Creating Stone Butch Contemporalities: Trauma, Asexuality, and Transgender Frameworks
In the 1940s and 1950s, lesbian dichotomies of butch-femme identity were at their height through the popularization of the lesbian bar scene (Zimmerman). In lesbians bars, lesbians of both butch and femme identities found solace from heterosexual norms of relationships and desire and were able to find other gay women. This community inspired Leslie Feinberg to write the fictional, yet semi-autobiographical, Stone Butch Blues, which looked at this scene through the eyes of a young working-class butch, Jess. However, identities, as shown in Stone Butch Blues, became more complicated than the simple butch or femme, and many characters in the novel expand butch identity into claiming the label “stone butch”. This identity, while niche, was made more widely known through Stone Butch Blues’ publication (Zimmerman). The label of “stone butch” also was more permanently cemented into lesbian and gay memory, as the book is still taught, and continues to shape modern queer theory.
While Stone Butch Blues was written as fiction, the experiences depicted in the book are based on Feinberg’s life. The book, then, becomes very important as a historical account of stone butch, butch, and femme identity. In “Prioritizing Audiences: Exploring the Difference Between Stone Butch and Transgender Selves”, author Sara Crawley continues to defend the use of this book by stating Jess’ gender expression and sexual expression as fact, not made up for the sake of this book, and that “dykes read Stone Butch Blues as real and historical and use it in practice,” (Crawley 15). Because of the points Crawley makes, the semi autobiographical nature, as well as the historical importance of the novel, I will consider Stone Butch Blues as incredibly accurate to stone butch experience, and fundamental as an exhibit for this paper.
Because of of the literary, social, and cultural permanence of the label “stone butch”, contemporary concepts become important in discerning it’s current meaning. While the label may have been used historically to mean a limited identity, present theory adds dimension to the way the word is used. In this paper, I will argue that modern-day concepts of asexuality, trauma, and transgender identity expand and inform the term “stone butch” to meet the changing landscape of queer theory.
Many definitions of “stone butch” exist, but the most common, here taken from the Encyclopedia of Lesbian Histories and Cultures, Volume 1, determines a stone butch as “a butch woman who does not allow herself to be touched during lovemaking, but who often experiences orgasm while making love to her partner,” (Zimmerman 140). Like other butches, stone butches dress in a masculine style of clothing and can tend to exhibit stereotypical or traditional masculine mannerisms, which includes being the sexual aggressor (Zimmerman). What differentiates them from the umbrella term of “butch”, however, is the sexual specificity of “stone”. In Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinities, Sandy, a stone butch, describes this role: “I love to make love. I still say that’s the greatest thing in the world. And I don’t want them to touch me. It spoils the whole thing …. I am the way I am,” (Halberstam 111). This quote characterizes the sexual specificity of stone butches, as Sandy clearly states she does not want to be touched sexually. She also, however, clarifies her love of making love, showing that her sexual specificity, while significant, does not keep her from experiencing sex.
In Stone Butch Blues, the sexual characteristics of stone butch identity are not only important to the storyline, but central to the characters’ realization and development. The main character of the novel, Jess, is identified as a stone butch early in the novel, and indoctrinated into lesbian bar scenes at an early age. Here, she meets other butches and stone butches, including Butch Al. Butch Al, teaches Jess the duties of a butch, most importantly, how to fuck a femme, the other, feminine and submissive (Zimmerman), half of the butch-femme dichotomy (Feinberg 27). Midway through the book, Jess has her first sexual experience with a femme named Angie. After the encounter, Angie comments on wanting to pleasure Jess in the way she had pleasured her, “[Angie] ran her hands through my hair. ‘I just wish I could make you feel that good. You’re stone already, aren’t you?’ I dropped my eyes,” (Feinberg 76). Through this encounter, Jess cements herself as a stone butch in sexual context by denying sexual reciprocation.
Trauma: Creating Stone’s Shields
Trauma is a critical theme when discussing both the plot of Stone Butch Blues and the components of what makes contemporary stone butch identity. Through discussions of the manifestations of trauma in the body and historical realities of sexual assault to butches, trauma becomes an important characteristic in discussing the sexual identities of stone butches.
In An Archive of Feelings’ chapter titled “Trauma and Touch: Butch Femme Sexualities”, Ann Cvetkovich explores the trauma that comes with butch sexualities. Central to this argument is Cvetkovich’s interpretation of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud introduces the concept of a protective shield, and trauma as a break of that created protective shield (Cvetkovich 53). Cvetkovich uses Freud to explain what can occur after trauma takes place. “Noted PTSD expert John Wilson cites Beyond the Pleasure Principle as an early account of hyperarousal and numbing, two of the clinically accepted symptoms of trauma,” (Cvetkovich 53). This reading places stone butches “stone” aspects as protective shields, numbing aspects that occur as a result of experienced trauma. By creating these shields through emotional and physical untouchability characteristic to “stone” behavior, stone butches attempt to protect themselves from further traumatizing situations.
While it is impossible to speak to all the trauma a stone butch may experience, Stone Butch Blues shows experiences that could clearly cause a protective shield to form: police violence, rape, and incarceration. Throughout the book, Jess and her butch friends regularly experience brutal and violent raids to the bars they inhabit, and are incarcerated for gender transgression. In jail, Jess, other butches, and “drag queens” are routinely raped and beaten by police officers. Early in the book, Jess witnesses her older butch mentor, Al, after she gets raped by a cop. After Jess and Al are bailed from jail, Jess and Jacqueline, Al’s femme girlfriend, have a conversation speaking to the shields created in response to police violence:
[Jacqueline] came closer to me. “Did they hurt you, baby?” “No,” I lied. I was mortaring a brick wall inside myself. The wall didn’t protect me, and yet I watched as though it wasn’t my hands placing each brick. I turned away from her to signal that I had something important to ask. “Jacqueline, am I strong enough?” She came up behind me and turned me around by the shoulder. She pulled my face against her cheek. “Who is, honey?” she whispered. “Nobody’s strong enough. You just get through it the best you can. Butches like you and Al don’t have a choice. It’s gonna happen to you. You just gotta try to live through it.” I was already burning with another question. “A1 wants me to be tough. You and Mona and the other femmes are always telling me to stay sweet, stay tender. How can I be both? Jacqueline touched my cheek. “Al’s right, really. It’s selfish of us girls, I guess. We want you to be strong enough to survive the shit you take. We love how strong you are. But butches get the shit kicked out of their hearts too. And I guess we just sometimes wish there was a way to protect your hearts and keep you all tender for us, you know?” I didn’t. I really didn’t. “Is A1 tender?” Jacqueline’s face tightened. The question threatened to reveal something that could pierce Butch Al’s armor. Then Jacqueline saw I really needed the answer. “She’s been hurt real bad. It’s hard for A1 say everything she feels.” (Feinberg 35–36)
As depicted by this quote, butches’ sexualities in this novel (and historical life) are intensely transformed by their experiences being incarcerated and surviving police violence. However, there is much more to impact from this conversation. Jess talks about mortaring a wall that she knows cannot protect her early in this quote, which helps show the ways in which Jess uses stone as a protection from trauma that can be unavoided while being butch. Jacqueline enforces this sentiment with Jess, saying that in order to live through butch realities, protective shields are critical for survival. Butch Al, a seasoned stone butch who has experienced incredible amounts of sexual assault and police violence, becomes an example of this, as due to her hurt and trauma, has trouble expressing how she feels, a central tenet of being stone butch. In “A Scar is More Than A Wound: Rethinking Community and Intimacy through Queer and Disability Theory”, Hammer continues to talk about the ways in which sexual violence effects lesbian communities in Stone Butch Blues. “The fear of rape haunts butch-femme culture and becomes for Jess and her friends a part of what Cvetkovich calls the historically “traumatic texture” of lesbian communities,” (Hammer 164). This fear of rape that Hammer refers to is one of the key traumas that causes the need for this protective shield. In Cvetkovich chapter “Trauma and Touch”, where she expands on this “traumatic texture”, she also goes on to connect this experience directly to the mentally and sexually stone aspects of some butches. “A stone attitude was a form of protection against the raids and arrests that were a regular occurrence in pre-Stonewall bar culture as well as against the harassment that butch women working in factories frequently experienced. Refusing to show that one had been affected by insults strip searches, rapes, beatings, and other forms of psychic, physical, and sexual trauma to which lesbians were subject was a significant form of butch resistance,” (Cvetkovich 67). In order to be “strong” and live through the daily harassment that came with being butch, numbness (and sexual specificity potentially) derived from trauma attempt to protect the butch person.
Are Stone Butches Asexual?
While the connection between trauma and asexuality can be contentious, as AVEN (the Asexuality Visibility Network) clearly states trauma does not cause asexuality, modern asexuality studies can place trauma and asexuality as forces influencing each other (Cerankowski 238). Asexuality, through contemporary discourses, has been expanded to encompass individuals with various sexual identities and numerous degrees of sexual specificity (Chasin 406).
While the definition of what entails asexuality has been in flux, and is generally very individualized, “aexuality is generally understood to coincide with a lack of desire for partnered sexual contact,” (Chasin 406). Through this definition, stone butches would not be considered asexual, not only because of their desire to pleasure another partner, but also because their lack of self-identification, as asexuality was not a common term. However, using modern day asexual frameworks, it becomes possible to find asexual resonance within stone butch identity.
In their article “Asexual Resonances: Tracing a Queerly Asexual Archive”, Przybylo and Cooper define asexual resonances by saying: “…We shift our focus to a blurrier imagining of asexuality; we are attuned less to self-identified asexual figures than to asexual “resonances” — or
traces, touches, instances — allowing us to search for asexuality in unexpected places,” (Przybylo and Cooper 278). Here, Przybylo and Cooper define resonance as a framework to look at absences in sexual practice, but not defining historical figures as clearly asexual. Applying the concepts of asexual resonance to stone butch identity and Stone Butch Blues reveals potentially hidden instances of asexuality.
While stone butches tend to engage in sexual activity, their sexual specificity opens up possibilities of asexual resonance. In Jack Halberstam Female Masculinities’ chapter “Lesbian Masculinity: Even Stone Butches Get The Blues”, he states: “The stone butch has the dubious distinction of being possibly the only sexual identity defined almost solely in terms of what practices she does not engage in,” (Halberstam 123). While stone butches engage in sex, Halberstam argues that their sexual intimacy is defined by what the stone butch will not allow or will not do. This specificity in sexual encounters and identity definition through disengagement draw connections with asexual resonance because of its lack of sexual reciprocity, common in standard sexual practices.
Stone butch identity is also further linked to asexual resonance through the changing landscape of what defines asexuality. While asexuality has been defined solely as someone who does not desire sex (a la AVEN), asexuality has branched out to contain many other labels with varying relationships to sexual activity (Chasin 406). In their piece, “Reconsidering Asexuality and Its Radical Potential,” CJ Chasin discusses these identities, saying, “Despite a clear and widely accepted definition of asexuality as a lack of sexual attraction, it is evident from writing and other forms of self-expression by asexuals…that diverse asexuals derive different meaning from being asexual and that there is considerable nuance of variation in how to be part of the asexual community,” (Chasin 406). The opening up of the asexual community, as Chasin discusses here, allows for more variety within the asexual label. Chasin goes on to say, “For example, self-identified gray-asexuals and demisexuals typically experience some sexual attraction in certain situations and may not consider themselves strictly asexual…” (Chasin 406). While these labels find home under the asexual umbrella, Chasin states that asexual people can experience different amounts of sexual attraction. Some people, holding more specific identities, under the asexual umbrella may even engage in sex, similar to stone butches. This broadened definition of asexuality allows for variety in the levels of sexual attraction for asexuals, potentially allowing for those with amounts of sexual attraction, but expressed sexual specificity, like stone butches, to resonate with asexual identity or labels.
Gender Transgression: Stone Butches and Transgender Identity
Broadness and expansion within transgender identity, like asexual identity, has also redefined the label stone butch in contemporary conversation. “Transgender” as an umbrella term opens up possibilities to what identities can fall under it. Nonbinary individuals, those who do not identify fully as a man or woman, have gained acceptance under the transgender umbrella, and portrays more variance within the community. Nonbinary peoples’ position as a gender outside of the categorized gender binary is important when talking about stone butch identity, another identity that is separate from classic ideas of male and female.
While many stone butches fully identified as female, other aspects of this identity and of the people in the stone butch community can separate them as a potentially nonbinary identity. In “Female Masculinity”, Jack Halberstam argues that stone butches inhabit a space “between female masculinity and transgender subjectivity,” (Halberstam 124). Halberstam also talks about stone butch identity as a particular form of lesbian masculinity, an almost gender identity created through stone butch lesbians (Halberstam 124). In this piece, Halberstam goes on to talk about the ways that stone butch’s sexual specificity also could potentially be caused by gender disturbance. He says, “The stone butch manages the discordance between being a woman and experiencing herself as masculine by creating a sexual identity and a set of sexual practices that correspond to and accommodate the disjuncture,” (Halberstam 126). Thus, Halberstam argues that to retain masculine identity within sexual contexts, stone butches insist on being “tops”, or the aggressor, commonly wearing a strap-on dildo, and not receiving genital stimulation. These practices allow stone butches to relieve gender disjunctures, which while different, draw parallels to what is known in transgender theory as gender dysphoria. Dysphoria is a common experience of transgender individuals, feeling a disjuncture between their body and sex assigned at birth and their internal sense of self. Looking at the stone butch sex practices and transmasculine sex practices described earlier as a way to relieve disjuncture, connects transgender individuals and stone butch people through this shared experience of dissatisfaction. However, it is also important to point out the different ways that this disjuncture/dysphoria functions. While transmasculine individuals distance themselves from female existence, stone butch individuals commonly identify as cisgender women, and instead of distancing themselves from being female, find ways to marry their female embodiment and masculinity.
More connections between transgender/nonbinary identity and stone butch practice can be seen in other sex practices. In “The P Word: Trans Men, Stone Butches, and the Politics of Penetration,” Bobby Noble expands on the idea of sexual action as a link in this way. Noble talks about the ways that stone butches see penetration and genital contact as a “invasive” and “very gendered” sexual practice (Noble 17). “And moreover, not only are the choreographies of the event of penetration persistently gendered, they might also mark spaces of trauma, shame, and ambivalence for FTM trans men about the gendered (i.e., “female”) terms of embodiment,” (Noble 17). Noble argues that the practice of resisting vaginal penetration for stone butches and for some transgender individuals is due to its gendered connotations, but also could be connected to trauma of embodiment.
Because vaginal penetration, and having a vagina in the first place, is seen as a female embodiment, both stone butches and transmasculine individuals can be adverse to it. The gender disjunctures common between stone butch and trans people (gender dysphoria), create the vagina and vaginal penetration as a space of trauma because it doesn’t fit the person’s self image. On top of the gendered trauma/shame surrounding the vagina and vaginal penetration, the sexual assault experienced by many stone butches further centers the vagina as a site of trauma.
Stone Butch Blues also offers an important look into the commonalities between stone butch and transgender identity. In Stone Butch Blues, both Jess, Grant, Edwin, and Rocco, other stone butch characters, undergo gender transitions, through top surgery (mastectomy) and hormone replacement therapy (testosterone). While one does not need surgery or hormones to be transgender, and vice versa, these acts, common of contemporary transgender men or transmasculine individuals, also create ties between stone butches and trans people. Stone Butch Blues, because of this portrayal of transition, is also modernly seen as a transgender novel, and potentially nonbinary experience, as Jess talks about not feeling like a man or woman, and Feinberg hirself identified as transgender (Feinberg 171).
In the book, Jess and other characters who undergo parts of transition talk about the ways in which passing as male and transitioning would relieve them from many of the horrors of being stone butch, like police harassment, and allow them to better get factory jobs (Feinberg 158). Jess also talks about the ways that hormones make her feel more comfortable in her body, like the way she expected to be before puberty (Feinberg 184). Later in the book, Jess decides to stop taking hormones, as she felt the person she was seeing in the mirror didn’t match her gender identity (Feinberg 240), and expresses a sentiment essential to nonbinary identity, not identifying as a man or woman:
But who was I now — woman or man? I fought long and hard to be included as a woman among women, but I always felt so excluded by my differences. I hadn’t just believed that passing would hide me. I hoped that it would allow me to express the part of myself that didn’t seem to be woman. I didn’t get to explore being a he-she, though. I simply became a he — a man without a past. Who was I now — woman or man? That question could never be answered as long as those were the only choices; it could never be answered if it had to be asked. (Feinberg 241)
Here, it is obvious Jess is constricted between two ill-fitting choices, woman and man. While Jess denies being transgender in the book, to her, transgender meant becoming a man, which she wasn’t. Saying this, claiming Jess as nonbinary would be incorrect.
Stone Butch Contemporalities
It is important to not project modern concepts onto historical figures and characters. While the ideas presented in this paper modernize “stone butch” through contemporary frameworks, it is vital to note that many stone butches of that and this time period would not have identified with any of these terms. Using this modern language however, lets us see representation and commonalities between the past and now. Expanding the way we look at stone butch also expands the way we look at historical displays of gender and sexuality, adding nuance to previously strictly defined labels. To consider ideas of trauma, asexuality, and transgender subjectivity with the stone butch label not only expands concepts of gender and sexuality, but importantly adds to the ways that trauma integrates with gender and sexuality.
Through contemporary ideas of trauma, asexuality, and transgender identity, the label “stone butch” can be modernized in order expand queer theory. Stone Butch Blues and the character of Jess allow readers to see these three ideas play out in a realistic world and conflate in the stone butch characters of the novel. Contemporary conceptions and theories talking about “stone butches” would be incomplete without considering the ways that modern frameworks revolutionize this incredibly intricate existence.
Works Cited
Cerankowski, KJ. “Queer Dandy Style: The Cultural Politics of Tim Gunn’s Asexuality.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1 & 2, 2013, pp. 226–244.
Chasin, CJ DeLuzio. “Reconsidering Asexuality and Its Radical Potential.” Feminist Studies, vol. 39, no. 2, 2013, pp. 406–426.
Cvetkovich, Ann. “Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities.” An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures, Duke Univ. Press, 2015, pp. 49–82.
Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. Leslie Feinberg, 2014.
Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity. 5. print. ed. Durham [u.a.]: Duke Univ. Press, 2003. Web.
Hammer, Karen. “A Scar is More than a Wound: Rethinking Community and Intimacy through Queer and Disability Theory.” Rocky Mountain Review 68, no. 2 (Oct 1, 2014): 159–176.
Noble, Bobby. “The ‘P’ Word: Trans Men, Stone Butches and the Politics of Penetration.” Atlantis 31, no. 2 (2007): 16.
Przybylo, Ela, and Danielle Cooper. “Asexual Resonances: Tracing a Queerly Asexual Archive.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 3 (29 June 2014): 297–318.
Zimmerman, Bonnie. Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1. Taylor & Francis, 2000. Print.
