Opengender

The modern association of female-to-male crossdressing with lesbianism is sufficiently ubiquitous in western culture to be received as a necessary one. The connection is, however, of relatively recent date. The significance of the 'maiden' in male clothing across a range of cultures and time-frames is far too extensive even to summarise here. However, prior to the 19th Century in Europe, female-to-male crossdressing seems rather to have been associated with sexual laxity and female rebellion than with lesbianism or, indeed, with any particular psychological state of being. Of course, prior to the 'medicalisation' process, women loved women and engaged in (what would now be defined as) lesbian acts and crossdressing was considered sometimes to accompany inter-female acts of 'sodomy' (a catch-all term for illicit forms of penetrative intercourse) but not to be in any way coextensive, or even necessarily always connected, with such acts (Faderman, 1981; Rose, 1984; Smith-Rosenberg, 1885; Friedli, 1987; Trumbach, 1991: 121-123; Howard, 1993).

An association between crossdressing and lesbianism began generally to be made at the end of the 19th Century (Foucault, 1976; Faderman, 1981 and 1991; Rubin, 1984; Jeffreys, 1985: 102-126; Weeks, 1985). Foucault (1976) argued that there had been a shift away from a conceptualisation of (hetero)sexuality which had seen illicit sexual acts as proceeding from the soul's imponderable tendency to evil and towards a scientific discourse "which spoke, not of sin and salvation, but of bodies and life processes" (Foucault, 1976: 64). Darwinian biologism was a profound influence on late-19th-Century and 20th-Century scientific thinking about sexuality (Weeks, 1985: 67). The publication of Krafft-Ebing's (1886) sexological study had paved the way for an explosion of sexological literature (Weeks, 1985: 67). Science and medicine began to define a "homosexual personality." Ellis' influential study (1901) delineated 'inversion' as a congenital or organic condition — although not always "physically visible" in lesbian women (Ellis, 1901: 255-258). In Freud's work, 'inversion' figures as inversion of (sex) object choice (Freud, 1905: 46-52). In Ellis, it figures rather as an inversion of gender-identity. Most usually these modes of 'inversion' were elided together (as they were in European films of the 1920s and 1930s — see below). Through the processes of these biologistic and medicalising discourses, the lesbian body (rather than the soul) came to represent the site of lesbian 'difference.'

This naturalising representational order was frequently resented by lesbians (and gays); not least because of its extensive deployment to underpin oppressive practices in the institutions of medicine, law, and family. 'Third sex' and 'homophile' organisations in Europe from the 1920s to the 1950s attempted to reverse the pathologising tendency of the 'inversion' model by reversing the implications of its biologism. That is, they posited homosexuality as a blameless and harmless product of nature which was needlessly persecuted by the unenlightened (Dyer, 1990: 74-75; Wolff, 1986; Weeks, 1985: 118-119). The extent to which the dominant construct of the 'mannish' lesbian actually reflected, conditioned, or produced, lesbians' own practices has been a matter of heated debate in feminism (Shockley, 1979; Faderman, 1981; 314-371; 1991: 37-187 and 159-187; Newton, 1984; Davis and Kennedy, 1986; Nestle, 1987; Whitlock, 1987; Jeffreys, 1987; Bogus, 1992; Weiss, 1992: 30-50).

Faderman's (1981) groundbreaking analysis of representations of lesbianism in literature represented lesbianism, instead, as a cultural construct formed through politicised conflict and thus as subject to historical transformation. Faderman's study associated constructs of lesbianism with broader discursive struggles over the boundaries of female identity and activity. Faderman (1981) and van Casselaer (1986) drew out connections between the success of first-wave feminism -- in expanding the sphere of women's activities into "male" professional and political fields -- and the codification in medical discourses of lesbianism as a form of "phallic" competition with men. The adoption of "masculinising" clothing (that is, clothing suitable for physical activity) by women thus cited not an organically "perverse" organisation of desires; but a political struggle between feminism and masculinist reaction.

Faderman's (1981) argument was that, in contrast with the turbulent early-modern period, the sexual passivity attributed to femininity had become so naturalised by the 18th Century that intimate relationships between women were seen as entirely unthreatening. The subsequent shift towards an increasingly virulent pathologisation of lesbianism in the early 20th Century was a direct response to Suffragism:

[W]hen the Conciliation Bill, which would have given a million women the vote, was vetoed in November 1910, the suffragists decided to start throwing bricks and make complacency impossible. Antifeminists must have considered that whatever would scare women away from the movement was fair play. And to associate feminism with what the experts had called morbid would surely scare women away. (Faderman, 1985: 337)

A connection between crossdressing and lesbian sexuality was thus made directly by sociologists and sexologists themselves (van Casselaer 1986: 10), with the motive of halting the entry of women to the public sphere. Sexologists argued that "masculine" activities required "transvestite" (utilitarian) clothing, and encouraged women to emulate a male virility which they could not achieve. Thus, feminist women merely lost their femininity and became "de-sexualised" (van Casselaer: 1986: 10-16). Lesbians such as Radclyffe Hall, who adopted and publicised a crossdressed, mannish, persona, were thus often interpreted by 1980s radical lesbian feminism as colluding with anti-feminist attempts to frighten and pressure women out of 'masculine' professions and back into 'feminine' passivity (Faderman, 1981: 316-326) or with a will to appropriate male dominance to themselves. Faderman (1981) argued that many contemporaneous lesbian figures had rejected this pathologising model outright, including Natalie Barney, a friend of Radclyffe Hall's, who saw lesbianism as "an expression of her feminism" (Faderman, 1981: 372). Faderman later, however, described Barney as "reflecting the sexologists' influence on her conception of her own homosexuality" (Faderman, 1991: 58).

Faderman (1991) also noted that mannishness was often associated by sexologists most particularly with working-class women. This association was originally formed partly as a result of the class prejudices of medical observers who already considered working class women to be less feminine or "refined." Sexologists were also reluctant to "see a deviant sexuality" in women of their own class (Faderman, 1991: 41). It was also engendered by the selection of environments in which women were available for intrusive observation by the sexologists.

The females that the earliest sexologists ... defined as sexual inverts were often a captive population in prisons and insane asylums, daughters of the poor. (Faderman, 1991: 41)

In any case, the passivity enforced in middle-class women would have made survival far more difficult in the relatively challenging environments in which poorer women were obliged to survive (Faderman, 1991: 41). If feminine passivity was actually produced by restrictive clothing and restraints on gesture, social behaviour and sexuality; then refusal of these restraints could be seen, instead, as facilitating the attainment of economic and social autonomy for women. A second-generation of "New Women" wanted not only economic opportunity, but also freedom from the restrictions of femininity (Newton, 1984: 564). Public acknowledgement of 'inversion' could facilitate resistance to marriage, and to the economic dependence and passivity associated with 'femininity' (Faderman, 1991: 58).

Jeffreys, on the other hand, saw any advantage acquired by adopting virilising codes as an appropriation of male power at the expense of more feminised women:

An advantage must have been the superior status. Amidst all the hatred directed at lesbians by the straight world, butch lesbians were at least able to feel superior to someone, the femme. (Jeffreys, 1985: 74)

Both second-wave feminism and gay liberation tended to perceive crossdressing and role-playing as forms of internalised self-hatred left over from the bad-old-days before Women's Liberation and Stonewall (Jeffreys, 1985: 80). For lesbian feminists, crossdressing also articulated as an alignment with gay men:

Lesbian-feminists protested that the butch image was created by males so that "the female homosexual was groomed to appear as a burlesque of licentious, slightly cretinous, ersatz men" and that some lesbians had accepted that image because they had been saturated with it and believed it was the only way to feel authentic ... Lesbian-feminists were sometimes revolted at signs of what they regarded as excessive sexuality among a few lesbians and took a moralistic ... stance ... They would tolerate nothing that resembled the raw sexuality of male eroticism. (Faderman, 1991: 232, quoting Susan Helenius, "Returning the Dykes to the Dutch" in Everywoman, 2:10, 1971)

According to most lesbian accounts, however, lesbian crossdressing practices have always differed from the "camp" presentation associated with male homosexuality (Faderman, 1991; Davis and Kennedy, 1986; Nestle, 1987; Penelope, 1986). Even within the cross-fertilising queer arena, lesbian crossdressing appeared to retain laws of its own (Davy, 1994: 130-149). These specificities may be seen as produced by the inequalities subsisting between men and women. Furthermore, there are diachronic contextual specificities. The mapping of feminist critique over the bar cultures of the 1950s can be perceived as de-historicising. Penelope, for example, described her own transition from a butch identity in the context of the embattled bar-cultures of the 1950s to a lesbian-feminist consciousness -- the possibility for which had not opened out until the 1970s (1986: 14-17). Jeffreys also acknowledged that "a (feminist) critique was not available in the bar scene of the 1950s" (1987: 90). Furthermore, Faderman (1991) noted synchronic diversities in specificities of race and class identifications.

The 'butch' stereotype is also racially inflected for British women of African-Caribbean descent. Black women are already constructed in white culture as less feminine:

The belief that Black men are better in bed is mirrored in the lesbian community ... The idea that Black women are dominating, insatiable animals and undesirable can stay with us throughout adulthood. We are often pushed into these roles by both the white heterosexual and lesbian and gay communities ... (Mason-John, 1995: 80)

Asian women, on the contrary, have conventionally been constructed in orientalist representation as the hyper-feminised objects of white male desires (Karimjee, 1991). However, Asian lesbianism has also been negatively associated with mannishness in orientalist literatures:

The Moslem Harem is a great school for this "Lesbian" (which I call Atossan) love; these tribades are mostly known by peculiarities of form and features, hairy cheeks and upper lips, gruff voices, hircine odour and the large projecting clitoris with erectile powers. (Karimjee, 1991: 32; quoting Burton's Thousand Nights cited by Rana Kabbani in Europe's Myths of the Orient, 1988: 53)

Whilst many rejected the stereotype, some black lesbians recorded specifically black lesbian butch identities or crossdressing practices. Many of the women of the Harlem Renaissance who were recorded as having bisexual lifestyles crossdressed. They were referred to as 'bulldaggers — a term which Bogus linked specifically to popular cinema (1992: 34). Moraga, a Latina lesbian, described her own specific experience of roleplay and its relation to feminism:

... I feel a lot of pain around the fact that it has been difficult for me to conceive of myself as thoroughly female in that sexual way. So retaining my "butchness" is not exactly my desired goal. (Moraga, interviewed in Hollibaugh and Moraga, 1983: 400)

On the other hand, in the video Framing Lesbian Fashion (1992), a woman of Asian descent who posed for Gill Posener's image in the notorious On Our Backs calendar (1989) (which does not credit her name) stated that she specifically wanted to phallicise her self-image to counter the racist hyper-feminisation of Asian women.

Although there is some commentary on the contradictory and ambivalent significances of "mannish" coding to lesbians of colour, the majority of black lesbians in the 1980s situated themselves in a more globalised network of political concerns and expressed little interest in what many black lesbian theorists saw as essentially a white concern:

I cannot align myself with anything that is not about the liberation of Black and Third World women and this does not speak to my needs ... I do think it's a white woman's issue. (Sims, 1982: 99)

By the mid-1980s, opposition to radical-lesbian-feminist constructs had emerged within white lesbian discourse. Whilst the feminist project had been extremely successful in alleviating the stigmatisation of lesbianism, this was thought by some groups of lesbians to have been achieved at the cost of largely eliminating desire or pleasure, as well as history, from the lesbian agenda (Moraga and Hollibaugh, 1983; Hollibaugh, 1984; Nestle, 1987). Papers given at the Barnard Conference (The Scholar and Feminist IX Conference, "Towards a Politics of Sexuality," in 1982) coalesced discussion of lesbian sexuality — including practices of role-playing — re-signified as a liberatory sexual freedom posited against a perceived "anti-sex" and victimising bias in radical feminism:

... [L]ooking at the danger and damage done us is only a part of coming to terms with sex. We should also begin to look at sexuality itself and at what we mean by words like desire, passion, craving, need. (Hollibaugh, 1984: 402)

Radical feminist lesbians, however, saw such arguments as collaborating with an anti-feminist backlash:

The context in which lesbians ... are promoting role-playing is that of a massive and coordinated onslaught upon feminism. (Jeffreys, 1987: 90)

The decade nevertheless saw some rehabilitation of the archetypal figure of the mannish lesbian and the butch bar-dyke. Lesbian-feminists contributors to the US lesbian-feminist academic journal Lesbian Ethics, in dialogue with British lesbian-feminists such as Jeffreys, radically re-signified the butch figure from within the lesbian-feminist field of discourse. Strega (1985) criticised a "superficial romanticising of butches [sic] 'erotic power'" (78) in libertarian lesbian discourse (although she did not mention Nestle (1987) specifically, this would appear to have been her primary reference). Retaining a radical feminist position (see, for example, Daly's exposition, 1978: 1-9) that "femininity" can be separated from "femaleness" (the former being a product of patriarchal culture and the latter of "nature"), Strega argued that heterosexual feminism confused the terms, colluding with heterosexist models of "femininity:"

Feminism has remained extremely heterosexist and Lesbophobic, and so it supports the male ideals of feminine values. That is why most ex-het feminist Lesbians think that butches are in a role, but that femmes are not. Like with other privileges, femme-ness is considered the norm. And of course it's those with the privilege who have the power to define what the norm is. (Strega, 1985: 78)

Butch-ness was thus re-figured as resistant to the feminine role rather than appropriative of the male role. The butch thus represented the 'true' (ontological) female:

If something in her [the butch] cannot and will not accept the artificiality of femininity, the trappings and mannerisms of the feminine role, everyone around her will begin telling her she's not really a girl ... When she continues to resist, and as her Lesbian identity becomes obvious, she is labelled a deviant, a freak of nature, a man-in-a-woman's body . . . The pressure is meant to humiliate and bully her into accepting femininity. (Strega, 1985: 75)

Ruston et al extended this reversal to a discursive de-naturalisation of heterosexual gender:

It is men and het women who truly play roles. Their roles are so much a part of dominant male culture that they are taken for granted and considered to be natural. (Ruston et al, 1986: 27 -- emphasis theirs)

Penelope's re-conceptualisation, which seems to owe much to Wittig (1981), removed the butch entirely from "the masculine" -- which for Strega, Ruston, et al, had figured as a pre-cultural space:

English, like any language, describes the version of reality preferred by the majority of speakers in a society, and forces us to accept the reality agreed upon by those speakers. The United States is a heteropatriarchal society, a culture that assumes that heterosexuality is "natural", that male dominance is "natural", and that female subordination is "natural", and English provides its speakers with ways of expressing these assumptions as though they were incontrovertible facts. The words masculine and feminine exist only because they express concepts essential to the maintenance of H[etero]P[atriarchal] reality. But the existence and continual use of these words doesn't mean that they denote "real" or actual things. (Penelope, 1986: 60 &mdahs; emphasis hers)

Use of the term 'real' man, or woman, thus effectively posits an 'unreal' man or woman — and it is in this 'unreality' that the figure of the butch locates. Queer space opens out as this field of linguistic exclusion translates into social exclusion. The use of terms such as 'mannish' lesbian or 'effeminate' homosexual operate to reconfirm the linguistic dichotomy which produces men, women, and queers in the first place. Penelope also noted that the gradation of lesbian behaviours in the 1950s bar-scene, of which 'ki-ki' was the median term, disappeared in the process of the feminist transformation of lesbian culture; reflecting, perhaps, the paradoxical extremity of feminist re-polarisation of gendered identity.

Whilst Penelope's insistence on the productive effect of patriarchal language constitutes a discursive, or anti-essentialist, position, she nevertheless retained a sub-textual extra-heterosexual 'reality:

If we're real, then their conceptual framework is flawed ... I suggest we toss out HP semantics along with MASCULINE and the Lesbian labels derived from HP, BUTCH/FEMME ... Most importantly, we must stand our ground outside of HP reality, occupy it with determination, and resist efforts to assimilate us and dilute the radical force of our perceptions. (Penelope, 1986: 79 — emphasis hers)

Penelope was, probably quite deliberately, unclear as to the status of this 'ground' outside of HP reality. It first appears as a reverse-discursive space opened out as an articulation of the exclusions effected by heteropatriarchal language. However, if lesbianism occupies a reverse-discursive space, we can only work-over and not "toss out" patriarchal definitions. On the other hand, Penelope's account of language as culturally productive and her reverse-discursive formulation of lesbian occupation of the "irreal" posited by the terms 'real man' and 'real woman' seems to deny any substantive position. It becomes, effectively, a lesbian-feminist double-reversal which re-frames the dominant as 'unreal' and the lesbian as "real."

Jeffreys (1994) acknowledged that this kind of approach politicised the issue of roleplaying, but maintained that such arguments did not escape from essentialism.

They call upon all lesbians to simply relinquish the privileges of passing and give up femininity so that "butches" would no longer suffer for their visibility. This is a more dynamic lesbian positive solution [than that of Nestle, 1987] ... But their use of role-playing vocabulary in situations in which it hardly seems appropriate does undermine the important political points they are making ... It rigidifies butch-femme categories and does not allow for change. (Jeffreys, 1994: 92)

Jeffreys does seem, however, basically to agree with Strega, Ruston, and Penelope's constructions of lesbians' relationship to the patriarchal category of femininity. Jeffreys further contended, and I would strongly agree with her, that the rejection of femininity has been a more communal lesbian construct, and has not been confined to those adopting a butch style

There has been a historical tradition of lesbians rejecting femininity in different ways and to different extents but the rejection of femininity has been, I would suggest, a common theme. (Jeffreys, 1994: 93-4)

This is not, however, fundamentally in contradiction with the Lesbian Ethics position which did not support roleplaying but merely argued that a femme identification articulates a less radical deconstruction of the patriarchal category of femininity than that achieved by a butch identity in the urban bar settings of the 1950s. Penelope, furthermore, specifically recommended that a lesbian-feminist identification with 'femaleness' (as opposed to 'femininity') can more profitably be approached by abandoning lesbian roleplaying altogether. In any case, unless a lesbian femme adopts an excessively (hetero)feminine personal stylisation, heterosexist culture interprets lesbians (and feminists) willy-nilly as masculinised — that is, as signifying 'aggression' (Nestle, 1986: 102; Hart, 1994). The Lesbian Ethics contributors seem merely to have wished to emphasise that lesbian feminism does not constitute a celebration of (an effectively heterosexual) femininity, but a rejection of it. In other words, it seems to be an argument better addressed to a tendency in 'cultural feminism' to naturalise patriarchal constructs of femininity (see my discussion of radical feminism, Ch.3) rather than to libertarian lesbianism.

Queer theory's model of sexuality seemed to offer a discursive means to supersede the problematic of heterosexually gendered subject positions altogether. Crossdressing could be figured as a deconstructive 'play' with heterosexual gender-signifiers effecting a de-subjectivised lesbian desire (Case, 1988/9; Butler, 1990; de Lauretis, 1991). Radical-feminism conflicted with this queer agenda; partly because of a continued commitment to identity politics but mainly because radical feminism retained the view that a male perspective over-determines any and all representation of desire. A 'true' lesbian desire would, therefore, be unrepresentable by any available means:

We must remember that homosexual (lesbian feminist) desire will not be recognised as "sex." We do not even possess suitable words to describe it. The course of eroticising equality and mutuality has received no prizes from male supremacy ... (Jeffreys, 1990: 315).

Jeffreys, indeed, saw the postmodern project, which was primarily associated with libertarian lesbianism and queer theory, as little more than the queer articulation of a more general reactionary attack on radical feminism.

Feminism as it has been generally understood has been declared impossible. Post-modern theory has been enlisted to support the sexual libertarian and specifically sadomasochistic project. (Jeffreys, 1994: 101)

These issues will be explored in more detail in later chapters dealing both with feminism and with queer discourse, however. I am primarily concerned here with a model of lesbianism as a rejection of (hetero)feminising patriarchal practices. Although avowedly constructionist, this model can be argued, nevertheless, to tend towards the universalisation of the lesbian figure. As Faderman noted (1991) mannishness is very differently coded in different cultural contexts because gender articulates differently in racialised contexts. Shockley (1979) argued that a mannish lesbian stereotype derived from white literature was deployed to shore up African-American cultural myths that lesbianism is acquired from white culture. The sociological myth of the 'black matriarchy' represented black women as "towers" of limitless strength (hooks, 1982: 75-85; Smith, 1983: xxvi), placing additional pressures on black lesbians. Black men often accepted it as a reality which they perceived as further disempowering oppressed black men. Whilst some black feminists felt empowered by it (hooks, 1982: 80), others saw it as occluding the heterosexist oppression of black women (Shockley, 1979; Combahee River Collective, 1981; Smith, 1983).

Black lesbians could also be mythologised as sharing in the black man's "legendary sexual prowess" (Shockley, 1983: 85). The universalising model of lesbianism as a resistance to (white) feminisation becomes still more problematic.

The butch-femme debate in white lesbian culture was primarily a politicised conflict about appropriate strategies for resisting the production of white heterosexual femininity as passive and powerless (this model also seems also to have some resonances for Asian lesbians). (White) lesbian feminisms often saw the valorisation of 'the feminine' as a radical challenge to inversionist models of mannishness. Other lesbians, white and of colour, have re-deployed phallic imagery to a project of signifying lesbian (female) autonomy. Queer lesbians' fascination with the figure of the butch was seen by radical feminists as, once again, colluding with anti-feminist strategy. The political valences of crossdressing practices seem, however, contingent to specificities of context, both diachronically and synchronically.