O'Callaghan - Grisley L Business.pdf (126.46 kB)
‘Grisley “L” business’: Re-valuing female masculinity and butch subjectivity in Tipping the Velvet and The Night Watch
According to the lesbian cultural critic Emma Healey, the figure of the butch lesbian not only carries ‘the weight of nearly one hundred years of stereotyping on her shoulders’, but also suffers homophobic ‘scorn and ridicule’ from heterosexist culture as well as ‘internalised lesbophobia’ within lesbian communities. As Gayle Rubin indicates, the term ‘butch’ is ‘the lesbian vernacular for women who are more comfortable with masculine gender codes, styles or identities than with feminine ones’ and ‘encompasses a variety of ways of and motivations for using masculine gender codes and preferences’. Butchness exists, therefore, as Jack Halberstam points out, on a varied continuum of female masculinities that signify ‘differently gendered bodies’ and female subjectivities.
History
School
- The Arts, English and Drama
Department
- English and Drama
Published in
Sarah Waters and Contemporary FeminismsPages
193 - 214Citation
O'CALLAGHAN, C., 2016. ‘Grisley “L” business’: Re-valuing female masculinity and butch subjectivity in Tipping the Velvet and The Night Watch. IN: JONES, A. and O'CALLAGHAN, C. (eds.) Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms, London: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 193-214.Publisher
Palgrave MacmillanVersion
- AM (Accepted Manuscript)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2016Notes
This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Palgrave Macmillan in Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms, available online: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50608-5_11.ISBN
978-1-137-50607-8Publisher version
Language
- en