ABSTRACT
Roberta Osabe, for instance, left a lover in the 1980s because the woman had an “old-fashioned” idea of how femmes were supposed to conduct themselves. A woman who walked into a lesbian bar in a dress during the period was likely to have her lesbian identity questioned, and unlikely to have anyone ask her to dance. Performance theory’s focus on the social significance of bodily movement and adornment is quite compatible with anthropological studies of how people use ritual, work style, and dance to produce culturally specific notions of gender and selfhood. Organizers staged the dance as a one-time celebration invoking a theme that encouraged women to participate in a spirit of satire and costume. The marginalization of women who call themselves femme or butch lesbians also contrasts sharply with prefeminist working-class lesbian communities in which women generally adopted one or another of the categories as a persona, if not always as an identity.
