Butch and femme - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Butch and femme are LGBT

LGBT

LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

terms describing respectively, masculine

Masculinity

Masculinity is possessing qualities or characteristics considered typical of or appropriate to a man. The term can be used to describe any human, animal or object that has the quality of being masculine...

and feminine

Femininity

Femininity is a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with girls and women. Though socially constructed, femininity is made up of both socially defined and biologically created factors...

traits, behavior, style, expression, self-perception and so on. They are often used in the lesbian

Lesbian

Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

, bisexual and gay

Gay

Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

subculture

Subculture

In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...

s. A similar term, en femme
En femme
The term en femme is an anglicized adaption of a French phrase. It is used in the transgender and crossdressing community to describe the act of wearing feminine clothing and/or expressing a stereotypically feminine personality...

, is also frequently used in the crossdressing community.

Butch and femme are sometimes used to describe the identities of each person in a gay or lesbian relationship in terms that are analogous to a heterosexual relationship, with butch representing the traditionally male role and femme the traditional female role. Not all gay or lesbian couples can be described accurately in these terms.

Etymology

The word femme is taken from the French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

word for woman. The word butch, meaning "tough kid" may have been coined by abbreviating the word butcher, as first noted in George Cassidy's nickname, Butch Cassidy
Butch Cassidy
Robert LeRoy Parker , better known as Butch Cassidy, was a notorious American train robber, bank robber, and leader of the Wild Bunch Gang in the American Old West...

. Butch gained the sense "male-like lesbian" in the 1940s.

Attributes

The terms butch and femme are often used to describe lesbians and gay men. Butch can be used as an adjective or a noun to describe one's gender or gender representation. A masculine person of either sex can be described as butch.

Stereotypes and definitions of butch and femme vary greatly, even within tight-knit LGBT communities. Butch tends to denote masculinity displayed by a female-bodied individual beyond what would be considered typical of a tomboy

Tomboy

A tomboy is a girl who exhibits characteristics or behaviors considered typical of the gender role of a boy, including the wearing of typically masculine-oriented clothes and engaging in games and activities that are often physical in nature, and which are considered in many cultures to be the...

. It is not uncommon for females with a butch appearance to meet with social disapproval. A butch woman could be compared to an effeminate man in the sense that both genders are historically linked to homosexual communities and stereotypes.

For western homosexual women, butch-femme has had varying levels of acceptance throughout the 20th century. People who prefer 'femme on femme' and 'butch on butch' relationships face discrimination and cultural repression within their own cultures. This was common in the mid-twentieth century United States working-class lesbian butch-femme scene, and today, this is notable in cultures where masculine tops who have sex with feminine bottoms or trans women are considered straight.

Alternate conceptualizations of femme or butch persons suggest that butch and femme are not attempts to take up "traditional" gender roles. This argument situates "traditional" gender roles as biological, ahistorical imperatives, a claim that has been contested by Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

, Judith Butler

Judith Butler

Judith Butler is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley.Butler received her Ph.D...

, Jay Prosser, Anne Fausto-Sterling

Anne Fausto-Sterling

Anne Fausto-Sterling, Ph. D. is Professor of Biology and Gender Studies at Brown University. She participates actively in the field of sexology and has written extensively on the fields of biology of gender, sexual identity, gender identity, and gender roles.-Life and career:Fausto-Sterling...

, and many others. These authors regard gender as both socially and historically constructed, rather than as essential, "natural", or strictly biological. Specifically with regard to butches and femmes, lesbian historian Joan Nestle

Joan Nestle

Joan Nestle is a Lambda Award winning writer and editor and the co-founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives.-Life:Nestle's father died before she was born, and she was raised by her widowed mother Regina Nestle, a bookkeeper in New York City's garment district, whom she credits with inspiring her...

argues that femme and butch may be seen as distinct genders in and of themselves.

Others have argued that butch and femme are "read" as imperfect mimicries of heterosexual gender roles, due to the uncritical assumption that masculinity and femininity are inseparable from genetic femaleness or maleness. For example, to suggest that a butch woman is attempting to annex heterosexual male power or privilege—a claim leveled by some radical feminists such as Sheila Jeffreys

Sheila Jeffreys

Sheila Jeffreys is a lesbian feminist scholar and political activist, known for her analysis of the history and politics of sexuality in Britain. She is a professor in Political Science at the University of Melbourne in Australia...

—fails to note the social censure leveled at individuals who reject social and cultural imperatives that link biological sex with "gender performance".

History

Prior to the middle of the 20th century in Western culture, homosexual societies were mostly underground or secret, which makes it difficult to determine how long butch and femme roles have been practiced by women. Photographs exist of butch-femme couples in the decade of 1910–1920 in the United States; they were then called "transvestites". Butch and femme roles date back at least to the beginning of the 20th century. They were particularly prominent in the working-class lesbian bar culture of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, where butch-femme relationships were the norm, while butch-butch and femme-femme were taboo. Those who switched roles were called ki-ki, a pejorative

Pejorative

Pejoratives , including name slurs, are words or grammatical forms that connote negativity and express contempt or distaste. A term can be regarded as pejorative in some social groups but not in others, e.g., hacker is a term used for computer criminals as well as quick and clever computer experts...

; they were often the butt of jokes.

In the 1940s in the U.S., most butch women had to wear conventionally feminine dress in order to hold down jobs, donning their starched shirts and ties only on weekends to go to bars or parties as "Saturday night" butches. The 1950s saw the rise of a new generation of butches who refused to live double lives and wore butch attire full-time, or as close to full-time as possible. This usually limited them to a few jobs, such as factory work and cab driving, that had no dress codes for women. Their increased visibility, combined with the anti-queer rhetoric of the McCarthy era, led to an increase in violent attacks on gay and bisexual women, while at the same time the increasingly strong and defiant bar culture became more willing to respond with force. Although femmes also fought back, it became primarily the role of butches to defend against attacks and hold the bars as queer women's space. While in the '40s, the prevailing butch image was severe but gentle, it became increasingly tough and aggressive as violent confrontation became a fact of life. In the 1950s, ONE, Inc.
ONE, Inc.
ONE, Inc. was an early gay rights organization in the United States.The idea for a publication dedicated to homosexuals emerged from a Mattachine Society discussion meeting held on October 15, 1952....

assigned Stella Rush to study "the butch/femme phenomenon" in queer bars. Rush reported that women held strong opinions, that "role distinctions needed to be sharply drawn," and that not being one or the other earned strong disapproval from both groups.

Starting in the 1970s, some feminist theorists pronounced "butch-femme" roles politically incorrect, because they believed that all butch/femme dynamics by necessity imitated hetero-sexist

Heterosexism

Heterosexism is a system of attitudes, bias, and discrimination in favor of opposite-sex sexuality and relationships. It can include the presumption that everyone is heterosexual or that opposite-sex attractions and relationships are the only norm and therefore superior...

gender roles, leading to butch-femme relationships being driven underground.

However, "inherent to butch-femme relationships was the presumption that the butch is the physically active partner and the leader in lovemaking....Yet unlike the dynamics of many heterosexual relationships, the butch's foremost objective was to give sexual pleasure to a femme. The essence of this emotional/sexual dynamic is captured by the ideal of the "stone butch," or untouchable butch....To be untouchable meant to gain pleasure from giving pleasure. Thus, although these women did draw on models in heterosexual society, they transformed those models into an authentically lesbian interaction."

Antipathy

Antipathy

Antipathy is dislike for something or somebody, the opposite of sympathy. While antipathy may be induced by previous experience, it sometimes exists without a rational cause-and-effect explanation being present to the individuals involved....

toward female butches and male femmes could be interpreted as transphobia

Transphobia

Transphobia is a range of negative attitudes and feelings towards transsexualism and transsexual or transgender people, based on the expression of their internal gender...

, although it is important to note that female butches and male femmes are not always trans-gendered or identified with the trans movement.

Today

Some young people today in queer

Queer

Queer is an umbrella term for sexual minorities that are not heterosexual, heteronormative, or gender-binary. In the context of Western identity politics the term also acts as a label setting queer-identifying people apart from discourse, ideologies, and lifestyles that typify mainstream LGBT ...

communities eschew butch or femme classifications, believing that they are inadequate to describe an individual, or that labels are limiting in and of themselves. Other people within the queer community have tailored the common labels to be more descriptive, such as "soft stud," "hard butch," "gym queen," or "tomboy femme." Comedian Elvira Kurt

Elvira Kurt

Elvira Kurt is a Canadian comedian and was the host of the entertainment satire/talk show PopCultured with Elvira Kurt on The Comedy Network in Canada. The show's style was similar to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and began in 2005, and was canceled due to poor ratings in early 2006...

contributed the term "fellagirly" as a description for queer females who are not strictly either femme or butch, but a combination. In the 1950s and 1960s the term chi-chi was used to mean the same thing.

Those who identify as butch and femme today often use the words to define their presentation and gender identity rather than strictly the role they play in a relationship, and that not all butches are attracted exclusively to femmes and not all femmes are exclusively attracted to butches, a departure from the historic norm. In New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

LGBT

community a butch may identify herself as AG (aggressive) or as a stud.

In 2005, filmmaker Daniel Peddle chronicled the lives of AGs in his documentary The Aggressives, following six women who went to lengths like binding their breasts to pass as men. But Peddle says that today, very young lesbians of color in New York are creating a new, insular scene that's largely cut off from the rest of the gay and lesbian community. "A lot of it has to do with this kind of pressure to articulate and express your masculinity within the confines of the hip-hop paradigm..."—Village Voice

Other terms and identities

Various terms
Among the subcultures composed of butch gay and bisexual men is the "bear community". Gay men who are more femme are sometimes described as "flamers." Femmes are sometimes confused with "lipstick lesbian

Lipstick lesbian

Lipstick lesbian is a slang term used to describe lesbian and bisexual women who exhibit extremely feminine gender attributes, such as wearing make-up , wearing dresses or skirts and having other characteristics associated with feminine women...

s" which generally are understood to be feminine lesbians who are attracted to and partner with other feminine women. Conversely, a butch woman may be described as a "bulldyke" or simply just as a "dyke

Dyke (slang)

Dyke is slang terminology referring to a lesbian or lesbianism. It originated as a derogatory label for a masculine woman, and this usage still exists. However, some attempt to use it in a manner they see as positive, or simply as a neutral synonym for lesbian...

". There is also an emerging usage of the term soft butch

Soft butch

A soft butch or stem is a woman who exhibits some stereotypical butch and lesbian traits without fitting the masculine stereotype associated with butch lesbians. These traits may or may not include short hair, clothing that was designed for men, and masculine mannerisms and behaviors...

or "chapstick lesbian." The usage of "dyke" has widened in recent years to encompass queer women in general. At one point, both were considered derogatory; "dyke" has become a more neutral term, but may still be taken as offensive if used in a derogatory manner or by those outside the LGBT

LGBT

community.

Banjee
Banjee

Banjee

Banjee or banjee boy is a term from the 1980s or earlier that describes a certain type of young Latino, Black, or multiracial man who has sex with men and who dresses in stereotypical masculine urban fashion for reasons which may include expressing masculinity, hiding his sexual orientation and...

or banjee boy is a term from the 1980s or earlier that describes a certain type of young Latino

Latino

The demonyms Latino and Latina , are defined in English language dictionaries as:* "a person of Latin-American descent."* "A Latin American."* "A person of Hispanic, especially Latin-American, descent, often one living in the United States."...

or Black

Black people

The term black people is used in systems of racial classification for humans of a dark skinned phenotype, relative to other racial groups.Different societies apply different criteria regarding who is classified as "black", and often social variables such as class, socio-economic status also plays a...

man who has sex with men

Men who have sex with men

Men who have sex with men are male persons who engage in sexual activity with members of the same sex, regardless of how they identify themselves; many men choose not to accept sexual identities of homosexual or bisexual...

and who dresses in urban fashion for reasons which may include expressing masculinity

Masculinity

, hiding his sexual orientation

Sexual orientation

Sexual orientation describes a pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attractions to the opposite sex, the same sex, both, or neither, and the genders that accompany them. By the convention of organized researchers, these attractions are subsumed under heterosexuality, homosexuality,...

or attracting male partners. The term is mostly associated with New York City

New York City

and may be Nuyorican

Nuyorican

Nuyorican is a portmanteau of the terms "New York" and "Puerto Rican" and refers to the members or culture of the Puerto Rican diaspora located in or around New York State especially the New York City metropolitan area, or of their descendants...

in origin.

Homomasculinity
"Homomasculinity" is a term coined by gay activist

LGBT social movements

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movements share inter-related goals of social acceptance of sexual and gender minorities. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their allies have a long history of campaigning for what is generally called LGBT rights, also called gay...

editor in chief of Drummer magazine Jack Fritscher

Jack Fritscher

Jack Fritscher, Ph.D. is an American author, novelist, magazine journalist, gay historian, photographer, videographer, university professor, and social activist known internationally for his fiction and non-fiction analyses of gay popular culture...

in 1977. The term describes a subculture

Subculture

In sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, a subculture is a group of people with a culture which differentiates them from the larger culture to which they belong.- Definition :...

of gay men who prefer masculine-identified men as legitimately as some men prefer effeminate men and drag queens. Equating the three self-fashioning identity labels "gay," "homosexual," and "homomasculine," Fritscher also coined "homofemininity" for lesbians to whom he opened Drummer magazine in the late 1970s by publishing writing about the Society of Janus

Society of Janus

The Society of Janus is a San Francisco, California based BDSM education and support group, and is the second oldest BDSM organization in the US. It was founded in August 1974 by the late Cynthia Slater and Larry Olsen....

and writing from Samois

Samois

Samois was a lesbian-feminist BDSM organization based in San Francisco that existed from 1978 to 1983. It took its name from the fictional estate of Anne-Marie, a lesbian dominatrix character in Story of O, who pierces and brands O...

, a group founded by gay activists

LGBT social movements

Patrick Califia

Patrick Califia , born 1954 near Corpus Christi, Texas is a writer of nonfiction essays about sexuality and of erotic fiction and poetry. Califia is a bisexual trans man.-Biography:...

and Gayle Rubin

Gayle Rubin

Gayle S. Rubin is a cultural anthropologist best known as an activist and influential theorist of sex and gender politics. She has written on a range of subjects including feminism, sadomasochism, prostitution, pedophilia, pornography and lesbian literature, as well as anthropological studies and...

. Humanist Fritscher intended "homomasculinity" as an identity concept and never as an exclusionary concept as promulgated by Jack Malebranche

Jack Malebranche

Jack Donovan is an American writer. Mark Simpson, British journalist and editor of the 1995 book Anti-Gay, called Donovan “a straight-talking Drill Instructor for today’s gay generation, weaning them off pop divas and bear beauty pageants and licking them into a more manly, more...

in his latter-day book Androphilia. The term "homomasculinity" grew out of the gay-identity movement and the leather subculture

Leather subculture

The leather subculture denotes practices and styles of dress organized around sexual activities. Wearing leather garments is one way that participants in this culture self-consciously distinguish themselves from mainstream sexual cultures...

of 1970's San Francisco. and is detailed in Fritscher's gay linguistics essay "Homomasculinity: Framing Keywords of Queer Popular Culture" presented at the Queer Keyword Conference, University College Dublin, Ireland, April 2005.

Stud
Another common term is "Stud". A stud is a dominant lesbian, usually butch, often African American. A "stud" typically dresses more masculine, and enjoys "masculine" activities. A "stud" is stereotypically used to describe a black masculine lesbian, as most white masculine lesbians are considered "butch".

Symbols

Historically, a blue star has been used as a symbol of butchness. The site Butch-Femme.com uses a black triangle in a red circle to represent butch/femme sexuality.

External links

TransFemmeButch Forum for like minded people
ButchFemmePlanet.com
Motley Queer
bfd
Butch/Femme Society
Butch-Femme Network
Boi Meets Play: Online magazine exploring Boi Culture and Style

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

Etymology

Attributes

History

Today

Other terms and identities

Symbols

See also

External links