I Read It: The Sublime Lesbian Feminism of 'Stone Butch Blues'

Leslie Feinberg's magnum opus lives up to its reputation, though not in ways one might expect.

Narrative

When I first opened the pages of Stone Butch Blues, I did not expect to find my own past inscribed within its margins.

To be sure, the book is very much grounded in a specific time, place, culture and moment. It is a dramatized historical narrative that captures the tumultuous mood of the US-American social upheavals that began in the 1960s, through a queer working-class lens. The reader is carried across decades alongside the protagonist, Jess, stopping at the very cusp of the 90’s, in the thick of AIDS activism and the gradually increasing visibility and acceptance of queer people. It is an optimistic, hopeful tale, something that is easy to forget in the midst of its most brutal and brutalizing chapters, when Feinberg’s words unflinchingly spell out the horrific traumas that working-class lesbians and queers had to endure in order to simply live as themselves. Somewhat uncharitably, but not entirely inaccurately, one could describe Stone Butch Blues as one butch’s struggle against an unending wave of corrective, re-gendering violence that she only just manages to outpace. While unapologetic in its depiction of the excesses of the heterosexual regime, however, the story is so much more than a parade of patriarchal savagery.

Gender is the burning, white-hot core of Stone Butch Blues, duly recognized as a relentless force that Marks and Others. Jess, very early on, recognizes herself as a “he-she”, a slur becoming her first word to describe the manner in which she is unique and unlike most girls of her age. “Unique” is synonymous with “aberrant” under patriarchy, however, and despite how clumsy and futile Jess’ attempts to escape the looming eventuality of womanhood are, heterosexual reclamation, re-gendering violation finds her all the same. Jess’ existence is viewed by those around her as an error to stamp out, an anomaly to redress, setting the tone for the remainder of her whole life. Stone Butch Blues is the story of Jess and her lifelong battle with Gender.

It is not a battle that abates even when Jess finds her compatriots, her shield-sisters and her comrades throughout the various stages of her life, even when her family bonds are forged in love and community ties rather than the flimsy shackles of blood. Jess is a butch, a lesbian defined by her masculinity, her stoicism and her quiet resilience, but even finding her people does little more than provide her with friends and allies to lose, casualties to tally up in the war-zone of the degendered wastes. Lesbians aren’t women, we are reminded every time a cop car drives up in front of a bar, and the paddy wagons are here to round them back up behind womanhood’s iron bars. The sentence for defying heterosexuality is worse than death: it is torture, it is repeated, sustained and indefinite violation at the hands of the regime’s most debased, lurid enforcers, its most shameless and soulless pigs. Humanity is found in words and touches of comfort exchanged between cells, in hot bubble baths that can wash away grime but not shame and powerlessness, but the animalistic clawing of the patriarch rakes at their very spirits, diminishing their numbers, their selves, and their sanities. Queerness is an occupied territory, Feinberg grimly reminds us, and its soldiers are only too willing to pillage it hollow.

Suffering, ubiquitous though it may be, does not define us, and it does not define Jess, either. For despite the horrors she endures, hurtling herself forward through the barbarous landscape without letting cracks deepen into fissures, Jess’ defining attribute remains solidarity. She is an organizer on the factory floor and the streets of New York alike, a calm, dependable presence whom others constantly learn to rely on. Jess is flawed, limited, a person, someone who must grow and learn at her own pace, but the core principle that rules her no matter what barriers she intends to cross, whether racial or gendered or classed, is strength in togetherness, is power in unity, is unbreaking fortitude of the union. Feinberg’s socialism streaks and highlights the pages with its brilliant red hues, reminding us all what it means to fight for rights and dignity: recognizing our common struggle.

Ironic, given Jess’ personal struggle with difference. Despite her desire to unify, Jess has always been a woman apart, someone who struggles most keenly with Gender’s penetrating Mark upon her body. Her butchness makes her stand out, alienates her from womanhood and manhood alike, drawing dirty stares and angry glares from people who reflexively fume, for some reason, when they cannot ascertain precisely what’s in your pants. In a bold but truly desperate maneuver, Jess resorts to back-alley treatments and medical intervention to reshape her body and sex into a form that more closely resembles society’s expectations, choosing stealth in the face of inexhaustible direct fire. She acquires a prescription for testosterone, masculinizing her face and figure, and saves up for an off-the-books top surgery, shedding the breasts that have plagued her since puberty with the sexualizing gaze of heterosexual desirability. Faced with a world that refuses to accept what she is, Jess compromises, choosing to navigate the Gendered labyrinth as man, at least outwardly.

I could never have guessed, when I began to read Jess’ heartbreaking account of her lonely, isolated existence as a man, that I would see my own pain reflected in her words. Jess had wanted a flat chest for the vast majority of her life, as well as the ability to exist in public without being hyperscrutinized as only a Third-Gendered queer can be, but the peace that this ceasefire brings is a troubled one, turbulent under the surface. Jess is now a closeted lesbian, moving through the world as a man, an experience that I would not wish on my most reviled foe, leave alone a marginalized woman simply trying to survive. She talks about flirting with a woman in a diner as man, and the uncanny dissonance of being a woman who loves women, but who isn’t seen as one, burrows its way into my being, barbed and bilious, shredding my heart with a pain I haven’t felt in years. Her past is erased, her future uncertain, and the man who presently stares back at her in the mirror isn’t someone she recognizes. It is like drowning, Jess says, or like being buried alive. She has become a ghost, haunting her own bones, bones whose shape and contours she no longer knows, can no longer claim.

Passing—unnoticed, unregarded, unseen—is its own form of Gendering violence, a ‘privilege’ exacted at a steep cost to one’s own sense of self.

So when Jess stops taking testosterone, when she shaves herself one last time and resolves to look into a mirror and finally, finally see herself, it is a moment of quiet triumph. Her hips fill out, her stubble is zapped away and she becomes something she has no names for—not yet, at least, not in the time she inhabits. Is Jess a butch, still? Is she a lesbian? She, and the book, answer with a resounding yes. Jess finds herself—in the arms of a transsexual woman, in the acceptance of a lesbian community, in the incompatibility of her fully-realized self with the ghosts of her past life. Jess becomes, and she does so in a way that neither capitulates to patriarchy nor compromises with it in ways she cannot bear. A past of people just like her beckons towards a future of the same, a closed ring of infinite possibility of where we have been and where we will go. We see, in the book’s final pages, its vision for a future free of the present’s burdens: it is transsexual, it is lesbian, it is phantasmatic, yes, but a dream more real than anything this paltry patriarchy can conjure. It is a world free, finally, of Gender.

Meta-Narrative

We inhabit a media landscape that does not merely neglect the butch, but one that seeks to erase her entirely.

This has as much to do with derision, revulsion, and degradation as it does absence. While the butch is a figure unlikely to so much as peripherally inhabit, leave alone figure prominently within a text, the masculine woman is an oft-invoked specter to browbeat those who aspire to embody such a designation. Sexual difference remains the core of patriarchal organization: women are female, and so feminine, and so any desire for or display of masculinity is abominable. The ugly feminist, the aged, lonely spinster surrounded by feline companions, the man-hating dyke—all are figures summoned over campfires, expected to scare girls straight.

It is hardly a surprise, then, that Stone Butch Blues has acquired not merely prominence, but an unlikely canonization within lesbian and butch circles. Jess is not simply a butch protagonist, she is the butch protagonist, one whose journey touches so many aspects of “our history”. The rush to hold up, elevate to eminence, and indeed preserve within lesbian consciousness this indelibly, unapologetically butch text has preceded the need to ask some rather important, clarifying questions—such as who the “our” refers to when regarding the book as a historical artifact.

For one thing, many of us hail from contexts where Stone Butch Blues does not so much describe a past that leaves prominent scars on the present as it does darkly mirror the way queer people are treated under the extant regimes we formerly inhabited or continue to struggle against. The police raids, economic and sexual exploitation, and pitched battles for labor justice are a reality that many lesbians still contend with globally, making Stone Butch Blues an oddly resonant narrative in its centering of struggle, that inalienable fixture of queer life in periphery and metropole alike. Strange, then, how this struggle does not constitute the focus of arguments that hold forth the text’s universalism; rather, Stone Butch Blues finds itself dubiously positioned as a kind of Butch Bible, a credo to guide young butches and teach them how to embody their identities.

While understandable, the temptation to sanctify the text is nonetheless misguided. Jess Goldberg is a stunningly portrayed character, a butch lesbian whose every facet and contour is offered up for the reader’s scrutiny, but she is flawed and troubled and frequently wrong in the way only an immaculately-crafted, thoroughly-humanized character can be. Jess’ stoic facade is one she maintains unevenly to her own detriment, one her temper frequently flares past, resulting in her isolating herself far more than she cares to be. She neglects people who care deeply for her and deliberately, viciously wounds some whom she cares for; the definitive turning point of her life and self-actualization is when she decides, finally, to lower her walls around someone who is much on guard as she is, and to have that vulnerability and acceptance reciprocated. Her lowest point is when she dons manhood for a time, fortifying herself in the armor of gendered legibility and invisiblization, a process that she both views and experiences as the nailing shut of her own coffin. Jess is a terrifically relatable character, but a blueprint she is not—she is, arguably, much more a cautionary tale.

Which brings up another odd aspect of the book’s reputation: Stone Butch Blues has been strangely heralded as a celebration of trans manhood, when its actual pages profess a rather different story. Once, on page 155, Jess’ friend Jan has this to say:

“Yeah, but I’m not like Jimmy. Jimmy told me he knew he was a guy even when he was little. I’m not a guy.”

Neither Jess nor Ed—her friend who started on hormones before her—ever conceptualize the choice to start or not start hormones in terms of an affinity for manhood or an affirmation of a sincerely-professed identity. It is discussed and regarded as a negotiation, a strategic maneuver, an attempt to survive a harsh and hostile landscape even if the measures taken are drastic. It is an attempt that Ed does not survive, and Jess herself, once she starts on the path, questions whether she has or will.

Manhood, ultimately, is not aspirational or even much of a refuge for Jess. It is treated like as much of an imposition on butches as womanhood, a clumsy formulation intended to make sense of the butch’s supposedly paradoxical existence of “he-she”. A woman who rejects womanhood can only be a man, society supposes, and Jess sees in this cissexist, limited polarization a lifeline that proves to be no life at all. It becomes necessary to analyze the novel here not as an account of a real person’s life, but as fiction, and the themes of Jess’ own doomed bargain with patriarchy are clear: her acceptance of the idea that the only alternative to womanhood is manhood nearly seals her fate, dooms her to a freedom more confining that anything she’s experienced her whole life, detaches her from her own personhood, and almost erases everything she is and could be.

I somehow doubt this is the relationship most trans men have to their identities.

Most frustrating of all, however, is the elision of the book’s relationship to trans women. If butches are a rare find in media, texts that treat trans women with dignity and humanity are rarer still. The hyperscrutiny directed at transsexual women is frequently mistaken for a privilege when it is surveillance, pathologization, and rhetorical violence, a equivocation of trans womanhood with a fully-dehumanized sexual object, a reality that makes the thoughtfulness of Feinberg’s portrayals all the more impressive, especially considering the time it was written in. The sense of kinship I felt with the text was, to my increasing surprise, heartily returned, with Feinberg herself drawing parallels between her protagonist and the transsexual women she encountered both in and around the lesbian bar scene, as well as outside of it. Butch pain—Jess’ pain—reflects and is reflected in that of the transsexual woman, an implicit throughline that is explicated in the text’s conclusive arc, when the woman who Jess is able to finally let in is also transsexual.

This is an elision that is doubly frustrating due to the revisionism that posits feminist, lesbian, and women’s movement as rigidly bordered and distinct to the transsexual struggle in ahistorical ways, an elision that Feinberg’s text is determined to rectify but the meta-narrative around the selfsame text reinforces. It is frustrating how the TE”RF” narrative regarding second-wave feminism’s transmisogyny is reproduced uncritically by motivated gender-conservative actors and their putative opponents alike, and frustrating that despite Stone Butch Blues’ putative canonization this aspect of its message remains conspicuously buried, even when the TE”RFs” in question both noticed and heavily opposed it! Janice Raymond herself saw fit to attempt to take aim at Feinberg’s novel in the 1994 edition of Transsexual Empire. Stone Butch Blues’ gall to humanize and empathize with transsexual women registered to Raymond as an unforgivable transgression, decrying it as “politically disappointing”—inadvertently high praise from one with her politics—and recoiling from its utter rejection of patriarchal gender.

Perhaps that is the one concession we can make to Sister Raymond—she correctly identified where the book’s subversive potential lay, an act that seems to be beyond much of the text’s modern adherents.

Political disappointment, after all, is not a stranger to Stone Butch Blues, less due to its own few shortcomings and more to be attributed to the fandom that has sprung up around it. Feinberg’s own brilliance aside, she was not above restating and reifying existing feminist principles and theory. Her keen awareness of the movement’s contours infects the story’s events, and those with a discerning eye can easily pick out the stances and positions she denounces or adopts, can trace the individual battles of the lesbian-feminist sex wars that Feinberg chooses to correspond on. Her disdain for the TE“RF” line on butchfemmes as “reproducing heterosexuality” is both palpable and humorous, and her utter rejection of the heterosexual regime in plot, theme, and motif is as triumphant as it is spiteful.

That is what Stone Butch Blues is—resistance in a hard-bound brick of a text, a rock hewn from the miasma of lesbian-feminist history that recenters its utter and deliberate rejection of gender. It is a battlecry demanding we stare into the mirror and smash the face of the man that patriarchy keeps trying to make us into when it cannot stop us from shedding womanhood’s shackles. Stone Butch Blues is in many ways a transfeminist text, a historical anomaly raising the banner of transsexual liberation in a time when such a thing was unthinkable—and remains so to this day. Read Stone Butch Blues, not because it will tell you exactly how to be a butch, a lesbian, or a transsexual, but because Feinberg’s call to action, call to desertion, call to refusal, remains every bit as relevant and resonant today as it was when it was released.

Kill the man who wears your face, and tear his flesh apart to reveal your own.