[“THE INVISIBLE BUTCH, OR THE UNREPRESENTABLE BODY
I go back, now, to the question that’s been a silent but present one throughout most of this article. On the cultural landscape of lesbianism, in the realm of representation, where is the butch? Given the above evidence, it’s clear she remains on the margins, rarely seen. Why? Perhaps most obviously because like the butch, unlike the femme, is not consumable; her relative invisibility on the cultural landscape has to do with her perceived (un)attractiveness. Sue O'Sullivan points out that the butch is "the caricature lesbian whipping girl, the one who serves as the repository of mainstream hatred and fear of feminism’s ‘excesses’…. She is 'mannish’ but not at all stylish and at the same time she is definitely a woman. Therefore she has to be ugly— in other words butch.” Or, as Sherrie Inness, nicely encapsulating this point, maintains: "Butches fail to fulfill heterosexual ideas about what is attractive and sexually appealing in women.” In other words, the butch, a woman marked more by conventional masculine characteristics than feminine ones, is considered “ugly.” And given the configurations of our mainstream cultural landscape, there is little room for those deemed unattractive. In fact, such supposed unattractiveness is an affront to an image-based culture; such as O'Sullivan contends, “the so-called loony, ugly (read not stereotypically feminine) lesbian, increasingly designated as an arbiter of political correctness, remains a figure for derision and hatred.”
But perhaps such "derision and hatred” towards the butch, and her invisibility on the mainstream cultural landscape, is not so simply explained. Another characteristic attributed to the butch that conceivably marks her as unrepresentable is her socioeconomic status. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, Lillian Faderman points out that from the 1920s through the 1960s, the butch-femme pair was usually associated with the working class. Indeed, one need only read Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues to get an idea of the type of blue-collar jobs the “stone butches” of the 1950s and 1960s held, working primarily on docks and in factories. I would assert that this connection between the butch and her working-class status further contributes to her mainstream undesirability. Look for a moment at the following description of butch-femme relations, as described in a 1993 article in New York magazine:
“It was very different when I came out in Texas,” says Jean Sidebottom, the editor and publisher of Sappho’s Isle, the tri-state lesbian newspaper. “That bulldyke world was very much the scene I first came out into. The first lesbian bar I ever walked into, in Houston, was owned by a woman called Papa Bear. She was mildly obese, with short-cropped, masculine, stone-butch hair. She smoked cigarettes and wore T-shirts and blue-jeans— she had a key chain on her belt loop and a knife in her boot. Her girlfriend was a stripper. There was a certain sleaziness associated with it that I somehow could never accept. It gave you a feeling of being less than a real person.” (Emphasis mine)
The lesbian Sidebottom describes is a butch coded so with her “short-cropped, masculine, stone-butch hair” and her clothes— jeans, boots, T-shirt. There are no markers of “normality” on Papa Bear; she is not only masculine, she is also masculine and undesirable (“mildly obese”). On James Dean, T-shirts, blue jeans, and the accessories might be sexy. On Papa Bear, these attributes contribute to a caricature of the bull dyke and her hypermasculinity, a caricature that seems to be presented as simultaneously humorous and loathsome. Couple this with the fact that the butch’s girlfriend is a stripper, and the entire image— and, by extension, the entire body of the butch— is deemed sleazy. Finally, the last line of the quote— “it gave you a feeling of being less than a real person”— leaves me wondering: what is “it”? What specifically leaves Sidebottom feeling so unlike a “real person”? One reading, of course, might be that she felt uncomfortable trying to fit into butch-femme codes of the 1950s and 1960s. However, given the description that precedes this statement I want to point out another reading: the connection between “being less than a real person” and being a butch (or, more specifically here, a bull dyke.) For even if it was the whole scene that made Sidebottom uncomfortable, in this passage it is Papa Bear who represents the source of not only discomfort, but also “sleaziness.” The butch here is presented as working class, masculine, and above all, distasteful. Given these characteristics, this lesbian, clearly, is not palatable in any way. And the ways in which class marks the butch— considerably different from the ways class marks the upwardly mobile femmes or feminine lesbians discussed earlier— only contributes to her unrepresentability.“]
Butch-Femme couple, circa 1950s, seen in Before Stonewall (1984)
excerpts from Arlene Istar’s “Femme-dyke” about being a Jewish femme dyke and grappling with femme invisibility, identity, and sexuality. Published in Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (1992).
Original press photo of the lesbian nightclub Le Monocle, Paris (1937) by Brassaï