Stubborn Identifications: Butch at 50

• In Event: Butch and Femme Histories, Practices, and Communities: Toward a Critical Intersectional Pedagogy of Love and Repair

Abstract

This paper explores the “temporal drag” of teaching and learning as a butch professor (Freeman 2000). In an historical moment when young people—both the youth I study and the students I teach—are re-writing the vernacular of gender and sexual identities, I ask how age and aging refashion gender non-conformity. What can butch, and this butch professor, learn from the experiences of trans and non-binary youth? And, what can it mean to hold onto a stubborn identification with butch as I age into this particular, gendered body?

I have been butch since 4th grade. At first I was called and called myself a tomboy and nobody seemed to care. Then, in high school, butch was a slur spit out by boys passing by my locker. In university, at the dawn of queer theory, I had a femme girlfriend who cleaned up the word and offered it back to me as a love language. Since then, I’ve aged into butch. I don’t get misrecognized as a 19 year old boy anymore; I feel closer to the butches I first admired in Stone Butch Blues. And like them and especially the protagonist Jess, I have a femme girlfriend who helps repair the damage of living in the straight world (Hollibaugh and Moraga, 1981, p. 61)

This strange “temporal drag” of living as a butch across decades describes a “crossing of time … in the mode of a stubborn identification with a set of social coordinates that [exceed my own] historical moment”(Freeman, 2000, p.738). And I do feel stubborn. The queer and trans world has offered up many new identities to describe gender and sexual non-conformity. Why hold onto butch when there are so many other terms, identities, and communities that also wrestle with what Cherríe Moraga, in 1981, describes as her sense that she is neither male or female but instead “this hybrid or somethin” (Hollibaugh and Moraga, 1981, p. 60)? Lubin and Vacarro (2019), in their commentary on this dialogue between Hollibaugh and Moraga find a pedagogical method in this discussion of butch/femme erotics. They write: “[the sexual theory of Moraga and Hollibaugh, and the queer theory that followed] teaches its practitioners how to feel smart, rather than bad, about having ambivalent attachments to unstable objects, including and perhaps especially when those objects are our selves” (p. 289).

And so, I am stubbornly and ambivalently attached to butch. As my body ages and softens, both my 4th grade version of butch (cocky, striped t-shirt and grass stained jeans, raging crush on Andrea Tarullo and her feathered hair) and my university version of butch (wallet on chain, white t-shirt, women’s studies syllabus in pocket) tether me to collective and life histories in whose wake I write. The temporal drag Elizabeth Freeman references means I am dragging the past into the future even as I perform an anachronistic queer identity. It is a version of what Heather Love (2009) calls, “feeling backward,” and what this panel might describe as butch pedagogy.

Author

• Jen Gilbert, OISE - University of Toronto
  Presenting Author