Female Masculinity and Phallic Women

Unruly Concepts

Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 During the 2008 us election, internet images circulated of vice

2 presidential candidate Sarah Palin carrying big guns. In a commen-
3 tary titled Sarah Palin: Operation Castration, French Lacanian the-
4 orist Jacques-Alain Miller warned: We are entering an era of post-
5 feminist women, women who are ready to kill the political men.
6 They play the castration card and are thus invincible. Such over-
7 heated rhetoric regularly attends discussions about phallic women
8 and female masculinity. This essay seeks to analyze current uses of
9 these overlapping but disparate concepts about women who are pre-
10 sumed to have a relation to a or the phallus, or to the vague and elas-
11 tic category of masculinity.
12 Female masculinity is an elusive, inherently paradoxical con-
13 cept that slips away from efforts to pin it down. I examine it here in
14 several historical and disciplinary contexts. My first three examples
15 derive from central theorists of the topic over the past four decades.
16 I start with a case history by Robert Stoller, the most authoritative
17 US psychoanalytic writer on gender between World War II and con-
18 temporary feminist and queer theory. His 1973 book, Splitting: A Case
19 of Female Masculinity, is a study of one psychotic woman that also claims
20 to advance the understanding of gender (that is, of masculinity and
21 femininity) more generally. Despite Stollers dated approach, subse-
22 quent masculinity studies up to the present day continue to rely on

Feminist Studies 38, no. 3 (Fall 2012). 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
584
Judith Kegan Gardiner 585

his psychoanalytic concepts. Next I turn to philosopher Judith But- 1

lers essay The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary in 2

her 1993 book, Bodies that Matter. As one of the most influential pio- 3

neers of queer theory, Butler revised Lacanian psychoanalysis; in 4

turn, her work inspired cultural studies scholar Judith (Jack) Halber- 5

stam, whose 1998 book Female Masculinity depicts types of women who 6

exemplify Butlers abstract ideas, thereby popularizing the concept of 7

female masculinity as a possible lifestyle for women and especially 8

butch lesbians. Then I briefly discuss several postmillennial soci- 9

ological studies that apparently mark a progressive trajectory from 10

pathologizing nonnormative gender to liberatory gender self-defini- 11

tion. However, broadening this inquiry troubles narratives of progress 12

and requires new theoretical paradigms. A contrast between Gover- 13

nor Palin and chicks with dicks a genre of transnational transsex- 14

ual pornography reveals a cultural polarization between phallic 15

power and abjected penis-for-pleasure. Taken as a whole, this narra- 16

tive illustrates the instability, even the incoherence, of the concept of 17

female masculinity and its role in propping, rather than undermin- 18

ing, masculinity altogether. 19

In all these examples, Im interested in the theories that address 20

gender variation, particularly the way that female masculinity still 21

rests on binary conceptions of power that connote maleness and also 22

on psychoanalytic assumptions. I note the divergent explanatory 23

frameworks for gender nonconformity applied in these cases and 24

their varied cultural contexts. Such theories are migratory, appear- 25

ing across conceptual, political, and geographical borders. For Stoller 26

in the 1970s, Freudian psychoanalysis remains the master discourse 27

at a prosperous time in United States history when polarized gender 28

roles seem in retreat and new social movements arise seeking wom- 29

ens liberation, civil rights for minorities, and greater equality for les- 30

bians and gay men. Twenty years later, Butler speaks from within the 31

academic disciplines of philosophy and gender studies in an era of 32

relative social quiescence characterized by a popular sense of mis- 33

sion accomplished with regard to womens liberation. A pioneer of 34

queer theory, she critiques older radical feminisms while retaining 35

nuanced allegiances to psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. Fol- 36

lowing Butler, Halberstam firmly establishes female masculinity on 37

the agenda of trans and queer studies, and her taxonomies become 38
 586 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 widely accepted. However, female masculinity is in an asymmetrical

2 alliance with the field of masculinity studies, which is chiefly devoted
3 to analyzing masculinity in men, often through object relations the-
4 ories such as those of Nancy Chodorow. One paradox of female
5 masculinity discourses is that instead of being considered derivative,
6 female masculinity may be celebrated as superior to masculinity in
7 men. In todays contexts, rapidly changing popular culture, medical
8 advances, and communication technology create new communities
9 and gender formations and invite new theoretical interventions.

10 Robert Stoller: Pathologizing Female Masculinity

11 In adapting Freudian theory to his clinical practice, psychoanalyst
12 Robert Stoller became one of the most noted authorities on the psy-
13 chology of gender in the mid-twentieth century, especially on the
14 variant formations of sexual preference and desire he labeled per-
15 versions. The title of his book Splitting refers to his main subject,
16 a woman whose psyche is split through multiple personalities, while
17 the books subtitle A Case of Female Masculinity creates female mas-
18 culinity as a psychological syndrome. Since Freud declared penis envy
19 the bedrock of womens psyches, it is not surprising that psychoana-
20 lysts such as Stoller discover widespread phallic fantasies in women.
21 For Freud, penis envy originates from the anger and disappointment
22 that all little girls experience when they recognize that their genitals
23 are inferior to male genitals. Thus in the Freudian paradigm, normal
24 femininity means that girls love their fathers, resent but identify
25 with their mothers, and finally achieve contentment with their lot by
26 having a compensatory baby, preferably one born with a penis. One
27 alternative to this normative female Oedipus complex is the mascu-
28 line protest in which the woman rebels against femininity by choos-
29 ing masculine occupations and sometimes by becoming a lesbian.
30 Stoller adheres to much of these Freudian psychodynamics in
31 his fourteen-year analysis of Mrs. G., who believes she has an invisible
32 internal penis that protects her from predatory men and persuades
33 her that her desires for women are not homosexual. Quoting from
34 audiotaped analytic sessions, Stoller traces her multiple personalities,
35 sexual ambivalence, and gender dysphoria to her childhood family,
36 including her weak father and rejecting mother. He uses this unique
37 case to build generalizations about gender identity in women in
Judith Kegan Gardiner 587

general. He writes that the main purpose of [his] research is to find 1

sources of masculinity and femininity in childhood psychology and 2

family dynamics, and the book begins: This is a book about Mrs. G., 3

a very masculine woman, and the pieces into which she was split in 4

order to accommodate that masculinity. He gives very few details 5

to explain why he describes her as very masculine. Well into the 6

case history, he calls her butchy, tough, and belligerent, with a 7

cocky position of her head. Although he mentions that she is Mex- 8

ican American, he never discusses her ethnicity or her working-class 9

background as factors shaping her gender or sexuality. 10

Stoller explains that as a child Mrs. G. envied her brother and in 11

response created her own masculinity by imitation and identifica- 12

tion, and maleness (a penis) by hallucination. He thus distinguishes 13

a biological or embodied maleness from psychological masculin- 14

ity. The doctor presents this penis delusion as Mrs. G.s most salient 15

symptom. When asked, what would happen if you lost your penis? 16

she replies, Then I wouldnt be anything. My penis is what I am. 17

However, she doesnt claim she is a man, instead using her fantasy 18

penis to protect her from acknowledging that she has homosexual 19

feelings. So Stoller judges that she becomes psychologically health- 20

ier when she finally considers herself a lesbian. Although he is sym- 21

pathetic to his patient, he describes both female masculinity and 22

homosexuality as pathological aberrations from a natural heterosex- 23

ual norm: Most homosexuals are what they are in order to preserve 24

a nucleus of heterosexuality somewhere inside [themselves], and he 25

judges that Mrs. G.s masculine sexual behavior is a defense mecha- 26

nism to keep her from recognizing that she wanted to be taken care 27

of and mothered herself. 28

According to Stoller, phallic women like Mrs. G. have both 29

femininity and conflicts about it. He also claims that similar drives 30

and defenses relating to having a phallus are ubiquitous in women 31

of our society so long as the word phallus is properly understood 32

to indicate not a penis but its attributes intrusiveness, power, vio- 33

lence. He generalizes that fantasies of being a member of the oppo- 34

site sex are extremely common, especially among homosexuals. Mrs. 35

Gs envy and hatred of maleness fit Stollers description of Freuds 36

penis envy common to all women. Stoller believes that gender iden- 37

tity is built from a set of convictions concerned with masculinity 38

 588 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 and femininity and from internalized unconscious fantasies. How-

2 ever, against Freud, he emphasizes that egosyntonic forces and
3 non-conflictual learning help create womens gender identity, and
4 therefore femininity is not just a defense against envy of maleness
5 and masculinity.
6 When Mrs. G. claims that she wouldnt be anything without
7 her imaginary penis, her explanation indicts the sexist culture: she
8 says, a man always has an advantage because he works and he sup-
9 ports himself, whereas being feminine means youre vulnerable to
10 males. Her denial of lesbian desires, too, fits an era largely intol-
11 erant of homosexuality. Her gendered and sexual pathology and
12 what Stoller has labeled her female masculinity then, might
13 all be understood in terms of her nonconformist responses to the
14 sexism and homophobia of the times. As we have seen, although
15 Stoller claims to be seeking the sources of female masculinity, he
16 introduces Mrs. G. from the first as a very masculine woman with-
17 out explaining the term. Thus female masculinity is his goal, the
18 thing he seeks to understand, and at the same time it is his starting
19 point. Stoller interprets gender and sexual orientation as interde-
20 pendent psychological structures that defend a core true self that
21 is always heteronormative, even in homosexuals and lesbians. Fur-
22 thermore, although Mrs. G.s delusional penis is a rare symptom, he
23 also regards penis envy, transsexual fantasies, and female masculin-
24 ity as normal in women.

25 Judith Butler: The Lesbian Phallus

26 Some of the contradictions in Stollers pioneering theories of female
27 masculinity and gender formation appear decades later in the writ-
28 ing of Judith Butler despite the transition from a Freudian case his-
29 tory to a Lacanian poststructuralist theory. Butlers essay The Les-
30 bian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary subverts previously
31 negative connotations of female masculinity. The essay starts with a
32 disavowal: After such a promising title, I knew that I could not pos-
33 sibly offer a satisfying essay; but perhaps the promise of the phallus is
34 always dissatisfying in some way. This tease connects the subject of
35 the work with its writing and connects the relation between writer
36 and reader, one or both of whom seem possessed of it: I assure you
37 (promise you?) that the essay couldnt have been done without the
Judith Kegan Gardiner 589

lesbian phallus, despite its only fugitive appearance in the essay. But- 1

lers opening gambit diminishes masculinist pretensions by imply- 2

ing that no phallus ever satisfies. The lesbian phallus is a contradic- 3

tion in terms, and the essay plays with this imaginary construction 4

to critique the Lacanian concept of the phallus the master symbol 5

of power to imply that if one can imagine a lesbian phallus, the 6

phallus will become detached from male bodies and hence usable by 7

other subjects. 8

Butler dismantles Lacans binary, in which having is a sym- 9

bolic position that institutes the masculine within heterosexuality, 10

always in opposition to a feminine that lacks having or is equated 11

with being. Into this closed symbolic system, the lesbian phallus 12

may be said to intervene as an unexpected consequence of the Laca- 13

nian scheme, an apparently contradictory signifier which, through 14

a critical mimesis, calls into question the ostensibly originating and 15

controlling power of the Lacanian phallus, indeed, its installation as 16

the privileged signifier of the symbolic order. Thus Butlers analy- 17

sis creates and undermines the Lacanian phallus, a phrase that con- 18

flates Lacans symbol with her own apparently masculine authority 19

over theory. 20

Often Butler presents a supposed cause as instead an effect, most 21

famously in the thesis that gender identity does not cause gendered 22

behavior, but rather that performing gender creates the sense of an 23

internal gender identity. Here, instead, I suggest that an effect noted 24

by Butler makes sense as a final cause or implicit purpose. Butler calls 25

the lesbian phallus an unexpected consequence of the Lacanian 26

scheme even though it is not a part of Lacans writings but rather her 27

own invention. She remarks that to de-authorize the male imagi- 28

nary, her strategy will be to show that the phallus can attach to a 29

variety of organs, and that the efficacious disjoining of phallus from 30

penis constitutes both a narcissistic wound to phallomorphism and 31

the production of an anti-heterosexist sexual imaginary. Her pur- 32

pose, then, is to separate the phallus from the penis; that is, to detach 33

the symbol of power from the male organ and so burst the bubble 34

of an inviolable masculine imaginary. This rupture is immedi- 35

ately accomplished in the very imagining of the lesbian phallus. How- 36

ever, such reasoning only works if we already agree that the phallus 37

is a mobile concept that represents something like power in general, 38

 590 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 not just the power of biological males. And furthermore, the confla-
2 tion of masculinity and power may encourage some lesbian theorists
3 to assign the phallus more to themselves rather than to heterosex-
4 ual women.
5 Well into the discussion that began by positing its existence,
6 Butler admits that the lesbian phallus is a fiction, but perhaps a the-
7 oretically useful one. This usefulness is deployed, not just against
8 Lacans theories, but more pointedly against what she calls the fem-
9 inist orthodoxy on lesbian sexuality. The lesbian phallus may then
10 serve as the missing part, the sign of an inevitable dissatisfaction
11 that is lesbianism in homophobic and misogynist construction. Who
12 is dissatisfied? The homophobe and misogynist, here rhetorically
13 associated with a feminist orthodoxy that apparently refers to essen-
14 tialist radical feminism. Thus Butlers essay is historically situated
15 in the early 1990s in relation to an evolving feminism and emerging
16 queer theory as well as to deconstruction and psychoanalysis.
17 In her essay Butler switches from attacking Lacans sexism
18 presumably with the concurrence of her feminist readers to attack-
19 ing feminist orthodoxy, and becomes a kind of overbearing mother
20 (rather than the Lacanian abusive father) to the rebellious child of her
21 own queer theory. She says that feminist orthodoxy will see in the
22 lesbian phallus both the defilement or betrayal of lesbian specific-
23 ity and a pathetic mimicry of man. The term specificity does not
24 itself specify whether it is referring to political power, woman iden-
25 tification, female eroticism, or anything else. Thus Butler imagines
26 that, for both the feminist and the misogynist, who become conflated,
27 the lesbian phallus is not a symbol of power but of failure: its not
28 the real thing (the lesbian thing) or its not the real thing (the straight
29 thing). However, this euphemism, the real thing, itself collapses
30 penis into phallus, so that questioning the authority of either term
31 deflates both. Because it is, in her words, an idealization, one which
32 no body can adequately approximate, the phallus is a transferable
33 phantasm, and its naturalized link to masculine morphology can be
34 called into question through an aggressive reterritorialization. This
35 explanation restates the point her title has already made as she grabs
36 the phallus by its theoretical handle in order to make it her own in a
37 masculinist rhetoric of conquest, an aggressive reterritorialization.
Judith Kegan Gardiner 591

Butler then shifts tactics to claim that the notion of a lesbian 1

phallus upsets the logic of noncontradiction that serves normative 2

heterosexuality. By appropriating the (lesbian) phallus, Butlers 3

argument succeeds in cutting off phallic ownership from the penis. 4

She argues: 5

When the phallus is lesbian, then it is and is not a masculinist figure 6

of power . And insofar as it operates at the site of anatomy, the 7

phallus (re)produces the spectre of the penis only to enact its van- 8

ishing . This opens up anatomy and sexual difference itself as 9

a site of proliferative resignifications. 10

These careful conditionals posit a nominalist reality. When 11

the phallus is lesbian assumes that the phallus exists and that the 12

new concept of a lesbian phallus is proliferative and so power- 13

ful. The lesbian is not sterile here but appropriates patriarchal gen- 14

erativity. But the only reason a feminist has for connecting penises 15

and power is that she knows she lives in a male-dominated society. 16

Butlers figure of the lesbian phallus thus reaffirms several popular 17

ideas at the level of high theory: the lesbian is and is not mannish; her 18

desire is to share or seize male power. Power is and is not tied to 19

masculinity and to anatomical maleness. Conversely, masculinity is 20

unthinkable without some connection to power. I note, too, that But- 21

lers language goes through a metaphorical sex change within this 22

passage: the masculine phallus penetrates and opens up anatomy 23

and so sexual difference, thus figuring the body and sexuality as 24

always already female and fruitful. 25

Butler says that the phallus has no existence separable from 26

the occasions of its symbolization, but the lesbian phallus can sig- 27

nify differently and so resignify, unwittingly, its own masculinist 28

and heterosexist privilege. This formulation assumes that mascu- 29

linist and heterosexist are so tied together that lesbian masculinity 30

would not perhaps could not reinforce heterosexist binaries 31

a questionable assumption. Butler also implies that the opposite of 32

the masculinist and heterosexist must be a feminist and queer 33

and hence more progressive alternative. Butlers lesbian phallus 34

thus deflects the 1970s-style lesbian feminist suspicion that women 35

who take symbols of male power reinforce those symbols. Instead, 36

 592 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 she argues that the masters master tool is exactly what can best dis-
2 mantle the masters house.
3 Butlers persuasive central argument in her 1990 book Gender
4 Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is that anything that is socially
5 instituted has to be practiced to remain in force and hence can be
6 repeated differently. One question her later work raises, then, is
7 whether or not feminists wish to promote an alternative imaginary to
8 a hegemonic imaginary that uses the lesbian phallus as the alterna-
9 tive to the masculinist phallus. Butler concludes The Lesbian Phal-
10 lus essay by asserting that what is needed is not a new body part,
11 as it were, but a displacement of the hegemonic symbolic of (hetero-
12 sexist) sexual difference and the critical release of alternative imagi-
13 nary schemas for constituting sites of erotogenic pleasure. The last
14 word of the chapter introduces pleasure to a discourse that has pre-
15 viously focused instead on meaning and power. Since a conclusion
16 in Butlers discourse can often be read as its cause, I therefore turn
17 the essay around to see pleasure as the goal for which the concept of
18 the lesbian phallus was invented. This pleasure is deeply implicated
19 in the powers of naming, which may be exactly what the phallus as
20 logos means. Furthermore, although (feminine) pleasure here takes
21 over as a feminist goal from (masculine) power, both become synec-
22 doches, parts of the feminist dream figured as the whole of a new way
23 of thinking and speaking, a new imaginary that is no longer hetero-
24 sexist and masculinist, despite its teasing appropriation of the central
25 masculinist symbol of power.
26 So Butler creates the lesbian phallus by naming it, but in so
27 doing she has already performed her own act of cutting away at her
28 Lacanian master texts. She cites Lacan as pronouncing the body and
29 anatomy are described only through negation: anatomy, and in par-
30 ticular, anatomical parts, are not the phallus, but only that which the phallus
31 symbolizes (Il est encore bien moins lorgane, pnis ou clitoris, quil symbolize), that is,
32 to translate from Lacans text, it is much less the organ, penis or cli-
33 toris, that is symbolized She explains that this means that the phal-
34 lus is a synecdochal extrapolation, a part for the whole. Through-
35 out her own discussion thereafter, she, too, takes only one part for
36 the whole, repeatedly referring to the penis but without mentioning
37 the clitoris that Lacan himself puts in parallel not in opposition
38 to the penis. If Butler had admitted the clitoris to her discussion, that
Judith Kegan Gardiner 593

addition might have disrupted the binary she creates between inade- 1

quate penis and powerful phallus. Furthermore, attention to the cli- 2

toris might figure alternative positive female imaginary construc- 3

tions to the lesbian phallus, as Teresa de Lauretis suggests. The 4

Lesbian Phallus does not discuss the most obvious phallic female 5

in the Freudian system, the phallic mother who figures as the fan- 6

tasy figure of completeness of which the child must be disabused or 7

else become a fetishist. In the following chapter in Bodies that Matter, 8

Butler does introduce the figure of the phallic mother, defining it 9

as devouring and destructive, the negative fate of the phallus when 10

attached to the feminine position. This is a misogynous construc- 11

tion that displaces phallic destructiveness onto women, not the 12

men who claim to be the proper holders of power. Butler concludes 13

that phallic mothers these figures of hell, figures which constitute 14

the state of punishment threatened by the law are partly figures 15

of homosexual abjection that is, the feminized fag and the phalli- 16

cized dyke. Here the phallicized dyke stands in unvoiced con- 17

tradiction to the lesbian phallus described earlier, not a newly imag- 18

ined figure of power but a tired old figure of social exclusion. This 19

juxtaposition refigures the preceding chapter on the lesbian phallus 20

into an exercise in utopian thinking, its initial moment not merely 21

the imaging of the lesbian phallus but of triumph over the mental 22

strictures of patriarchy, social defamation, and homophobia. 23

Throughout the The Lesbian Phallus, the lesbian is not defined 24

or specified by practice or desire. Presumably the term refers to 25

women who desire women erotically, rather than to the woman- 26

identified woman of 1970s lesbian feminism, but the terms vagueness 27

endows it with its own powerful symbolic aura. The lesbian phallus 28

is an abstraction originating only in a chain of signifiers. It has no 29

personal psychology, no relation to the absent fathers and rejecting 30

mothers of Stollers case histories, and no specific sexual desires, prac- 31

tices, or forms of self-presentation. Instead, Butlers essay enacts its 32

theories about the discursive construction of gender by creating the 33

lesbian phallus as a disembodied concept. The author teases that she 34

has it, since the essay couldnt have been done without it. Thus 35

her essay implicitly makes the case for the phallic lesbian as a power- 36

ful discursive construction, a phallic woman who is never pictured 37

as embodied (and so never disparaged as freakish) but who remains 38

 594 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 most stereotypically masculine in her very abstraction into dis-

2 course. Furthermore, the term remains within the binary Lacanian
3 logic that it disputes. Having a phallus or not having one remain the
4 only choices. Despite the vast difference between Stollers interpre-
5 tation of Mrs. G.s fantasized penis and Butlers invention of the fan-
6 tasized lesbian phallus, Butlers ideas still echo the Freudian notions
7 that women especially lesbians envy and wish to appropriate
8 mens penises and that powerful women are by definition phallic.

9 Judith Halberstam: Redefining Female Masculinity

10 Following Butler, literary critic Judith (Jack) Halberstam has been
11 crucial in moving the discourse from a stigmatized to a positive
12 view of female masculinity. Halberstam begins by assuming rather
13 than explaining the term. S/he introduces her book Female Masculin-
14 ity by saying she tells people that she is writing about women who
15 feel themselves to be more masculine than feminine, without their
16 needing Halberstam to define either masculinity or women.
17 Like Stoller, she considers masculinity self-evident, prior to definition,
18 valuable, and powerful. There is something all too obvious about the
19 concept of female masculinity, she writes. At the same time her goal
20 is to raise female masculinity from a term that is disparaged to one
21 that is celebrated so that masculine girls and women do not have to
22 wear their masculinity as a stigma but can infuse it with a sense of
23 pride and indeed power. Believing that Butlers brilliant abstractions
24 needed specific embodiment, Halberstam provides a careful taxon-
25 omy that differentiates many varieties of masculine women, includ-
26 ing passing women, butches, and the liminal category of transmen,
27 who cease to identify as female at all. Her study of contemporary drag
28 kings achieves ethnographic solidity and includes subjects of color
29 who are often lacking from discussions of alternative gender forma-
30 tions. Among the behaviors she associates with masculinity are dress-
31 ing like men, desiring women, being recognized as men, painting on
32 moustaches, growing moustaches, engaging in traditionally male
33 occupations, and protecting female partners. Halberstam provides
34 concrete examples of masculine women that pay welcome attention
35 to differences of race and social class. Her valuable historical and eth-
36 nographic study has made a fundamental impact on queer studies,
37 even as some of its arguments remain tied to earlier gender binaries.
Judith Kegan Gardiner 595

Acknowledging her debt to Butler, Halberstam describes The 1

Lesbian Phallus as elusive, difficult, and hardly explicit. She praises 2

it for showing the possibility of a female body both being and having 3

phallic power and for dissociating the phallus from the penis, par- 4

ticularly in the phallic dyke body, the butch body that has been 5

repudiated by both psychoanalysis and feminism. In fact, she dis- 6

parages the penis while validating fantasies of possessing it. The very 7

lack of a penis what we might call the privileged gadget of male 8

masculinity allows womens erotic pleasure without the danger of 9

pregnancy. She claims that for many contemporary lesbians, desire 10

works through masculinity and through phallic fantasy, including 11

Butlers theoretical fantasy of the lesbian phallus and more con- 12

cretely through sexual practices that phantasmically transform their 13

female bodies into penetrating male bodies. 14

Halberstam also shares Butlers repudiation of 1970s-style 15

woman-identified lesbian feminism, which objected to gendered 16

roles and male identification and instead championed androg- 17

ynous female self-presentation, woman bonding, and egalitarian 18

sexual practices. So, for example, Halberstam resists the old-fash- 19

ioned feminism that understands women as endlessly victimized 20

within systems of male power. Associated with this feminism, for 21

her, is modern femininity, characterized by unhealthy practices, 22

passivity and inactivity. So she disparages androgyny and feminin- 23

ity and proposes both that girls would be better off in childhood with 24

an unassigned gender neutrality and that it would be healthier if 25

masculinity were a kind of default. 26

Halberstam claims that female masculinity is an independent 27

and original gender that does not imitate an authentic male mascu- 28

linity. Instead, male masculinity often imitates prior female forms. 29

She not only categorizes but also champions female masculinity as a 30

progressive social force, as she explains in a 2002 essay: 31

Female masculinity, I have argued in a book of the same name, 32

disrupts contemporary cultural studies accounts of masculinity 33

within which masculinity always boils down to the social, cultural 34

and political effects of male embodiment and male privilege. Such 35

accounts can only read masculinity as the powerful and active alter- 36

native to female passivity and as the expression therefore of white 37

male subjectivities. 38
 596 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 In contrast, she believes, female masculinity offers an alternative

2 mode of masculinity that clearly detaches misogyny from maleness
3 and social power from masculinity. These conclusions do not obvi-
4 ously follow from her premises: masculine women, like everyone
5 else, can be misogynists, and misogynists may still equate masculin-
6 ity with power, especially in societies that in fact empower wealthy
7 white men over other groups. Furthermore, Halberstam, too, retains
8 the binary of masculinity and femininity, disparaging both feminin-
9 ity and alternative gender categories, such as androgyny, even as she
10 expands the boundaries of masculinity.
11 Halberstam both limits and idealizes female masculinity, espe-
12 cially conflating it with the gender and erotic system of the lesbian
13 butch. For example, she critiques movies featuring conventionally
14 attractive bisexual women by saying, real lesbianism has much more
15 to do with masculinity. At the same time, she claims that Butlers
16 work has amply shown [that] female masculinity provides a far
17 better and more representative model for the workings of masculin-
18 ity in a postmodern society than masculinity in men, a formulation
19 that retains the connection between masculinity and social power,
20 even as she incidentally mentions the desirability of also making the
21 feminine livable and powerful. Throughout her discussion, phal-
22 lic power is an overdetermined redundancy, repeatedly called a fan-
23 tasy and yet resolutely retaining the reference to the male body part,
24 even in its absence. So, like Butler, Halberstam retains the cachet
25 of the phallus, even as she insists it can thrive apart from the penis,
26 while discarding Butlers involvement with psychoanalytic theory.
27 Why shouldnt a woman get in touch with her masculinity? she asks,
28 as though doing so is an innate drive toward activity and social power,
29 while at the same time she seeks to have skill, strength, speed, phys-
30 ical dominance, uninhibited use of space and motion recognized,
31 not as human potentials, but specifically as aspects of female mascu-
32 linity. Thus the revisionary concept of female masculinity contin-
33 ues a broader devaluation of femininities, and reinforces the cultural
34 failure to develop alternative, nonbinary genders and un- or less gen-
35 dered identities.
Judith Kegan Gardiner 597

Masculinity in Men, Women, and Transmen 1

In contrast to feminist discussions of female masculinity and the 2

lesbian phallus, feminist studies of masculinity in men have gener- 3

ally criticized its social and psychological effects. Current scholar- 4

ship about mens masculinity often describes it negatively as a source 5

of insecurity for the man and of trouble for society, an incitement 6

to violence and bad behavior that arises from deep in the psyche as 7

well as from conformity to social norms. Scholars describing the self- 8

styled masculinities of butch lesbians and of female-to-male transsex- 9

uals describe these masculinities as gallant and brave but claim they 10

are not imitations of mens masculinity and not pathological, oppres- 11

sive, or best understood through psychoanalytic categories. Does this 12

mean paradoxically that masculinity is best done by women? Com- 13

parisons between these discourses demonstrate gaps in the construc- 14

tion of masculinity and femininity as opposites and encourage spec- 15

ulation about the concepts of imitation, identity, and identification as 16

well as about gender as a cultural fantasy. 17

Feminist psychoanalytic theorists of the past four decades have 18

interpreted Freudian paradigms to analyze and often indict mas- 19

culinity in men. Beginning in the same Freudian context used by 20

Stoller in the 1970s, Nancy Chodorows Reproduction of Mothering in 1978 21

deduced from object relations psychoanalysis the differing effects on 22

the personalities of boys and girls of typical mid-twentieth-century 23

Western family structures, with fathers away in the paid workforce 24

and mothers dominating child rearing at home. Whereas girls formed 25

close personal identifications with their mothers, Chodorow claims, 26

boys identified instead with cultural stereotypes of the masculine 27

role and sought a secure masculine self through superego formation 28

and the disparagement of women. They therefore internalized a mas- 29

culinity defined negatively in terms of denial of relation and con- 30

nection (and denial of femininity). Cut off from the intense inter- 31

personal connections that bonded mothers with daughters, adult 32

men fear intimacy and so fail to satisfy women emotionally. However, 33

repressing their emotions and relational needs is functional in pre- 34

paring men to participate in alienated work. Thus the sexual division 35

of labor, which allocates childcare primarily to women, also produces 36

a polarized psychology in women and men that perpetuates male 37

dominance and, hence, capitalism and patriarchy. Instituting equal 38

 598 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 and shared parenting by mothers and fathers, Chodorow claims,

2 would end these asymmetries and reduce mens needs to guard their
3 masculinity and their control of social and cultural spheres which
4 treat and define women as secondary and powerless.
5 Chodorows characterization of normal Western masculinity as
6 competitive, emotionally impoverished, and fearful of intimacy con-
7 tinues to provide a psychological foundation for scholarship to the
8 present day. For example, C. J. Pascoes 2007 ethnography of US sec-
9 ondary schools describes boys masculinity as created defensively
10 through misogyny and homophobia. Her main thesis, encapsulated
11 in her books title, Dude, Youre a Fag, is that these boys achieve mas-
12 culine identity by compulsively repudiating the specter of failed
13 masculinity. Thus, while subscribing to Chodorows psychological
14 explanations of differing masculine and feminine personality struc-
15 tures, Pascoe interprets contemporary gender formations through
16 the radical feminist binary grid of masculine dominance and femi-
17 nine submission, a binary in which the freest female position belongs
18 to those few athletes and activists who are masculine, girls who
19 act like guys. Similarly, sociologist Michael Kimmel outlines mas-
20 culinity formation in contemporary young US men in his 2008 book,
21 Guyland. Ever since Freud, he says, accepting the premises of object
22 relations psychoanalysis, weve believed that the key to boys devel-
23 opment is separation, that the boy must switch his identification from
24 mother to father in order to become a man. He achieves his mascu-
25 linity by repudiation, dissociation, and then identification. Accord-
26 ing to Kimmel, this dangerous but necessary path causes boys, then
27 men, to suppress empathy, nurturance, vulnerability, and depen-
28 dency. Inevitably feeling inferior due to their failure to match up
29 to impossible standards, young men nonetheless remain confident
30 of their masculine superiority over girls and women. Kimmel con-
31 trasts the static code of masculinity over the past century with its
32 imperatives that men be tough, aggressive, and successful with the
33 increased freedom and flexibility he attributes to women, who, after
34 decades of feminism, seem entitled, empowered, and emboldened.
35 Despite his recognition of womens continued secondary social status,
36 Kimmel still explains that the intensity of mens struggle to prove
37 manhood today is because its no longer as easy to differentiate
Judith Kegan Gardiner 599

between men and women as it was in the past. Yet he is reluctant 1

to discard the ideology of mens masculinity altogether, naming ele- 2

ments such as honor, respect, integrity, doing the right thing despite 3

the costs as enormously valuable the qualities of a real man, 4

even though women may share the same traits. Thus Kimmel fol- 5

lows earlier feminist theorists such as Chodorow in framing mas- 6

culinity as something that men anxiously perform for one another 7

and against women, according to the defensive and negative psycho- 8

logical construction of masculinity developed from mother-domi- 9

nated childhoods. On the other hand, the positive traits he attributes 10

to masculinity such as honor and respect are human ideals that 11

many feminists would say have no necessary relationship to gender. 12

Other current theories about mens masculinity agree that it is 13

protean and multifarious, but they still rely on the same hypothe- 14

sis deduced from object relations psychology, which claims that mas- 15

culinity is derived defensively from boys rejection of their mothers 16

femininity. Such theories argue that social hierarchies create hier- 17

archical psyches that maintain social hierarchies, exactly the circu- 18

lar process Chodorow originally outlined. Despite acknowledging 19

changes in family structures that relegate fewer women to isolated 20

housework and childcare, such theories describe masculinity devel- 21

opment in men as still based on psychologically derived entitlement 22

feelings and the need to dominate women. 23

While Halberstam revalues female masculinity not as patho- 24

logical but as creative and desirable, she concludes her spectrum of 25

female masculinities with the female-to-male transsexuals (FtMs or 26

transmen) who can no longer be categorized as women and hence as 27

examples of female masculinity. Current studies of transmen docu- 28

ment the self-concepts of these newly embodied men, some essen- 29

tializing and some queer. These recent studies contest psychoana- 30

lytic views such as Stollers that label identifications with the gender 31

not assigned at birth as pathological or views such as Chodorows 32

that find masculinity defensive in origin. Instead, they champion the 33

validity of transitioning gender, specifically the masculinity of the 34

transman, at the same time as disavowing identification with the neg- 35

ative characteristics that they, too, often attribute to biological males. 36

Instead of analyzing the psychological or social sources that motivate 37

 600 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 gender identification, they take as given a persons conviction of being

2 or wanting to be a specific gender and proceed to describe the trans-
3 mans social existence.
4 In his sociological study Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among
5 Transsexual Men, Henry Rubin aims to correct misconceptions about
6 transmen. The terms of his subtitle are significant, since he argues
7 that identity follows from embodiment, but that, when it does
8 not, individuals will struggle to conform their bodies to their iden-
9 tities so that they become recognizable to themselves and others.
10 Many of his interview subjects felt that they were always authenti-
11 cally male but that they needed technological help such as breast
12 removal surgery and testosterone administration to restore the
13 link between their bodies and their core identities or true selves.
14 Although they wanted penises, most did not seek phalloplasty
15 because of the imperfect results currently available. Against theories
16 like Butlers that emphasize the discursive constitution of the subject,
17 Rubin argues that bodies are more important to gender identity than
18 behavior, labeling, or sexual preference. Paradoxically, Rubins inter-
19 view subjects believe that all men have male bodies but that they are
20 men even though they lack penises and once had female bodies.
21 Despite the relentless grief over their own incomplete bodies
22 that haunts some transmen, Rubin resolutely depathologizes his
23 subjects, claiming these are not women with mental problems, in
24 denial about their female bodies but rather men whose bodies have
25 erupted in a vicious mutiny against them. However, Rubins subjects
26 differentiate themselves from the hegemonic masculinities of males
27 and say they do not seek male privilege but merely recognition as
28 men. For one subject, even his desire to have a child did not mean
29 he was a woman. Rubin counters performative poststructuralist
30 gender theory with his subjects more old-fashioned view that gender
31 expresses and externalizes a stable inner core of identity, a view he
32 judges a powerful fiction that people in this culture cannot do
33 without.
34 In contrast to Rubins essentialist subjects, Canadian Bobby
35 Nobles Sons of the Movement emphasizes the fluid, protean, and contra-
36 dictory self-awareness of transmen. Noble admires drag kings who
37 play with the ironic no mans land between lesbian, butch, transman,
38 and bio-boy, where the self-evident is neither. He claims that the
Judith Kegan Gardiner 601

current proliferation of complex female masculinities shows a simul- 1

taneous approximation of heterosexual masculinity and queering 2

of that masculinity. Here, again, the category of masculinity is 3

expanded, but a binary that valorizes masculinity supersedes femi- 4

ninity or alternative gender categories. Similarly, English sociolo- 5

gist Sally Hines confirms Rubins finding that transmen often reject 6

hegemonic masculinity: Im not a mans man, one claims, while 7

another self-identifies as a beta male rather than an alpha one. For 8

some transmen, their earlier lives as women inevitably alter their pre- 9

sentations of masculinity, as one subject says, so while I want to be 10

perceived and understood and taken totally as male, I will never be 11

100 percent male because of my background. Noble comments that 12

transmen almost never fully become men; they stay in the place of 13

transit. Using an object relations approach, one might hypothesize 14

that transmens only partial engagement with masculine qualities 15

such as emotional inhibition or dominating behavior may be a result 16

of their pre-transition psychological childhood as girls. Their distanc- 17

ing themselves from negative behaviors associated with masculinity 18

might also result from their self-conscious interactions with feminist 19

interviewers. Both Noble and Hines reject psychoanalysis as an ade- 20

quate approach to trans subjectivity. Instead, Hines argues for more 21

nuanced, empirically based theory of gender that can address the 22

intricacies of transgender identities and subjectivities and so bridge 23

the gap between social theories and poststructuralist accounts of 24

gender identity formation; such theories might advance the proj- 25

ect also advanced here in this essay of theorizing gender diver- 26

sity in relation to social structures, discursive formations, subjective 27

understandings, embodied corporalities, and cultural (and subcul- 28

tural) practices. 29

The trajectory of female masculinity, traced here from the 1970s 30

to the present, might seem at this point to be a progress narrative 31

of increasing individual choice and voice and decreasing stigma for 32

nonnormative gender in comparison to the more negative evalu- 33

ations often made by feminist scholars of the effects of masculinity 34

in men. Recent studies of female masculinity open up more diverse 35

perspectives than the white US examples Ive cited so far, while they 36

also indicate contentions over identities and their borders. African 37

American drag king Shon claims his performances respect black 38

 602 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 men and so differ from white drag satires of dominant white mascu-
2 linities. Transman artist and educator, Nico Dacumos describes his
3 mixed consciousness while complaining that my female masculin-
4 ity provoked fear and disgust from straight people, while F2Mestizo
5 Logan Gutierrez claims that his twenty-six years spent between
6 races prepared me for what it would feel like to be between genders
7 as a biracial FtM.
8 But my last, cautionary counterexample is deliberately more
9 confusing, both ethically and politically. It illustrates that the nar-
10 rative of gender progress may depend in part on its inclusion of only
11 a privileged minority of gender enactments. It considers a genre of
12 transsexual pornography that features figures labeled as she-males
13 or chicks with dicks, that is, people who look like feminine women
14 but who have penises, and not apparently masculine transmen who
15 do not. Including these performers may seem to replace the subject
16 of female masculinity with that of male femininity. However, these
17 transsexuals appear as literally phallic women, and so testify against
18 undue complacency about the evolution of liberatory discourses of
19 gender diversity and their effects on real people in differing national,
20 global, racial/ethnic, and economic contexts. As Eithne Luibhid
21 observes, all identity categories become transformed through
22 circulation within specific, unequally situated local, regional,
23 national, and transnational circuits that differentially structure
24 social inequalities and opportunities.
25 Transsexual pornography stars illustrate both an expansion of
26 and an exclusionary limit to contemporary gender variance. As rep-
27 resented in pornographic animations, they are chicks with dicks,
28 fantastic tranny babes, curvaceous women with huge penises. In
29 distinction from the animated versions, most commercial transsex-
30 ual pornography involves real people who appear at various stages
31 of surgical and hormonal sex changes. These performers may be US
32 people of color or third world sex workers whose own cultures are
33 rarely taken into account. They generally do not speak for them-
34 selves but are directed by others who profit from new technologies
35 in a global sexual market. The featured performers in the live-actor
36 transsexual pornography available in the United States look like
37 stereotypically feminine young women with big bosoms, slender
38 waists, and long hair. These actors, from countries including Brazil
Judith Kegan Gardiner 603

and Thailand, are shown having sexual relations with one another 1

or often with white men who stand in for the US male viewer. The 2

transsexuals own pleasures and preferences may or may not be 3

served as they are made the means for a form of international sexual 4

and gender neocolonialism. 5

These transsexual performers may be examples of free and fluid 6

identities as well as examples of the exploitations of an international 7

sex trade geared primarily to white Western heterosexual men. More 8

even than the penis-less transmen, these performers seem to con- 9

found theories connections among gender, sexuality, sexual ori- 10

entation, and power. Stereotypically feminine in appearance and 11

lacking in social power, they present visions of phallic women far 12

different from the threatening Lacanian portrait of Sarah Palin with 13

which this essay began. One might celebrate these representations for 14

expanding and breaking the gender binary of women and men. On 15

the one hand, they seem to stabilize the dominant figure of the pene- 16

trating masculine man as presumed viewer; on the other hand, some 17

heterosexual male viewers may be enjoying, even identifying with, 18

watching two persons with penises engaged in sexual acts, so implic- 19

itly queering their own desires and identities. However, control of this 20

pornographic discourse seems to lie less with the performers or view- 21

ers than with the marketers. 22

Engaging the Future 23

What conclusions can we draw from these representations of phal- 24

lic women and of female masculinity over a forty-year period? My 25

examples represent an apparent progression from the devaluation of 26

a freakish anomaly to a celebrated individual freedom, albeit figured 27

in a worldwide market economy in which genders, sexualities, and 28

their representations can be purchased. I argue that this trajectory 29

illustrates the very incoherence of the concepts of female masculinity 30

and the phallus. It also illustrates the apparently oppositional analyt- 31

ical frameworks for the understanding of masculinity generally. One 32

framework, based in object relations psychoanalysis, derives negative 33

social consequences like sexism and male dominance from the psy- 34

chic structures of masculinity that men develop in mother-domi- 35

nated childhoods. In response, Raewyn Connell and James Messer- 36

schmidt suggest the possibility of democratizing gender relations 37

 604 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 in an attempt to establish as hegemonic among men a version

2 of masculinity open to equality with women. The other approach
3 to masculinity traced here, particularly among masculine women
4 and transmen, rejects psychoanalysis as sexist and deterministic and
5 instead opts for poststructuralist convictions about the malleability
6 of gender and identity, sometimes in the apparently contradictory
7 essentialist belief that FtM transition springs from a pre-existing mas-
8 culine true self and sometimes from a more mobile sense of the possi-
9 bilities now open to people born as girls.
10 These oppositional approaches to masculinity, I suggest, unduly
11 simplify their analyses by reifying gender and treating masculinity as
12 a coherent entity, despite recognition of its multiple varieties. Robert
13 Nye claims that the principal question for some feminist agendas is
14 whether masculine gender, now that we know it to be a thing apart
15 from sexed bodies, can or ought to be fully deconstructed and erased
16 or whether men, or men and women together, can reform mascu-
17 linity, make it available to both men and women, and purge it of
18 its brutal, agonistic, and domineering qualities. Does even a kinder,
19 gentler masculinity require men being on top?
20 Critiquing the concept of female masculinity, Lori Rifkin chiefly
21 objects that the category is restricted to lesbians and excludes hetero-
22 sexual women. However, I question both Nyes and Rifkins prem-
23 ises, which still reify masculinity even while suggesting that it can be
24 reshaped. Instead, I suggest that the reverse is more helpful: to make
25 clear that masculinity includes ideas some women and men have
26 about the ideals and attributes proper to male bodies but that there
27 is no it that has an essential coherence. Furthermore, masculinity
28 in women or in men, for that matter still alludes to the cultural
29 and historical practices and privileges of male embodiment that are
30 mythologized or associated with negative practices like brutality
31 and dominance for Nye or positive ones like honor, respect, integ-
32 rity for Kimmel.
33 To dispute the coherence of a master category of masculin-
34 ity whether in men, women, or transpersons is not to deny the
35 existence and usefulness of historicized categories such as those of
36 the transman, the butch lesbian, or the pro-feminist man, all cate-
37 gories subject to change as society and technologies change. Criteria
Judith Kegan Gardiner 605

of social recognizability and intelligibility, too, are historically in 1

flux; as new gendered forms appear, they may become recognized. 2

As better phalloplasties are constructed, there may be more trans- 3

men; as gender inequality and homophobia diminish, there may 4

be fewer. Some of the conceptual confusion around these categori- 5

zations, I suggest, comes from the belief that to understand peoples 6

desires for change is necessarily to pathologize all that is nonnorma- 7

tive in a given time and culture. Other confusions may arise from 8

the incoherence built into concepts such as imitation, identification, 9

and identity. I doubt anyone would ever wear a necktie or learn 10

how to knot it without imitating, that is, without learning from, 11

someone or a representation of someone who had worn one, but that 12

does not make any such wearer either authentic or fake valoriz- 13

ing or negative labels that have bedeviled the history of gender vari- 14

ance. Too often discourses on masculinity use the term loosely as 15

either a synonym for social power or an alibi; covering with an aura 16

of biological inevitability a rich complex of social relations in which 17

men disproportionately acquire status and resources. I suggest, more- 18

over, that it would be helpful not to automatically label dominance 19

behavior and entitlement as synonymous with masculinity, although 20

of course they often overlap. But dominance behavior and its accom- 21

panying sense of entitlement are common to all socially valorized 22

statuses, so that it seems unhelpful, for example, to call bourgeois 23

women masculine whenever they run businesses. The multiple 24

hierarchies of social status may or may not borrow some of the same 25

signifiers while evolving their own forms of organization and oppres- 26

sion, and more socially conscious psychologies may help to interpret 27

their manifestations in individuals and societies. The imperfect anal- 28

ogy with race helps clarify these gender categories: the evident and 29

harmful existence of racism does not prove that there really are sep- 30

arate races, and the nominal or fictional status of a category of race 31

or gender does not disable the category from real social effects. 32

Thus I argue that the current move to separate masculinity from 33

men and grant it an independent existence is not an advance. Instead, 34

it reifies masculinity as a coherent entity while obscuring analyses of 35

historically specific formations of gender and sexuality in their inter- 36

actions with race, nationality, and social class. Here I concur with 37

Connell and Messerschmidt on the need to recognize the layering, 38

 606 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 the potential internal contradictions, within all practices that con-

2 struct masculinities and on the need of the field of masculinity stud-
3 ies for more complex models of gender hierarchy and more specific
4 analyses of how embodiment interacts with privilege and power.
5 Gender change and variance in societies and discourses may lead to
6 people developing more ungendered, androgynous, both/and cat-
7 egories and identities. Such changes may simultaneously help reduce
8 the salience of gender in distributing goods and social statuses. All
9 the examples Ive outlined maintain a gender dualism, looser or
10 tighter, that continues to valorize some version of masculinity over
11 any version of femininity. The field of gender transition is currently
12 very mobile. The technology of sexual reassignment is continually
13 changing and may not be in synch with legal requirements for binary
14 gender, although laws, too, may change. Psychologies and ethics of
15 gender and sexuality are also in flux. As the gender range within and
16 outside each binary sex category grows, we might expect increased
17 tolerance for inter, neither, and alternate genders and sexualities as
18 well. Such expansion of gender variance is a valuable goal in itself
19 but not sufficient to end gender and sexual exploitation, as is evident
20 from the example of international transsexual pornography.
21 This travel through representations of female masculinity leads
22 me to conclude that the phallus isnt what it used to be and, in
23 fact, never was. In all its versions, concepts of female masculinity
24 implicitly rely on the sexist assumptions of Freudian and Lacanian
25 psychoanalysis, even when psychoanalysis is explicitly renounced.
26 Since no other psychological theories have yet replaced the cultural
27 influence of psychoanalysis, much current discussion avoids psy-
28 chology altogether and instead relies on self-reports by gender-vari-
29 ant people. The Lacanian phallus is a confusing formulation, always
30 supposed to be an abstraction, yet always tethered to male anatomy
31 and so abjecting both femininity and women, as in Millers hysteri-
32 cal remarks about Sarah Palin a hysteria encouraged by Lacanian
33 terms and metaphors. For Miller, even if a womans phallus is rec-
34 ognized as only a semblance, it still connotes castration and dis-
35 empowerment to men. The project of undoing gender must include
36 challenging old theories and dismantling old fantasies, both frighten-
37 ing and utopian. Transsexual pornography illustrates how the con-
38 trol over discourse achieved by queer mobilizations does not extend
Judith Kegan Gardiner 607

evenly, and it emphasizes the importance of context to analyses of 1

gender and power. 2

Theories about phallic power, despite their claims of dissociation 3

from biological men, continue to naturalize connections between 4

men, their penises, and social control. The phrase is either a redun- 5

dancy, a vague synonym for social power, or a justification for patri- 6

archal social relationships that disadvantage women. For Stoller, Mrs. 7

G. created masculinity by imitation and identification, and male- 8

ness (a penis) by hallucination. Butlers lesbian phallus, she claims, 9

is a contradictory signifier that still revolves around the connection 10

between masculinity and power. Halberstam asks, Why shouldnt 11

a woman get in touch with her masculinity? a query that presup- 12

poses that all or some women have an inner predisposition for activ- 13

ity and social power that is separate or opposite to what is female or 14

feminine in them. Even the pornographic chicks with dicks, those 15

most feminine of phallic women, presumably derive erotic appeal 16

from their transgressive rejection of the social power usually accru- 17

ing to persons born male. We might say the phallus is always under 18

erasure, described as independent of the penis while always recalling 19

it. Like the phallus, the concept of female masculinity is a confusing 20

formulation to be used, if at all, in carefully specified contexts, since 21

it may act either to confirm or disrupt heteronormativity and the 22

gender binary. Athena Nguyen comments that severing the natural- 23

ized connection between masculinity and male bodies may not suc- 24

ceed as a strategy for challenging patriarchal power without the aid of 25

feminism as a political force. Thus the incoherent concept of female 26

masculinity partially detaches masculinity from being the exclusive 27

property of biological males but leaves untouched both its opposi- 28

tional superiority to femininity and its critical vagueness. It contin- 29

ues the devaluation of femininities and reinforces the cultural failure 30

to develop alternative genders and un- or less gendered identities that 31

are not validated on the old masculine model. Yet in both the case of 32

phallic power and of female masculinity, reference to mens bodies 33

continues, so that such formulations advance the project of desta- 34

bilizing gender binaries but not necessarily of minimizing gender 35

as a social hierarchy. Thus, whereas Halberstam states her goal as 36

making maleness nonessential to masculinity, I hope instead for 37

 608 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 making masculinity nonessential to the distribution of power and for

2 rethinking gender outside the terms set by psychoanalytic discourse.

3 Notes
4 A short version of this essay was delivered at 35 Years of Feminist Scholar-
5 ship, a conference honoring Claire G. Moses on her retirement as editorial
6 director of Feminist Studies and as professor of womens studies at the Univer-
7 sity of Maryland.
8 1. Jacques-Alain Miller, Sarah Palin: Operation Castration, trans. Jake
9 Bellone with James Curley-Egan, published on the website www.Lacan.
10 com, 2008, http://www.lacan.com/jampalin.html.
11 2. Robert J. Stoller, Splitting: A Case of Female Masculinity (1973; repr., New Haven,
12 CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
13 3. Judith Butler, The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary,
14 in her Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge,
15 1993), 57 91.
16 4. Judith Halberstam also goes by the first name Jack, but is referenced here
17 as Judith in line with the name on the 1998 book that I discuss. Halbers-
18 tams website is http://www.egomego.com/judith/home.htm.
19 5. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
20 1998).
21 6. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology
22 of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
23 7. Sigmund Freud, Female Sexuality, (1931) in his Standard Edition of the
24 Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey
25 (London: Hogarth, 1962) 21: 223 43.
26 8. Stoller, Splitting, xiii, 233.
27 9. Ibid., 271.
28 10. Ibid., 196.
29 11. Ibid., xiii.
30 12. Ibid., 272, 291.
31 13. Ibid., 373.
32 14. Ibid., 313, 316.
33 15. Ibid., 13.
34 16. Ibid., 270.
35 17. Butler, The Lesbian Phallus, 57.
36 18. Ibid.
37 19. Ibid., 63.
38 20. Ibid., 73.
Judith Kegan Gardiner 609

21. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: 1
Routledge, [1990], 1999) 24 25. 2

22. Butler, The Lesbian Phallus, 262n26. 3

23. Ibid., 85, all quotations this paragraph. 4

24. Ibid., 86, all quotations this paragraph. 5

25. Ibid., 88. 6

26. Ibid., 89. 7

27. Ibid., 90. 8

28. Ibid., 91 both quotations this paragraph (emphasis in original). 9

29. Ibid., 80. 10

30. Ibid. 11

31. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire 12
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 231. 13

32. Butler, Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex, in her 14

Bodies that Matter, 102. 15

33. Ibid., 103. 16

34. Butler, The Lesbian Phallus, 57. 17

35. Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (New York: 18
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 19. 19

36. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, xi, both quotations this paragraph. 20

37. Ibid., 356, 357. 21

38. Ibid., 68. 22

39. Ibid., 72. 23

40. Ibid., 17. 24

41. Ibid., 58, 266. 25

42. Ibid., 41, 27, 269. 26

43. Judith Halberstam, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Men, Women, and 27
Masculinity, in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith 28
Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 345. 29

44. Ibid. 30

45. Ibid., 349. 31

46. Ibid., 355. 32

47. Ibid., 357. 33

48. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 269, 272. 34

49. Chodorow, 169, 218. 35

50. C. J. Pascoe, Dude, Youre a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley: 36
University of California Press, 2007), 5. 37

51. Ibid., 115. 38

 610 Judith Kegan Gardiner

1 52. Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (New York:
2 Harper Collins, 2008), 52.
3 53. Ibid., 243, 26, 270.
4 54. Proponents of this view include Robert Nye, Locating Masculinity: Some
5 Recent Work on Men, Signs 30, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 1937 62; and Anthony
6 McMahon, Male Readings of Feminist Theory: The Psychologization of
7 Sexual Politics in the Masculinity Literature, Theory and Society 22, no. 5
8 (October 1993): 675 95.
9 55. Henry Rubin, Self-Made Men: Identity and Embodiment among Transsexual Men
10 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), 15, 11, 22.
11 56. Ibid., 169, 107, 122 23, 150.
12 57. Jean Bobby Noble, Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer
13 Cultural Landscape (Toronto: Womens Press, 2006), 251, 257 (emphasis in
14 original).
15 58. Sally Hines, TransForming Gender: Transgender Practices of Identity, Intimacy and Care
16 (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 93
17 59. Ibid., 94.
18 60. Noble, Sons of the Movement, 28.
19 61. A conscious motivation to acquire privilege is not necessary for transmen
20 to actually achieve some measure of that privilege: Kirsten Schilt and
21 Matthew Wiswalls study of trans economics shows that male-to-female
22 transsexuals lose money, status, and social networks, thus approximat-
23 ing the social status of women, whereas transmen fare much better. See
24 Schilt and Wiswall, Before and After: Gender Transitions, Human Capi-
25 tal, and Workplace Experiences, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy
26 8, no. 1 (2008), Article 39, http://www.bepress.com/bejeap.
27 62. Hines, TransForming Gender, 190.
28 63. Shon is interviewed in Del Lagrace Volcano and Judith Jack Halber-
29 stams The Drag King Book (London: Serpents Tail, 1999), 143.
30 64. Nico Dacumos, All Mixed Up With No Place to Go: Inhabiting Mixed
31 Consciousness on the Margins, and Logan Gutierrez-Mock, F2Mestizo,
32 in Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity, ed. Mattilda a.k.a.
33 Matt Bernstein Sycamore (Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2006), 27, 233.
34 65. Eithne Luibhid, Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship, GLQ
35 14, nos. 2 3 (2008): 169 90, 170.
36 66. An example of animated transsexual pornography can be found at www.
37 sheanimale.com.
38 67. For example, Bangkok Transsexuals Ass Pounded 2 (Robert Hill Releasing Co.
39 DVD: 2008); TgirlsOnGirls (Hundies Presents DVD: 2008); Chicks with Dicks
40 http://www.youporn.com/watch/55507/chicks-with-dicks. No aspect of
41 Brazilian culture is mentioned in Tgirls, which is set in Brazil, nor do
42 the performers express their own sexual preferences, as found in Don
Judith Kegan Gardiner 611

Kulicks anthropological studies of travesties, The Gender of Brazilian 1

Transgendered Prostitutes, American Anthropologist 99, no. 3: 574 85. 2

68. R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethink- 3

ing the Concept, Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 853. 4

69. Robert Nye, Locating Masculinity: Some Recent Work on Men, Signs 30, 5
no. 3 (Spring 2005): 1939. 6

70. Lori Rifkin, The Suit Suits Whom? Lesbian Gender, Female Masculinity, 7
and Women-in-Suits, in FemmeButch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to 8
Go, ed. Michelle Gibson and Deborah T. Meem (New York: Harrington 9
Park: 2002), 158. 10

71. Connell and Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity, 852. 11

72. Stoller, Splitting, 196. 12

73. Butler, The Lesbian Phallus, 73, 89. 13

74. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 269. 14

75. Athena Nguyen, Patriarchy, Power, and Female Masculinity, Journal of 15

Homosexuality 55, no. 4 (2008): 665. 16

76. Halberstam, The Good, the Bad, 355. 17