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emmaraecohen's review against another edition
4.0
A difficult but important read. I was worried it would be outdated, as the outset of the book chronicles her struggles with WASPish positionality, politics, and puritanical upbringing, ripe with painful-to-read internalized homophobia. It thankfully ended with Esther making significant personal and professional realizations that were a long time coming throughout her life (and to the reader’s detriment, were often drawn out with unhappy conclusions). I found much of her worldview was framed in personal experiences in Freudian psychoanalysis in which she is still obviously unsettled by deep, unresolved personal traumas. But to the reader, this makes her more human. Though an emotionally difficult read, I believe it’s an important work worth getting through. The insights in the second half of the book about her connections to the emerging field of queer studies at the time are well worth reading to understand academic lineages in this space.
gaykittens's review against another edition
1.0
Esther Newton impressively manages to be transphobic, racist, and classist without realizing a thing. It's unfortunate to waste so many words on introspection - apparently far more than an editor and five beta readers would allow in the book itself - and fail to understand some fundamental truths about one's beliefs.
coepi's review against another edition
4.0
I really enjoyed this book and wish it was more widely known and accessible (I was only able to read it through my university's subscription). It's very readable and interesting and gave me quite a lot of insight into lesbian history. Also, I had fun spotting references to anthropologists I know of (Sherry Ortner, David Schneider, etc) and hearing abut what they were like as people.
My one critique of My Butch Career would be that the ending feels a little abrupt - there's not a lot of tying up loose ends and so on, it just... stops. Still, I suppose that's sometimes how autobiography goes. It also wasn't nearly enough of a problem to undermine how much I liked this book overall and would heartily recommend it.
My one critique of My Butch Career would be that the ending feels a little abrupt - there's not a lot of tying up loose ends and so on, it just... stops. Still, I suppose that's sometimes how autobiography goes. It also wasn't nearly enough of a problem to undermine how much I liked this book overall and would heartily recommend it.
legs_mcgee's review against another edition
2.0
This book reminds me of why I am not fond of memoirs as a genre.
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