#butch femme lit

[martyr0l0gy]

For anyone else who thirsts for reading trans / lesbian / genderqueer lit, but struggles because low circulation and academic interest make it difficult to find Real copies of: here' a PDF file of S. Bear Bergman's 'Butch Is A Noun' essay collection. And just a little reminder for the ✨️community✨️ butch/femme identities aren't just presentation. They're history and culture and politics and self definition. Please please please know about the intricacies of butch identities before just claiming your obsession with them. Butch attraction without context and humanisation is just dehumanising fetishism of gender non-conforming presentations (which can admittedly be fun in the right, consensual contexts.. but I digress).

[androgynealienfemme]

"We go from store to store, trying to things on and inspecting them. I give my opinions on dresses and shoes, blouses and lipstick colors. Sometimes I say things that make the other women look at me, agape, as though my mouth has been possessed by that flighty queen from Queer Eye even while the rest of my body still looks like any other big dumb boy's. I say that I like a skirt but I wish it were bias-cut instead of A-line, or that I am not fond of the fashion for surplice tops, or that the post-WWII idiom in shoes this season is amusing but rarely looks good on actual feet, or that I like the look of a bolero jacket. I know the names of colors, heliotrope and coral and Nile blue, and I can say without hesitation whether a lipstick might look better matte with a bit of powder.

These other women look at me with wonder, their boyfriends and husbands having made a fetish out of refusing to learn such words under any circumstances, as though merely pronouncing the word "periwinkle" or "princess seam" could easily turn a strong man gay as a box of birds. They say to her, "That's your husband?" in voices that loiter between admiring and disgusted, as though they know that there's no force on earth that could make their men or boys take such interest in their clothing and they think they might really prefer that to the spectacle of me, filling an armchair, legs crossed ankle over knee, looking just right until I say "tea length."

The point is that she wants other girls to see what it looks like to have a boy so cracy in love with you, as I am, that he will spend an afternoon talking about capri pants to have a boy so delighted by you that he never calls you by your name, but addresses you always as "beautiful girl," or "my love" or occasionally and with great fondness, "boss." To have a boy who will happily fetch your next-size-down and carry your bags and charm the salesclerks at the register without flirting overmuch and just generally try to make himself as useful as possible, all for the dizzy and undying pleasure of making you happy. And even though I am not a boy, I look like one, and so I can be complicit with her in this kind of wonderful afternoon, part indulgence of her great beauty and style, part guerilla feminist activism.

Later, when we walk through the mall or down the sidewalk, me laden with packages that are clearly hers, I watch the eyes of the people we pass: the women who look at me with a certain longing, wishing they had their own boys to carry the bags. The men who look at her with an unmistakable hunger, wishing that they had the honor of schlepping for a girl like her, and then look at me with a certain edge of disbelief, not quite clear about why I get to squire this marvelous example of femininity around when they are clearly wealthier, more handsome, better hung. I have learned to meet all of these gazes with a calm kind of sweetness. There's no point in defensiveness or sheepishness or challenge. I'm the one holding her bags."

"Being a Shopping Switch” Butch is a Noun essays by S. Bear Bergman (2006)

[archergrid]

I’m seeking beta readers for my sapphic heist romance novel! If you like:

👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩 Butch/femme

💰 Steal from the rich

👾 Latina hacker main character

🌹 Asian butch-fatale love interest

🕯️slow burn

🎯forced proximity

🌶️ spicy love scenes

Then DM me or reply to this post for details~

[macbxth-pdf]

Excerpts from She Strips to Conquer: An Interview with J., Butch Sex Worker by Lily Burana from Dagger: On Butch Women Edited by Lily Burana and Roxxie, & Linnea Due (1994)

(Sorry for the glare off of my kindle! You can find this book as a pdf or epub file on internet archive!)

[pretty-lil-ladybug]

"If the butch deconstructs gender, the femme constructs gender. She puts together her own special ingredients for what it is to be a "woman," an identity with which she can live and love"

Joan Nestle, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader

[holeymolars]

"Is butch/femme the way she smokes a cigarette, shapes her mouth, wears her Levis, takes you into her body - or not, touches her breasts - or not, bites her hot dog, builds her shoulders, shops for clothing, is silent or talks? Is it in the poise of her hand? Is it in the kind of risks she takes? The way she presses you against a wall? Which one of you has the cock, to have or to hold? (As Lacan put it, virility can only be made manifest on the body of a woman - if so, where is butch/femme located?) Does she go into her closet to feel real? How do we approach the painful subtleties of butch/femme, the yearning to be recognised, the reflex that pulls, the propulsion toward each other which can so often end in retreat? Butch/femme is all the intricate things, and the melancholy too, perhaps also the perversely gainful validation of being dysphoric in a culture which demands gender congruence."

butch/femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, Sally R. Munt

[haveyoureadthistransbook]

Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis

goodreads

Sasha and Jesse are professionally creative, erotically adventurous, and passionately dysfunctional twentysomethings making a life together in Brooklyn. When a pair of older, richer lesbians—prominent news host Jules Todd and her psychotherapist partner, Miranda—invites Sasha and Jesse to their country home for the holidays, they’re quick to accept. Even if the trip includes a third couple—Jesse’s best friend, Lou, and their cool-girl flame, Darcy—whose It-queer clout Sasha ridicules yet desperately wants.

As the late December afternoons blur together in a haze of debaucherous homecooked feasts and sweaty sauna confessions, so too do the guests’ secret and shifting motivations. When Jesse and Darcy collaborate an ill-fated livestream performance, a complex web of infatuation and jealousy emerges, sending Sasha down a spiral of destructive rage that threatens each couple’s future.

Mod opinion: I've read and unfortunately really disliked this book. I was so excited for trans butches (although of course there's only acceptance for tme trans butches & no trans femmes at all, so that definitely did not help my enjoyment of the book), but I just didn't like any of the characters at all.

[variousqueerthings]

I’m reading Persistance: All Ways Butch And Femme and lemme tell you it’s doing wonders for everything -- feelings about gender, politics, language, relationships 

every time I think I’ve come at some unknowable concept about myself that nobody could possibly understand and I’m totally alone (or at the very least I’m something new and fragile), reading about other queers makes me understand that actually it’s existed possibly forever and I can calm tf down and stop being so angsty, it’s not fragile at all, it’s years of others living these things into reality!

anyway, us lonelies under 30 (and over 30 too quite probably) who think we’ve reinvented the wheel and nobody could possibly get it, we need to read this sort of stuff to get out of our own heads and to respect where we came from and maybe all the fucking discourse can chill out and we won’t be so afraid of changes and concepts that already exist and have done for a lot of years!

[lil-miss]

If someone got me a physical copy of The Persistent Desire I think I would marry them on the spot or like give them my soul or something.

[theydaybrigade]

Update on reading Stone Butch Blues

I’m starting chapter 13 and barely getting past the first page without getting pissed off.

Chapter 13 spoilers below! (But not many because I’m on the second page of the chapter still)

Of course they address post Stonewall police brutality escalation. I think that’s great and I love how Leslie talks about how the community adapted to keep the culture and community going. (Like keeping tabs on police radios to prepare for raids.)

Then they talk about lesbian inter-community discourse and bigoted attitudes towards one another. It’s not that I didn’t expect it, it’s that I’ve noticed it hasn’t really gotten any better. Mocking someone for being femme? Disgusting. Calling butches “male chauvinist pigs”? Equally fucking disgusting.

It reminds me of a coworker I once had, (who was sort of a supervisor but wasn’t technically allowed to be one due to the nature of the position classification. Long story, won’t give too many details…) which just frustrates me because I had to put my identity exploration on hold because this asshole at work would police my identity and how I talked about myself. We worked at a fucking multicultural center at my university and she had a background in gender studies. Do better. 🙄

Anyway, I’m working through these big feelings and that’s making me read slower… which is frustrating because I want to be able to read this faster because I want to know how it ends! 😭

[androgynealienfemme]

"Faggy butch was good. It accurately described my pink button-down shirts, my giggles, the fact that I talked with my hands. I once saw a tape of myself in which I made a gesture that looked more like it belonged in A Chorus Line than in the middle of an interview. Faggy butch was like genderqueer -- not quite this or that, a little of both, maybe. A friend once said to me, "I access my femininity through my masculinity."

I feel lucky to have grown up in a world with butch pioneers, and I feel lucky that I had an idea about what being butch might have meant. But instead of making me feel part of the community, these constructions of what butch was -- stereotypes really-- pushed me away from the word and identity. Instead I chose a newer term, genderqueer, which had yet to be defined; it was in flux, it was a new frontier. I may not have been butch "enough", but genderqueer was all mine to rewrite and redefine.

I still like the word "genderqueer," still claim it and own it and love the way it makes room for me, in all my complexities. But I'm coming back around to butch. Maybe its because the years of pink prom dresses are further and further behind me, maybe its because i'm learning from butch elders who talk in terms that make room for me, giggles and all. Maybe its because the people i know have no idea (unless I tell them) that i was never a tomboy. They only know me -- my short hair tightly bound chest, and button down shirts.

I think that every new generation feels the need to reject their elders, reject what came before them, and feel that they are knew gender rebels. We invent terms, we create new spaces, and sometimes, we come back to where our big brothers started -- home."

“PERSISTENCE: All Ways Butch and Femme, Coming Back Around to Butch” Miriam Zoila Pérez, On Butch and Femme: Compiled Readings, (edited by I.M. Epstein) (2017)

[libraryofbaxobab]

November 7, 2023:

I'm really sorry, but I didn't like this. Not just because I physically recoiled every time the main character referred to her vulva as her "kitty cat" and sex as "S" like we're in fucking middle school, although that should have been enough. The characters all appear to be supremely insecure about sex, yet that is literally all they talk about. But more than that, the microscopic examination of body language as if it speaks volumes, disjointed dialogue, childish overreactions, and uncomfortable sexual overtones all combined to make me feel annoyed and vaguely embarrassed.

I kind of had a mini identity crisis about it, actually. I've found that a lot of recent popular queer literature doesn't make me feel seen; rather, I feel actively excluded. I just can't connect with this book and others like it, for a reason that's hard to describe. Like normally, I can relate to characters who are unlike me and in unknowable situations because I can understand their feelings, motivations, and wants and therefore understand their words and actions. Not so here. I don't know why any of this. Like, I can tell when characters are very uncomfortable about certain topics, but I cannot fathom why and the book won't explain it to me. This is supposed to be very funny, but I don't get any of the jokes. I can't even tell where the jokes are. I think pretty much every character sucks but not in a relatable "We all know someone just like that!" way. They each seem like a caricature but of whom I can't tell. Is that the joke? Are these parodies of people I should recognize? Should I take what they're saying at face value or consider them naïve? Are the shifting pronouns of the butch supposed to be a joke? The graphic performance art that takes place? The characters acting like children for no reason? The definition of femininity as unmitigated jealousy of other femmes? The casual alcohol abuse and embarrassing sexual reverberations? All this makes me feel like I'm not Enough. That I'm not active in the community enough, that I'm not reading the right articles, that I'm not following The Discourse closely enough, that I'm not putting on the correct performance, and therefore I'm not queer enough because that's how they define queerness: performance and fantasy. It strikes me as vaguely religious. And it hurts my feelings, not gonna lie.

This was way more personal that I ever meant to get, but I really can't give an objective explanation why I found this read awful. What numerical value can I give to something that actually made my life worse?

X/10 #WhatsKenyaReading

[biromanticbookbabe]

Okay for real. I think what finally made me finally realize I was a lesbian and not bisexual was my reaction to Stone Butch Blues. 

I know Jess isn’t real. But I wanted to go fight everyone who ever hurt her and they aren’t real either. Like that was one of several really strong emotions I had while reading that I can’t remember feeling in a very long time. 

The intensity of my reactions didn’t seem like a straight reaction to that book. I was like oh, okay. 

[macbxth-pdf]

Fevers, Fall-Outs, and Fast Foods by Zoe Whittall from Brazen Femme: Queering Femininity edited by Chloë Brushwood Rose and Anna Camilleri

Please ignore the fact that some of my annotations are edited out

[miss-conjayniality]

y’know……being gay is a blessing tbh. it’s honestly crazy how much power butch women have over me…..natural mood boosters for me.

[milkandhoneyfemme]

Love butchfemme couples where the femme looks like she has a 10 step skincare routine, perfectly done nails, reads classic lit and does yoga, and the lovestruck butch is holding onto her wrist trailing from behind like a rescue dog she found in an alleyway chewing on a wrench