Sally R. Munt

Cherry Smyth

Inside Lesbian Gender (Lesbian & Gay Studies)

Butch/Femme

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Butch/femme has become a form of self-representation for lesbians; it gives lesbian desire a partial, sometimes reluctant, entry into the symbolic realm of language and culture. In the hegemonic sense, we are women, but we are something else too.

How do we approach the painful subtleties of butch/femme, the yearning to be recognized, the reflex that pulls, the propulsion towards each other which can so often end in retreat? Butch/femme is all the intricate things, and the melancholy too, perhaps also the perversely gainful validation of being dysphoric in a culture which demands gender congruence.

Retrospective shame is always so distinctly bitter, as it carries the potency of revelation.

Gazing is also a sophisticated language of gay and lesbian courtship, the nuances of various looks, lingering, direct, frequent, or oblique characterizing the preliminaries of street or bar interaction, and there is the covenanting 'dyke stare', the eyes held by a stranger fractionally longer than decorously necessary, establishing a deft, brief and secret kinship, a mirroring, which colludes to simultaneously acknowledge and rebut shame.

Shame occurs when we internalize an ideal we are not able to meet; we become ashamed, punishing ourselves, and projecting this onto others whom we include in our failure. For example: butch baiting, especially from other butches, is a product of this failure ('You aren't a real butch, because... '). An aspect of this is the competitiveness shame produces, a measuring of oneself against an internalized and projected ideal, 15 and a desire to make others fail in comparison to ourselves ('I'm butcher than you'). This does not promote butch diversity, it idealizes an impossible category.

These momentary suspensions, when linked together in the context of a particular relationship, work toward a more profound kind of ego destruction... each lover is refigured by the other, made to bear the mark of the other upon the self. But all such transformation involves the breaking down of resistance, of violence to an existing order of the ego.

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