Female Masculinity

Author: Judith Halberstam
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822322436
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

Book Description
Masculinity without men. In Female Masculinity Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. She rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity. She considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. She also explores issues of transsexuality among "transgender dykes"--lesbians who pass as men--and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of "lesbian" a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators. Female Masculinity signals a new understanding of masculine behaviors and identities, and a new direction in interdisciplinary queer scholarship. Illustrated with nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of female masculinities. And as Halberstam clearly demonstrates, female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders.

Splitting

Author: Robert J. Stoller
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300065725
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
This text is a case study of a woman, otherwise intelligent and apparently sane, who was convinced that she had internally a full set of functioning male sex organs. This account of her diagnosis and treatment is illustrated by excerpts from the patient-analyst dialogue during her therapy.

Masculinities without Men?

Author: Jean Bobby Noble
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774859849
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
Conventional ideas about gender and sexuality dictate that people born with male bodies naturally possess both a man's identity and a man's right to authority. Recent scholarship in the field of gender studies, however, exposes the complex political technologies that construct gender as a supposedly unchanging biological essence with self-evident links to physicality, identity, and power. In Masculinities without Men? Jean Bobby Noble explores how the construction of gender was thrown into crisis during the twentieth century, resulting in a permanent rupture in the sex/gender system, and how masculinity became an unstable category, altered across time, region, social class, and ethnicity.

Postcolonial Amazons

Author: Walter Duvall Penrose Jr.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019108803X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 315

Book Description
Scholars have long been divided on the question of whether the Amazons of Greek legend actually existed. Notably, Soviet archaeologists' discoveries of the bodies of women warriors in the 1980s appeared to directly contradict western classicists' denial of the veracity of the Amazon myth, and there have been few concessions between the two schools of thought since. Postcolonial Amazons offers a ground-breaking re-evaluation of the place of martial women in the ancient world, bridging the gap between myth and historical reality and expanding our conception of the Amazon archetype. By shifting the center of debate to the periphery of the region known to the Greeks, the startling conclusion emerges that the ancient Athenian conception of women as weak and fearful was not at all typical of the region of that time, even within Greece. Surrounding the Athenians were numerous peoples who held that women could be courageous, able, clever, and daring, suggesting that although Greek stories of Amazons may be exaggerations, they were based upon a real historical understanding of women who fought. While re-examining the sources of the Amazon myth, this compelling volume also resituates the Amazons in the broader context from which they have been extracted, illustrating that although they were the quintessential example of female masculinity in ancient Greek thought, they were not the only instance of this phenomenon: masculine women were masqueraded on the Greek stage, described in the Hippocratic corpus, took part in the struggle to control Alexander the Great's empire after his death, and served as bodyguards in ancient India. Against the backdrop of the ongoing debates surrounding gender norms and fluidity, Postcolonial Amazons breaks new ground as an ancient history of female masculinity and demonstrates that these ideas have a much longer and more durable heritage than we may have supposed.

In a Queer Time and Place

Author: Judith Halberstam
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814735843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 237

Book Description
The first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music In her first book since the critically acclaimed Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. She presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms’ especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture. In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don’t Cry, Halberstam turns her attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. She examines the “transgender gaze,” as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. She then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities. Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place.

Female Masculinity

Author: Jack Halberstam
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478002700
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 360

Book Description
In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two centuries. Demonstrating how female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. He rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity; considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities; and explores issues of transsexuality among “transgender dykes”—lesbians who pass as men—and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of “lesbian” a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators. Featuring a new preface by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition of Female Masculinity remains as insightful, timely, and necessary as ever.

Men. Women. Relationships

Author: Paul Elam
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781070406329
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Relationship books are almost always written by and for women. Even relationship books written by men usually appeal to a female audience. "That won't do," says men's advocate Paul Elam. "Typical relationships involve men and women together. Both voices must be heard." In "Men. Women. Relationships." Elam offers the balance and counter-theory needed in the modern relationship dialogue. He takes on the nature and substance of modern relationship issues in a decidedly masculine voice that will appeal to men and be informative for women. Elam calls shots honestly, exactly how he sees them, delivering the sometimes brutal truth with a more masculine form of sensitivity. As Moiret Allegiere put it, "The writing of Paul Elam is a knuckle-sandwich lovingly delivered straight into the central nervous system; a satirical and provocative technical knock-out designed to make you stop, breathe and think. If the provocative nature of his writings is over-shadowed by anything, it is overshadowed by the compassion which directly nourishes its roots; compassion that is easily discovered by merely scratching the surface.""Men. Women. Relationships." is a frank and factual look directly into the heart of relationship problems between men and women, written for those who prize honesty above platitudes and facts above relationship fiction. It is a book that will genuinely help men and women in their relationship lives.

Feminine Masculine Balance: A Paradigm Shift for a Peaceful and Abundant Society

Author: Jacqueline Mcleod
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
ISBN: 9781544511566
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
We're well into the twenty-first century, yet we continue to struggle with the same problemsthat have plagued us for centuries. Violence. Poverty. Inequality. Toxic relationships. Ashopeless as it seems, however, real change is possible. The first step is to understand thedriving force behind all the turmoil in the world.In Feminine Masculine Balance, Jacqueline McLeod explains how masculine and feminineenergies are unbalanced on a global scale. Masculine attributes like competitiveness, rationality, and detachment, while beneficial for all genders, grow dangerous when theydominate our value systems. With compassion and humor, Jacqueline demonstrates howwomen and men alike can become better versions of themselves by valuing and respectingtheir feminine energies to the same level as their masculine energies.It's past time for humanity to wake up. Jacqueline's insights into our out-of-whacksociety-and her vision of a world in balance-will open our eyes to a new way of being

Female Masculinity and the Business of Emotions in Tokyo

Author: Marta Fanasca
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003802893
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 229

Book Description
Female Masculinity and the Business of Emotions in Tokyo investigates the novel “emotion business” of dansō escorting as a phenomenon emerging between gender performativity and pop-culture, commodified relationships and the wish for self-expression. Fanasca documents the dreams, ambitions and fears of young crossdresser escorts negotiating their identity with and within the Japanese society, as well as those of crossdresser escorts’ clients: women looking for the perfect man and the opportunity to experience emotions. Combining anthropological, sociological and gender studies theories with an ethnographic approach, Fanasca argues that dansō crossdressing is the tool used by a sector of Japanese women to resist the heteronormative and patriarchal society and its expectations, while reinventing themselves and their identities looking for self-actualization. Female Masculinity and the Business of Emotions Tokyo is an interdisciplinary work which will interest both scholars and students of Japanese studies, gender studies, and anthropology.

Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars

Author: Finn Mackay
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755606663
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
“Thoughtful and often moving.” Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars provides important theoretical background and context to the 'gender wars' or 'TERF wars' – the fracture at the forefront of the LGBTQ international conversation. Using queer and female masculinities as a lens, Finn Mackay investigates the current generational shift that is refusing the previous assumed fixity of sex, gender and sexual identity. Transgender and trans rights movements are currently experiencing political backlash from within certain lesbian and lesbian feminist groups, resulting in a situation in which these two minority communities are frequently pitted against one another or perceived as diametrically opposed. Uniquely, Finn Mackay approaches this debate through the context of female masculinity, butch and transmasculine lesbian masculinities. There has been increasing interest in the study of masculinity, influenced by a popular discourse around so-called 'toxic masculinity', the rise of men's rights activism and theory and critical work on Trump's America and the MeToo movement. An increasingly important topic in political science and sociological academia, this book aims to break new ground in the discussion of the politics of gender and identity.