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‘Grisley “L” business’: Re-valuing female masculinity and butch subjectivity in Tipping the Velvet and The Night Watch

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posted on 2018-06-19, 10:27 authored by Claire O'CallaghanClaire O'Callaghan
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 Feminisms

Pages

193 - 214

Citation

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 Macmillan

Version

  • 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

2016

Notes

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

978-1-137-50607-8

Language

  • en