9 Portraits of Butch Women Proving "Masculinity is a Trait, Not a Gender"

[redqueen]

In an effort to both allocate space for and document the existence of masculine women, photographer Meg Allen created a powerful series of portraits for an exhibit at Cafe Gabriela in Oakland, Calif.

Entitled BUTCH, Allen's series not only represents genderqueer women for a broader, heteronormative audience, but reaffirms butch identity within the queer community at a time when "butch flight," or gender transitioning, is arguably becoming more and more commonplace. It is, as Allen says on her website, "an homage to the bull-daggers and female husbands before me, and to the young studs, gender queers and bois who continue to bloom into the present."

Pioneering queer theorist and historian Gayle Rubin asserted in her 1992 essay "Of Calamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries" that butch identity, the interplay "of masculine traits with a female anatomy," varies depending upon the individual embodying that identity and each individual’s socio-economic, racial and ethnic reality "to adopt and transmute the many available codes of masculinity."

Even the New Statesman asked, "Do we need a better word for 'butch'?" proposing that "masculine-of-center" be used in lieu of the maligned, culturally "irrelevant" term. But do we really need to flee from the "butch label"? Through her photographs, Allen has attempted to get the heart of "what a (lesbian looks) like now."

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http://www.policymic.com/articles/86527/9-portraits-of-butch-women-proving-masculinity-is-a-trait-not-a-gender

Love these pics.


Side issue: In the New Statesman article, someone is quoted as saying that new words for butch are "aggressive" and "dominant". Do I even need to begin to explain how these terms reinforce the hierarchical structure of patriarchy?