Judith Halberstam,
Female Masculinity.
Duke University Press Durham and London 1998.
ISBN 08223 2243 9
329pp
US$17.95 (paper)

(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)
Uploaded 1 March 2000

Most people will acknowledge that masculinity has become somewhat of a favoured topic in the last ten years or so, but what about masculinity without men?

There continues to be chapters in essay collections by the usual suspects — Eve K. Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, for instance – yet Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity is the first full-length study of masculine women.

Halberstam is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego and is also the author of Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monster.
While queer discussion about masculinity is more likely to extend beyond the male body and not use the term as a synonym for men or maleness anyway, Female Masculinity covers a vast amount of ground well beyond this. Halberstam scrutinizes the politics of butch/femme in lesbian communities, transsexuality among transgender dykes, as well as looking at Hollywood butches, drag kings and women and boxing.

Halberstam details ways in which female masculinity has been ignored, and rather than conceptualising masculinity without men, she compiles the myths and fantasies about masculinity that make masculinity and maleness difficult to pry apart then offers examples, mostly queer and female, of alternative masculinities in fiction, film and lived experience. Halberstam’s methods are interdisciplinary, using what she calls a queer methodology (“a scavenger methodology” or that which “betrays a certain disloyalty to conventional disciplinary methods.)

The premise of book is that female masculinity “is a specific gender with its own cultural history rather than a derivative of male masculinity” and points out how psychoanalytic approaches that assume that female masculinity mimics male masculinity are not particularly helpful and certainly not insightful.

The book begins with textual readings of two examples of female masculinity from 19th century literature, Anne Lister’s diaries and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.

Halberstam uses Lister’s diaries to put together a same sex desire structured by “unequal desires, sexual and gender roles, ritualised class relations and an almost total rejection of sexual sameness” and then puts The Well of Loneliness forward to emphasise the ongoing construction of modern lesbian identity.

Paraphrasing Eve K. Sedgwick, Halberstam asks what makes it so difficult not to presume an essential relationship between masculinities and men, and then proceeds to journey between male and female and within queer and straight space, but while “thinking in fractal terms and about gender geometries.” Fasten your seat beats, you’re in for a scenic but bumpy ride.

When dealing with the stone butch, for example, Halberstam points out how very different identifications between sexuality, the body and gender emerge – the sexually untouchable woman complicates the idea that all lesbians share sexual practices or even that women share female sexual desires.

Halberstam also looks at the history of butch women in film and goes beyond the discourse of positive and negative images. She sees queer cinema “with its invitations to play through numerous identifications within a single sitting” as creating a place for the reinvention of ways of seeing. A consideration of Valerie Traub’s proposition of using lesbian and heterosexual as adjectives rather than nouns is used as a challenge to the usual binary code of visual texts used by film theory. Halberstam points out that positive images can be no less stereotypical, in so far as they are not necessarily more realistic. She looks at a number of old “negative” images including The Killing of Sister George (1968) and The Children’s Hour (1961) and then discusses the geneology of the butch in film history to show that negative images may also provide a history of representation of sexual minorities as well as access to the history of looking butch.

The chapter on drag kings provides a foray into something which became something of a phenomenon in New York in the 1990s. The fact that in the theatre of mainstream gender roles, femininity is often presented as simply costume whereas masculinity manifests as realism or as a body, makes for interesting added value to Halberstam’s thesis.

Indifference to feminine masculinity, Halberstam argues, has “ideological motivations and has sustained the complex social structures that wed masculinity to maleness and to power and domination.”

In the texts covered, Halberstam has attempted to restore some of the complexity lost within the usual rigid binary definitions. She shows how certain identities tend to be exceedingly specific, and that it is important to recognise the many distinctive types of masculinity in women as well as, and to do so in place of using catch-all phrase of lesbianism.

She steers herself admirably between the subtle and not so subtle interactions between the personal and the theoretical.

It is important to do so, she argues, in order for an understanding of minority gender categories that incorporates rather than pathologises them.

This study is well on the way to helping create such acceptance.

Millissa Deitz