Masculinities without men: Female masculinity in twentieth-century fictions

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, both queer theory and queer popular culture began to grapple with the figure of female masculinity. Texts such as A Restricted Country, by Joan Nestle (1990); Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg (1991); collections like Daggers, edited by Lily Burana, Roxxie and Linnea Due (1994); and The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, edited by Joan Nestle (1991) began to articulate sites of butch subjectivities. At the same time, many of these texts were named in emergent female-to-male trans-sexual discourse as proliferating a confusion and a colonization of, the field of female masculinity, claiming that while butch subjectivity and ftm trans-sexual masculinity might, on occasion, look the same, such mis-recognized similitudes masked important historical and experiential differences. This dissertation considers the cultural significance of, but also the discursive and epistemological histories of the "slash" between "butch/ftm trans-sexual" masculinities. It argues that the discursive history of both is to be found in Radclyffe Hall's 1928 novel, The Well of Loneliness, a rearticulation of the subject produced by late nineteenth-century sexology: the invert. Working from the poststructuralist premise that subjectivities are effects of discourse and language, this work posits that transsexual, trans-gendered, and/or butch bodies emerge as the effect of onto-performative speech-acts, discernable through the strategic use of pronouns.; Section One theorizes female masculinity relative to dialogic sites of male masculinity, gay masculinity and trans-sexual masculinity in queer popular culture. Section Two offers historical, discursive and juridical contexts within which to consider female masculinity as the effect of Hall's The Well of Loneliness and its obscenity trial. The 1928 trial that banned The Well followed the legal and moral precedents established only 10 years earlier in the 1918 Pemberton Billing trial which constructed sexology and its subjects as German and therefore treasonous. Consequently, one of the long-term effects of the Billing trial was a metonymic slippage between British nationalism and heterosexual masculinity, a slippage that both produced but also necessitated the legal censuring of the subject of Hall's novel.; Section Three offers a reading of The Well of Loneliness that examines the processes by which Stephen Gordon rearticulates himself as a subject of male masochism through a disidentification with non-phallic masculinity vis-a-vis Christ motifs. This section also examines the mis-readings of the mirror scene by recent critics who erroneously posit that Stephen is female and then miss the ways that the scene at the mirror reproduces Stephen as a subject of whiteness. Chapter Four reads two contemporary prose narratives, Stone Butch Blues (1993) by Leslie Feinberg and Sacred Country by Rose Tremain (1992), for the ways that they rearticulate the subject of a productive male masochism and whiteness as it was produced in Hall's text. The Postscript concludes by examining discursive utterances differentially producing but then collapsing butch and trans-sexual masculinities in Kimberly Peirce's film Boys Don't Cry, a fictionalized account of the rape and murder of Brandon Teena (1999).