ABSTRACT
Butch is the recognisable public form of lesbianism; despite the media hype of chic femme in the early 1990s, it communicates a singular verity, to dykes and homophobes alike. Butch – despite the evidence of butch heterosexual women, and the passion of femmes for women – is the gospel of lesbianism, inevitably interpreted as the true revelation of female homosexuality. Butch is the signifying space of lesbianism; when a butch walks into a room, that space becomes queer. In this essay I intend to explore how those signals have been ascribed onto the butch body, historically through pathologisation, and more recently in a reverse discourse of elevation, circumscribed by the pride/shame dichotomy. Butch pride is invested in the butch’s generation of a lesbian presence, her making of actual and symbolic space is predicated on her own apparent hermeticism. For the butch to shift space, her own boundaries must be secured; her apotheosis is in the stone butch’s untouchability. Crucial to the butch performance is a sense of autonomous embodiment, an imperviousness which constructs the butch body as a sexual agent, something that does rather than is. Butch phallicism becomes spread across the surfaces of the body, which are eroticised because of the paradox of inside/outside extant in the enigma of the masculine woman. Butch, in common use, is a term as unstable as the gender configurations of masculinity and femininity. Indeed, butch and femme are often sympathetically interpreted as lesbianism’s corresponding gender roles. Gayle Rubin describes butch as the ‘lesbian vernacular’, defining it so:
Butch is most usefully understood as a category of lesbian gender that is constituted through the deployment and manipulation of masculine gender codes and symbols.
