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Butch is a lesbian who exhibits a masculine identity or gender presentation. [1] [2]
Since the lesbian subculture of 1940s America, "butch" has been present as a way for lesbians to circumvent traditional gender roles of women in society and distinguish their masculine attributes and characteristics from feminine women. [a]
Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, butch became a central identity in the lesbian community. [5] It was often understood in conjunction with femme identity, and butch-femme relations have been studied at great length. [6] As a result, butch identity on its own remains somewhat ill-defined. [6] Butch people are often described as sexually dominant lesbians who are interested in having sex with femmes. [6] The Queen's Vernacular claimed a butch was "a lesbian with masculine characteristics." [7] In Of Catamites and Kings, Rubin describes a butch as those lesbians who use masculine mannerisms, and/or who wear traditionally male clothing, and/or who experience gender dysphoria. [8] The defining characteristic that most scholars agree on is that butch people are lesbians who are to some degree aligned with masculine traits.
In the mid 20th century, butch people were usually limited to a few jobs, such as factory work and cab driving, that had no dress codes for women. [9] During the 1950s with the anti-gay politics of the McCarthy era, there was 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.[ citation needed ] Although femmes also fought back, it became primarily the role of butches to defend against attacks and hold the bars as gay women's space. [10] The prevailing butch image was severe but gentle, while it became increasingly tough and aggressive as violent confrontation became a fact of life. [11] Leslie Feinberg's novel Stone Butch Blues is a predominant piece of butch literature, and offers a window into butch bar culture, police brutality towards transvestites (both drag queens and butch people), and butch eroticism in the 1970s. [12]
One of the subcategories of the butch identity was and is people who experience gender dysphoria. [8] In the mid 20th century, butch was a group that included most lesbians who identified with masculine characteristics; unsurprisingly, this was a space that included many transmasculine identities. [13] In the words of butch, transgender man S. Bear Bergman, "butch and transgender are the same thing with different names, except that butch is not a trans identity, unless it is." [14] However, there is something of a "border war" between butch and FTM identities, as renowned butch scholar Jack Halberstam put it in Transgender Butch. [13] Some butch people identify as women and undergo some amount of medical transition, and some FTM individuals identify as butch men. [15] The difference between the two groups is nuanced and has as many interpretations as there are butch people. [8] Halberstam argues that in "making concrete distinctions between butch women and transsexual males, all too often such distinctions serve the cause of heteronormativity." [15]
Butch and femme are masculine (butch) or feminine (femme) identities in the lesbian subculture that have associated traits, behaviors, styles, self-perception, and so on. This concept has been called a "way to organize sexual relationships and gender and sexual identity". Butch–femme culture is not the sole form of a lesbian dyadic system, as there are many women in butch–butch and femme–femme relationships.
Femme is a term traditionally used to describe a lesbian woman who exhibits a feminine identity or gender presentation. While commonly viewed as a lesbian term, alternate meanings of the word also exist with some non-lesbian individuals using the word, notably some gay men and bisexuals. Some non-binary and transgender individuals also identify as lesbians using this term.
"Lipstick lesbian" is slang for a lesbian who exhibits a great amount of feminine gender attributes, such as wearing make-up, dresses or skirts, and having other characteristics associated with feminine women. In popular usage, the term is also used to characterize the feminine gender expression of bisexual women, or the broader topic of female–female sexual activity among feminine women.
LGBTQ slang, LGBTQ speak, queer slang, or gay slang is a set of English slang lexicon used predominantly among LGBTQ+ people. It has been used in various languages since the early 20th century as a means by which members of the LGBTQ+ community identify themselves and speak in code with brevity and speed to others.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to transgender topics.
A trans man is a man who was assigned female at birth. Trans men have a male gender identity, and many trans men undergo medical and social transition to alter their appearance in a way that aligns with their gender identity or alleviates gender dysphoria.
LGBTQ culture is a culture shared by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals. It is sometimes referred to as queer culture, LGBT culture, and LGBTQIA culture, while the term gay culture may be used to mean either "LGBT culture" or homosexual culture specifically.
Gender expression, or gender presentation, is a person's behavior, mannerisms, and appearance that are socially associated with gender, namely femininity or masculinity. Gender expression can also be defined as the external manifestation of one's gender identity through behavior, clothing, hairstyles, voice, or body characteristics. Typically, a person's gender expression is thought of in terms of masculinity and femininity, but an individual's gender expression may incorporate both feminine and masculine traits, or neither. A person's gender expression may or may not match their assigned sex at birth. This includes gender roles, and accordingly relies on cultural stereotypes about gender. It is distinct from gender identity.
Boi is slang within butch and femme and gay male communities for several sexual or gender identities.
A soft butch, or stem (stud-fem), is a lesbian who exhibits some stereotypical butch traits without fitting the masculine stereotype associated with butch lesbians. Soft butch is on the spectrum of butch, as are stone butch and masculine, whereas on the contrary, ultra fem, high femme, and lipstick lesbian are some labels on the spectrum of lesbians with a more prominent expression of femininity, also known as femmes. Soft butches have gender expressions of women, but primarily display masculine characteristics; soft butches predominantly express masculinity with a touch of femininity.
LGBTQ stereotypes are stereotypes about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people based on their sexual orientations, gender identities, or gender expressions. Stereotypical perceptions may be acquired through interactions with parents, teachers, peers and mass media, or, more generally, through a lack of firsthand familiarity, resulting in an increased reliance on generalizations.
A stone butch is a lesbian who displays female butchness or traditional "masculinity" and who does not allow their genitals to be touched during sexual activity, as opposed to a stone femme.
Stone Butch Blues is an autobiographical novel by Leslie Feinberg. Written from the perspective of stone butch lesbian Jess Goldberg, it intimately details hir life in the last half of the 20th century in New York.
The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) people in the Philippines are generally accepted in Filipino society, and it has been ranked among the most gay-friendly countries in Asia. It has the second highest social acceptance rate in the Asia-Pacific next to Australia, according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2013. Despite this, some discrimination still persist and LGBT people have limited LGBT-specific rights, leading some activists to characterize LGBT culture in the Philippines as "tolerated, but not accepted." Homosexuals in the Philippines are known as "bakla", though there are other terms to describe them. According to the 2002 Young Adult Fertility and Sexuality Survey, 11 percent of sexually active Filipinos between the ages of 15 and 24 have had sex with someone of the same sex. According to Filipino poet and critic Lilia Quindoza Santiago, Filipino culture may have a more flexible concept of gender. Kasarian is defined in less binary terms than the English word; kasarian means "kind, species, or genus".
Madeline Davis was an American LGBT activist and historian. In 1970 she was a founding member of the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier, the first gay rights organization in Western New York. Davis became the first openly lesbian delegate at a major party national convention, speaking at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. The same year, she taught with Margaret Small the first course on lesbianism in the United States, titled "Lesbianism 101" at the University at Buffalo.
Dyke is a slang term, used as a noun meaning lesbian. It originated as a homophobic slur for masculine, butch, or androgynous girls or women. Pejorative use of the word still exists, but the term dyke has been reappropriated by many lesbians to imply assertiveness and toughness.
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy was one of the founding feminists of the field of women's studies and is a lesbian historian whose book Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: A History of the Lesbian Community documents the lesbian community of Buffalo, New York, in the decades before Stonewall.
The following outline offers an overview and guide to LGBTQ topics:
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community is a 1993 book by Madeline Davis and Elizabeth L. Kennedy on the history of lesbian women in Buffalo and western New York state from the 1930s to the 1960s. Based on oral histories of 45 women, the book won awards from the American Sociological Association, the American Anthropological Association and the Lambda Literary Foundation. Published by Routledge, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold was reprinted for its 20th anniversary.
Lesbian fashion is the style of dress popular among lesbian and women-loving-women communities. It utilizes various signals and archetypes to convey the wearer's sexual orientation. The trends of lesbian fashion are influenced by societal factors, and its statements have been made purposefully subtle or bold in accordance to the shifting societal climate around lesbianism.
