Discussion Questions: "Female Masculinity" by Judith Halberstam

[Sabrina]

See you guys tomorrow!!!


Is the feminist movement ultimately preventing, or in direct conflict
with, true gender expression freedom? In other words, can both
feminism and the movement for free gender expression co-exist?

Halberstam spends an entire chapter discussing the presence of
butchness on film. She asserts that in addition to some of the fairly
transparent representations of female masculinity, specifically being
butch, that there some more genuine representations found in
contemporary queer cinema (Postmodern Butch section). However, I was
drawn back to a quote she said on Page 6: “But even as a cursory
survey of popular cinema confirms, the image of the tomboy can be
tolerated only within a narrative of blossoming womanhood; within such
a narrative, tomboyism represents a resistance to adulthood itself
rather than to adult femininity.” Even in modern cinema, does this
still seem to be the case for child and adolescent portrayals of
female masculinity?

The discussion of the stone butch and butch-femme sex roles seems to
again beg the question that keeps coming up in our club: can women be
in a relationship in which they are a submissive partner (regardless
of the gender of their dominant partner) and still feel empowered as a
woman and live as a feminist?

Do you agree with Halberstam’s contention that the sexual expression
for stone butches has been unfairly pathologized as being the result
of self-hatred and/or abuse?

Does the stone butch make female masculinity possible? [page 126] And
what about hetero female masculinity? Did I miss that in the book? If
it’s not in there, is it because it doesn’t exist?

On page 133, Halberstam seems to flip her script on criticizing the
over-pathologizing of sexual behavior when discussing a relationship
between a white stone and her black lover. Whereas she has maintained
to this point that gender and sexuality are mutable, she now claims
that fluctuating facets of identity, race and class remain fairly
static and that there could be underlying issues of racial oppression
that make the white stone’s dominant sexual position potentially be
cause for alarm. How can she so adamantly believe that white stone
butch and their white femme partners can be in a fully functional
relationship without any subversive issues, but she thinks it’s
impossible to do this interracially? I smell white guilt!!!

At several points in the book, the “romanticism” of lesbian love is
described and how it created a huge chasm between femme lesbian and
hetero feminists and butch lesbians, especially stones and FTMs. This
divergence amongst women seemed to be born in 2nd wave feminism. To
what extent does it still exist in the 3rd wave?

What is womanhood at its essence? Is gender really a social construct
in its entirety?

Ultimately, as this book focused so much on female masculinity as it
relates to sexual expression, my thought is why does what anyone does
sexually have to do with whether they are a feminist or not?