is possible to create a society "in which men do not oppress women, and sexual expression is allowed to follow feelings, the categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality would disappear" (2). They believed in a "natural" connection between lesbianism and feminist, "It is the primacy of women relating to women, of women creating a new consciousness of and with each other, which is at the heart of women’s liberation, and the basis for the cultural revolution. Together we must find, reinforce, and validate our authentic selves" (Radicalesbians 4). In their view, radicalizing lesbianism as a political identity would serve as a starting point to resistance against hetero patriarchy and would free women from oppressive internalized sex roles.
A similar argument concerning patriarchal domination over lesbians’ and women’s identities and roles was articulated by Adrienne Rich in her essay
"Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence". Rich focuses on heterosexuality as a political institution which acts as a natural, unproblematic and stable category but
17 instead is forced on women who have no other choice or possibility (229). Women are unable to voice this discrepancy because they are "male identified":
Internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex … Male identification is the act whereby women place men above women, including themselves, in credibility, status, and importance in most situations, regardless of the comparative quality the women may bring to the situation … Interaction with women is seen as a lesser form of relating on every level. (qtd. in Rich 237)
The possibilities of escape from this heteronormative model are concepts of lesbianism that Rich named "lesbian existence [which] suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence" and
"lesbian continuum to include a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history – of woman identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman" (239). Similarly as for Radicalesbians, "lesbian continuum" extends lesbianism to include all women who want to reject compulsory heterosexuality and as "a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women" (Rich 239). Lesbianism is a rejection of heterosexuality by displaying its ideology, as Rich argues:
That there is a nascent feminist political content in the act of choosing a woman lover or life partner in the face of institutionalized heterosexuality. But for lesbian existence to realize this political content in an ultimately liberating form, the erotic choice must deepen and expand into conscious women identification – into lesbian feminism. (245)
Both of these theories still dwell on the heterogendered distinction between men and women and on the dichotomy of sex and gender. The idea of woman identified woman had excluding effects it was based on the idea that there exists a true woman behind or before patriarchy, therefore lesbian identities of butches and femmes started to be regarded as simple copies of heterosexual relationships or even disgusting stereotypes. Lesbian feminists of the 1970s identified the butch within her supposed male identification, which was forbidden in the movement. Butch femme role playing
18 reproduced dominant and submissive power imbalances that were thought to be inherent in heterosexuality. The woman identified women preferred the only possible identity – the androgynous identity without any clear gender markers, no obvious masculine or feminine appearance: "sturdy shoes, dungarees, work shirt and back pack" (Nestle 236).
Here are two recollections of lesbian women who after their coming out in the 1970s had to change their appearance according to the prescribed sexuality:
After I came out, I started to question the clothing I wore, the style of my hair, jewelry, make up, the playing dumb thing. I cut off all my hair, I stopped shaving my legs and armpits, I stopped wearing make up and I literally burned my bra. I exchanged my sandals for an attractive pair of construction boots. I felt stronger, even more powerful than I had before. I wasn’t playing dumb, I was playing tough. (qtd. in Maltry and Tucker 94)
I tried to look more butch. I drabbed it up a bit. But always had a lot of trouble, and that was a source of great discomfort to me. Women who felt that they were 'originally' more feminine in comportment, hairstyle, or dress sometimes felt they had to be 'pretend butches' in order to be lesbians. And, despite their efforts to move toward androgyny, lesbian feminists were often more sympathetic toward 'butchy' women. They affirmed that which the dominant culture had historically stigmatized as lesbian the masculine woman. But being too masculine was also scorned on the grounds that it imitated men and carried the trait of butch femme roles. (Stein 88)
Though as Carol A. Queen points, this prescribed "uniform" was much a butch style:
"We have renamed the identity, it seemed, but kept the look. That way we could say we’d vanquished it, even as we kept it around to turn us on" (16).
In the 1980s, a more radical theory was proposed by Monique Wittig who questioned "naturalization" of gender categories and especially the category of the
"woman" itself. Wittig proposes that, the "category 'woman' as well as the category
'man' are political and economic categories not eternal ones" (15). Wittig suggests that if we accept categories of gender, even if we criticize them we, "naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible" (11). Wittig introduces a theory where lesbianism stays outside gender categories – because lesbians are not economically or sexually dependent on men:
19 To destroy 'woman' does not mean that we aim, short of physical destruction, to destroy lesbianism simultaneously with the categories of sex, because lesbianism provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely. Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) in not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man … which lesbians escape by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual. (20)
In opposition to the dominating concerns of lesbian feminism, there were scholars who disagreed with the androgynous identity and absolute equality regarding lesbian relationships, most of them focused on sexuality and sexual acts. Esther
Newton and Shirley Walton created a four part schema of precious sexual vocabulary for a clearer understanding of butch femme role playing, they proposed categories of
"sexual preference", "erotic identity", "erotic role" and "erotic acts" to avoid wrong social and sexual labeling (244). Sexual preference "indicates from which gender you usually select your sexual partners" while erotic identity refers to "how one imagines oneself as erotic object … [this] unique combination is necessarily modeled on public, i.e. culturally shared, symbols" (Newton and Walton 244). Erotic role indicates "what you imagine … doing in partnered sex" which is conventionally only divided into
"active" and "passive" roles but has to be redefined as "interactions, not physical activities" and finally erotic role refers "to content, such as body zones (anus, feet, penis), objects (shoes, leather, perfume) or specific scenes (rape, capture, schoolroom)"
(Newton and Walton 245 6). Newton and Walton proposed this model to criticize the
1970s and 1980s model of lesbian "egalitarian sexuality" that they defined as "sexual partnering involving functional (if not literal) interchangeability of partners and acts,
"according to which "there could only be one look and one role for all, which partly explains why lesbianism is assumed to be intrinsically more egalitarian that heterosexuality, and why lesbian feminists tend to look alike" (247).
20 Other critics of such "mutually orgasmic, struggle free, trouble free sex" are
Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga who argue that "when you deny that roles … you can only come up with neutered sexuality, where everybody’s got to be basically the same because anything different puts the element of power and deviation in there and threatens the whole picture" (395 6). Open communication between sexual partners and defining one’s erotic roles and identities are more effective not only for better understanding our sexual partner’s needs and desires, but also for understanding one’s own sexual self. Therefore butch femme relationships can still be based on mutual equality without being criticized for endurance of power exchange:
My fantasy life is deeply involved in a butch/femme exchange. I never come together with a woman, sexually, outside those roles. It’s saying to my partner, 'Love me enough to let me go where I need to go and take me there. Don’t make me think in through. Give me a way to be so in my body that I don’t have to think; that you can fantasize for the both of us. You map it out. You are in control'. It’s hard to talk about things like giving up power without it sounding passive. I am willing to give myself over to a woman equal to her amount of wanting. (Hollibaugh and Moraga 398)
In this last part of the thesis, opposing theories dealing with lesbianism as political and sexual activity was presented. The lesbian feminist movement of the
1970s and 1980s was obsessed with the destructions of the power imbalances in sexual relations. Lesbian feminists assumed that when the female desire is completely liberated from patriarchy, it will not include any elements of dominance and submission.
Sexuality was placed within the social and political context and this created a concept of woman identified woman who would value equality, respect and femininity. Equality also in the realm of sexuality was one of the major goals of lesbian feminism.
Therefore, butch femme role playing was criticized for its assumed adoration of power imbalances and its imitation of heterogendered sexual practices. Consequently, significance of butch femme sexual dynamics was ignored and replaced by neutral androgynous sexuality freed from any role playing. Thus, lesbian feminists were
21 dependent on the dominant heterogendered codes which they tried to destabilize.
Instead, they were promoting a normative view on lesbian community.
The following 1980s era was a period of reaffirming the butch and femme identities, and at the same time other lesbian communities flourished. Miller states that,
"by the early 1980s, some lesbians were beginning to reevaluate prevailing lesbian mores concerning sex and relationships – mores that dictated serial monogamy and frowned upon butch/femme role playing, sado masochism, and anything that smacked of the inequalities of heterosexual relations" (467 8).
22 2. Butch and Femme Identities in Lesbian Independent Films The previous chapter presented opposing views on butch and femme gender identities as they were visible from the 1940s. On one hand, butches and femmes were regarded as brave women who displayed their desires and sexual identity, thus opposing the dominant society and their hetero patriarchal values. Contrary to the advocates of the lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s who attacked the sexist and patriarchal division of gender roles and created a concept of woman identified woman who would value equality, respect and femininity. Therefore, butch femme role playing was criticized for its assumed adoration of power imbalances and its imitation of heterogendered sexual practices.
The following chapter will deal with three lesbian independent films – Robin’s
Hood, Itty Bitty Titty Committee and Butch Jamie. The chapter will start with an introduction of queer theory which is trying to denaturalize heteronormative understanding of sex, gender and sexuality. The three films will be placed in the context of lesbian independent cinema and the New Queer Cinema, which included films that were "fresh, edgy, low budget, inventive, unapologetic, sexy and stylistically daring"
(Rich, "Queer" par. 4). The thesis will also employ theories of gender performance by
Judith Butler and queer performance by Richard Dyer, to demonstrate the ways in which the butch femme queer women in these three films express their gender identities. The thesis will also examine how these identities are understood by other film characters in the diegesis, and we will look for clues of butch and femme identities and butch femme gender roles as well. Two of our main aims will be, to present what are the major issues that concern contemporary lesbians or lesbian communities as presented in the films and whether butch and femme identities are still valid in contemporary lesbian communities as shown in the films. The chosen films might be
23 understood as works that consciously attempt to address specifically lesbian audience, because they rely on audience’s awareness of symbols, humor, politics and music relevant to lesbian and lesbian feminist communities.
Here are short summaries of all three films. In Robin’s Hood, the two main characters are Brooklyn and Robin. There are enormous differences between these two women. Brooklyn is white and butch, and works as a mechanic and is also a thief.
Robin is black and femme, and works as a social worker. They meet by chance, and regardless of their differences, they fall in love and experience an intense relationship unknown to both of them. Though Robin would like to make a difference in life of the poor community, she is forced to quit her job, "trespasses" to the wrong side of the law, and also begins to steal together with Brooklyn. As the title suggests, they do not steal just for themselves, but they also return money to the community, by “stealing from the rich and giving to the poor". While Robin and Brooklyn struggle during their search for happiness, this strengthens their relationship and ends as a happy family. Robin and
Brooklyn in Robin’s Hood could therefore stand as an example of the butch femme inseparable couple that stays away from the lesbian community and are more engaged with poor and non white communities they are coming from.
Itty Bitty Titty Committee tells a story of a young Latina lesbian, named Anna who suffers from low self esteem (she didn’t get to college and recently split up with her girlfriend) and works at a cosmetic surgeon’s clinic. Her life changes when she meets Sadie, the leader of a radical feminist group called Clits In Action (CIA). The
CIA is a rebel group whose main members are Shuli – a political brainpower of the group, Meat – an anarchist artist, Aggie – a skillful and sensitive female to male. The group works on public projects, their mission being to inspire and educate women from all around and to point out the subordinate position of women in history and
24 contemporary society. Anna gradually turns into an active anarchist and falls in love with Sadie, who is engaged in a long relationship with Courtney, the head of a more mainstream feminist group called Women for Change. This complicates personal relations within the group and also gradually forces the CIA to finish their actions, but not for long. Their last radical act successfully destroys one of the chauvinistic and phallic symbols of American nation. Though Itty Bitty Titty Committee is a love story, it points to the persistent dominance of patriarchy over the lives of heterosexual women and lesbians and focuses on lesbian feminist activism in contemporary society. In addition, it portrays butch and masculine women as central and sympathetic characters whose main goals in life are not to find their counterpart femme partners, but to engage in issues regarding womanhood.
In Butch Jamie, an unemployed actress Jamie Klein tries to look more "femme" during her auditions, so she puts on make up, skirt, tights, etc. But she never manages to get cast because she does not conform to the set beauty standards. Therefore Jamie decides to make a fundamental change: she goes to an audition as herself, as butch
Jamie. Much to her surprise, this time she gets the role. There’s one catch though it’s a part of a man. Jamie first refuses because she is too offended by such an offer, but since she needs the money, she takes the part, although on the set she cannot reveal that she is actually a woman. But Jamie’s new double life is complicated when a heterosexual Jill gradually falls in love with her, because she loves shorter men and especially vegetarians. The revelation of Jamie’s true identity causes more problems and she gradually finds out that she is attracted to her bisexual roommate, Lola. Butch Jamie plays with gender stereotypes and tries to redefine the category of what it means to be a
"woman". In her everyday life, Jamie reveals the traits of masculinity and femininity which are recognizable and easy to embody.
25 2.1. Queer Theory
The following section will introduce basic concepts of queer theory which problematizes normative positions of sexuality and gender identities, including butch and femme identities and visibility of lesbian identities, in general. The films and film characters that are the subjects of this thesis should be considered within the discourse of queer theory.
Queer theoretical discourse emerged in the early 1990s and is understood as "a product of specific cultural and theoretical pressures which increasingly structured debates … about questions of lesbian and gay identity. Perhaps most significant in this regard has been the problematizing by post structuralism of gay liberationist and lesbian feminist understandings of identity and the operations of power" (Jagose 76). Queer theory attacks notions about identity as being "fixed, coherent and natural". The queer approach could be summarized as:
The one that problematises normative consolidations of sex, gender and sexuality – and that, consequently, is critical of all those versions of identity, community and politics that are believed to evolve 'naturally' form such consolidations. By refusing to crystallize in any specific form, queer maintains a relation of resistance to whatever constitutes the normal. (Jagose 99)
Queer identity, therefore, allows people to identify in opposition to conventional heterosexual identity and at the same time retain fluidity of their sexual expressions.
Michele Aaron summarizes a definition of queer as follows:
[Q]ueer’s most basic function is as an umbrella term or catch all for uniting various of non straight sexual identity. But it means much more than this. Queer represents the resistance to, primarily, the normative codes of gender and sexual expression – that masculine men sleep with feminine women – but also to the restrictive potential of gay and lesbian sexuality – that only men sleep with men, and women sleep with women. In this way, queer, as a critical concept, encompasses the non fixity of gender expression and the non fixity of both straight and gay sexuality. ... An its most expansive and utopian, queer contests (hetero and homo ) normativity. (5)
26 Many lesbian women and scholars found (and find) the label queer identity to be very liberating, because it has freed them from rigid identity politics which ordered women to have sex exclusively with women in order to call themselves lesbians. Others have asserted that such an umbrella term which includes everyone (heterosexuals, gays, lesbians, transsexuals, etc.) will inevitably cause lesbian women to become invisible again. According to Sullivan, queer as an umbrella term "veils over the differences between, for example, lesbianism and gayness, between 'women', between transsexualism and cross dressing, and ignores differences of class, race, age and so on, once again positing sexuality as unified and unifying factor … [queer has] the effect of
(mis)representing us as one big happy (queer) family" (44 5). Similar anxieties of erasure of lesbian identity are stressed also by Goodloe who writes that "any move to invalidate the 'identity' of a marginalized group necessarily prevents that group from attaining the degree of subjectivity needed to overcome the oppression of having been for so long objectified" (1). Because lesbians have been marginalized, stereotyped and oppressed, it is important for them to acquire an identity to stay visible within society.
As Wolfe and Penelope argue, lesbian and feminist theories have a double task: "to both resist a kind of deconstruction that would render lesbians even more invisible, and to work toward the (re)construction of a lesbian identity as it is experienced through a collective history and culture" (qtd. in Goodloe 1).
On the other side of queer theoretical discourse is the work of Judith
Halberstam, who opposed the queer resistance towards identity categorization, and in her Female Masculinity reinvented the importance of categories of gendered identities.
To support her claim, Halberstam uses the term "nonce taxonomies" to signify "the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world"
27 (Sedgwick 23). Halberstam argues that we use naming and defining of "desire, physicality, and subjectivity" every day to make sense of our world, but very often we fail to recognize them ("Female" 8). Therefore, it is important to categorize different identities which were historically suppressed. Halberstam also insists that it is necessary to change the compulsory gender binaries into "gender preference" to allow new genders to be named and noticed in our society ("Female" 27).
Halberstam points out the attempt of the binary gender system of "male" and
"female" categories to dominate "precisely because virtually nobody fits the definitions of male and female, the categories gain power and currency from their impossibility"
("Female" 27). As an example of limiting the possibility of gay/lesbian/straight categorization, Halberstam uses a list of queer sexual experiences and gender varieties that recently appeared in lesbian zines: "guys with pussies, dykes with dicks, queer butches, aggressive femmes, F2Ms, lesbians who like men, daddy boys, gender queens, drag kings, pomo afro homos, bulldaggers, women who fuck boys, women who fuck like boys, dyke mommies, transsexual lesbians, male lesbians" ("The Making" 212).
Therefore, butch and femme identities could be understood as two types of
"gender preferences" that point to categories of male and female. Butches and femmes, as other lesbians, need to acquire their subjectivity and maintain their visibility in dominant society. As will be presented in the following chapters, identities of some film characters can be best described within queer theory because of its inclusiveness, flexibility and fluidity.
2.2. New Queer Cinema and Lesbian Independent Film
From a historical perspective, gay and lesbian characters appearances in films were usually reduced to stereotypes of villains or victims. As Richard Dyer mentioned in 1977, "most stereotypes of gays [and lesbians] in films are demeaning and offensive.
28 Just think of the line up – the butch dyke and the camp queen, the lesbian vampire and the sadistic queen, the predatory schoolmistress and the neurotic faggot … The amount of hatred, fear, ridicule and disgust packed into those images is unmistakable"
("Stereotyping" 297). Dyer also proposes that the reason why gay and lesbian characters were shown in stereotypical ways is because such images were mostly produced by heterosexual discourse, therefore, "what we should be attacking in stereotype is the attempt of heterosexual society to define us for ourselves, in terms that inevitably fall short of the 'ideal' of heterosexuality (that is, taken to be the norm of being human), and to pass this definition off as necessary and natural" ("Stereotyping" 300). Halberstam agrees that lesbianism in film usually equaled stereotyping: "a particular economic way of identifying members of a particular social group in relation to set of quickly recognizable characteristics … it is usually pejorative mode of representation because it can be used to reduce the heterogeneity of any given group to a select few types"
("Female" 180).
Moreover, gay and lesbian characters were presented only through their sexuality as if their sexual identity was the only valuable and worth mentioning feature they possessed. A typical depiction of a butch lesbian in film was a very negative image reducing lesbianism to sexual practices, which portrayed "lesbianism as a strange, ritualistic exchange involving S M power dynamics and gross humiliation for the femme identified partner" (Halberstam, "Female" 183). Dyer argues that such media representation was made by using "synechdoche – that is, taking the part for the whole.
It is felt necessary to establish the character’s gayness, because that one aspect of her or his personality is held to give you, and explain the rest of personality. By signaling gayness from the character’s first appearance, all the character’s subsequent actions and words can be understood, and explained away, as those of a gay person" ("Stereotyping"
29 300). As will be shown in the following film analyses, it is still important to establish the character’s (sexual) identity right at the beginning of narratives, but the difference lies in the extend to which sexual identity is being understood as the only feature of each character or whether they hold other traits that are important for the story.
Before we turn to the New Queer Cinema and its relation to the lesbian independent film, we have to briefly mention film productions of the 1970s, called
"counter cinema". These films emerged from the tradition of American experimental cinema and were based mostly on self made personal filmmaking which combined emerging feminist documentary practice. Liz Kotz connects lesbian film production with lesbian feminism of the 1970s, and summarizes that "lesbian experimental film tried to free itself from repressive, 'patriarchal' culture and create a 'new language' of lesbian desire and identity" (342). But such experimental films were criticized by the majority of lesbians for being too political and formal, they felt that such "idealized iconography of women’s bodies and sexuality has the effect of isolating sex from everyday life, from relationships and all their inevitable emotional and political complications" (Kotz 342). Still, these films were pioneers that spread radical feminist thoughts and meanings and therefore, formed the basic of lesbian cinematic praxis, even though the upcoming decade presented more popular, romantic and coming out lesbian films without any radical concepts of identity.
The 1980s experienced emergence of "lesbian cinema" lesbian romantic films that were on the one hand important because they presented lesbian characters as role models without negative stereotyping and therefore, supported visibility of strengthening lesbian sub culture. But on the other hand, characters in such films were based on sameness (feminine sameness). Judith Halberstam calls such types "the barely butch" because "lesbians are rendered invisible in this kind of film preciously because
30 there are few traces of female masculinity" ("Female" 221). She also adds that before the emergence of lesbian independent films, mainstream productions totally erased sexual activities from femme lesbian characters on screen. This strategy of no sex only romantics, "depend[s] on thoroughly ideological conceptions of positive (white, middle class, clean, law abiding, monogamous, coupled etc.) [images]" (Halberstam, "Female"
185).
In the 1990s, lesbian independent cinema emerged with a number of films that still tried to avoid the stereotypes of earlier lesbian productions, such as the essential feminine characters and their struggle with "coming out" and "first loves". Lesbian independent films were also trying to avoid conventions of mainstream productions that insisted on happy endings or politically correct queer characters. Female characters in these films were already aware of and comfortable with their lesbian identities, "it gave a fresh image to lesbians beyond their familiar portrayals as psycho killers, depressives, vampires, or victims, and engaged in playful gender bending" (Aaron 107). This movement was called the New Queer Cinema and includes gay and lesbian films produced between 1992 and 2000.
B. Ruby Rich, who coined the name of the movement called New Queer
Cinema, describes its shared characteristics in terms of "Homo Pomo" style involving
"appropriation and pastiche, irony as well as reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitely breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist and excessive. Above all, they’re full of pleasure" (16). Michele Aaron elaborated on this definition and proposed the following characteristics of the New Queer Cinema:
[W]hat binds the group together is … defiance … these films give voice to the marginalized not simply in terms of focusing on the lesbian and gay community,
31 but on the sub groups contained within it … the films are unapologetic about their characters’ faults or, rather, crimes: they eschew positive imagery … the films defy the sanctity of the past … the films frequently defy cinematic convention in terms of form, content and genre … the films in many ways defy death. (3 5)
Though the New Queer Cinema started as a strong political and aesthetic movement, B.
Ruby Rich became skeptical of its short lived timeframe and renamed it from
"movement" to "moment" and continued, "It was meant to catch the beat of a new kind of film and video making that was fresh, edgy, low budget, inventive, unapologetic, sexy and stylistically daring [but] has become just another niche market, another product line pitched at one particular type of discerning consumer" ("Queer", par. 12).
Therefore, nowadays it is possible to classify a vast number of films as descendants of the New Queer Cinema (as is the case of our three films). In a way we can say that the
New Queer Cinema is nowhere as it is everywhere.
Lesbian films remained marginal within New Queer Cinema production and also within the critical response aimed at these films. Nevertheless, lesbian films, although they explored lesbian sexuality without implying that it is a perfect form of sexual and romantic expression, "enabled new ways of screening female intimacy as well as facilitated the transition of lesbianism into a more popular cultural arena" (Aaron 104).
As with queer theory, there was a thread of postmodern inclusiveness of lesbian identity even in lesbian film production, which "also risks erasing the specificity of lesbianism by turning it into a version of desire no different to heterosexual desire … Lesbian cinema in the new queer age, then, walks the tightrope between marginality and mainstream, between a broader (even promotional) appeal, and its assertion of a counter cultural position" (Aaron 104). From the 1990s, lesbian film narratives have offered a variety of lesbian types which break the traditional division between female passivity and masculine activity, and "make lesbian a powerful fiction and a political
32 fact by presenting a self sufficient, sociable and professional world of women" (Aaron
108).
Robin’s Hood , Itty Bitty Titty Committee and Butch Jamie refer to the thematic and formal notions drawn from New Queer Cinema, even though the movement already ended. All three films were low budgeted and produced in independent productions.
Robin’s Hood was produced by Filmworks7 ( http://www.filmworks7.com ) which is a film company that values artistic freedom and whose vision and passion is to create soulful stories with authentic and diverse characters. It was established in 2003 by the director of Robin’s Hood Sarah Millman. Itty Bitty Titty Committee was produced by
Power Up (http://www.power up.net ) which is a production company that promotes the visibility and integration of gay women in entertainment, the arts, and all forms of media, and was established in 2000. Butch Jamie was produced by Ballet Diesel Films
(http://www.balletdiesel.com/ ) which is a production company that specializes in producing lesbian and queer films and was established in 2002 by the director of Butch
Jamie Michelle Ehlen.
Thematically Robin’s Hood , Itty Bitty Titty Committee and Butch Jamie present a variety of topics, for example: activism, feminist issues, male/female roles and drag kinging. They also give voice to and represent various subgroups such as butch femme couples, radical lesbian feminists, and butch women who pass as men. All lesbian characters are aware and comfortable with their identities. Though all of the three films have happy endings by which they relate more to conventions of mainstream cinema, they, at the same time, eschew positive imagery because they feature characters of thieves, liars, punks, radicals, cheaters, passers, who are all very active women. Robin’s
Hood and Itty Bitty Titty Committee refer to past events; Robin’s Hood refers to low class butch femme women of the after war era and Itty Bitty Titty Committee refers to
33 lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s. All three films also defy cinematic conventions by using narrative flash forwards, slow motion, documentary style images, voice over, grainy Super 8 montages, etc. Robin’s Hood , Itty Bitty Titty Committee and
Butch Jamie present strong messages about contemporary lesbian subculture which is not represented as monolitical but diverse, active, political and whose interests and concerns differ from LGBT subjects to issues of identity, gender, race or poverty.
2.3. Performance of Gender and Performance of Queerness
Now we will present the basic theories of Judith Butler, focusing mainly on her concept of gender as a kind of imitation/performance and also the performance of queerness in everyday life of gays and lesbians as was proposed by Richard Dyer.
Performance theories are used to describe the theatricality of all gender identities. Both these concepts deal also with butch and femme identities in heterogendered society which takes heterosexuality as the original identity. Butches/femmes are, therefore, able to parody and subvert conventions attached to male and female genders by making traits of masculinity and femininity visible as fabrications.
Theoretician Judith Butler criticizes the notion of heterosexuality as something natural, neither produced nor artificial. The "naturalization" of heterosexuality is achieved by "setting up certain illusion of continuity between sex, gender, and desire"
(Butler, "Imitation" 27). According to Butler, there is nothing authentic about gender:
"[g]ender is repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being" ("Gender" 33). Moreover, gender is "an ongoing discursive practice … open to intervention and resignification" (Butler, "Gender" 33). Butler’s theories problematize the constructed nature of all gender categories, so that any
34 naturalization of gay or lesbian desire is not functional within her theoretical discourse.
She explains, "gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original ; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself" ("Imitation" 21). Supposedly 'natural' heterosexuality itself is open for imitation, as "heterosexuality is always in the process of imitation and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself – and failing "
("Imitation" 21). Since normative heterosexuality fails to acknowledge the importance of butch femme role playing, and sees it only as a plain copy of the heterosexual original, Butler questions the notion of the original as something which failed to confirm the validity of its own copy:
The origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives. Hence, if it were not for the notion of the homosexual as copy, there would be no construct of heterosexuality as origin. Heterosexuality here presupposes homosexuality. And if the homosexual as copy precedes the heterosexual as origin , then it seems only fair to concede that the copy comes before the origin, and that homosexuality is thus the origin, and heterosexuality the copy. ("Imitation" 22)
However, such an inversion of copy and original is impossible; it destabilizes too greatly the whole social framework, and therefore, Butler proposes a more radical view which connects heterosexuality and homosexuality, in which "imitation does not copy that which is prior, but produces and inverts the very term of priority and derivativeness" ("Imitation" 22). Since gay and lesbian identities are defined as
"derivative inversions" within a heterosexual framework which stands opposed to such identities, the entire concept of heterosexuality in its original form collapses:
The repetition of heterosexual constructs within sexual cultures both gay and straight may well be the inevitable site of the denaturalization and mobilization of gender categories. The replication of heterosexual constructs in non heterosexual frames brings into relief the utterly constructed status of the so called heterosexual origin. Thus, gay is to straight not as copy is to original, but, rather, as copy is to copy. (Butler, "Gender" 41)
35 Thus, as there is no original gender identity to be imitated, it could be said that butch femme role playing cannot imitate heterosexual gender roles, since heterosexuality lacks the original status. As a result, butch and femme practice "gender parody" which depicts the artificiality of heterosexual norms, and butch femme role playing then
"expose[s] heterosexuality as an incessant and panicked imitation of its own naturalized idealization" (Butler, "Imitation" 23). Butler, in a sense, values this "failure of naturalized heterosexuality" because it becomes "an occasion for subversive and proliferating parody of gender norms" and enables gendered queer identities to play their parts ("Imitation" 23).
Is it possible, though, for butch and femme identities to be disrupted and subverted when the stable notion of male and female identity is deconstructed? Butler believes so and proposes that "Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony" ("Gender" 177). Subversion is possible when queer identities perform a parodic repetition of heterogendered norms, therefore "gender is performative" ("Imitation" 23). However, heterosexuality, by its endless repetition, causes its own instability, because "repetitions in the way in which power works to construct illusion of a seamless heterosexual identity, if heterosexuality is compelled to repeat itself in order to establish the illusion of its own uniformity and identity, then this is an identity permanently at risk" ("Imitation" 24). Moreover, Butler argues that femaleness and maleness exist because people perform femininity and masculinity, when she writes that "gender proves to be performative that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be … there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that
36 identity is performatively constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results" ("Gender" 25).
Taking into consideration these theories, we see that it is not possible to entirely escape gender, or heterosexual and homosexual gender identities, as they are too related, too interdependent. Butch femme identities, as placed within gender discourse by parodying the hegemonic categories of male and female, perform the very
"fabrication" of gender:
Within lesbian context which, 'the identification' with masculinity that appears as butch identity is not a simple assimilation of lesbianism back into the terms of heterosexuality. As one lesbian femme explained, she likes her boys to be girls, meaning that 'being a girl' contextualizes and resignifies 'masculinity' in a butch identity. As a result, that masculinity, if that it can be called, is always brought into relief against a culturally intelligible 'female body.' It is precisely this dissonant juxtaposition and the sexual tension that its transgression generates that constitute the object of desire. In other words, the object [there is not just one] of lesbian femme desire is neither some decontextualized female body nor a discrete yet superimposed masculine identity, but the destabilization of both terms as they come into erotic interplay. ("Gender" 156 7)
Butler sees butch and femme gender identities as inseparable, as a couple that performs a "parodic repetition" of heterogendered binarised roles. Therefore, we cannot simply criticize butches and femmes for replicating heterosexual identities, because the very masculine and feminine codes butch femme use for their gender performance, "become source of their erotic significance" ("Gender" 157).
According to Halberstam the notion of gender as performance must be joined with the notion of gender as fiction:
Gender fictions are fictions of a body taking its shape, a cut up genre that mixes and matches body parts, sexual parts, and postmodern articulations of the impossibility of identity. Such fictions demand readers attuned to the variegated contours of desire. The end of identity in this gender fiction does not mean a limitless and boundless shifting of positions and forms, rather it indicates the futility of stretching terms like lesbian or gay or straight or male or female across the vast fields of experience, behavior, and self understanding. It further hints at the inevitable exclusivity of any claim for identity and refuses the respectability of being named, identified, known. ("The Making" 210)
37 Gender performance by butches and femmes is related to the concept of everyday performativity of queerness which is explained by Richard Dyer as follows:
[B]eing lesbian/gay become[s] a kind of performance, something we all do but only with the terms, the discourses, available to us, and whose relationship to any imputed self doing the performing cannot be taken as read. This may be a characteristically gay (I hesitate to claim lesbian/gay) perception, since for us performance is any everyday issue … [A]ll sexual identities are performances. (33)
Even though, according to Dyer, all sexual identities are performative, queers seem to be more aware of this fact in their own everyday personal performances and in their perceptions of performances of others. Though Dyer talks primarily about performances by gays, we could insist that for queer women, performance is also an everyday issue, especially when considering butch femme identities and roles. As previously mentioned lesbians have, throughout history, tried to acquire adequate visibility in society, which is also connected to performance, because lesbians must perform their butch/femme/queer identity visibly, otherwise they could be read incorrectly and could be assumed to be heterosexuals. Visible traits which butches and femmes use as part of their everyday performances are manifested in their style gestures, walking, looks, clothes, etc. These traits of queer performativity are essential for reading the woman in the opposition to a conventional heterosexual female aesthetics. Butches and femmes, therefore, refuse to follow the gender and social roles prescribed to females in dominant society. Clothes are particularly important in everyday performance of queerness, according to Richard
Dyer:
Dress is always a significant aspect of a person for it reveals class, gender, racial and other subcultural positions whether consciously or unconsciously. Importantly it indicates how the wearer inhabits those positions, how she/he feels about being in that social position. Dress is especially significant for gays [and lesbians] since being gay [or lesbian] doesn’t actually of itself “show” physically, and it is through dress that we can make a statement about ourselves that, unlike a verbal pronouncement, is there all the time. (167)
38 Similarly, Arlene Stein asserts that:
When one becomes a lesbian, gendered bodily significations of hairstyle, clothing, and even comportment are problematized. … Lesbians tend to be members of, or at least travelers through, both heterosexual and homosexual worlds. Unless they pass as men …., in order to live, work, and love, they must satisfy the requirements of both worlds. In the straight world they must 'pass' as straight, or at least develop a self presentation that marks them as female. In the lesbian world they must conform to different norms of membership. (86)
According to presented theories of performance, lesbians in the heterogendered world are often judged as heterosexual if they show no visible and readable traits that would mark them lesbian. Performance of butchness, femmeness and queerness as part of lesbian self presentations and their everyday life will be analyzed in the following three films.
2.4. Robin’s Hood – Butch and Femme as an Inseparable Couple
Robin’s Hood starts with a flash forward from which we can anticipate the characters’ future. We see Brooklyn and Robin, two women dressing in feminine clothing, and using wigs, lipstick and dark glasses to disguise, or cover their true identities. What follows is a mishap during their bank robbery and, as a result, Brooklyn is shot. Cut. Entering the film, in its present time, we immediately identify Brooklyn as butch. She carries her masculine identity constantly; she is powerful and in control. Her dress, body language, and the manner in which she carries herself all serve as external cues of her masculinity. These traces of masculinity place her sexual desires within queer discourse, in which "butch does not require penile proof, a fleshly monument to
'real' masculinity. Butch is a belief, a performance, a swagger in the walk; butch is an attitude, a tough line, a fiction, a way of dressing" ("The Making" 223). Also, the use of voice over from the beginning of the film allows Brooklyn to self identify as a butch,
39 with declarations such as, "I was bread to love women, I’ve loved women all over the world, I’ve loved them for a moment … or two."
On the other hand, to define Robin’s queer identity at first sight is complicated, due to historical erasure of black femmes from the lesbian theoretical and historical discourse, through "the ethnocentric racism inherent in advocating for the symbol of
One Lesbian" (Bogus 30), which preferred only white models of lesbianism. Though at the beginning of the film Robin was armed and dangerous, now she is a full black femme who, if viewed as a type of black lesbian identity, suffers the most stereotyping within the lesbian historical discourse:
We, Black femmes can often be masculin(ized) – automatically viewed, treated, and cruised as butches. And if we are seen as Femmes, we can still be devalued or just plain not perceived as Femme(ininine) in any sense but the sexual – not just in larger world, but also inside of queer/Black/'colored' communities of supposed resistance. (Bryan 147)
Therefore, Robin suffers double oppression – the double invisibility of being first, a black lesbian and second, a black femme. As argued in previous chapters, femmes were rendered invisible in history and were, most of the time criticized for passing as heterosexuals. But as Halberstam states, passing is not exclusively attached only to femmes, it is a constant process similar to identity:
Passing as a narrative assumes that there is a self that masquerades as another kind of self and does so successfully; at various moments, the successful pass may cohere into something akin to identity. At such moments, the passer has become. What of a biological female who presents as butch, passes as male in some circumstances and reads as butch in others, and considers herself not to be a woman but maintains distance from she category 'man'? For such a subject, identity might best be described as process with multiple sites for becoming and being. ("Female" 21)
Robin, always very feminine, is clearly identified as femme only in the company of
Brooklyn. This serves as a critical point regarding the dependence of a femme lesbian on her butch partner. Though there are femmes who couple with other femmes or other genders, "it is possible to be more than one half of any duality, more than just an
40 extension, an opposite: male/female. Rational/emotional. Butch/femme." (Ruth 16). The narrative of Robin´s Hood displays the opposite; Robin’s femmeness is identifiable through and next to Brooklyn’s butchness.
Brooklyn performs her butchness constantly. Her codes of butchness include mainly male clothing (vests and trunks, shirts, jeans and leather jacket), since "Clothing is her way of making her masculinity both real and potent, convincing and natural; without her male clothes, she is either awkward (in women’s clothes) or inadequate next to the 'real' embodied masculinity of a man" ("Female" 100), a posture that signifies self reliance and capability. Brooklyn also rides a motor bike, which is a very masculine hobby to have, she is a mechanic, which is a male dominated profession, and most of the time, she drinks beer, which is a very masculine mannerism, and she constantly watches women ("I just really love looking at you," Brooklyn says to Robin)
– whether it is Robin or not. Brooklyn is also very experience in seducing women and knows the tricks to attracting them, as she explains "I’m not dangerous, I’m not gonna hurt you and I can show you very good time". This part of the dialogue proves that
Brooklyn possesses "butch phallus" which "offers its roughness, toughness, cockiness with a keen eye for when those qualities begin to interfere with rather that enhance a partner’s pleasure. If the butch phallus does not succeed in giving the femme sexual pleasure, it does not exist" (Bordo 101).
When a woman has sex with men, she automatically falls off the category
"lesbian", though many women find their attraction to women late in their lives, after marriages with men, or after having children. This is exactly the case that limits Robin’s identity, as well. There is no history of female lovers in Robin’s life, only sexual relations with men where her last one night stand adventure leaves her pregnant.
Positioning Robin into the category of bisexuality is limiting – she shows no desire to
41 return to men, she loves Brooklyn because she is butch, and because she is a woman.
"Loving masculinity in a woman differs crucially in one way from loving it in a man: In her is it a badge of standing out, not of fitting in" (Queen 21). When a definition of identity fails the subject it should define, it is possible to apply queer theory. Robin is identified as a femme queer, because "Femme is inherently 'queer' … as bent, unfixed, unhinged … Release from the strictures of binary models of sexual orientation and gender and sex. Released from a singular definition of femme" (Camilleri and Rose 12).
Robin’s self definition as a lesbian is partly presented in her voice over ("I think I’m falling in love. With a thief who is white" … "It’s my girlfriend") and dialogues with
Brooklyn ("Look baby, you know I like it when you sex me the best"). Robin and
Brooklyn are a queer couple, their gender roles are displayed according to butch femme dichotomy and their desire within this framework is fulfilling: "In a butch/femme relationships the eroticized un/familiar exists not in the context of the normal, but of the forbidden" (Queen 22).
Both Robin and Brooklyn come from lower working class (historically the most victimized class of butch femme lesbians), or functionless families. Brooklyn’s father is being sent to prison constantly, and her mother was a French prostitute. Robin’s family was very poor and her brother died from a drug overdose. However, both of them try to re create a certain family structure. Brooklyn has her thief buddy Monroe who is like a brother to her and Robin wishes to make a change within her poor community, where she is like a sister to her clients. Brooklyn’s butch masculinity is overtly displayed around Monroe because "Masculinity … becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white male middle class body" (Halberstam, "Female" 2). Brooklyn and Monroe exchange just a few words, only smoke and drink together, but they seem to know each other well, and they rely on one another. Monroe knows about Brooklyn’s
42 love interests and is aware that as Brooklyn is more and more falling in love with
Robin, her thief ability is endangered: "This fucking love shit’s making me sick man.
It’s making you sloppy." Robin’s most important friend is Damia, one of her former clients, whom Robin helps survive in a society that automatically associates black people with crime. These intense friendships are important for establishing one’s identity within the social framework of heterogendered society. As Crawley suggests, there is an "incredible importance of audience in the development of individuals’ understandings of self – the importance of others in allowing us to claim a particular gender or sexuality" (23). Monroe and Damia accept the performance of Brooklyn’s and
Robin’s butch femme identities, and so does Brooklyn’s father, who is more interested in Brooklyn quitting her crime job than leaving her girlfriend. Thus, these close friendships do support the confirmation of queer identities.
Still there is one danger that negatively influences one’s perception of an individual identity. In Robin’s Hood , the power of authority is represented by a white woman, Robin’s boss, who shows lack of interest in real solutions in helping the
"unacceptable" classes, in this case the class of lower class black people. Robin’s boss is cold and calculating and shows no support or empathy for the under privileged. The boss misuses her power, she is narrow minded and racist. She views Robin as strange, different and unacceptable because she is too caring, but also because she is black.
Robin’s sexual identity is unimportant in this case. Therefore, Robin chooses to quit her job and bypass the ineffective corrupt system of welfare and decides to join Brooklyn in her crimes. What follows is a series of bank robberies with an unexpected twist; when mysterious monetary donations begin to arrive at the doorsteps of community centers and poor residents with a note saying "Thank you for helping our children".
43 Robin and Brooklyn not only prove that they do not need men for their love, but they also steal from the corrupt system which is dominated by men. However, without help from a man their love would not survive. As one of their bank robberies ends violently and Brooklyn is shot, it seems to be the end of the butch femme "fairytale".
Luckily, Brooklyn is saved by a cop who is Robin’s old friend and ex lover. The conclusion of the film shows that a family like structure (two parents and a child) is important to some lesbians as we are presented with a picture of Brooklyn and Robin taken two years later. Brooklyn owns a motorcycle shop and Robin delivered a baby, creating a queer family of two mothers. It seems that at least on a personal level the butch femme couple achieved their ideal life; they brought happiness to one another.
The position of Robin’s and Brooklyn’s identity within a larger framework of lesbian communities is a complicated issue, as it seems that they do not actively enjoy any relations with other lesbians, with the one exception of Brooklyn’s affair with another femme that had an unsatisfying end. Although queer public spaces exist bars and cafés where which they can attend, it seems that once Brooklyn and Robin found their true love, they no longer need lesbian communities. They are able to happily live outside these communities and more so, they participate in and assimilate into the heterogendered society while still retaining their distinguished genders of a butch and a femme. However, there are still dramatic differences between queers and straights, as
Burana explains: "It’s only in bed that we do the same things as straights. The rest of what we do is totally different – how we think, how we feel, how we walk, how we relate to each other, our culture" (119).
Assimilation in the narrative of Robin’s Hood is portrayed in a very positive manner where the butch and femme relationship is positioned within the dominant heterosexual society, in which everyone searches for love, respect and "normal" life. At
44 the same time, while adopting customs and attitudes of the dominant society, butch femme genders will always stand outside with their specific erotic interplay. "Overtly gendered sexual display of femme/butch expression is a politicized erotic place through which heterosexuality is recorded, transformed, duped, and parodied, especially in terms of female gender, sexual pleasure, and domestic/public space" (Harris 75). By displaying their sexual relationship, butch femme couples might encounter misunderstandings, and there will always be someone trying to position them within the prescribed female gender since "Straight society simply could not tolerate the idea of a feminine, 'normal' looking woman who got her needs for sex and masculine companionship and protection met by a strong and erotically skilled woman" (Califia
220).
According to Halberstam, Brooklyn in Robin´s Hood could be seen as an example of a "postmodern butch". These characters are quite often presented in a butch femme narrative where they consciously problematize the class and race background of lesbian characters ("Female" 222 30). As shown in Robin’s Hood , butchness and femmeness are both active and strong qualities, and when tied together they can "make a difference" no matter what background or race they represent. As the film progresses,
Robin turns into a powerful and active femme who finds an alternative way to help the needy. The film narrative stresses that their thievery is not important; what is important is the fact that they were stealing for others who would otherwise have no chance to survive. In a way, Robin came to realize how powerful she could be, "because butch women are still in competition with straight men. That’s why it’s the responsibility of femme lesbians to come out. Because we can pass, we need to come out in support of our butch sisters" (Roxxie 95).
45 To finalize the points, both Robin and Brooklyn play up their modified roles.
Brooklyn as a tough but sexy and responsible butch, Robin as a caring but active femme. They are aware of their places within society, but they would not surrender.
There is always a chance to make a difference within one’s identity, and there is always a way to differ from expectations. A butch can perform her butchness by competing with men, but at the same time she can fall in love and she can commit herself to only one woman. A femme can perform her femmeness by caring for others, but can still actively pursue changes that go beyond her personal life. In Robin’s Hood butch and femme identities constantly overlap and reconcile, in a position of lesbian postmodernism which is too complex to be easily defined:
The opportunity to talk about a discursive space in which fantasies – lesbian feminist, mainstream, straight, psychotic, and gay – write themselves and fail, collapsing such categories as gay/straight, public/private, queer/normal, inside/outside, secrecy/revelation, butch/femme, fantasy/reality. The impossibility of knowing the difference in any of these categories marks a moment in what might be called the lesbian postmodern. The postmodern (lesbian) subject, then, becomes the one about whom we cannot say anything for sure. (Brown 232)
2.5. Itty Bitty Titty Committee – Is Feminism More Important than
Lesbianism?
Itty Bitty Titty Committee focuses on a group of young radical feminists (some of them lesbians) who through their radical actions, address feminist and lesbian issues such as exploitation of women in society, body image and plastic surgery, lesbian and gay marriage, social activism, etc. All their actions have one common goal; they want do bring down the patriarchal system that dominates and shapes society. Their emphasis on a female grouping could be seen as an allusion to the lesbian feminists of 1970s and
1980s as discussed in the previous chapters. Lesbian feminists of that era believed that
46 traditional associations of gender with certain activities, energies and qualities can be seen as having developed from patriarchy and because, according to them, society was still dominated by men who maintained this division, men were held responsible for this oppression of women. Women enthusiastically tried to create all women spaces where only women were allowed to participate and moreover many were inspired to become lesbian (feminists) in an effort to fight the patriarchal power over women. As Faderman notes, being a lesbian was kind of an imperative writing that "There were probably more lesbians in America during the 1970s than any other time in history, because radical feminism had helped redefine lesbianism to make it almost a categorical imperative for all women truly interested in the welfare and progress of other women" ("Odd" 207).
The feminist group in Itty Bitty Titty Committee is called the C(I)A – Clits in
Action, and is a type of radical political art group that uses graffiti, artistic public statements, website and protesting to achieve their goals. Activism and action constitute crucial parts of identities of the C(I)A members and as will be argued later, ideas of feminism stand above their lesbianism. C(I)A’s further mission is to inspire other women all over the world, because they view their activism as crucial attempts to change the system, no matter what the results might be. Fundamental issues that need to be addressed in their actions, according to the C(I)A, are actions aimed against heterogendered culture and politics, resistance to patriarchy by actions against their oppressors, and the destruction of heterosexuality (the binary gender system) itself because it is nothing more than the systematic exercise of techniques of male power over women.
Itty Bitty Titty Committee starts with black and white documentary like images from punk rock concerts that have mostly women in the audience and a voice over commentary that states "what is it that they’re, that younger women are pushing up
47 against." These initial images set a rebellious atmosphere and expectations about what is going to happen next. Cut. We enter a wedding salon where several women try on wedding dresses and one of them is Anna, the main character of the film, who is disappointed about the small size of her breasts and is persuaded by her mother to wear some makeup to the wedding of her sister Kate. Anna’s sexuality is revealed immediately by her mother, "I’ve read the lesbian handbook from cover to cover and it doesn’t say anything about no makeup." It’s, therefore, obvious that Anna’s lesbianism is no secret from her closest family, but Anna seems very unhappy during the whole dress fitting. Anna works at a plastic surgery clinic where her conscience is undermined by a female colleague Maude, who appears as a stereotypical blond woman with large
"plastic" breasts which are often shown by the clinic’s doctor as an example of his good work and Maude is frequently called to display her breasts to the new clients who are considering breasts enlargement.
Anna is positioned as the film’s narrator and we follow her in her struggle for power, self worth and witness her search for her real feminist identity. At the beginning,
Anna appears as a confused, sad, careless and passive young femme, who is unable to find a stable place in society. Her life changes when she meets Sadie, an unofficial leader of the C(I)A. Sadie is attractive, tricky and full of energy and action. They meet as Sadie spray paints all over the front of the plastic surgeon’s building, leaving the sign: "A woman is more than her parts". Though Anna is a smart woman, she has not thought much about her job; it is just work for her. Sadie introduces Anna to the world of the C(I)A and their actions, they are presented as a tight knit group of women who share the same world view and whose personal histories are interwoven. As shown throughout the thesis, female bonding was crucial to lesbian feminist groups; they were able to create a strong sense of female communities with sexuality and feminist politics
48 as major components. The group’s members are Sadie – an unofficial leader, Shulamith
– ex layer and the political brain of the group, Meat – the artist, and Aggie – qualified in technical things.
In the C(I)A, sexuality or sexual orientation doesn’t play such a crucial role.
Though most of its members are lesbians, they could be more classified as a queer group because they include heterosexual/bisexual women and transgenders. Queer as a historically derogative term could within the C(I)A be transferred into a positive value; a positive value of differences. Jagose emphasizes the same argument: "… identifying difference [is] a crucial term for queer knowledges and modes of organisation" (77).
Therefore, queer identity could be a more inclusive identity than exclusive; it includes people who identify for example as transgender. It values variety of identities which would be otherwise on the margins of "stable" identity categories of gay or lesbian, since queer identity "mark[s] a flexible space for the expression of all aspects of non
(anti , contra ) straight cultural production and reception" (qtd. in Jagose 97). For the
C(I)A, the unifying and identifying factor of the women in the group are their common feminist goals to fight the heterogendered binary system and to reclaim public space for women. Therefore, it is complicated to characterize the members’ queer identities (not to mention butch or femme identities), because they are unimportant to them, since the women of C(I) A self identify through their performance of actions and not through their sexualities. It is obvious though, that their everyday performance of queerness is a major component of their feminist activities as they fight against all "stable" categories.
On the other hand, it is possible to characterize their identities as they are read or understood by other C(I)A members. Anna confesses that she likes "femmy blondes" which could be directed to Sadie who looks very feminine with her blond hair and slim figure. Aggie is female to male transgender, and as Sadie says "He’s the man of the
49 house". He is comfortable with his transforming identity, with his facial hair and is prepared to "become" a man. Aggie’s participation in the C(I)A is explained by Sadie, as that their group consist of women who were "born with a clit," therefore it is impossible to exclude FTMs and butch lesbians for their masculine appearances or postures. This is a significant change of attitude towards masculine woman comparing to the lesbian feminists in the 1970s and 1980s who advocated erasure of any masculine traits in women and proposed androgynous female identities. Meat could be identified as a butch with artistic style through her clothes, attitude and posture; she is concentrated only on her work and presents no desire to date other women (though she briefly mentions that Sadie used to be her girlfriend for a month). This is contrary to
Shulamith, who is judged by others as heterosexual, since she has had sexual relations only with men who she uses exclusively for sex, and wonders: "Why is it that only the men who know how to tickle the clitoris are incapable of stringing two sentences together?" But to the surprise of others, Shulamith in the course of the story falls for a butch woman named Calvin, who is the butchest woman among the group. She often wears an army uniform and passes as a man, ("you know Calvin’s a girl, right? ").
Lesbian feminists were reserved toward bisexuality, where "by the early 1970s, in many lesbian circles, bisexuality was anathema; bisexuals were at best inferior lesbians and at worst collaborators with the enemy … They believed that they were originally bisexual but had been socialized to be straight. Coming out therefore entailed identity work designed to get in touch with one’s lesbianism and resocialize oneself to be gay" (Stein
85 6). As shown, Itty Bitty Titty Committee presents a variety of lesbian and female characters and helps to promote visibility of diverse types of lesbians, whose identity is related to political actions, as Aaron points the need for:
[P]ostmodernism and neo liberal markets promote a universalizing portrayal of lesbian desire, which makes it a desire like any other. This liberal humanist
50 tendency is welcomed by many gays and lesbians as well as by heterosexuals, but it does see lesbian desire as incidental, private, and thus as politically inconsequential … inclined to phase out the specificity of lesbian (and I would add more generally of female) intimacy … it promotes lesbian visibility, yet at the same time inhibits the emergence of a specifically lesbian consciousness. (109)
As mentioned earlier, radical feminist politics is an identifying feature that unites the characters, since the skills that each character has are more important then their sexual identities. Joining their skills together, they could make a difference. The
C(I)A presents public projects that are charged with cultural, political and social content. They believe in the possibility to change society and are willing to turn their desires and fantasies about the "equal world" into actions. Precisely, "action" and their slogan "Put yr clit to action" are the words that symbolize their identities and achievements. It could be, therefore, stated that characters with lesbian identities in Itty
Bitty Titty Committee are refusing to comply with the restrictive requirements of feminine passivity; they see their position as women as if they were at war and themselves being soldiers who have to fight the (male) enemy. According to the C(I)A
"the public arena is entirely dominated by phallo centric imagery, chauvinistic political leaders, male fantasies of men. Most women aren’t aware how much it affects them".
One such unaware woman was Anna who proved that passive and obedient women can change into active and subversive feminists with their own original ideas about the disturbance of patriarchy. Anna’s change is the most significant in the course of the story, as she starts questioning her position in society and also sees through her
"endangering" job and realizes that she has been working "for the enemy". She changes her bedroom decoration (from posters of mainstream music bands to spray painting of punk and feminist slogans), attitude (from submissive to dynamic and creative) and speech – "I no longer feel the need to surround myself with symbols of the misogynist tyranny … Marriage is a sexist institution designed by men to oppress women."
51 The C(I)A’s actions are aimed at the deconstruction of the binary system that society is structured around. They want to reform the whole heterogendered system, but are unable to realize that society and other members of minority groups are unprepared for such radical changes claiming that it’s impossible to reform the system if there are still no equal rights for everyone (lesbians including). This disagreement is presented through an example of protest for/against gay and lesbian marriages and the reaction of
Sadie’s long time girlfriend Courtney, who is the head of a more conservative feminist group called Women for Change, the biggest non profit organization in the country advocating for women worldwide. The C(I)A uses the chance of the protest to make themselves more visible, be on nationwide television and therefore straightforwardly spread their massage. They protest against the institution of marriage itself seeing it as
"an institution that has historically and categorically discriminated against women …
Marriage is an archaic useless folk tradition … The LGBT community deserves better than marriage!" This demonstration end in a violent fight which stands as one of the turning points in the C(I)A’s actions, they begin to be incapable of controlling their feelings and frustrations about the fact that their actions have a very limited effect.
Courtney, as a member of older generation, is unwilling to voice such radical changes and is advocating slower and sophisticated changes. This incident is a particular example of the CIA’s attitude; they are willing to act immediately when they feel that something needs to be done or there is an opportunity, without considering the consequences of their actions, which have always be on the edge of the law. Women for
Change is presented as an organization with board meetings and budgets to consult, who are unable to react quickly. Although, Courtney was the initial inspiration for
Sadie, who without their relationship and Courtney’s support would have been unable to run the C(I)A.
52 Itty Bitty Titty Committee’s relation to the 1970s and 1980s lesbian feminist politics could be, moreover, seen in the representation of real life personas or artifacts from those years. The C(I)A places statues of Emma Goldman and Angela Davis in the park. Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches and Davis is an American socialist organizer and professor who was associated with the
Black Panther Party. C(I)A’s goal is to acknowledge importance of women who might have been forgotten in male dominated history, they accompany the statue of Angela
Davis with a sign "Angela Davis never got the props she deserves. Thank you Angela!
Women like you changed the world". Another example is a moment when Anna is being introduced to the basic concepts of feminism, and we see a montage of existing anarchist and feminist books, magazines and music. Moreover, Anna’s mother used to be an intern in Ms. Magazine (an important feminist magazine which started being published in the 1970s), which might explain why she is accepting of Anna’s lesbianism.
A reference to contemporary politics could be seen in the character of butch
Calvin, who was just dishonorably discharged under the "Don’t ask, Don’t tell" politics which forbids gays and lesbians to join the US military. Calvin explains the reasons for her dismissal as, "They’re just pissed off we get more pussy that they do. It makes them look totally bad," which corresponds to thoughts of Judith Halberstam: "there are two types of lesbians who remain incredibly threatening to heterosexual men – the attractive lesbian who rejects them and the butch lesbian who rivals their masculinities" ("The good" 362). All these references give the audience cues of real life lesbian and feminist thinking and support the notion that Itty Bitty Titty Committee was produced not exclusively for lesbian audience but for a female audience in general.
53 Eventually, personal issues as Sadie is unable to break up with her girlfriend and Anna is already too much in love with Sadie cause the C(I)A’s political and social activism to crumble. But as Anna is too involved with the C(I)A, she is unable to live without their actions, and declares "we cannot let all of our bullshit ruin everything that’s important to us". This emphasizes the previous idea that issues of feminist politics are more important than sexual identities and the lives of the C(I)A member personal is less important than political. Anna thinks out a plan that goes beyond everything that the C(I)A has achieved so far. On the 125 th anniversary of the creation of the
Washington Monument, there is a special television talk show dedicated to the event, one of the guest will be Courtney, who sees this celebration is a classic form of distraction that politicians use often to "focus attention on meaningless symbols rather than engage the country in the true issues at hand." The C(I)A sees the celebration in a more radical way, because they see the monument as a phallic symbol of the homosocial bond between men, and just another example of heterosexism in society.
They ask "why do all of our important American symbols have to look like enormous erections?" Therefore, the C(I)A breaks into the live talk show and with the help of each member they place a giant penis head on the top of the monument and afterwards they destroy it with huge explosion accompanied by a sign that reads – "This country has enough dicks" – a symbolical destruction of patriarchy.
Itty Bitty Titty Committee presented a variety of lesbian characters whose individual sexual expressions stood behind their collective feminist actions. Therefore, the film presented an ideological difference where everyday performance of female gender is stressed above the character’s lesbian identity. Butch and femme identities were positioned as two varieties of unlimited gender variants, though butch characters appeared as strong, central and sympathetic, as Halberstam notes, "butches do not
54 necessarily wear male clothing as drag; they embody masculinity" ("Female" 241). The film narrator Anna, identified as femme, was attracted to other femme woman, therefore, the butch femme as inseparable couples, as shown in Robin’s Hood, is an irrelevant idea in this film.
Itty Bitty Titty Committee showed a group of young feminists who valued, above all else, their willingness to fight the binary heterogendered system through radical actions that referred to contemporary social and political issues of women and LGBT minorities, such as full equality. Feminism was more important than their lesbianism, though personal goals of all C(I)A members were fulfilled as the concluding freeze frames of the film suggest.
2.6. Butch Jamie – Redefinition of the Female Butch Jamie as the title suggests is a story of Jamie, an unsuccessful actress who self identifies as butch, but struggles with her acting career and with her perceived gender. Butch Jamie thematically tries to challenge gender stereotypes, for example,
Jamie goes from performance of femme identity, then switching to a performance of her
"true" butch identity, and finally to performance of maleness as she passes as a man.
The film points out different levels of gender performance and shows how different cases of gender performance cause Jamie to change her perception of the world and how perception of Jamie herself/himself is judged and accepted by others. Apart from gender perception, Butch Jamie also thematizes dating conventions, politics of lesbian relationships, male stereotypes and assumptions and offers as satirical look at the movie industry. In the end, the whole film diffuses with the idea that it is important to be yourself.
55 Actress Jamie is in a complicated situation; she goes from audition to audition, but is unable to get any role. Although she dresses up as femme (long fingernails, earrings, wig, thighs, dress, changed her voice), she is still not suitable for the movie industry. She also encourages herself by listening to motivational female CD where a very calm voice advices women to feel their feminine energy which emanates from their breasts, moreover the breasts are talking and saying "You’re a woman". Jamie’s gender impacts her acting career and her career impacts her gender. Jamie as an actress is trying to perform a female, even calls herself Femme Jamie, but it turns out to look more like a transvestite show. Jamie’s female cross dressing emphasizes the artificiality of femaleness since her posture, attitude and voice cannot be read as feminine, especially compared to other actresses waiting for the role whose conventional femininity would not be questioned. Jamie feels humiliated as she is continually read as a strange parody of a woman.
Fortunately, Jamie has a best friend, David, who is gay and who very supportively advises Jamie that she should for once try to look like herself. Jamie is very reserved about this suggestion for authenticity: "this 'be yourself' shit … it’s really cliché, and it’s stupid." But after a while, she changes her mind and declares "butch
Jamie is gonna kick your ass" and goes to an audition with her best butch attitude
(sincere, self confident, powerful) and in her best butch attire (pans, shirt, leather wristband, chain necklace, gel in her short spiky hair). Jamie as a butch could not be mistaken for a heterosexual woman as "lesbian masculinity refer[s] to women who perform their masculinity within what are recognizably lesbian relations" (Halberstam,
"Female" 120). Before the audition she uses the women’s bathroom and is immediately mistaken for a man, but since she is used to having her gender misread, she replies calmly "I know what you thought". This story is supported by Judith Halberstam’s
56 experience where “having one’s gender challenged in the women’s restroom is a frequent occurrence in the lives of many androgynous or masculine women; indeed, it is so frequent that one wonders whether the category 'woman' when used to designate public functions, is completely outmoded" ("Female" 20 1). Jamie is successful at this audition for a role in an independent film, but she gets the role of Steve, a man. First she is offended by this offer but takes it at the end. Jamie has to keep her female identity a secret because the producers of the film don’t want all the attention for the film to revolve around the fact that a male part is played by a woman. From now on Jamie has to pass as a man:
It is passing when people effectively present themselves as other than who they understand themselves to be. Effectively is key because an ineffectual effort to pass is just that, a failed attempt. Passing means that other people actually see or experience the identity that the passer is projecting, whether the passer is telegraphing that identity by intention or by chance. The somewhat awkward wording is intentional. Who they understand themselves to be deliberately sidesteps a more complicated discourse over Who they are (and who or what determines who we are anyway?) or even the less complicated Who others see them as or even Who they have become . Passing never feels natural. It is a second skin that never adheres. (Kroeger 7 8) Immediately, Jamie begins her learning process of reproducing visibly identifiable forms of male masculinity, "masculinity does not belong to men, has not been produced only by men, and does not properly express male heterosexuality … what we call masculinity has also been produced by masculine women, gender deviants, and often lesbians" (Halberstam, "Female" 241). She starts with the basic male behavioral pattern, as she discusses with Steve the male restroom etiquette, whether men greet each other once they enter the bathroom and what they say to one another.
Steve again advises Jamie to be herself, this time "with a beard". Jamie is persistent in avoiding any authenticity and eagerly studies male behavior and psyche, for example by listening to a motivational male CD. From this she learns that true masculine energy protrudes from her penis and has to repeat the male "mantra" of her penis saying "I’m
57 large and in charge". Jamie therefore uses a tube sock to make a penis like crotch. She binds her breasts and also glues on artificial facial hair which is the fakest male piece of attire she uses, the side burns and soul patch are obviously mock but nobody around her notices, as if such details weren’t important for the reading of male gender and the overall appearance, the way Jamie walks and talks, was read more "masculine".
Jamie’s male alter ego "drag king" Steve is born. According to Halberstam, "A drag king is a female (usually) who dresses up in recognizably male costume and performs theatrically in that costume … the drag king performs masculinity (often parodically) and makes the exposure of the theatricality of masculinity into the mainstay of her act" ("Female" 232). Halberstam distinguishes a drag king from a drag butch, who is "a masculine woman who wears male attire as part of her quotidian gender expression" ("Female" 232). Jamie as Male Jamie performs "drag kinging" which
"render[s] masculinity visible and theatrical … all the emphasis is on a reluctant and withholding kind of performance" (Halberstam, "Female" 238 9). Jamie makes her masculinity visible and theatrical especially with her insistence on supposedly masculine vulgar language, in addition she laughs about sexist remarks directed towards her female colleague, thinking that "real" men do it. Moreover, she becomes obsessed with "banging" women and rehearses in from of the mirror apparently masculine lines:
"I banged her. Yeah, five times. Yeah. She was good. I was better." Jamie as a man performs her masculinity in a manner related to a traditional and conservative definition of males as rational, assertive, self assured and physically strong. All Jamie’s behavior and attitudes correspond with Halberstam’s elaboration on drag kinging which involves different modes:
Including understatement … hyperbole (which) satirizes and parodies the forms of masculinity that these men are supposed to represent … layering [that] allow[s] her femaleness to peek through … performs the role almost seamlessly … audience sees through the role … they can catch a glimpse not of females or
58 femininity but of a butch masculinity. So the male role is layered on top of the king’s own masculinity … layering a masculine performance over a butch appearance … role playing reveals the permeable boundaries between acting and being: the drag actors are all performing their own queerness and simultaneously exposing the artificiality of conventional gender roles. ("Female" 259 61) Jamie’s performance of masculinity and maleness is read as heterosexual as if other characters, who work with Jamie, were unable to see her true identity. As argued in previous chapters, everyone is assumed to be heterosexual until something suggests otherwise. For example the character of Lola, Jamie’s roommate, is assumed to be heterosexual until she arranges a date with a woman. Jamie realizes that Lola is bisexual but cannot comprehend it: "you just look really straight t… and what does straight look like? … not gay… well, I’m not gay. I’m bisexual … same thing". This is the case of character Jill as well, when she is attracted to male Jamie despite different clues that
Male Jamie reveals about herself/himself. Jill is attracted to Jamie being small, vegetarian and for being sensitive as s/he supposedly studied at a women’s college. Jill is also read by Jamie as conventionally heterosexual (conventionally feminine), because there are no visible traits of her hidden queerness and she is overly persistent in dating
Jamie, the man. Jamie is aware of the big lie that is being built by not revealing her true gender, though she is comfortable in being male when she has at least someone that likes her/him:
Deception and lying can make passing much harder on the passer than on the people the passer has to dupe … the source of the anxiety is both ethical and moral in nature. The ethical anxiety as about authenticity, about the deception of presenting yourself as other than who you understand yourself to be, and the moral anxiety is about lying. Lying is troubling because it is about betraying others, and inauthenticity is troubling because it is about betraying the self. (Kroeger 75)
Jamie’s relationship with Jill demonstrates her life as full of stereotypes in which she believes and which she projects onto other people. Jamie thinks that there are rules for everything in heterosexual relationships, that there must be certain activities
59 assigned for men or for women only, "I think she’s going to ask me out soon. You know, and I feel like I should be a man and do it first. I thought girls didn’t even ask guys on dates, anyway." Jamie is also judgmental toward bisexuals and foreigners.
According to her, bisexuals don’t exist and as they are just lesbians/gays unable to come out and foreigner, in this case a German girlfriend of her roommate, is just a rude and recovering alcoholic. Jamie in such instances turns into a narrow minded character that lives in a world divided by labels through which she judges other people. Jamie is making sense of the world only through stereotypes. As Liz Kotz notes, nowadays lesbian films are "no longer bound to the production of so called 'positive images' or idealized representations, these filmmakers and videomakers are challenging and extending contemporary awareness of the relations between power and sexuality, cultural identity and community" (Kotz 346).
Jamie’s roommate Lola is the only person who gradually shows her that the world and people aren’t black and white stereotypes. For example, Lola, herself bisexual, is trying to define the difference between heterosexual relationships and lesbian relationships. She says:
With men, it’s like … gender roles are more non negotiable. So some guys want to wear the pants, and some guys want you to wear the pants, so to speak. But it’s always one way or the other … but with women … it depends on the person of course, but … sometimes there’s this certain silent negotiation, moment to moment about, you know, who’s on top and who’s on the bottom. And it can change, depending on the situation. So I feel like gender roles in lesbian relationships are … more fluid.
Inability or impossibility to see through and beyond some identities is exposed when Jill reveals being an ex lesbian who forced herself to attend de gay meetings for two years. Jamie is speechless and revelation of female gender only causes more distress for Jill, "You men are all the same! A bunch of selfish, fucking assholes! … My boyfriend has a fucking pussy." Therefore Butch Jamie turns into a story of importance
60 of being earnest to oneself and one’s environment, with earnestness of one’s gender identity and expression at the top.
Butch Jamie presented varieties of performances of femininity and maleness as both exposing supposed naturalness of everyday female/male behavior and identity as being false. In this case, femme Jamie’s femininity appeared as impropriate costume and parody of females. Compared to male Jamie’s drag king performance of masculinity as realism through his/her body language, speech and manners, as
Halberstam suggests, "the drag king performance, indeed, exposes the structure of dominant masculinity by making it theatrical and by rehearsing the repertoire of roles and types on which such masculinity depends" ("Female" 239). Moreover, Butch Jamie accused heterogendered society of making queer people hide their true identities. In
Jaime’s case, she had to pass as a man to get employment and in Jill’s case, she had to pass as heterosexual to be satisfied (temporarily) with her sexual identity. Jamie and Jill served as parodies of ideal heterosexual couples whose power dynamics were distributed around notions of prescribed male and female gender roles; if they weren’t forced to hide their true identities they would be able to form idyllic butch and femme lovers.
Through the character of Jamie, Butch Jamie problematizes the concept of being female. Though Jamie identifies as butch, wears men’s clothes, appears overtly masculine, she still sees herself as female. A female who understand and uses codes of masculinity and maleness because that is the position she is comfortable with: "For butches, being butch is about being yourself; for society, being butch is about slapping convention in the face. When society is slapped, it strikes back – both at butches and at anyone else in the vicinity" (Burana, Roxxie and Due 10).
61 3. Conclusion
Even though heterosexual society continually values and preserves the dichotomy of a masculine, active male and a feminine, passive female whose gender roles and sexual desires are prescribed and unchanging; theoretical queer concepts have problematized assumptions that heterosexuality is "natural" and "original". This thesis has placed butch and femme gender identities within the discourse of queer theory and has presented how the notion of butch femme couples changed throughout history.
By identification as butch or femme, traditional gender roles of male and female are challenged. Moreover, the expectations society created about appropriate gender presentation and desire are disrupted. Butches and femmes have expanded the concept of what it means to be a lesbian, to be female. Historically, butch femme women were theorized as an inseparable couple, which reduced the validity and power of the femme.
This was due to the strong visibility of the butch who was easily recognizable and therefore analyzable. Femme lesbians were often misunderstood as heterosexual because they could "pass" as heterosexual. Only in the company of butches were femmes given the power to display their lesbianism.
The lesbian feminist movement of the 1970s and 1980s attacked the sexist and patriarchal division of gender roles; it placed sexuality within a social and political context and created a concept of woman identified woman who would value equality, respect and femininity. Thus, butch femme role playing was criticized for its assumed adoration of power imbalances and its imitation of heterogendered sexual practices.
Since the mid 1980s, scholars have been trying to redefine lesbian histories and validate the existence of butch femme identities. Also, as a result of the queer discourse, gender as a concept is problematized; there is no continuity between sex, gender and desire. Judith Butler’s theories were used, where she argues that positions of butch and
62 femme gender identities as an inseparable couple perform a "parodic repetition" of heterogendered binarised roles. Therefore, we cannot simply criticize butches and femmes for replicating heterosexual identities, because the very masculine and feminine codes that butches and femmes embody are used for their gender performance of lesbian erotic dynamics. Richard Dyer’s performance of queerness in everyday life of gays and lesbians proposed that queerness needs to be performed constantly otherwise LGBT minorities are read by dominant society as heterosexual.
Analyses of three contemporary independent lesbian films Robin’s Hood , Itty
Bitty Titty Committee and Butch Jamie, which thematically and stylistically refer to the
New Queer Cinema movement, present lesbian characters in variety and lesbian communities as multicultural. Individual goals of lesbians in films vary but are influenced by a dominant society, thus Robin and Brooklyn in Robin’s Hood fight governmental apathy and institutional racism towards lower class citizens by robbing banks; the actions of the C(I)A feminist group in Itty Bitty Titty Committee were motivated by patriarchal and heterogendered society that treats women unequally; Jamie in Butch Jamie was forced to pass as a man otherwise she would not be accepted in the movie business.
All women are presented as active members of society with goals that reach beyond their personal happiness, though many of their acts are on the verge of lawfullness. These diverse narratives made by queer filmmakers could be generalized as illustrations of a variety of desires that lesbian/queer communities might have and possible positions that lesbians could hold within their communities; some are more politically and socially oriented in fights for equality, others are eager to deconstruct the binary heterogendered world they live in, or live outside any lesbian community.
63 In all three films, there are visibly strong characters that could be identified as butches or femmes, though for some of them the self identification as butch/femme is not crucial as in Itty Bitty Titty Committee. The butch identity of the characters
Brooklyn, Meat, Calvin and Jamie worked as the most recognizable and identifiable lesbian identity, and their performances of masculinity were fully accepted within the
"diegetic" heterosexual society. The acceptance of their masculinity reached its peak in
Butch Jamie where Jamie’s embodiment of male/masculine traits enabled her to pass as a man, therefore proving that masculinity is easily to be performed and parodied.
On the other hand, femme characters were still often misread as heterosexual since femininity is conventionally connected with heterosexual women, though the active approach of femmes in their lives and goals suggested their queerness. Therefore butch femme as inseparable couple cannot be seen as the most frequent and visible representative of lesbianism in contemporary society, rather they should be read as two types of various lesbian identities: "nothing is more frightening than defining who we are in this time of siege because who I am can never be who you are, and who we are can never be who all of us are. No matter how hard we try to homogenize the lesbian nation, we are just fractured – and just as full of vitality – as the rest of the world’s peoples" (Burana, Roxxie and Due 12).
64 4. Summary
Diplomová práce se zabývá historickým přehledem vývoje genderových identit butch a femme, jako specificky lesbických genderových variant. Identity butch nebo femme narušují tradiční rozdělení genderových rolí a očekávání, která jsou kladena na příslušné genderové identity a touhy. Butch a femme lesby tak rozšiřují pojetí toho, co znamená být "ženou". Heterosexuální společnost neustále oceňuje a udržuje dichotomii maskulinní aktivity muže a femininní pasivity ženy, jejichž genderové role a sexuální touhy jsou předepsané a neměnné. Queer teorie naopak dekonstruovala předpoklad heterosexuality a binárních rolí jako něčeho přirozeného a původního. Butch a femme lesby nekopírují heterosexuální identity, ale performují/předvádějí "parodické opakování" heterogenderových binárních rolí. Butch femme dvojice ztělesňující rozpoznatelné maskulinní a femininní kódy, které však používají pro vlastní genderové představení lesbické erotické dynamiky.
Na příkladu třech nezávislých lesbických snímků, které tématicky a formálně odkazují na filmy New Queer Cinema, sledujeme lesbické postavy, které sami sebe identifikují jako butch a femme, nebo jsou takto identifikované svým okolím. Tyto postavy předvádí své genderové identity a zároveň různé formy mužskosti a ženskosti.
Butch postavy jsou více viditelné, jelikož předvádění mužskosti se odehrává na základě jednodušeji rozpoznatelných znaků (oblečení, řeč těla, mluva) než předvádění ženskosti, které se často spojuje s heterosexuální identitou. Podle analyzovaných filmů není postavení butch femme dvojic v současné lesbické kinematografii dominantní, přesto jsou butch a femme postavy nedílnou součástí širších lesbických subkultur.
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