Scan barcode
A review by circlepines
Butch Is a Noun by S. Bear Bergman
2.0
Oh, man. I love Bear Bergman. I loved his* most recent book, The Nearest Exit Is Behind You. I saw him give a talk last week and it was amazing, energizing, and thought-provoking. Butch Is a Noun is the work that put him on the map and I wanted to love it, too; instead, I was barely able to stick with it to the end.
It basically comes down to this: for a book about gender, Butch Is a Noun has a really poor gender analysis. Throughout the book Bear uses "butch" and "femme" without attempting to define or explain them, with a wink and a nod, as though their meaning and their relationship to queer identity and queer politics are understood. Yet many of the essays simply map "butch" onto "masculine/gentlemanly" and "femme" onto "feminine/ladylike," then proceed to generalize in ways that would be blatantly sexist if the terms "man" and "woman" were used instead.
What to make of a a paragraph like this -- a paragraph that essentializes butchness and femmeness absent any kind of queer context, and suggests that anyone who is feminine-of-center and interacts with a masculine-of-center person in a way that is assertive and expects respect is femme? In the end, there's a complete failure to separate what is radical, liberatory gender play from what is just a queer reframing of sexism.
I still love most of Bear's work, but I'm glad that I was introduced to him through The Nearest Exit rather than through Butch Is a Noun.
* this is not the pronoun set that Bear used at the time Butch Is a Noun came out, but it is the pronoun set that he is using now
It basically comes down to this: for a book about gender, Butch Is a Noun has a really poor gender analysis. Throughout the book Bear uses "butch" and "femme" without attempting to define or explain them, with a wink and a nod, as though their meaning and their relationship to queer identity and queer politics are understood. Yet many of the essays simply map "butch" onto "masculine/gentlemanly" and "femme" onto "feminine/ladylike," then proceed to generalize in ways that would be blatantly sexist if the terms "man" and "woman" were used instead.
This business of putting a butch through hir paces does not seem, by the way, to be a learned behavior, but rather an instinctive one; little four- and six-year-old femme girls that I meet in airports and ice cream lines regularly assume their command of me, asking me questions, telling me what they want and need. In their ways, they're looking for the right kind of audience, looking to have the right kind of attention; a kind of attention I can hardly describe, but one which I recognize as the sort that butches have for femmes. It is an attention heavy with some measure of restraint, a way of relating that is queered, with irony -- here's the tough guy, the dude, the butch with the flashy moves and the nice manners, the man of things, and yet this butch, if he's a gentleman, and I am, doesn't make a move without the femme's intention being explicit and assured.
What to make of a a paragraph like this -- a paragraph that essentializes butchness and femmeness absent any kind of queer context, and suggests that anyone who is feminine-of-center and interacts with a masculine-of-center person in a way that is assertive and expects respect is femme? In the end, there's a complete failure to separate what is radical, liberatory gender play from what is just a queer reframing of sexism.
I still love most of Bear's work, but I'm glad that I was introduced to him through The Nearest Exit rather than through Butch Is a Noun.
* this is not the pronoun set that Bear used at the time Butch Is a Noun came out, but it is the pronoun set that he is using now