#Bulldagger

[macbxth-pdf]

Happy international lesbian day to the recently discovered and newly out lesbians!

Happy international lesbian day to lesbians who live in areas with small lesbian communities.

Happy international lesbian day to the trans and GNC lesbians!

Happy international lesbian day to the butchfemme community!

Happy international lesbian day to the BIPOC lesbians!

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL LESBIAN DAY

[femmepire-butchbiter]

Black lesbians

BLACK LESBAINS

BLACK LESBIANS

[blkmogai]

BULL DAGGER & BULL DYKE

[PT: Bull Dagger and Bull Dyke /end PT]

a flag for those that reclaim the term bull dagger / bull dyke that was used derogatorily against black (butch) lesbians.

dagger icon / axe icon

[catgirl-ocd]

Harebourg and Nox rift adventures

[queertations]

"She is a hellish 'It,' a supernatural 'he,' or at the very least, an 'unnachel' woman."

The Myth and Tradition of the Black Bulldagger by SDiane A. Bogus from Dagger: On Butch Women edited by Lily Burana and Roxxie and Linnea Due

[macbxth-pdf]

A little tidbit of knowledge for all the black sapphics who may come across my blog

Source: Dagger: On Butch Women ( Edited by Lily Burana, Roxxie and Linnea Due )

Passage: The Myth and Tradition of the Black Bulldagger by SDiane A Bogus (pg 29-36 in the physical copy, pgs 30-37 on the pdf)

Mutuals who I think would like this post: @femmepire-butchbiter @nsslaughter @cobwebgf @blackhighfemme @brownsugarbunny @cottagecorewitchebitche

[foundorfollowed]

our favorite walkable mexican place closed for good AND the waiter at the indian place we went to instead visibly panicked over which dyke to hand the check to for so long my wife had to take pity on him and just tell him to give it to her

[macbxth-pdf]

Like there’s chapstick and futch(ya know the label created by white lesbians?). Hell folks are trying to use BULLDAGGER. Bulldagger, a hella black term for black sapphics that were masculine presenting or made masculinity their own. Black lesbians and black sapphic women were historically pushed out of white lesbian spaces. We had own terms (AG/Aggressive, Bulldagger, Stud, Stem, Fish etc) and now those terms are for everyone?

It’s not even about lesbians being mean, it’s about terms and how they are used. Somehow yall can understand protecting an aspect of your culture as a lesbian when it’s about the interpretation of a Chappel Roan song. Hell, yall will turn around and revise history and rewrite narratives on who was using a word and how it was used. Yall will create whole new words to further push a certain narrative.

But yall can’t understand that stem/stud/bulldagger don’t belong to you?

Being a stud/stem/bulldagger isn’t just a different aesthetic of masculinity or fluid masculinity. It’s about the blackness tied to it. And I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again: Blackness can’t be replicated.

I'm starting to understand why many lesbians, but ESPECIALLY black lesbians are just straight up mean. If I have to hear another gaggle of people try to redefine stud/stem again, somebody is catching a femme-coded fist to their solar plexus. Like, tighten tf up.

[florriescreamlagoon]

I wanted to call it mother—

this longing for the ground.

E Hughes

[mlentertainment]

killing my dad with hammers i can tell you that much

[macbxth-pdf]

“ During the last twenty to thirty years discussions about the gender and sexual preferences of the younger talented tenth of the Harlem Renaissance — 1924 to early 1930s — artist, performers, writers, and singers have challenged the heteronormal perception of this elite group. There is one blues singer whose reputation and image appear in discussions of literary artist from this period and in a very public way embody an insurgent encounter to conventional gender identities. Blues Cabaret singer, Gladys Bentley, who Hughes refers to in the opening epigraph, gained popularity with her spirited lyrical renditions of popular melodies that she often preformed in masculine attire. The colloquial term used for some Negro, masculine, women was bulldagger. At that time ‘bulldagger’ was not a pejorative term in the black community ; they ‘…are associated with physical strength, sexual prowess, emotional reserve, and butch chivalry. The term has roots in African American communities of the early twentieth century, especially with 1920s Harlem where sexual and gender mores were more flexible.

According to Jeanne Flash Gray, ‘who participated in Harlem gay life in the late 1930s and 1940s,… ‘There were many places run by and for Black Lesbians and Gay Men, when we were still Bull Daggers and Faggots and only whites were lesbians and homosexuals’ (qtd. in E.Garber 1989, 331) ”

Source: How Does a Bulldagger Get Out of the Footnote? or Gladys Bentley’s Blues from ninepatch: A Creative Journal for Women & Gender Studies Vol, Iss 1, Article 31

Author: Assistant Professor of Minor Studies and Adjunct Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University , Regina V. Jones

[wnchestmutt]

…🫀♱ ★ “Whomsoever I've cured, I've sickened now. And whomsoever I've cradled, I've put you down. I'm a search light soul they say. But I can't see it in the night....”

♰ Be warned I may incorporate humor from time to time, and my account may veer into suggestive, grotesque, or bloody themes. But this does not mean this account is sexual in nature, nor will I boo you for interpreting any of my work that way. Simply keep in mind that mod is currently 17

♰ I encourage masc of all kinds to interact; esp gnc and butches since i focus on a lot of internal aspects of masculinity rather than physical. Safe place for all go wild.

♰ People and accounts I obviously don't fw being terfs or radfems(why are you here unless to be tamed), Trans discourse/infighting (I think your lame leave I don't care for that afab vs amab, gender binary transfem vs transmasc bull), ppl who dabble in proship drama n debates don't bring that to my account. Also do NOT flirt with me dawg

[neve-gallus-girl-detective]

Sometimes, at work, I'll do something and then be like "oops that's faggot behavior" lmaoo

[omgthatdress]

Sometimes, the line between "drag artist" and "performer who is queer" becomes incredibly blurry and hard to define.

One of the most famous queer artists of the Harlem renaissance was Gladys Bentley, who was openly a lesbian and who wore men's clothing as a part of her stage persona.

Bentley sometimes used the term "male impersonator" as a way of being able to wear masculine attire on stage, but she was never fully pretending to be male. She was always being herself.

A virtuouso piano player, she was called "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Player" and the "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs" She headlined at places like Cotton Club and the Ubangi Club, and always drew in massive crowds.

Described by Langston Hughes, "For two or three amazing years, Miss Bentley sat, and played piano all night long … with scarcely a break between the notes, sliding from one song to another, with a powerful and continuous underbeat of jungle rhythm. Miss Bentley was an amazing exhibition of musical energy – a large, dark, masculine lady, whose feet pounded the floor while her fingers pounded the keyboard – a perfect piece of African sculpture, animated by her own rhythm."

Gladys Bentley was far from being the only queer woman blues singer of the day. Lucille Bogan, Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey also had sexual relationships with women, and sang songs about same-sex desire and "bulldaggers."

Even still, Bentley stood out for her unabashed queerness. When performing at the Ubangi Club, she had a chorus line of drag queens performing behind her.

As time wore on and America became more conservative, Bentley's career struggled. In the 1950s, she renounced her old ways and claimed she had been "cured" of lesbianism and "become a woman again" through a regimen of estrogen shots. It was the only way she was able to maintain a career through the McCarthy era.

[macbxth-pdf]

Uplift Bulldaggers, Black Butches, and Studs all day everyday.

Bulldagger

Bulldagger - Most often used in a derogatory way to describe a masculine lesbian; most often used in African American communities.

Bulldagger: Bulldagger is pejorative slang for a very masculine lesbian, which often carries a more racialized meaning than its synonyms bulldyke, bulldiker, and diesel dyke. Bulldaggers are associated with physical strength, sexual prowess, emotional reserve, and butch chivalry.

These are two different definitions of this word, given by two different sources. The word bulldagger has its roots in 1920′s Harlem, specifically in the African-american blues community. This word was used to mean lesbian, but since gender was much less defined and separate from sexuality at this point, the word was also associated with individuals that we would consider “trans” from our modern perspective. 

From SDiane Adamz-bogus: “The Black Bulldagger is a link to our ancient and recent Black woman-loving past, and the predecessor of today’s Black lesbian. She is a character, an idea, a woman who loved women but was heavily male-identified more often than not. She was the unattractive girl, the tomboyish teen, the independent woman, or any Black sister who repulsed the advances of men.”

[notchainedtotrauma]

"Ultimately, the refusal of the masculine female or "bulldagger" in the image Black Revolutionary Woman leads to policing black women according to their sexuality, often reducing them to that sexuality or to obsessively demonstrating their heterosexuality."

from The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, The Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense by Kara Keeling

Carrie Mae Weems, from The Kitchen Table Series

Still from the visuals to BIGDOG by Slimeroni

This essay speaks to how Black men use Black women as stewards of the "revolution", that is as de facto service workers, erotic laborers, and available wombs, and how Black women are textualized as "revolutionary" only when legible within the narratives of the Black cisheteropatriarchy.

It critiques the continuous violence that Black masculinity, cloaked beneath the image of radicalism, bears upon Black women, and the necessity for them to rid their minds and bodies of the guilt and submission to artificial "leaders". It invites Black women to radicalize themselves through willfulness and alongside the realization of their own pleasure.

This essay is public, so if you want to tip:

Pp is ccd4t@virginia.edu

K0fi