Patriarchy Interrupted: Differential Realizations and Manifestations of Power in Butch/Femme Relationships

Abstract

This auto-theoretical essay explores femme and butch as differential identities, expressed through the very specific gender performances of lesbian identity—fem(me)ininity and mas(k)ulinity. We revisit a night spent together as a means of cocreating the understanding of lesbian habitus and the space lesbians occupy when they come together sexually. We interrogate what this means for our own gender performances and expressions of power both within our relationship and in the broader world. Beginning with the term fe(me)ininity and moving through the call for feminist scholarship to create new language, we offer mas(k)ulinity as a new way to frame the subversive performance of butchness. We suggest that the spaces created by femme/butch pairings, ones that manifest fem(me)ininity and mas(k)ulinity, reorient power within relationships, and have the potential to disrupt patriarchal forms of gendered control.

Keywords

fem(me)ininity mas(k)ulinity butch femme auto-theory

I’m a distraught crew cut, Dickies coveralls wearing 25-year-old, sitting across from my therapist. I am not an auto mechanic, or sanitation worker. I am a newly out lesbian in New York City, circa 1997. I slouch in my chair, cry babying about the “dyke uniform” I must put on every time I leave my apartment. That uniform, or costume, transforms me into some sort of sexuality superhero. No one cares about Clark Kent—we all crave Superman. No one even knows who Barbara Gordon is. Unlike these superheroes, I put on my costume to reveal, not obscure, my true identity. Although at this nascent moment—was my identity driving the costume, or was the costume driving my identity? Butches are the most visible lesbians (Inness, 1998), and, as a result, often considered true, authentic lesbians (Levitt & Hiestand, 2005). What better way to come out, than to come really out, and be butch? I wanted to be seen as a lesbian. I wanted my desire to be laid bare—in your face; obvious; unmistakable. I craved to be object, not only subject. Look at me. See me. Make me real. Just under 20 years later, with the butch identity worn, discarded, yet always hung on me by others, I meet you. Always already seen as lesbian, I want to be seen as a woman. And then you see me.

—Kristin

I stayed with an emotionally abusive girlfriend for far too long because she was my first girlfriend and I feared that without her, I would no longer be, or be seen as a lesbian. I needed her so that I could be recognized for who I wanted to be. Who I was. Who I am (Walker, 1993). You see, I had been trying to come out for years, but the ease of the straight world pulled me back in when the lesbians who I wanted to date wouldn’t (couldn’t?) see me as gay. When I first see you, I wonder if you see me. Am I shrouded in my invisibility (Case, 1988; Walker, 1993) or have I mastered the look, the hold of your glance, the eyes that linger just a little bit longer to show you I want you. Do you see my fe(me)ininity or just femininity? (Douglas, 2004) Do I still need butch by my side to validate my lesbian identity? Without a butch, will you see me for who I am? (Gibson & Meem, 2002) or will I be invisible, cloaked in my femininity, relegated by the hegemony of heteronormativity?

—Rachel

Historically, survival for femme and butch women hinged on both the (collective) visibility and (individual) invisibility that emerges from differences in gender performance. The ability to “pass”—the butch as a man and the femme as a “normal” heterosexual woman—provided safety during the dangerous, homophobic 1940s and 1950s, which have long been considered the “heyday” of femme and butch lesbian identities. By the 1970s, however, these same sources of visibility and invisibility were villainized by second-wave feminisms. Butch–femme relationships were condemned as “replicating” the patriarchy. “Butch was seen as male-identified, and femme was seen as selling out to the traditional feminine stereotypes of women” (Inness & Lloyd, 1995, p. 3). As a result, femme and butch identities were largely abandoned in favor of more androgynous presentations of gender. Despite resurgences in the 1980s and 1990s, butch and femme remain hotly debated identities. The terms are simultaneously archaic and revolutionary (Coyote & Sharman, 2009) and, in the case of butch, so steeped in Whiteness that it erases the lived experience of women of color (Cole, 2016). Still, for the women who claim these identities, they are powerful and transgressive and, by subverting both sides of the normative gender binary, are, we argue, capable of interrupting patriarchy.

Finding Ourselves; Finding Each Other

We introduce our theory in two voices, from the femme and the butch perspective. This validates each identity as standalone, rather than existing solely in relation to, or defined through, each other. To reduce the distance between subject and object (Wittig, 1980), we speak in the second person, to the reader and to each other, when we write as individuals. The second person “erases the distinctions between personal and theoretical, idea and image” (Engelbrecht, 1990, p. 106). Our second person voice is ideal for an auto-theoretical approach as this method works to demonstrate differential identities outside of patriarchal notions of gender performance (Nelson, 2015). As an “emerging mode of feminist practice” in which “embodied experience becomes the primary material for generating theory,” a duo approach to auto-theory allows us to reflect the more egalitarian and less patriarchal nature of butch–femme relationships and uncovers theory as a lived reality in our everyday lives (Fournier, 2017).

The collaborative writing process also allows us to approach the same subject using individual lenses and subjectivities (Gale, Martin, Sakellariadis, Speedy, & Spry, 2012). As we write together, we “expose and engage” our internalized scripts (Norris & Sawyer, 2012, p. 289), reflect on the critical process, and interpret each other’s work (Lapadat, 2009). Our process of writing uses a sequential model, “in which one autoethnographer writes about his/her experience, passes his/her writing to the next person who adds his/her story to the previous writing, and passes it along to the next person for further addition of stories” (Ngunjiri, Hernandez, & Chang, 2010, p. 6). Together, we revisit our meeting and the night we spent together as a means of recreating understandings of gender, power, and performance. As a result, we create new theory about the differential nature of femme and butch gender performances in relation to each other.

Differential Identities

Our writing uncovers new ways to view expressions of power in gender and allows us to reconsider patriarchy, within femme–butch relationships. Following the call of Engelbrecht (1990), who claims that lesbians need their own form of textuality because subjective theory cannot account for lesbian materiality, we suggest butch and femme as differential identities. By differential, we mean that we are both women who desire women and, as butch and femme lesbians, we manifest versions of gender against and within heteronormativity. We are both invisible, and yet our invisibility manifests in opposite ways—Rachel’s as an unseen lesbian and Kristen’s as an unseen woman. Within lesbian gender performances, there is admiration for differentiations of one’s preferred gender performance/gender manifestation and attraction to women for their preferred gender performance/gender manifestation. All together, butch and femme produce a panoply of pairings and expressions that reflect a unique lesbian desire.

As communication scholars, we ground our understanding of differential identities in classic linguistic and deconstruction theory. We’re inspired by Saussure (1983), who asserted that signs, or in this case gender performance, are made meaningful by their location in a system of differences, and by Derrida (1982), whose “différance” allows us to play with how our butch and femme performances not only differ in ways already mentioned, but also how they defer meaningful readings of our genders and sexualities. In this way, we recognize that the meanings of who we are—alone and together—are always differential to, and of, each other. Always present/absent (Derrida, 1982) as meaningful identities, we as lesbians exist in the borderlands of society, and we create our own spaces and manifest our bodies in ways to be seen by each other. We do not wish to be seen as men, in the case of butches (Maltz, 1998), or by men, in the case of femmes, nor do we, as a pair, wish to be watched by men. As a result, we work to actively recreate our identities outside of the male gaze, informed by and imbued with our lesbian habitus, our set of cultural competencies (Bourdieu, 1989). Although always already existing before we came into it, our lesbian habitus is also part of our own making (Rooke, 2007). It is from this space we write to each other and in this space we explore our differential identities as a means of disrupting normative patriarchal notions of gender performance.

We also build off of more contemporary theories of gender, which are grounded in its interactive, social, and relational nature. Following Shotwell and Sangrey (2009), we acknowledge how one’s self-expression of gender changes other people’s experience of themselves (p. 59), as we see each of our own narratives of our gendered selves as intimately tied to the gendered narrative of the other (p. 64). Kristin becomes more butch as Rachel expresses her femme identity; likewise, Rachel becomes more femme to Kristin’s butch. As such, we understand that although individuals make choices and have freedom, “no one person can be author of her own gender” (Snorton, 2009). Rather “recognition becomes a site of power by which the human is differentially produced” (Butler, 2004, p. 2) and thus imbued with, or vacated of, social privileges and capital. Through our narrative, we uncover ways in which our femme and butch identities disrupt the hegemonic power of the gender binary in our everyday lives. Lesbian habitus (Rooke, 2007), for instance, provides us with the power to recognize and thus produce each other as “fugitives” (re)occupying gender’s “demilitarized zone,” which the gender hegemony has vacated by forcing adherence to either pole of the male/masculine and female/feminine binary (Stewart, 2017). Furthermore, the notions of fem(me)ininity and our new construct, mas(k)ulinity, provide us with the power of ironic representation (Galewski, 2008) to others, which throws recognition and misrecognition into play in ways that open “opportunity for deliberation and the potential rejection of social scripts, which get mapped onto one’s body” (Snorton, 2009, p. 83).

(Re)Mapping Our Bodies—Fem(me)ininity and Mas(k)ulinity

Following a long tradition of recreating, refiguring, and playing with language as an act of feminism (Douglas, 2004; Duggan & McHugh, 1996; Engelbrecht, 1990; Maltry & Tucker, 2008), we use the terms fem(me)inity and mas(k)ulinity to describe our identities of femme and butch. Although both femme and butch performances may be considered reenactments of normative notions of femininity and masculinity, respectively, they are in fact not (Douglas, 2004; Rose & Camilleri, 2002; Silverman, 2017). Fem(me)ininity is quite different than femininity; although femme women may be mistaken for being feminine, theirs is a more conscious understanding of gender performance. Femme women are not working to attract the male gaze and they refuse the fate of “Girl-By-Nature”; instead, they are “Girl-By-Choice” (Duggan & McHugh, 1996, p. 154). In fem(me)ininity, there is always an understanding of the put-on, production, and performance of gender. Fem(me)ininity is a subversive enactment done by femme lesbians (Duggan & McHugh, 1996), it is inappropriately feminine (Douglas, 2004), and it is brazen (Rose & Camilleri, 2002). Fem(me)ininity is an “ironic representation” that marks “the femme body as an interruption, a way of making queerness appear in a moment of ambiguity and incongruity” (Galewski, 2008, p. 292). Fem(me)ininity has the power to blur boundaries and open up possibilities for new gender identities. It is these moments of ambiguity and incongruity that make fem(me)ininity a differential identity. As each femme performance of gender navigates the spaces of difference in distinctive ways, fem(me)ininity can be used as a weapon to dismantle the patriarchal gender binary.

Similarly, butch women, such as Kristin, while often mistaken for men, do not in fact want to be men. Theirs is a decidedly “female masculinity” that is inherent to being female bodied (Halberstam, 1998) and it is this female body that not only attracts femmes, but also makes the masculinity performed by the butch transgressive. Following the feminist scholars who introduced the term fem(me)inity as a way to describe the gender performance of femme lesbians, we offer the term mas(k)ulinity as a way to describe the gender performance specific to butch lesbians. Although butch is often used as “a receptacle [term] for all lesbian masculinity,” the actual performance of butch in everyday life is as a differential identity. Butch presents a broad spectrum of levels in her “investment in masculinity” (Halberstam, 1998, p. 120), some of which are subversive (p. 46). Through the notion of “female masculinity,” Halberstam (1998) associates Butch “with a playful desire for masculinity and a casual form of gender deviance” (p. 143). We go further, extending “female masculinity” to mas(k)ulinity, which is always subversive. Following Paechter (2006), who notes “not all masculinities are entirely masculine, or femininities feminine” (p. 262), we offer mas(k)ulinity as the inherent presence/absence of both masculinity and femininity within the butch’s gender performance. Mas(k)ulinity disrupts and reinvents power within relationships. We extend this thinking to fem(me)ininity—suggesting that it too presents a differential identity not only between masculinity and femininity, but also among femininities, which contributes to its transgressive power.

A Roadmap

We begin our narrative by situating our fem(me)ininity and mas(k)ulinity within our life stories. We then examine how our gender performances shape our ability to be visible and recognized for who and what we are, and who and what we want. In an ever-changing landscape of gender identity, sexual orientation, and gender performance, we identify ourselves within definitions that are at once completely at play and constrained by context/habitus. We then move to the physical space(s) where we met and interacted. An academic conference in a progressive northeastern city is both a professional and a social environment; it is a habitus that allows our genders and sexualities to be expressed fully rather than restricted. The spatiality of the conference and the city nurtures our relationship and its sense of power. The fluidity of our sexual identities comes even more into play as the day turns into night. We adhere to our roles and also explore the possibilities of the space in between. As the years pass and our evening becomes this article, we put forth our differential construction of butch and femme.

(In)Visibility

Kristin

When I was 9, maybe 10 years old, a bully called me “faggot.” Not “dyke” but “faggot.” Like the word “bulldike,” which Grahn (1984) describes as being “used on a woman like a whip,” faggot “set off an explosion of fear in my belly” (p. 135). I didn’t know what faggot meant, but it was said with such a spitting disgust that I knew I didn’t want to be one. Had I been older, I would have recognized the twofold insult—a delegitimizing of my sexuality and my gender. Had the kid been older, maybe he would have chosen “bulldike” instead and I would have heard a “grudgingly granted hint of respect” for not so much my lesbianism, but my toughness (Grahn, 1984, p. 135). I was tough, after all. I stood strong in the mud on a cold spring afternoon at the baseball field as the same kid repeatedly punched me in my right shoulder during a “fight.” I think he was trying to wear me down so that I didn’t have the strength to punch him back. For me, there was victory and dignity in standing there and taking it. In just being the visible me that provoked his anger and threatened his sense of self/world. On the contrary, I wonder if his father had told him to never hit a girl, but he had no advice on how to proceed with a thing like me—a rough and tumble scraped knee little league teammate. His avoidance of the face or stomach was a cautious compromise.

Rachel

In college, I was friends with a group of lesbians, 1990s girl power dykes, who called each other “woman” and who wouldn’t let me be a lesbian until I had sworn off men and become a vegetarian. I wasn’t ready to commit to a life of no men and no meat, and so I remained in the closet. Almost 10 years passed before I met another group of lesbians. These were grad school lesbians, and they were much more accepting of my undetermined sexuality and feminine gender performance. These women read queer theory and understood the nuances of gender identities. They knew sexuality was a continuum, they understood that “subjectivity is a process of ongoing personal construction” (Rooke, 2007, p. 236), and they gave me a space to explore my interest in women.

I met Ali at a Take Back the Night event I helped organize and I stayed with her for far too long. She did not want to commit and also didn’t want me dating other people, she insisted we share meals and “eat less together” because my body was not the type she was “accustomed” to, she threw tantrums when she didn’t get her way, and she constantly compared me to her ex-girlfriend, who I would never live up to. But Ali made me gay. Together, out in public, the world saw me as a lesbian. I fit in at lesbian bars and, when I smiled at the butch women, they finally smiled back. I became femme through her butch (Holtz, 2009). And I stayed with her because I needed her to be seen for who I was.

Making Ourselves Visible

Kristin

Coming out is hard when you are masculine. Or, at least, harder than I thought. I thought I’d be instantly visible and notorious as a gender/sexual outlaw. I was right about that. What I hadn’t thought about was how in pulling one part of me out of the closet, I was pushing another part of me into the closet. My female part. When you’re not read as a woman, seen as a woman, recognized as a woman—can you be a woman? I wondered. Could I be trans? But I did not feel “a ‘fierce and demanding’ drive” (Meyerowitz, 2006) toward anything other than my assigned female-at-birth body. “While [I] may be read as a man [I] live as an embodied woman” (Browne, 2004, p. 342). I occupied some border place, or, an impossible gender “demilitarized zone” (Stewart, 2017) vacated of both maleness and femaleness. Society had stuck me in limbo. Or, no man’s land.

My entire life had been spent hiding from, or making myself invisible to, the male gaze. In High School, I began to carry a considerable number of extra pounds. With my pudgy face and curly hair, my classmates not so endearingly referred to me as “Cabbage Patch.” The extra weight disconnected me from my own body and rendered me invisible as a sexual being to others. At the time I thought I was just big boned, or, had a slow metabolism; looking back, I was buying myself time to figure out my own relationship to my body (and sexuality) without the scrutiny of the heteronormative male gaze. By coming out as butch I made myself extra visible. I was not ready to submit myself to the male gaze and less ready for what that gaze meant. Not objectification or desire, but competition, jealousy, and anger. Disdain for the threat I posed to manhood—recognized through my visible masculinity yet fueled through my invisible femininity and therefore not quite femaleness. This is the nature of my mas(k)ulinity—a glorious amalgam of masculinity and femininity—which, as a differential identity, throws both traditional genders on their ears by constantly playing each against the other.

As a result, I was (and continue to be) gazed upon like an exotic animal in the zoo. People saw me as neither male nor female but rather “a hybrid or something” (Hollibaugh, 2000, p. 77). What is that? Kinda looks like a man/woman. I wasn’t a man/woman, I was a woman producing herself differentially against the binaries of male/female, masculine/feminine, butch and femme, and causing commotion because eyes are trained to see absolutes and to categorize based on relational difference (Saussure, 1983). These eyes see masculinity, while I live and breathe mas(k)ulinity, which conceals or disguises my underlying femaleness and politicizes my gender expression, much in the same way your fem(me)ininity politicizes your performance of your more normative looking femininity. Both of our gender performances are imbued with, and derived from, power, which is reciprocal and shared between us as butch and femme. It is our individual and collective power that transforms our “look” of normative masculinity and femininity into identities of transgressive mas(k)ulinity and fem(me)ininity. Fem(me)ininity and mas(k)ulinity illustrate how our identities are expressed as differentials to both the hetero- and gender-norm, while also to each other.

Rachel

Coming out is hard when you’re feminine. When you’re not read as gay, seen as gay, recognized as gay, and not entirely sure you are gay, you get stuck in limbo. I had not yet cultivated my fem(me)ininity, only femininity. My life had been spent appealing to the male gaze and changing how I looked to appeal to my newfound interest in the mas(k)uline gaze, did not come easily.

I wore high heels to my first lesbian concert.

It was outdoors.

It was a folk band.

I didn’t want to change my look and give up my femininity yet I didn’t know how to be feminine and also attract women. Those eyes, the ones “held by a stranger fractionally longer then decorously necessary,” the ones that establish “a deft, brief and secret kinship” (Munt, 1998, p. 6), alluded me. Even today, many of the eyes I desire on me are still untrained. For all of the long-held glances, the drinks at lesbian bars, and the attempts at looking more gay, I still struggle to be seen. I am an object of sexual interest in a community where I am not equally accepted (Walker, 1993). I am not the first femme to suffer from and lament invisibility. There is a legacy of literature discussing how and why I remain unseen.

Although I haven’t entirely changed my look, I have embraced a fem(me)ininity, which is quite different. It is intentional and empowering. I choose how to wear traditionally feminine attire, I know how to command sexual admiration, and I do it only when I want to (Levitt, Gerrish, & Hiestand, 2003). In doing so, I’ve changed the way people look at me. I occupy a space that can be seen. I know how to get noticed by the women I desire. I’ve changed the way I look at women so that they now see me. I’ve always known the power in being objectified, in allowing myself to be an object of desire (Levitt et al., 2003), but now I know how to be objectified by women.

You see, although these days “I’m a queer femme who (still) passes as straight, at least to the untrained eye” (Sharman, 2009, p. 86), it took me years to come to this place. For much of my life, I was feminine and not yet a femme; I didn’t know the difference or how to differentiate between the power of feminine and the power of femme. I didn’t understand how my gender performance and my sexual orientation were in contrast. I saw the butch women I wanted and their femme partners and I couldn’t see how or why I was different. In the process of learning my femme identity, I also discovered the butch performance of identity I desire, mas(k)ulinity. Together, your butch and my femme create the balance of sexuality because our differences are powerful and sexual; they are differential. We know each other because we speak the same language (Engelbrecht, 1990). I do not desire any performance of butch identity; I desire you, your mas(k)ulinity. Your short hair and bow tie are the outside markers; however, your comfort in being a woman is also where the attraction emerges. As much as any gender performance can come “natural” to anyone (which we all know it cannot), you wear your butchness as a woman with comfort and ease and it is enticing.

Kristin

I see you as femme. So, therefore, you are femme. But before being seen as femme, you had to be made as femme, just as I had to be made as butch (Wittig, 1980, p. 103). I wonder if you had a femme version of “Butch Al” as the character Jess did in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. As a baby butch I had mine—her name was Leki and she taught me the ins and outs of being a “good” butch. Yes. There were bad butches—the misogynistic ones, the ones performing normative, toxic masculinity. Leki taught me a differential form of masculinity, a subversive butch mas(k)ulinity that is decentering and which refracts rather than anchors the gender performance of either side of the binary. Mas(k)ulinity, along with fem(me)ininity, recognizes the constant presence/absence of both masculinity and femininity within the gender performance, which disrupts and reinvents power within relationships. Whereas heterosexual couplings are traditionally based on a male/subject, female/object hierarchy, Leki reminded me there were no objects in butch and femme relationships—only Subject and Other/Self—“two categories [that] are equal in power and value” (Engelbrecht, 1990, p. 92). This fluidity is the opposite of patriarchy.

Thanks to Leki—who taught me differential ways of being butch within the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning) community—and the lived experience of my marginalized social position, I quickly acquired a butch, lesbian, and queer habitus that allowed me to survive these past 20 years. In addition to being differential identities, butch and femme can be performed as deferential identities. I became and remain adept at the “quick changes” necessary to fit, or “pass,” in a variety of physical spaces. I take my tie off in the car in the rest stop parking lot before I head in to use the Ladies room. Unlike Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake for refusing to take off men’s clothes, I cast off my “ceremonial butch” role (Grahn, 1984) to conform to the habitus of the NY Thruway rest area women’s room, which I read as “no men allowed—and this means you.” To seal the deal, and insure that I am read as “woman,” I speak in a higher pitch and smile much more than necessary. I crave to be recognized as a woman, yet few women in these spaces share the social position necessary to “possess the code” and read me as such (Bourdieu, 1989).

When I step into spaces where the social distance is collapsed—where we share more similar social positions and lived experiences—the risk of not being recognized as a woman, or, of being misrecognized as a man is mitigated. I am always certain to put on my butch costume at a conference: a tie (long or bow), a vest, and short-sleeve shirts to show off my heavily tattooed (and well-toned) arms. I know you will see me.

Rachel

I see you as butch. So, therefore, you are butch. But before being seen as butch, you had to be made as butch, just as I had to be made as femme (Wittig, 1980, p. 103). When I was coming out, I had no role models; I did not know about fem(me)ininity. I spent hours watching The L Word wondering how these beautiful feminine lesbians knew the other beautiful feminine lesbians were gay. These women felt like peers; well-educated, White, upper middle class, stylish, and urban. So much of what I was reading about lesbian identity invoked working-class stories, rural communities, and homophobia; I felt no connection to these stories or to these women, although I did find myself attracted to the butch women in the stories.

I watched the women of The L Word and wanted to be seen as they were seen. I also wondered if I was really gay because I didn’t find them sexually attractive. I didn’t yet know of, didn’t yet understand, the differential that exists between butch and femme lesbians that I desired. I knew the stories I read of femmes and butches together made sense to me and I knew I found my friend Desi sexually attractive, and that one girl in college who looked like a boy, I’ll never forget her; but where were the well-educated, well dressed, professional butch women? Then I met Ali.

When straight friends asked me why I wouldn’t just date a man if I wanted to date a woman that looked like a man, I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t yet have the words to speak. I just had a feeling. Without butch–femme models around to emulate or replicate, I didn’t have the role models I needed, I didn’t know how to be who I was.

Around the time of my coming out, I was also writing my dissertation. One of my chapters is on Jenny, from The L Word. Jenny is the character everyone loves to hate and the character whose journey from heterosexual to lesbian is the entry way for many viewers of the show (Moore, 2007); she became my role model. Not only is she Jewish like me, but she too struggles with understanding her sexual identity. When she cuts her hair short as part of her transformation, she nods to the unrecognizability of femme lesbians and to my short haircut in college. Yet she also acknowledges it’s not about the hair, it was never about the hair, there is something more. There is a look. A look I could not figure out. A look I desperately wanted to have.

When Jenny dates Moira/Max, I finally saw a relationship that made sense to me, and a character on the show to whom I was sexually attracted. But Jenny’s peers criticized Moira for being too butch and laughed at Jenny and Moira’s relationship for replicating heteronormative pairings. But it didn’t. They, you and I, we offer something particular to lesbian habitus. We offer something empowering, something with the potential to disrupt patriarchal heteronormativity. Their relationship of fem(me)ininity and mas(k)ulinity, just like ours, creates a differential form of gender performance and power dynamics.

Seeing Each Other: At First Sight

Kristin

I see you, from behind, talking to a copresenter after our session. Even through my “work mode” gaze that is not calibrated for sexualization, I recognize your femininity and think—cute dress. When you turn around and look at me, I really see you. I don’t think. I know. I see your fem(me)ininity and know you. The differences between us are visually stunning. You curvy, sexy, girly; me muscular, angular, boyish. But the differences are gradated; differential rather than absolute; slippages of knots along a rope of self/other being pulled tighter and tighter with desire. My mas(k)ulinity calibrates to your fem(me)ininity and falls into line. The “social distances inscribed in our bodies, or into the relation[s] to our bodies, to language and to time collapse, thus giving us a sense of our [shared] place” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 17)—as butch and femme. Finally, eye contact. Held one . . . two . . . three . . . seconds (too) long. The mutuality of sly smiles of recognition (Munt, 1998), the “revolution” that begins “when people look each other in the eyes, say ‘I want,’ and mean it” (Dorothy Allison, Foreword, p. xiii, Hollibaugh, 2000).

My want is for you and for me. For whereas “I desire that which I do not have,” which is your fem(me)ininity, you desire for that which you do not have, my mas(k)ulinity. This act produces a form of “(self) recognition” for us both (Engelbrecht, 1990, p. 92), that creates the differentiality of butch and femme identities. I see the trace of your difference, which opens your appearance as feminine and allows me to put a name to you—femme (Derrida, 1976). As with Derrida’s substitution of the “e” of difference with an “a” to make différance, the substitution of fem(me)ininity for femininity or mas(k)ulinity for masculinity cannot be detected when spoken but makes all the difference. Flush with our lesbian habitus, we both possess the code to read each other’s différance. We need no words to establish that recognition. Our bodies speak the “language of lesbianism” produced through our mutual desire.

Rachel

At first, I don’t see you. My phone is dying and the room is full. Finding a place near an outlet is my priority. I’m at the panel, to appease a friend and be supportive of colleagues from graduate school. I’ve heard their work before and now that my phone is alive and well, I am distracted with messages and emails. Plus, my seat near the outlet makes it hard to see the panelists. But then, I see you. You come out from behind the table, you walk around the room, you take up space in a way that draws me to you. You immediately have my attention and I watch you as you walk through owning your body. I wonder if my friends know you or if you are a random participant they’ve never met before. Do I have a chance of meeting you? You get lost in theory and I get lost in you. You go over your time limit. You keep saying “My last point . . .” and then offer more points. I see my friend fuming. She is intolerant of people who don’t follow the rules; I like rule breakers and I am enjoying looking at you. In your bow tie, with your mohawk, your flat chest, and your vest, I become acutely aware of how I look. Can you see me? Can you see the fem(me)ininity beyond the femininity? I watch your strong hands shifting your papers around and I wonder what those hands would feel like on me, in me. Everything about you draws me in, draws me to you. I feel myself come alive in your presence; the difference between us turns me on. Although, I could do without the projections about where your research is going and the empty promises you’re almost done.

As the panel comes to an end, I wonder if we will meet. I look at you and I hope I am cultivating the gaze that shows you I am interested. I want you to see me—as a lesbian:

By offering themselves as objects for butch gaze alone, femme women took control of their status as such. The admiring subject could only be another woman of her choice. It took a social foundation of equality and a shared valuing of the courage to relinquish the position of the viewer to elect to be the object of another’s gaze. (Levitt et al., 2003, p. 112)

As I move toward my friend on the panel, I also offer myself up to as an object for your gaze, I move by body in the hopes your eyes will follow me and in this way I take some control. The space I create between us awakens the lesbian habitus of performance and desire. You do watch me. And so it begins:

Maybe butch-femme is about tension, the good kind, the kind sexual tension is made of, where there’s a space for surprise, where you are not like me, and I am not like you. Maybe it’s about push, pull, balance, within me and between us. (Hillman, 2009, p. 246)

I ask my friend about you, I encourage her to invite you out with us the next night; you do not come. You make me wait, you have the power of coveting my desire, and you chose not to offer me yours (Levitt & Hiestand, 2005). I wonder if and when I will see you next. The feeling of rejection consumes me. I thought you had seen me. Desired me.

At Second Sight (Two Days Later)

Kristin

I see you. Last chair on the right. Your T-shirt says, “Femme,” and I think—“duh, don’t go wasting your symbolic capital on me.” I sit up (straighter) in my chair, squaring shoulders. I strive for eye contact as you stand, announcing, “this is a performance piece.”

You appear comfortable in your “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey, 1999) as if you are giving yourself away to me, yet you are not passive (Hollibaugh, 2000). You sense my eyes on you, and my wanting, and are willing to give yourself over to me because our visible differences are produced from invisible commonalities. I get the feeling you “like [your] boys to be girls and will appreciate how my ‘being a girl’ contextualizes and resignifies ‘masculinity’ in a butch identity” (Butler, 1990, p. 123). The “transgression” of my masculinity, performed by my female body, produces not only the mas(k)ulinity that diverts patriarchal expressions of power between us, but also the sexual tension that constitutes the object of desire. You make me object, which differs from the usual “subject” status given to male-presenting bodies and thus you transform my masculinity into mas(k)ulinity. You like my female body because it is female and because it performs mas(k)ulinity rather than masculinity, which are differentials to not only each other, but also your fem(me)ininity. My sexed body—female—is the “ground” that provides context for reading my mas(k)uline butch identity as “figure” (Butler, 1990). Without (either) one, I cannot be the other. So few people see both so at best I am fragmented; at worst, invisible.

Rachel

When I see you walk in to my performance panel, I know you’ve seen me, and you like me. No longer worrying about rejection, I see you’ve chosen to desire me. I’ve offered myself as an object to you, and, in doing so, I take control of our situation. As Rose and Camilleri (2002) suggest, my perspective is always “extrasensory” as in Berger’s (1972) “women watch themselves being watched” and Mulvey’s (1999) “to-be-looked-at-ness” but without the tragedy. Mine is an identity watched from two places (pp. 165-166). There is power in my objectification, a power you feed off. I command your attention. My role is to attract you and then choose whether or not to reject you; you have the choice of desire. I generate desire within you, whereas your desire coveted by me (Levitt & Hiestand, 2005). I read the look on your face as you read the word “femme” on my shirt and when I tell stories of sexual encounters, I feel your desire rise. The push pull happens here, in this academic space of a conference, surrounded by friends and strangers, we perform according to a lesbian habitus perceptible only to each other.

Kristin

“Butches have not been allowed to feel their own desire because that part of butch can be perceived by the straight world as male” (Hollibaugh, 2000, p. 78). Yet you desire me because I am not male. You desire my (fully) contextualized female body, which includes its “superimposed masculine identity” (Butler, 1990, p. 123), because it transgresses and destabilizes traditional notions of the sex/gender dyad. It is through your desire for me, your femme lesbian desire for my butch mas(k)ulinity, that my womanhood is recognized and made real. And it is through my desire for you, my butch lesbian desire for your fem(me)ininity, that opens a space for you to express your differential identity.

You do a wardrobe change. Actually two: one for the meditation conference session we both attend after your panel and another for the drinks that will happen later. I like that you have dressed for me. You have made yourself available to my gaze while also eschewing the male gaze. Differentially, you make your own meaning—of your gender, your sexuality (Mulvey, 1999)—and it is hot. As we move from our own performances as scholars in each of our panels, to being spectators together in a third session, the knot on our rope of differential identities slides toward sameness. Although we are always already butch and femme, we are now seeing through the same eyes as scholars. The idea of “later” is on my mind and shaping how we orbit each other’s bodies and how we perform differently in this shared space. The eyes of those around us begin to see what is happening, perhaps for the first time, even though they have known us for years.

Rachel

The validation we feel creates the “social distances” which “are inscribed in bodies or, more precisely, into the relation to the body, to language and to time” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 17). Together, we create a queer space that grows from our lesbian habitus. The “imagined” space in between us, the energy we manifest, is one that is “contingent & produced” (Martin, 2003, p. 376) through our sexuality, our words, and when our bodies are recognized. That no other person in the room exists within the space we’ve created points to the dynamic of lesbian desire. Unlike “phallogocentric subjectivity [which] relies on an essential visual distinction of binary (sexual) difference between Subject and Object (phallus/absence) [and] is inimical to lesbian(ism)” (Engelbrecht, 1990, p. 86), the difference between us is not binary, it is differential. As lesbians, we are the same as much as we are different; we have no biological or typological basis for perpetuating the patriarchal model of subject/object (Engelbrecht, 1990). But we are different and we depend on a difference that varies according to circumstance, time, and place.

Later, That Night

Rachel

As we move to the restaurant—a place that I have been to many times—we are seated one apart at the bar. The space we have created still exists but is now hindered by another body, a woman who you have been flirting with and been longing for. A person who has been straight her whole life and you’re not sure if being her first is of interest to you. Knowing that you are not my first, or even my second, is appealing to you. With me, there will be less need for explanation, for discussion, there is something that exists between our bodies that doesn’t require words.

The physical space we occupy and then create sets us apart from the others who surround us. Eventually, the woman leaves and I take her place next to you. I bump your knee with my thigh. I laugh and put my hand on your arm. I feign like I need to readjust on the bar stool just to feel the strength of your shoulders. You remain stoic, you play it cool, you let me come for you. You are butch and I am femme and the differential performances of our gender determine our manifestation and performance of desire. Our recognition of this differential is communicated through our flirting, it is a validation for us both, and the sexual energy intensifies as the evening progresses.

The bar is in the city’s “gayborhood,” and when we move on, we head toward a karaoke bar. We move with a group from the conference through the city streets. With each block you and I move closer to each other. Soon, we are holding hands. We know we will spend the night together. Without discussion, there is understanding. There is the energy that radiates when we are different and also the same. The others, our friends, surround us but they don’t come between us, they don’t perceive the habitus that we so electrically feel through our recognition of each other. Without each other, our butchness and femmeness have less meaning as the recognition for them ignores as inherent aspects of who we are. In the space we create, of sexuality and of otherness, there is equality; there is a redefining of power and a reimagining of what can be.

Kristin

I see you. Sly, from the corner of my eye, as you enter the bar. Stop slouching. Look cute. Look . . . involved in talking with someone else. I know the drill. I see you at once different/same; object/subject. I bring you to life through my gaze, whereas as my equal/other you carry yourself as powerful maker of your own meaning (Mulvey, 1999). You are femme, which is positioned differentially rather than absolutely in relation to me as butch. Through my gaze, I show my desire, while leaving space for you to orchestrate your [femme] sexuality (Hollibaugh, 2000). I watch your body move in ways that ask me to expose my desire and assure me you’ll respond (Hollibaugh, 2000).

Oh. Hi. Great you could join us. The eyes—connect, disconnect—not held too long, we have an audience. Small talk. Small talk. Margarita, margarita, guacamole. Hand on knee, nonchalant and recognized. The eyes. Nonaccidental, nonplatonic. Later. And now. The seat next to me opens up and you slide in. Our bodies fall into natural orbit around one another, opening spaces for the becoming of each of our genders (Butler, 1990). Our lesbian desire—our wanting of the same (woman) and different (mas(k)uline/fem(me)inine)—produces a differential, which is decidedly fluid and nonbinary. Performing our gender is not only an activity but also a coproduction. I open myself up to your gaze; you show me your desire; you make the initial move, while I take the risk of inviting you. I open the door for you and place my hand on your lower back to usher you in, you allow me to expose my desire through the movement of my hands on your body (Hollibaugh, 2000, p. 76).

The Morning After

Rachel

When I leave the following morning, I am acutely aware of my surroundings and I don’t want to leave. I want to stay in the world we’ve created on the borderlands of culture, the one that exists for a moment, outside of patriarchy. Before I leave, you scribble “R.S. + K.C.” on the wall designated by the host for guests to sign. Nestled among the other love notes of (seemingly heterosexual) couples who got engaged during their stay, or celebrated an anniversary, this sweet and simple notation makes our “queer bod(ies) visible through material and aesthetic processes” that are recognizable to all regardless of gender and sexual identity. It subtly creates a political moment of materialization (Rooke, 2007, p. 245) that reflects us.

The apartment is less than two blocks from my old apartment, the place I lived during graduate school. A place where I tried coming out and a place where I brought my first woman home—she was another feminine woman, we met online and then met for drinks. We were like two straight girls unsure of what to do. With you, years later, we know what to do, and we know what we want. We have come to a place of knowledge, no longer simple experimentation. As I walk back to my hotel room across the street from the conference, I look around the city I grew up in and think back to mornings in my 20s taking a similar walk home from men’s apartments. The walk does not change depending on my sexuality, the city does not change as a result of my gender performance, but I have changed. The night with you has confirmed my changes, my performance of lesbian has become recognizable to those by whom I want to be recognized, by women like you.

Kristin

We wake up way too early. I have an 8:30 a.m. panel. I meet a fellow panelist early for breakfast, before walking over to the conference hotel. Although we’ve had flirtation, or rather—I think we might have had flirtation—I don’t know where she stands in terms of sexuality. She does not see me as you see me. She sees the edginess of my in-your-face gender nonconformity; she sees the feminist whose “Well, the patriarchy isn’t going to fuck itself” is unapologetic. She does not see me as mas(k)uline, only masculine. Unlike you, her eyes are only calibrated for normative identities, not differential identities. She lacks the code, the habitus, to read me as a full, complete person.

At breakfast she teases me, knowing what has happened last night, and she continues to tease me as we arrive at the conference room. “I think your girlfriend just walked by,” she says. I smile and rush to the hall like an excited schoolboy. I look left, right. I don’t see you. For the first time, I don’t see you. And without you, I go unseen too.

At the panel everyone sees me but no one recognizes me. Sure, I’m an obvious lesbian and thus recognized as such. But lesbian is the least of my identity. I am a butch. Ok, so they may have also recognized me as that because, well, the tie and such. Aesthetics rule the roost when it comes to identifying and labeling others. But I live a differential identity, one that is mas(k)uline and subversive in its silent différance. I think of our T-shirts—yours “Femme”; mine “Well, the patriarchy isn’t going to fuck itself.” Both deployed to generate recognition that our gender performances are not normative enactments of masculinity and femininity, but rather subversive identities oriented around mas(k)ulinity and fem(me)ininity.

Rachel

After showering and dressing, I am back at the conference for my last paper presentation. I’m presenting a paper in progress, a media-autoethnography (Boylorn, 2015; Manning & Adams, 2015; Stern, 2013) about Jenny (The L Word) and Ali from the Amazon series Transparent. As two of the only femme Jewish lesbians on television, they offer me a way to explore my intersectional identity; they offer me a way to “theorize how we use popular narratives and the characters in them to make sense of our own lives” (Manning & Adams, 2015, p. 196). My mother is one of the few people in the audience—it’s early Sunday morning, the fact we have an audience is impressive—she sees me as her daughter and in her heteronormative privilege doesn’t understand my need to write about gender performance. But she likes listening to and reading my work. The others in the room first see me as a woman and then come to see me as a Jew and as a lesbian because I identify myself as such. Nothing about me (except my name, although people regularly miss that cue) materializes my invisible identities (Silverman, 2014). I am feminine, I am White and therefore assumed Christian (Auster, 1993; Boyarin & Boyarin, 1997; Brodkin, 2004; Byers & Krieger, 2007; Pellegrini, 1997). My otherness must come out. I want to be seen without saying a word and I think back to our morning. The kiss at the door before I left, the look in your eyes because you see me, the way you make me feel because you see me. Right now I feel invisible. Until I feel attacked.

As is often the case, my work on Jewish identity in U.S. popular culture is condemned on the basis of Israeli politics. I want to reminisce about you but instead I am forced to defend my work as an act of feminism rather than an act of aggression. The audience member, in this particular case, forgets that Jews have been oppressed for as long as they have existed and instead can only focus on Israel as an apartheid state. My Judaism is masked by my Whiteness and therefore I am privileged, and any claims I make to oppression are for her, and so many others, denied. My lesbianism becomes invisible, or at least secondary to my Judaism—so much for intersectionality. I am reduced to a colonizer, an oppressor.

And really, I just want to be back in bed with you.

Now

Rachel

When I read your story of being called a faggot it hurts. I’ve never been called a name because of my sexuality. Yes, I’ve had it questioned by friends and family who don’t understand why I “switched” from men to women at 30. Yes, I’ve been told I’m too pretty to be a lesbian and asked repeatedly why I want to date women who look like men when I’m pretty enough to get myself a real man. But somehow none of that seems to compare to a small you, on the playground, being bullied for who you are. Kids can be so mean. I was bullied for being fat as a child and I wonder if the shame I still carry about my weight is like the shame you carry about your gender performance. I have no shame about my sexuality or my fem(me)ininity.

I grew up in and live in a community where sexual orientation is hardly an issue and by the time I came out, I had the theory, the pop-culture references, and social movements behind me supporting who I was. Who I am. I also privilege from passing as straight and being seen as feminine. Or is it a peril? (Walker, 1993) Within the patriarchy, I am invisible because I am assumed to be straight. You, however, see me and make me be seen by that same patriarchal structure. You have the symbolic capital. Your “symbolic power is a power of consecration or revelation, the power to consecrate or to reveal things that are already there” (Bourdieu, 1989, p. 23). With you, a butch, the world sees me as femme. For the outside world, I need your mas(k)ulinity for my fem(me)ininity to be recognizable, but inside the space we create, we see each other. We see the differences between us that reveal not only our gendered subjectivities but also our sexualities, out differential identities.

Kristin

I laughed out loud at the first draft of your comments about The L Word. I think about how different our experiences have been as a result of our different gender performance. Everyone in my grad school cohort assumed I would study LGBTQ topics—I was the token overt gay, and that’s what tokens do. I was also a White, masculine presenting overt gay, which allowed me to “claim space” by my very presence (Cole, 2016, p. 102) and to make choices that were respected and not questioned by my mentors and peers. I studied the framing of neoliberalism and socialism in Costa Rica instead. What I studied did not determine or communicate my sexuality because I looked like a big ol’ dyke. And my sexuality did not matter, for the same reason. For you, your seemingly normative femininity made your sexuality matter, and your work became a source of visibility for your fem(me)ininity.

Visibility was a problem with The L Word, which left me wondering too. Where were the butches? And why were all the femmes into each other? It was not until Season 3 that we got Moira, who transitioned to Max that same season. Tasha came along during Season 4 and seemed kind of butch-ish, largely due to her active status in the military. There had always been Shane though—a lothario who wore an amazing amount of eyeliner. What I saw in The L Word characters, however, was an unknowing glance into fem(me)ininity. Although they all looked normatively feminine, they each operated from a center of power that is stereotypically associated with the masculine. These femme couples were imbued with power that slid from one to the other—in differential, or deferential—based on the situation. Differential in terms of one has more power one time, the other more power another time. Deferential in that the slippage of power deferred the reading of masculine or feminine as the behavior contradicted the look. As femmes, these characters were performing fem(me)inity, not femininity; and fem(me)ininity is always in differential to, and thus imbued with, mas(k)ulinity.

When I read your declaration “[I] have the symbolic capital,” it hurts. I understand the privilege and power I have been afforded based on both my Whiteness and masculine gender performance and I hate it. Although I may have the more obvious symbolic capital because “butches [are] known by their appearances,” you are also powerful. “Fems [are known] by their choices” (Nestle, 1984, p. 233). Just as my mas(k)ulinity develops through, and reveals, my “already there” femaleness, your fem(me)ininity develops through, and reveals, your “already there” lesbianism. In this way, as your differential fem(me)ininity meets with my differential mas(k)ulinity, we create a place where patriarchy has no foothold.

Interrupting the Patriarchy

We create our identities in the spaces of our communities (Brown, 2014), of the conferences we attend, of cities we walk through. The conference opens up the space for us to see each other. Arguably, the conference is queer space; gender-neutral signs cover the symbols of male and female on restroom doors; masculine women, feminine men, and gender-neutral presenting people abound and perform their identities with a freedom unlike in other spaces; papers and panel explore all forms of queer theory, feminist theory, and intersectionality; each year, as academics, we push the boundaries in effort to shift the systems that shape us, and in this space that we create, sometimes something new happens.

And this time, something new did happen. We met and spent a night together. Years later, we write about it to offer a new understanding of gender performances. We theorize around fem(me)ininity and introduce the concept of mas(k)ulinity. Our shared experience of the city, the conference, the neighborhood, the bar, and then, finally, the bedroom, offers us a chance to develop a new idea about identity. We perform iterations of butch and femme—little repetitions that are part and parcel of a lesbian habitus that allows us to recognize ourselves and others. Although we know the rules of the game, we also recognize that every iteration, or “version” of butch and femme, is an alteration or modification of a sign, because it is produced within an “infinity” of contexts that can never simply have one meaning (Derrida, 1988). Neither our sexed bodies, nor our butch and femme identities, can lay claim to “the real” (Butler, 1990) because the context within which we produce ourselves is always already undecideable (Derrida, 1982). Whether at the conference, in the bar, and really, everywhere, we respond with our differential identities, produced through the slippages of ground/figure, male/butch, female/femme, and all that’s in between. The nature of our identities manifest in the lesbian habitus we bring to the spaces we move through and exist within. This is not to deny the patriarchy’s hegemony, but there is power in the margins for new understandings to take place. In the margins, within the moments of slippage, no position has the upper hand. There is no absence of power, for it is always already present yet it is refracted and diffuse. Patriarchy is thus interrupted within, and by, the differentiality of butch/femme relationships.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was partially supported by the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Faculty Research Development Program.

ORCID iD

Rachel E. Silverman

Author Biographies

Rachel E. Silverman, PhD, is an associate professor of communication at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University. Her research focuses on narratives of women’s health and the intersection of LGBT and Jewish identity in popular culture and real life.

Kristin Comeforo is an associate professor of communication at the University of Hartford. Her research comes from the margins – it is intersectional and feminist, and focuses on gender, sexuality, and race in our everyday lives and popular culture.

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