In many ways, Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues does more than explore what it means to be a part of the LGBTQ community. In many ways, Stone Butch Blues is a “how to” book just as much as it is a lifeline for the LGBTQ community. It is a “how to” book in the sense it examines how to be a member of the LGBTQ community, while at the same time revealing the follies of a definitive correct way how. In doing so, Feinberg reveals not only the performative nature of gender, but also how the concept of
Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues discusses the reality that a person’s identity is not based solely on singular moments in one’s life but on all of those moments added together. Sexuality and gender are in a constant state of flux, able to change from moment to moment, and the person experiences them in moments. Mimi Marinucci uses Gender Defined and Undefined to discuss this very experience, and I question if sexuality and gender can really exist, if by the moment they are constantly changing
Leslie Feinberg’s “Stone Butch Blues,” narrates protagonist, Jess Goldberg, through hirs bodily transformation as a transgender. Jess, born as a woman, went from identifying as a “he/she” to passing as a man, until ultimately identifying as neither male nor female. Jess’s journey as a trans was far from easy, due to the violence, from the police and peers, ze often fell victim to. Moreover, when growing up Jess never felt as if there was a place for hir in society. When Jess was around 16 years old
Conformity Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues is a story about Jess; a masculine girl who understands from hir earliest memories that ze is different from other girls. Ze feels frustrated as Ze consistently gets asked the question,” Is that a boy or a girl?” Since ze feels that ze does not fit in the society and hir family and people around her reject hir, ze finally decides to come out as a stone butch lesbian in the gay drag bars of a blue-collar town. A stone butch has been so battered by homophobia
Gender norms surround every person in every culture, even though they have variety in each culture, they are still real and still impact individuals who stand out from the norms. Leslie Feinberg's book “Stone Butch Blues” shows how hard it is to challenge gender in the 1960’s when homosexuality and the transgender movement was something that was just starting up. Leslie shows the reader that just by existing in a transphobic environment ze is challenging what it means to be a man or a woman, and
powerful novel Stone Butch Blues (1993) challenges conventional thinking about both gender and sexuality. From birth, society labels children as either male or female depending on their genitalia. Based on the child’s biological sex they are then expected to conform to the gender roles that society has placed on them. These expectations of gender expression leave little to no room for genderqueer or gender non-conforming individuals. Jess Goldberg, the protagonist in the novel Stone Butch Blues, does not
Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher and critical theorist. Her area of expertise is gender theory. She is most well known for her theory of gender performativity which states that gender is a social construct which is performative in nature. In simple terms what this means is that gender is not a quality that people have, but a pattern of behavior that people perform. The performance of gender, Butler contends, creates and reinforces societal gender norms which are perceived
Disney Presents: A Brave Butch In the Disney movie, Brave, the main character is a princess named Merida. You see from the beginning that Merida enjoys archery, riding her horse, and doing many non-girly things. It is refreshing to see a princess in a movie that is not your typical girly girl. This can teach young girls that they do not have to succumb to the type of behavior the rest of society makes them feel they should. However, in other people’s eyes, including her mother’s, this is not how
go around town, across the country, the world even and not get stared after. The Butches face violence because of their appearance, while the Bears do not. Gay men, especially the Bears have more acceptance in the world than the Butches in Stone Butch Blues. The Bears in Bear Nation have a lot of acceptance already. Their national conference is being held, and men from all over the country and those even from other countries have arrived to the conference to celebrate that they are Bears. Their
The fallacy ‘appeal to tradition’ elucidates that validity is not ensured through ideas that have been common for ages. That is to say, just because things have always been a certain way, does not mean they are correct. In this context, gender as a binary is a common belief, but in reality, it varies on a spectrum of gender identification, including homosexuality or transgender. Gender has become a social construct swept up in the phenomenon of categorization: each individual must be labeled and