While fictional, the work takes large inspiration from Feinberg's lived experiences, describing it as "Like my own life, this novel defies easy classification. If you found Stone Butch Blues in a bookstore or library, what category was it in? Lesbian fiction? Gender studies?[...] this book is a lesbian novel and a transgender novel—making 'trans' genre a verb, as well as an adjective." Zie also describes it as hir "call to action."[1]
While Stone Butch Blues is a heavy read as noted by its advisory warning, it is frequently discussed as an essential work for LGBT communities, as it "never shies away from portraying the anti-Semitism, classism, homophobia, anti-butch animus, and transphobia that protagonist Jess Goldberg faced on a daily basis—but it also shows the healing power of love and political activism."[2]
Plot summary
The narrative of Stone Butch Blues follows the life of Jess Goldberg, who grows up in a working-class area of Buffalo, New York in the 1940s. Her parents, frustrated with Jess's gender nonconformity, eventually institutionalize Jess in a psychiatric ward for three weeks. When she reaches puberty and feels the weight of gendered difference, Jess learns of a gay bar from a coworker. There, she meets drag queens, butches, and femmes. Butch Al and Jacqueline take Jess in and teach her about lesbian roles and culture. After a police raid, the bar closes and Jess loses touch with Butch Al and Jacqueline. At school, football players harass Jess, tackling and gang-raping her. Traumatized, she drops out of school the next day, packing her bags and running away from home to a lesbian bar, where a butch, Toni, offers to let Jess sleep on her couch.
Jess finds her place in the lesbian community of Buffalo while the cops continue to raid gay bars. Jess is arrested, beaten, and raped by them. In a traumatized state, Jess and Toni fight, and Jess is left houseless again. She is taken in by Angie, a femme sex worker. The two have an intimate conversation and then sex. When Angie attempts to touch her, Jess cringes. Angie identifies Jess as a stone butch, assuring Jess that there is nothing wrong with being stone.
Jess gets a factory job and gets involved in union organization, but is alienated by male coworkers. One man intentionally jams Jess's machine, severely injuring Jess and leaving her unemployed. At her next job, Jess meets Theresa. Theresa is fired after opposing her boss for sexually harassing her, and Jess begins to date her. With Theresa, Jess matures, learns to take responsibility in relationships, and softens her stony exterior. Jess proposes, and they are unofficially wedded at the bar, a drag queen leading the procession.
Cops continue raids and retaliation increases, the crowd inspired by the Stonewall riots. Jess and the others are arrested, beaten, and raped by the police. Theresa, who takes care of Jess after raids, attends feminist meetings, where others treat her love of butches as a betrayal of the feminist cause. Meanwhile, Jess talks at length about her gender confusion, feeling like neither man nor woman. Theresa is confused and encourages Jess to forget about it, but the two later argue over Jess's gender. Jess learns about, and decides to pursue, medical transition. Theresa disapproves, and they break up.
Jess starts taking testosterone, gets chest reconstruction surgery, and begins to pass as a male. While relieved to be safer in public, Jess has complex feelings about her loss of visibility as a lesbian. She asks out Annie, a barista, and they have a date at Annie's house. Before they have sex, Jess slips into her strap-on without Annie noticing, effectively passing as male through their encounter. The next day, Jess accompanies Annie to a wedding, where Annie makes several homophobic comments. Horrified by Annie's use of slurs and insinuation that gay people are sex offenders, Jess leaves.
After years of passing as a man, Jess stops taking testosterone. She no longer passes as male and feels continually more comfortable in her gender nonconforming body. After encountering Theresa and her new partner at a grocery store, Jess decides she needs to leave Buffalo and moves to New York City. Jess forms a close friendship with her neighbor Ruth, a trans woman. While taking the subway, Jess is attacked and seriously injured by a group of teenage boys. Ruth nurses Jess back to health and they confess their love for each other on Christmas Eve.
Ruth and Jess embark on a road trip to Upstate New York to visit Ruth's family. While there, Jess visits Buffalo and reconnects with friends from her past. After returning to New York City, Jess witnesses a queer rights demonstration and decides to speak about her experiences. As the novel closes, Jess feels her life coming full circle, and she is filled with hope for her future with Ruth.
Stone Butch Blues has received high praise for many years. Laura Sackton of Book Riot named it as one of the forty best queer books of all time, describing it as "the kind of queer, trans narrative we badly need: honest, freeing, and vital."[3] The New York Public Library has listed it as one of 125 books they love,[4] marking it as the forefront of a "new movement of transgender political identity and solidarity that was taking shape in the 1990s."[5] The Guardian also listed Stone Butch Blues as one of the "top 10 transgender books."[6]
Feinberg covers topics related to union organizing and political activism in her real life, making Stone Butch Blues a political piece in addition to an LGBT work. The novel is also a significant work for many labor organizers, listed in Autostraddle as essential LGBT labor history reading.[7] As mentioned by Diane Anderson-Minshall in The Advocate, Jess's relationships throughout the novel also highlight the historical significance of femme sex workers within lesbian communities.[8]
Stone Butch Blues is considered a cult classic in LGBT communities, and continues to be popular almost 30 years after its original publication. At the Michael C. Weidemann LGBTQ Library, which houses over 9,000 books, Stone Butch Blues "is forever being checked out."[9] LGBT people often find comfort within the novel's sense of "bleak hope, the core to queer self-preservation."[10] However, it has also been discussed as a novel that should be read outside of the LGBT community, with Jo Livingstone stating "Stone Butch Blues, the cornerstone of her career, is a very good book by any measure," and that it is worth reading "if you're middle-aged or elderly or a teen who hasn't yet decided what to grow up to be."[11] After Feinberg's death in 2014, the book received renewed media attention, mentioned in Slate, The Guardian, CNN, Jezebel, and others.[2][12][13]
Publication history
The novel was first published by Firebrand Books in 1993, and picked up by Alyson Books in 2003. A 20th anniversary edition was released in 2014.[14] A free e-book edition is currently available on Feinberg's website.[15] Feinberg requested that the 20th anniversary edition was made available for free as "part of her entire life work as a communist to 'change the world' in the struggle for justice and liberation from oppression."[1]
Awards
The book was a 1994 Lambda Literary Award finalist in the category of Lesbian Fiction, and shared the award in the Small Press Books category with Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS.[16] It also won the 1994 American Library Association Gay & Lesbian Book Award (now the Stonewall Book Award).[17]
Major themes
Stone Butch Blues is most commonly described as a genderqueer narrative. It is sometimes seen as postmodern because of the ways it presents gender as a signifier lacking a fixed referent in the body, and the way Jess's identity breaks down the categories of male and female.[18] As such, it is also about crossing boundaries and seeking home. Jay Prosser writes that, "Jess does not feel at home in her female body in the world and attempts to remake it with hormones and surgery."[19] Because of her masculinity, she is also not at home in her community of origin, and thus the search for home becomes a theme as well. While physical changes help Jess to feel more at home in her body, Jess has greater difficulty finding a home in the world. Ultimately the book takes a stance of supporting coalitions.
Jess's stone butch identity illuminates the extent to which sexual trauma can affect one's sexual subjectivity. The first mention of Jess's stone butch identity occurs in her first sexual encounter with Angie, who tells Jess she is "stone already" after Jess reacts negatively to Angie's attempts to touch Jess in a sexual way. Leading up to this encounter, Jess has experienced rape at the hands of boys her age and police officers. Jess admits to Angie that she has been hurt, but cannot discuss the details. Her difficulty opening up to femmes, both sexually and emotionally, is a sign of the sexualized trauma she experiences both at a young age, and throughout her life by way of police brutality.
Stone Butch Blues is also a novel of the working class. Much of the action takes place within factories in Buffalo, New York. The novel involves a great deal of union organizing and discusses the treatment of working-class people. Feinberg also shows how gender and class intersect to shape Jess's identity, by portraying her discomfort with the middle-class feminists who disdain both the butch and femme identities that are standards of Jess's own working-class community. Cat Moses writes that "Stone Butch Blues is informed by an underlying yearning for the development of a revolutionary class consciousness among the proletariat, across gender and racial divisions."[20]
Translations
Stone Butch Blues has been translated into Chinese,[21] Russian,[22] German,[23] Italian,[24] Hebrew,[25] Slovenian,[26] Basque,[27] French,[28] and Spanish.[29]
Related Research Articles
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.
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.
Leslie Feinberg was an American butch lesbian, transgender activist, communist, and author. Feinberg authored Stone Butch Blues in 1993. Her writing, notably Stone Butch Blues and her pioneering non-fiction book Transgender Warriors (1996), laid the groundwork for much of the terminology and awareness around gender studies and was instrumental in bringing these issues to a more mainstream audience.
Transfeminism, or trans feminism, is a branch of feminism focused on transgender women and informed by transgender studies. Transfeminism focuses on the effects of transmisogyny and patriarchy on trans women. It is related to the broader field of queer theory. The term was popularized by Emi Koyama in The Transfeminist Manifesto.
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.
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.
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.
Minnie Bruce Pratt was an American poet, educator, activist, and essayist. She retired in 2015 from her position as Professor of Writing and Women's Studies at Syracuse University where she was invited to help develop the university's first LGBT studies program.
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.
Lee Lynch is an American author writing primarily on lesbian themes, specifically noted for authentic characterizing of butch and femme characters in fiction. She is the recipient of a Golden Crown Literary Society Trail Blazer award for lifetime achievement, as well as being the namesake for the Golden Crown Literary Society's Lee Lynch Classics Award.
Jeanne Córdova was an American writer and supporter of the lesbian and gay rights movement, founder of The Lesbian Tide, and a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement. A former Catholic nun, Córdova was a second-wave feminist lesbian activist and self-described butch.
The following outline offers an overview and guide to LGBTQ topics:
The African-American LGBT community, otherwise referred to as the Black American LGBT community, is part of the overall LGBTQ culture and overall African-American culture. The initialism LGBT stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender.
Juana María Rodríguez is a Cuban-American professor of Ethnic Studies, Gender and Women's Studies, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly writing in queer theory, critical race theory, and performance studies highlights the intersection of race, gender, sexuality and embodiment in constructing subjectivity.
Lesbian erasure is a form of lesbophobia that involves the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or reexplain evidence of lesbian women or relationships in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources. Lesbian erasure also refers to instances wherein lesbian issues, activism, and identity is deemphasized or ignored within feminist groups or the LGBT community.
Butch is a lesbian who exhibits a masculine identity or gender presentation.
Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, published in 1996, is an autobiographical popular history by transgender activist and author Leslie Feinberg. Feinberg is best known for her novel Stone Butch Blues. In Transgender Warriors, she discusses people who have crossed sex and gender boundaries in various places from ancient times to present day. It was one of the first books to articulate a trans-historical understanding of transgender identity and argue for the inclusion of gender nonconforming people throughout history.
Hijab Butch Blues is a 2023 memoir by pseudonymous author Lamya H, published by Dial Press.
For a look at the history of gay bars in Buffalo, NY during the time of the novel, see Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold by Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis.
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