Female Masculinity and Phallic Women

Unruly Concepts

Judith Kegan Gardiner

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During the 2008 us election, internet images circulated of vice

presidential candidate Sarah Palin carrying big guns. In a commentary titled Sarah Palin: Operation Castration, French Lacanian theorist Jacques-Alain Miller warned: We are entering an era of postfeminist women, women who are ready to kill the political men.
They play the castration card and are thus invincible. Such overheated rhetoric regularly attends discussions about phallic women
and female masculinity. This essay seeks to analyze current uses of
these overlapping but disparate concepts about women who are presumed to have a relation to a or the phallus, or to the vague and elastic category of masculinity.
Female masculinity is an elusive, inherently paradoxical concept that slips away from efforts to pin it down. I examine it here in
several historical and disciplinary contexts. My first three examples
derive from central theorists of the topic over the past four decades.
I start with a case history by Robert Stoller, the most authoritative
US psychoanalytic writer on gender between World War II and contemporary feminist and queer theory. His 1973 book, Splitting: A Case
of Female Masculinity, is a study of one psychotic woman that also claims
to advance the understanding of gender (that is, of masculinity and
femininity) more generally. Despite Stollers dated approach, subsequent masculinity studies up to the present day continue to rely on
Feminist Studies 38, no. 3 (Fall 2012). 2012 by Feminist Studies, Inc.

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his psychoanalytic concepts. Next I turn to philosopher Judith Butlers essay The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary in
her 1993 book, Bodies that Matter. As one of the most influential pioneers of queer theory, Butler revised Lacanian psychoanalysis; in
turn, her work inspired cultural studies scholar Judith (Jack) Halberstam, whose 1998 book Female Masculinity depicts types of women who
exemplify Butlers abstract ideas, thereby popularizing the concept of
female masculinity as a possible lifestyle for women and especially
butch lesbians. Then I briefly discuss several postmillennial sociological studies that apparently mark a progressive trajectory from
pathologizing nonnormative gender to liberatory gender self-definition. However, broadening this inquiry troubles narratives of progress
and requires new theoretical paradigms. A contrast between Governor Palin and chicks with dicks a genre of transnational transsexual pornography reveals a cultural polarization between phallic
power and abjected penis-for-pleasure. Taken as a whole, this narrative illustrates the instability, even the incoherence, of the concept of
female masculinity and its role in propping, rather than undermining, masculinity altogether.
In all these examples, Im interested in the theories that address
gender variation, particularly the way that female masculinity still
rests on binary conceptions of power that connote maleness and also
on psychoanalytic assumptions. I note the divergent explanatory
frameworks for gender nonconformity applied in these cases and
their varied cultural contexts. Such theories are migratory, appearing across conceptual, political, and geographical borders. For Stoller
in the 1970s, Freudian psychoanalysis remains the master discourse
at a prosperous time in United States history when polarized gender
roles seem in retreat and new social movements arise seeking womens liberation, civil rights for minorities, and greater equality for lesbians and gay men. Twenty years later, Butler speaks from within the
academic disciplines of philosophy and gender studies in an era of
relative social quiescence characterized by a popular sense of mission accomplished with regard to womens liberation. A pioneer of
queer theory, she critiques older radical feminisms while retaining
nuanced allegiances to psychoanalysis and poststructuralism. Following Butler, Halberstam firmly establishes female masculinity on
the agenda of trans and queer studies, and her taxonomies become

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widely accepted. However, female masculinity is in an asymmetrical

alliance with the field of masculinity studies, which is chiefly devoted
to analyzing masculinity in men, often through object relations theories such as those of Nancy Chodorow. One paradox of female
masculinity discourses is that instead of being considered derivative,
female masculinity may be celebrated as superior to masculinity in
men. In todays contexts, rapidly changing popular culture, medical
advances, and communication technology create new communities
and gender formations and invite new theoretical interventions.
Robert Stoller: Pathologizing Female Masculinity
In adapting Freudian theory to his clinical practice, psychoanalyst
Robert Stoller became one of the most noted authorities on the psychology of gender in the mid-twentieth century, especially on the
variant formations of sexual preference and desire he labeled perversions. The title of his book Splitting refers to his main subject,
a woman whose psyche is split through multiple personalities, while
the books subtitle A Case of Female Masculinity creates female masculinity as a psychological syndrome. Since Freud declared penis envy
the bedrock of womens psyches, it is not surprising that psychoanalysts such as Stoller discover widespread phallic fantasies in women.
For Freud, penis envy originates from the anger and disappointment
that all little girls experience when they recognize that their genitals
are inferior to male genitals. Thus in the Freudian paradigm, normal
femininity means that girls love their fathers, resent but identify
with their mothers, and finally achieve contentment with their lot by
having a compensatory baby, preferably one born with a penis. One
alternative to this normative female Oedipus complex is the masculine protest in which the woman rebels against femininity by choosing masculine occupations and sometimes by becoming a lesbian.
Stoller adheres to much of these Freudian psychodynamics in
his fourteen-year analysis of Mrs. G., who believes she has an invisible
internal penis that protects her from predatory men and persuades
her that her desires for women are not homosexual. Quoting from
audiotaped analytic sessions, Stoller traces her multiple personalities,
sexual ambivalence, and gender dysphoria to her childhood family,
including her weak father and rejecting mother. He uses this unique
case to build generalizations about gender identity in women in

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

sources of masculinity and femininity in childhood psychology and
family dynamics, and the book begins: This is a book about Mrs. G.,
a very masculine woman, and the pieces into which she was split in
order to accommodate that masculinity. He gives very few details
to explain why he describes her as very masculine. Well into the
case history, he calls her butchy, tough, and belligerent, with a
cocky position of her head. Although he mentions that she is Mexican American, he never discusses her ethnicity or her working-class
background as factors shaping her gender or sexuality.
Stoller explains that as a child Mrs. G. envied her brother and in
response created her own masculinity by imitation and identification, and maleness (a penis) by hallucination. He thus distinguishes
a biological or embodied maleness from psychological masculinity. The doctor presents this penis delusion as Mrs. G.s most salient
symptom. When asked, what would happen if you lost your penis?
she replies, Then I wouldnt be anything. My penis is what I am.
However, she doesnt claim she is a man, instead using her fantasy
penis to protect her from acknowledging that she has homosexual
feelings. So Stoller judges that she becomes psychologically healthier when she finally considers herself a lesbian. Although he is sympathetic to his patient, he describes both female masculinity and
homosexuality as pathological aberrations from a natural heterosexual norm: Most homosexuals are what they are in order to preserve
a nucleus of heterosexuality somewhere inside [themselves], and he
judges that Mrs. G.s masculine sexual behavior is a defense mechanism to keep her from recognizing that she wanted to be taken care
of and mothered herself.
According to Stoller, phallic women like Mrs. G. have both
femininity and conflicts about it. He also claims that similar drives
and defenses relating to having a phallus are ubiquitous in women
of our society so long as the word phallus is properly understood
to indicate not a penis but its attributes intrusiveness, power, violence. He generalizes that fantasies of being a member of the opposite sex are extremely common, especially among homosexuals. Mrs.
Gs envy and hatred of maleness fit Stollers description of Freuds
penis envy common to all women. Stoller believes that gender identity is built from a set of convictions concerned with masculinity

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and femininity and from internalized unconscious fantasies. However, against Freud, he emphasizes that egosyntonic forces and
non-conflictual learning help create womens gender identity, and
therefore femininity is not just a defense against envy of maleness
and masculinity.
When Mrs. G. claims that she wouldnt be anything without
her imaginary penis, her explanation indicts the sexist culture: she
says, a man always has an advantage because he works and he supports himself, whereas being feminine means youre vulnerable to
males. Her denial of lesbian desires, too, fits an era largely intolerant of homosexuality. Her gendered and sexual pathology and
what Stoller has labeled her female masculinity then, might
all be understood in terms of her nonconformist responses to the
sexism and homophobia of the times. As we have seen, although
Stoller claims to be seeking the sources of female masculinity, he
introduces Mrs. G. from the first as a very masculine woman without explaining the term. Thus female masculinity is his goal, the
thing he seeks to understand, and at the same time it is his starting
point. Stoller interprets gender and sexual orientation as interdependent psychological structures that defend a core true self that
is always heteronormative, even in homosexuals and lesbians. Furthermore, although Mrs. G.s delusional penis is a rare symptom, he
also regards penis envy, transsexual fantasies, and female masculinity as normal in women.
Judith Butler: The Lesbian Phallus
Some of the contradictions in Stollers pioneering theories of female
masculinity and gender formation appear decades later in the writing of Judith Butler despite the transition from a Freudian case history to a Lacanian poststructuralist theory. Butlers essay The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary subverts previously
negative connotations of female masculinity. The essay starts with a
disavowal: After such a promising title, I knew that I could not possibly offer a satisfying essay; but perhaps the promise of the phallus is
always dissatisfying in some way. This tease connects the subject of
the work with its writing and connects the relation between writer
and reader, one or both of whom seem possessed of it: I assure you
(promise you?) that the essay couldnt have been done without the

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lesbian phallus, despite its only fugitive appearance in the essay. Butlers opening gambit diminishes masculinist pretensions by implying that no phallus ever satisfies. The lesbian phallus is a contradiction in terms, and the essay plays with this imaginary construction
to critique the Lacanian concept of the phallus the master symbol
of power to imply that if one can imagine a lesbian phallus, the
phallus will become detached from male bodies and hence usable by
other subjects.
Butler dismantles Lacans binary, in which having is a symbolic position that institutes the masculine within heterosexuality,
always in opposition to a feminine that lacks having or is equated
with being. Into this closed symbolic system, the lesbian phallus
may be said to intervene as an unexpected consequence of the Lacanian scheme, an apparently contradictory signifier which, through
a critical mimesis, calls into question the ostensibly originating and
controlling power of the Lacanian phallus, indeed, its installation as
the privileged signifier of the symbolic order. Thus Butlers analysis creates and undermines the Lacanian phallus, a phrase that conflates Lacans symbol with her own apparently masculine authority
over theory.
Often Butler presents a supposed cause as instead an effect, most
famously in the thesis that gender identity does not cause gendered
behavior, but rather that performing gender creates the sense of an
internal gender identity. Here, instead, I suggest that an effect noted
by Butler makes sense as a final cause or implicit purpose. Butler calls
the lesbian phallus an unexpected consequence of the Lacanian
scheme even though it is not a part of Lacans writings but rather her
own invention. She remarks that to de-authorize the male imaginary, her strategy will be to show that the phallus can attach to a
variety of organs, and that the efficacious disjoining of phallus from
penis constitutes both a narcissistic wound to phallomorphism and
the production of an anti-heterosexist sexual imaginary. Her purpose, then, is to separate the phallus from the penis; that is, to detach
the symbol of power from the male organ and so burst the bubble
of an inviolable masculine imaginary. This rupture is immediately accomplished in the very imagining of the lesbian phallus. However, such reasoning only works if we already agree that the phallus
is a mobile concept that represents something like power in general,

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not just the power of biological males. And furthermore, the conflation of masculinity and power may encourage some lesbian theorists
to assign the phallus more to themselves rather than to heterosexual women.
Well into the discussion that began by positing its existence,
Butler admits that the lesbian phallus is a fiction, but perhaps a theoretically useful one. This usefulness is deployed, not just against
Lacans theories, but more pointedly against what she calls the feminist orthodoxy on lesbian sexuality. The lesbian phallus may then
serve as the missing part, the sign of an inevitable dissatisfaction
that is lesbianism in homophobic and misogynist construction. Who
is dissatisfied? The homophobe and misogynist, here rhetorically
associated with a feminist orthodoxy that apparently refers to essentialist radical feminism. Thus Butlers essay is historically situated
in the early 1990s in relation to an evolving feminism and emerging
queer theory as well as to deconstruction and psychoanalysis.
In her essay Butler switches from attacking Lacans sexism
presumably with the concurrence of her feminist readers to attacking feminist orthodoxy, and becomes a kind of overbearing mother
(rather than the Lacanian abusive father) to the rebellious child of her
own queer theory. She says that feminist orthodoxy will see in the
lesbian phallus both the defilement or betrayal of lesbian specificity and a pathetic mimicry of man. The term specificity does not
itself specify whether it is referring to political power, woman identification, female eroticism, or anything else. Thus Butler imagines
that, for both the feminist and the misogynist, who become conflated,
the lesbian phallus is not a symbol of power but of failure: its not
the real thing (the lesbian thing) or its not the real thing (the straight
thing). However, this euphemism, the real thing, itself collapses
penis into phallus, so that questioning the authority of either term
deflates both. Because it is, in her words, an idealization, one which
no body can adequately approximate, the phallus is a transferable
phantasm, and its naturalized link to masculine morphology can be
called into question through an aggressive reterritorialization. This
explanation restates the point her title has already made as she grabs
the phallus by its theoretical handle in order to make it her own in a
masculinist rhetoric of conquest, an aggressive reterritorialization.

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

phallus upsets the logic of noncontradiction that serves normative
heterosexuality. By appropriating the (lesbian) phallus, Butlers
argument succeeds in cutting off phallic ownership from the penis.
She argues:
When the phallus is lesbian, then it is and is not a masculinist figure
of power . And insofar as it operates at the site of anatomy, the
phallus (re)produces the spectre of the penis only to enact its vanishing . This opens up anatomy and sexual difference itself as
a site of proliferative resignifications.

These careful conditionals posit a nominalist reality. When

the phallus is lesbian assumes that the phallus exists and that the
new concept of a lesbian phallus is proliferative and so powerful. The lesbian is not sterile here but appropriates patriarchal generativity. But the only reason a feminist has for connecting penises
and power is that she knows she lives in a male-dominated society.
Butlers figure of the lesbian phallus thus reaffirms several popular
ideas at the level of high theory: the lesbian is and is not mannish; her
desire is to share or seize male power. Power is and is not tied to
masculinity and to anatomical maleness. Conversely, masculinity is
unthinkable without some connection to power. I note, too, that Butlers language goes through a metaphorical sex change within this
passage: the masculine phallus penetrates and opens up anatomy
and so sexual difference, thus figuring the body and sexuality as
always already female and fruitful.
Butler says that the phallus has no existence separable from
the occasions of its symbolization, but the lesbian phallus can signify differently and so resignify, unwittingly, its own masculinist
and heterosexist privilege. This formulation assumes that masculinist and heterosexist are so tied together that lesbian masculinity
would not perhaps could not reinforce heterosexist binaries
a questionable assumption. Butler also implies that the opposite of
the masculinist and heterosexist must be a feminist and queer
and hence more progressive alternative. Butlers lesbian phallus
thus deflects the 1970s-style lesbian feminist suspicion that women
who take symbols of male power reinforce those symbols. Instead,

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she argues that the masters master tool is exactly what can best dismantle the masters house.
Butlers persuasive central argument in her 1990 book Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is that anything that is socially
instituted has to be practiced to remain in force and hence can be
repeated differently. One question her later work raises, then, is
whether or not feminists wish to promote an alternative imaginary to
a hegemonic imaginary that uses the lesbian phallus as the alternative to the masculinist phallus. Butler concludes The Lesbian Phallus essay by asserting that what is needed is not a new body part,
as it were, but a displacement of the hegemonic symbolic of (heterosexist) sexual difference and the critical release of alternative imaginary schemas for constituting sites of erotogenic pleasure. The last
word of the chapter introduces pleasure to a discourse that has previously focused instead on meaning and power. Since a conclusion
in Butlers discourse can often be read as its cause, I therefore turn
the essay around to see pleasure as the goal for which the concept of
the lesbian phallus was invented. This pleasure is deeply implicated
in the powers of naming, which may be exactly what the phallus as
logos means. Furthermore, although (feminine) pleasure here takes
over as a feminist goal from (masculine) power, both become synecdoches, parts of the feminist dream figured as the whole of a new way
of thinking and speaking, a new imaginary that is no longer heterosexist and masculinist, despite its teasing appropriation of the central
masculinist symbol of power.
So Butler creates the lesbian phallus by naming it, but in so
doing she has already performed her own act of cutting away at her
Lacanian master texts. She cites Lacan as pronouncing the body and
anatomy are described only through negation: anatomy, and in particular, anatomical parts, are not the phallus, but only that which the phallus
symbolizes (Il est encore bien moins lorgane, pnis ou clitoris, quil symbolize), that is,
to translate from Lacans text, it is much less the organ, penis or clitoris, that is symbolized She explains that this means that the phallus is a synecdochal extrapolation, a part for the whole. Throughout her own discussion thereafter, she, too, takes only one part for
the whole, repeatedly referring to the penis but without mentioning
the clitoris that Lacan himself puts in parallel not in opposition
to the penis. If Butler had admitted the clitoris to her discussion, that

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addition might have disrupted the binary she creates between inadequate penis and powerful phallus. Furthermore, attention to the clitoris might figure alternative positive female imaginary constructions to the lesbian phallus, as Teresa de Lauretis suggests. The
Lesbian Phallus does not discuss the most obvious phallic female
in the Freudian system, the phallic mother who figures as the fantasy figure of completeness of which the child must be disabused or
else become a fetishist. In the following chapter in Bodies that Matter,
Butler does introduce the figure of the phallic mother, defining it
as devouring and destructive, the negative fate of the phallus when
attached to the feminine position. This is a misogynous construction that displaces phallic destructiveness onto women, not the
men who claim to be the proper holders of power. Butler concludes
that phallic mothers these figures of hell, figures which constitute
the state of punishment threatened by the law are partly figures
of homosexual abjection that is, the feminized fag and the phallicized dyke. Here the phallicized dyke stands in unvoiced contradiction to the lesbian phallus described earlier, not a newly imagined figure of power but a tired old figure of social exclusion. This
juxtaposition refigures the preceding chapter on the lesbian phallus
into an exercise in utopian thinking, its initial moment not merely
the imaging of the lesbian phallus but of triumph over the mental
strictures of patriarchy, social defamation, and homophobia.
Throughout the The Lesbian Phallus, the lesbian is not defined
or specified by practice or desire. Presumably the term refers to
women who desire women erotically, rather than to the womanidentified woman of 1970s lesbian feminism, but the terms vagueness
endows it with its own powerful symbolic aura. The lesbian phallus
is an abstraction originating only in a chain of signifiers. It has no
personal psychology, no relation to the absent fathers and rejecting
mothers of Stollers case histories, and no specific sexual desires, practices, or forms of self-presentation. Instead, Butlers essay enacts its
theories about the discursive construction of gender by creating the
lesbian phallus as a disembodied concept. The author teases that she
has it, since the essay couldnt have been done without it. Thus
her essay implicitly makes the case for the phallic lesbian as a powerful discursive construction, a phallic woman who is never pictured
as embodied (and so never disparaged as freakish) but who remains

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most stereotypically masculine in her very abstraction into discourse. Furthermore, the term remains within the binary Lacanian
logic that it disputes. Having a phallus or not having one remain the
only choices. Despite the vast difference between Stollers interpretation of Mrs. G.s fantasized penis and Butlers invention of the fantasized lesbian phallus, Butlers ideas still echo the Freudian notions
that women especially lesbians envy and wish to appropriate
mens penises and that powerful women are by definition phallic.
Judith Halberstam: Redefining Female Masculinity
Following Butler, literary critic Judith (Jack) Halberstam has been
crucial in moving the discourse from a stigmatized to a positive
view of female masculinity. Halberstam begins by assuming rather
than explaining the term. S/he introduces her book Female Masculinity by saying she tells people that she is writing about women who
feel themselves to be more masculine than feminine, without their
needing Halberstam to define either masculinity or women.
Like Stoller, she considers masculinity self-evident, prior to definition,
valuable, and powerful. There is something all too obvious about the
concept of female masculinity, she writes. At the same time her goal
is to raise female masculinity from a term that is disparaged to one
that is celebrated so that masculine girls and women do not have to
wear their masculinity as a stigma but can infuse it with a sense of
pride and indeed power. Believing that Butlers brilliant abstractions
needed specific embodiment, Halberstam provides a careful taxonomy that differentiates many varieties of masculine women, including passing women, butches, and the liminal category of transmen,
who cease to identify as female at all. Her study of contemporary drag
kings achieves ethnographic solidity and includes subjects of color
who are often lacking from discussions of alternative gender formations. Among the behaviors she associates with masculinity are dressing like men, desiring women, being recognized as men, painting on
moustaches, growing moustaches, engaging in traditionally male
occupations, and protecting female partners. Halberstam provides
concrete examples of masculine women that pay welcome attention
to differences of race and social class. Her valuable historical and ethnographic study has made a fundamental impact on queer studies,
even as some of its arguments remain tied to earlier gender binaries.

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Acknowledging her debt to Butler, Halberstam describes The

Lesbian Phallus as elusive, difficult, and hardly explicit. She praises
it for showing the possibility of a female body both being and having
phallic power and for dissociating the phallus from the penis, particularly in the phallic dyke body, the butch body that has been
repudiated by both psychoanalysis and feminism. In fact, she disparages the penis while validating fantasies of possessing it. The very
lack of a penis what we might call the privileged gadget of male
masculinity allows womens erotic pleasure without the danger of
pregnancy. She claims that for many contemporary lesbians, desire
works through masculinity and through phallic fantasy, including
Butlers theoretical fantasy of the lesbian phallus and more concretely through sexual practices that phantasmically transform their
female bodies into penetrating male bodies.
Halberstam also shares Butlers repudiation of 1970s-style
woman-identified lesbian feminism, which objected to gendered
roles and male identification and instead championed androgynous female self-presentation, woman bonding, and egalitarian
sexual practices. So, for example, Halberstam resists the old-fashioned feminism that understands women as endlessly victimized
within systems of male power. Associated with this feminism, for
her, is modern femininity, characterized by unhealthy practices,
passivity and inactivity. So she disparages androgyny and femininity and proposes both that girls would be better off in childhood with
an unassigned gender neutrality and that it would be healthier if
masculinity were a kind of default.
Halberstam claims that female masculinity is an independent
and original gender that does not imitate an authentic male masculinity. Instead, male masculinity often imitates prior female forms.
She not only categorizes but also champions female masculinity as a
progressive social force, as she explains in a 2002 essay:
Female masculinity, I have argued in a book of the same name,
disrupts contemporary cultural studies accounts of masculinity
within which masculinity always boils down to the social, cultural
and political effects of male embodiment and male privilege. Such
accounts can only read masculinity as the powerful and active alternative to female passivity and as the expression therefore of white
male subjectivities.

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In contrast, she believes, female masculinity offers an alternative

mode of masculinity that clearly detaches misogyny from maleness
and social power from masculinity. These conclusions do not obviously follow from her premises: masculine women, like everyone
else, can be misogynists, and misogynists may still equate masculinity with power, especially in societies that in fact empower wealthy
white men over other groups. Furthermore, Halberstam, too, retains
the binary of masculinity and femininity, disparaging both femininity and alternative gender categories, such as androgyny, even as she
expands the boundaries of masculinity.
Halberstam both limits and idealizes female masculinity, especially conflating it with the gender and erotic system of the lesbian
butch. For example, she critiques movies featuring conventionally
attractive bisexual women by saying, real lesbianism has much more
to do with masculinity. At the same time, she claims that Butlers
work has amply shown [that] female masculinity provides a far
better and more representative model for the workings of masculinity in a postmodern society than masculinity in men, a formulation
that retains the connection between masculinity and social power,
even as she incidentally mentions the desirability of also making the
feminine livable and powerful. Throughout her discussion, phallic power is an overdetermined redundancy, repeatedly called a fantasy and yet resolutely retaining the reference to the male body part,
even in its absence. So, like Butler, Halberstam retains the cachet
of the phallus, even as she insists it can thrive apart from the penis,
while discarding Butlers involvement with psychoanalytic theory.
Why shouldnt a woman get in touch with her masculinity? she asks,
as though doing so is an innate drive toward activity and social power,
while at the same time she seeks to have skill, strength, speed, physical dominance, uninhibited use of space and motion recognized,
not as human potentials, but specifically as aspects of female masculinity. Thus the revisionary concept of female masculinity continues a broader devaluation of femininities, and reinforces the cultural
failure to develop alternative, nonbinary genders and un- or less gendered identities.

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Masculinity in Men, Women, and Transmen

In contrast to feminist discussions of female masculinity and the
lesbian phallus, feminist studies of masculinity in men have generally criticized its social and psychological effects. Current scholarship about mens masculinity often describes it negatively as a source
of insecurity for the man and of trouble for society, an incitement
to violence and bad behavior that arises from deep in the psyche as
well as from conformity to social norms. Scholars describing the selfstyled masculinities of butch lesbians and of female-to-male transsexuals describe these masculinities as gallant and brave but claim they
are not imitations of mens masculinity and not pathological, oppressive, or best understood through psychoanalytic categories. Does this
mean paradoxically that masculinity is best done by women? Comparisons between these discourses demonstrate gaps in the construction of masculinity and femininity as opposites and encourage speculation about the concepts of imitation, identity, and identification as
well as about gender as a cultural fantasy.
Feminist psychoanalytic theorists of the past four decades have
interpreted Freudian paradigms to analyze and often indict masculinity in men. Beginning in the same Freudian context used by
Stoller in the 1970s, Nancy Chodorows Reproduction of Mothering in 1978
deduced from object relations psychoanalysis the differing effects on
the personalities of boys and girls of typical mid-twentieth-century
Western family structures, with fathers away in the paid workforce
and mothers dominating child rearing at home. Whereas girls formed
close personal identifications with their mothers, Chodorow claims,
boys identified instead with cultural stereotypes of the masculine
role and sought a secure masculine self through superego formation
and the disparagement of women. They therefore internalized a masculinity defined negatively in terms of denial of relation and connection (and denial of femininity). Cut off from the intense interpersonal connections that bonded mothers with daughters, adult
men fear intimacy and so fail to satisfy women emotionally. However,
repressing their emotions and relational needs is functional in preparing men to participate in alienated work. Thus the sexual division
of labor, which allocates childcare primarily to women, also produces
a polarized psychology in women and men that perpetuates male
dominance and, hence, capitalism and patriarchy. Instituting equal

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and shared parenting by mothers and fathers, Chodorow claims,

would end these asymmetries and reduce mens needs to guard their
masculinity and their control of social and cultural spheres which
treat and define women as secondary and powerless.
Chodorows characterization of normal Western masculinity as
competitive, emotionally impoverished, and fearful of intimacy continues to provide a psychological foundation for scholarship to the
present day. For example, C. J. Pascoes 2007 ethnography of US secondary schools describes boys masculinity as created defensively
through misogyny and homophobia. Her main thesis, encapsulated
in her books title, Dude, Youre a Fag, is that these boys achieve masculine identity by compulsively repudiating the specter of failed
masculinity. Thus, while subscribing to Chodorows psychological
explanations of differing masculine and feminine personality structures, Pascoe interprets contemporary gender formations through
the radical feminist binary grid of masculine dominance and feminine submission, a binary in which the freest female position belongs
to those few athletes and activists who are masculine, girls who
act like guys. Similarly, sociologist Michael Kimmel outlines masculinity formation in contemporary young US men in his 2008 book,
Guyland. Ever since Freud, he says, accepting the premises of object
relations psychoanalysis, weve believed that the key to boys development is separation, that the boy must switch his identification from
mother to father in order to become a man. He achieves his masculinity by repudiation, dissociation, and then identification. According to Kimmel, this dangerous but necessary path causes boys, then
men, to suppress empathy, nurturance, vulnerability, and dependency. Inevitably feeling inferior due to their failure to match up
to impossible standards, young men nonetheless remain confident
of their masculine superiority over girls and women. Kimmel contrasts the static code of masculinity over the past century with its
imperatives that men be tough, aggressive, and successful with the
increased freedom and flexibility he attributes to women, who, after
decades of feminism, seem entitled, empowered, and emboldened.
Despite his recognition of womens continued secondary social status,
Kimmel still explains that the intensity of mens struggle to prove
manhood today is because its no longer as easy to differentiate

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

to discard the ideology of mens masculinity altogether, naming elements such as honor, respect, integrity, doing the right thing despite
the costs as enormously valuable the qualities of a real man,
even though women may share the same traits. Thus Kimmel follows earlier feminist theorists such as Chodorow in framing masculinity as something that men anxiously perform for one another
and against women, according to the defensive and negative psychological construction of masculinity developed from mother-dominated childhoods. On the other hand, the positive traits he attributes
to masculinity such as honor and respect are human ideals that
many feminists would say have no necessary relationship to gender.
Other current theories about mens masculinity agree that it is
protean and multifarious, but they still rely on the same hypothesis deduced from object relations psychology, which claims that masculinity is derived defensively from boys rejection of their mothers
femininity. Such theories argue that social hierarchies create hierarchical psyches that maintain social hierarchies, exactly the circular process Chodorow originally outlined. Despite acknowledging
changes in family structures that relegate fewer women to isolated
housework and childcare, such theories describe masculinity development in men as still based on psychologically derived entitlement
feelings and the need to dominate women.
While Halberstam revalues female masculinity not as pathological but as creative and desirable, she concludes her spectrum of
female masculinities with the female-to-male transsexuals (FtMs or
transmen) who can no longer be categorized as women and hence as
examples of female masculinity. Current studies of transmen document the self-concepts of these newly embodied men, some essentializing and some queer. These recent studies contest psychoanalytic views such as Stollers that label identifications with the gender
not assigned at birth as pathological or views such as Chodorows
that find masculinity defensive in origin. Instead, they champion the
validity of transitioning gender, specifically the masculinity of the
transman, at the same time as disavowing identification with the negative characteristics that they, too, often attribute to biological males.
Instead of analyzing the psychological or social sources that motivate

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

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

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current proliferation of complex female masculinities shows a simultaneous approximation of heterosexual masculinity and queering
of that masculinity. Here, again, the category of masculinity is
expanded, but a binary that valorizes masculinity supersedes femininity or alternative gender categories. Similarly, English sociologist Sally Hines confirms Rubins finding that transmen often reject
hegemonic masculinity: Im not a mans man, one claims, while
another self-identifies as a beta male rather than an alpha one. For
some transmen, their earlier lives as women inevitably alter their presentations of masculinity, as one subject says, so while I want to be
perceived and understood and taken totally as male, I will never be
100 percent male because of my background. Noble comments that
transmen almost never fully become men; they stay in the place of
transit. Using an object relations approach, one might hypothesize
that transmens only partial engagement with masculine qualities
such as emotional inhibition or dominating behavior may be a result
of their pre-transition psychological childhood as girls. Their distancing themselves from negative behaviors associated with masculinity
might also result from their self-conscious interactions with feminist
interviewers. Both Noble and Hines reject psychoanalysis as an adequate approach to trans subjectivity. Instead, Hines argues for more
nuanced, empirically based theory of gender that can address the
intricacies of transgender identities and subjectivities and so bridge
the gap between social theories and poststructuralist accounts of
gender identity formation; such theories might advance the project also advanced here in this essay of theorizing gender diversity in relation to social structures, discursive formations, subjective
understandings, embodied corporalities, and cultural (and subcultural) practices.
The trajectory of female masculinity, traced here from the 1970s
to the present, might seem at this point to be a progress narrative
of increasing individual choice and voice and decreasing stigma for
nonnormative gender in comparison to the more negative evaluations often made by feminist scholars of the effects of masculinity
in men. Recent studies of female masculinity open up more diverse
perspectives than the white US examples Ive cited so far, while they
also indicate contentions over identities and their borders. African
American drag king Shon claims his performances respect black

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

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and Thailand, are shown having sexual relations with one another
or often with white men who stand in for the US male viewer. The
transsexuals own pleasures and preferences may or may not be
served as they are made the means for a form of international sexual
and gender neocolonialism.
These transsexual performers may be examples of free and fluid
identities as well as examples of the exploitations of an international
sex trade geared primarily to white Western heterosexual men. More
even than the penis-less transmen, these performers seem to confound theories connections among gender, sexuality, sexual orientation, and power. Stereotypically feminine in appearance and
lacking in social power, they present visions of phallic women far
different from the threatening Lacanian portrait of Sarah Palin with
which this essay began. One might celebrate these representations for
expanding and breaking the gender binary of women and men. On
the one hand, they seem to stabilize the dominant figure of the penetrating masculine man as presumed viewer; on the other hand, some
heterosexual male viewers may be enjoying, even identifying with,
watching two persons with penises engaged in sexual acts, so implicitly queering their own desires and identities. However, control of this
pornographic discourse seems to lie less with the performers or viewers than with the marketers.
Engaging the Future
What conclusions can we draw from these representations of phallic women and of female masculinity over a forty-year period? My
examples represent an apparent progression from the devaluation of
a freakish anomaly to a celebrated individual freedom, albeit figured
in a worldwide market economy in which genders, sexualities, and
their representations can be purchased. I argue that this trajectory
illustrates the very incoherence of the concepts of female masculinity
and the phallus. It also illustrates the apparently oppositional analytical frameworks for the understanding of masculinity generally. One
framework, based in object relations psychoanalysis, derives negative
social consequences like sexism and male dominance from the psychic structures of masculinity that men develop in mother-dominated childhoods. In response, Raewyn Connell and James Messerschmidt suggest the possibility of democratizing gender relations

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in an attempt to establish as hegemonic among men a version

of masculinity open to equality with women. The other approach
to masculinity traced here, particularly among masculine women
and transmen, rejects psychoanalysis as sexist and deterministic and
instead opts for poststructuralist convictions about the malleability
of gender and identity, sometimes in the apparently contradictory
essentialist belief that FtM transition springs from a pre-existing masculine true self and sometimes from a more mobile sense of the possibilities now open to people born as girls.
These oppositional approaches to masculinity, I suggest, unduly
simplify their analyses by reifying gender and treating masculinity as
a coherent entity, despite recognition of its multiple varieties. Robert
Nye claims that the principal question for some feminist agendas is
whether masculine gender, now that we know it to be a thing apart
from sexed bodies, can or ought to be fully deconstructed and erased
or whether men, or men and women together, can reform masculinity, make it available to both men and women, and purge it of
its brutal, agonistic, and domineering qualities. Does even a kinder,
gentler masculinity require men being on top?

Critiquing the concept of female masculinity, Lori Rifkin chiefly

objects that the category is restricted to lesbians and excludes heterosexual women. However, I question both Nyes and Rifkins premises, which still reify masculinity even while suggesting that it can be
reshaped. Instead, I suggest that the reverse is more helpful: to make
clear that masculinity includes ideas some women and men have
about the ideals and attributes proper to male bodies but that there
is no it that has an essential coherence. Furthermore, masculinity
in women or in men, for that matter still alludes to the cultural
and historical practices and privileges of male embodiment that are
mythologized or associated with negative practices like brutality
and dominance for Nye or positive ones like honor, respect, integrity for Kimmel.
To dispute the coherence of a master category of masculinity whether in men, women, or transpersons is not to deny the
existence and usefulness of historicized categories such as those of
the transman, the butch lesbian, or the pro-feminist man, all categories subject to change as society and technologies change. Criteria

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of social recognizability and intelligibility, too, are historically in

flux; as new gendered forms appear, they may become recognized.
As better phalloplasties are constructed, there may be more transmen; as gender inequality and homophobia diminish, there may
be fewer. Some of the conceptual confusion around these categorizations, I suggest, comes from the belief that to understand peoples
desires for change is necessarily to pathologize all that is nonnormative in a given time and culture. Other confusions may arise from
the incoherence built into concepts such as imitation, identification,
and identity. I doubt anyone would ever wear a necktie or learn
how to knot it without imitating, that is, without learning from,
someone or a representation of someone who had worn one, but that
does not make any such wearer either authentic or fake valorizing or negative labels that have bedeviled the history of gender variance. Too often discourses on masculinity use the term loosely as
either a synonym for social power or an alibi; covering with an aura
of biological inevitability a rich complex of social relations in which
men disproportionately acquire status and resources. I suggest, moreover, that it would be helpful not to automatically label dominance
behavior and entitlement as synonymous with masculinity, although
of course they often overlap. But dominance behavior and its accompanying sense of entitlement are common to all socially valorized
statuses, so that it seems unhelpful, for example, to call bourgeois
women masculine whenever they run businesses. The multiple
hierarchies of social status may or may not borrow some of the same
signifiers while evolving their own forms of organization and oppression, and more socially conscious psychologies may help to interpret
their manifestations in individuals and societies. The imperfect analogy with race helps clarify these gender categories: the evident and
harmful existence of racism does not prove that there really are separate races, and the nominal or fictional status of a category of race
or gender does not disable the category from real social effects.
Thus I argue that the current move to separate masculinity from
men and grant it an independent existence is not an advance. Instead,
it reifies masculinity as a coherent entity while obscuring analyses of
historically specific formations of gender and sexuality in their interactions with race, nationality, and social class. Here I concur with
Connell and Messerschmidt on the need to recognize the layering,

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the potential internal contradictions, within all practices that construct masculinities and on the need of the field of masculinity studies for more complex models of gender hierarchy and more specific
analyses of how embodiment interacts with privilege and power.
Gender change and variance in societies and discourses may lead to
people developing more ungendered, androgynous, both/and categories and identities. Such changes may simultaneously help reduce
the salience of gender in distributing goods and social statuses. All
the examples Ive outlined maintain a gender dualism, looser or
tighter, that continues to valorize some version of masculinity over
any version of femininity. The field of gender transition is currently
very mobile. The technology of sexual reassignment is continually
changing and may not be in synch with legal requirements for binary
gender, although laws, too, may change. Psychologies and ethics of
gender and sexuality are also in flux. As the gender range within and
outside each binary sex category grows, we might expect increased
tolerance for inter, neither, and alternate genders and sexualities as
well. Such expansion of gender variance is a valuable goal in itself
but not sufficient to end gender and sexual exploitation, as is evident
from the example of international transsexual pornography.
This travel through representations of female masculinity leads
me to conclude that the phallus isnt what it used to be and, in
fact, never was. In all its versions, concepts of female masculinity
implicitly rely on the sexist assumptions of Freudian and Lacanian
psychoanalysis, even when psychoanalysis is explicitly renounced.
Since no other psychological theories have yet replaced the cultural
influence of psychoanalysis, much current discussion avoids psychology altogether and instead relies on self-reports by gender-variant people. The Lacanian phallus is a confusing formulation, always
supposed to be an abstraction, yet always tethered to male anatomy
and so abjecting both femininity and women, as in Millers hysterical remarks about Sarah Palin a hysteria encouraged by Lacanian
terms and metaphors. For Miller, even if a womans phallus is recognized as only a semblance, it still connotes castration and disempowerment to men. The project of undoing gender must include
challenging old theories and dismantling old fantasies, both frightening and utopian. Transsexual pornography illustrates how the control over discourse achieved by queer mobilizations does not extend

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

gender and power.
Theories about phallic power, despite their claims of dissociation
from biological men, continue to naturalize connections between
men, their penises, and social control. The phrase is either a redundancy, a vague synonym for social power, or a justification for patriarchal social relationships that disadvantage women. For Stoller, Mrs.
G. created masculinity by imitation and identification, and maleness (a penis) by hallucination. Butlers lesbian phallus, she claims,
is a contradictory signifier that still revolves around the connection
between masculinity and power. Halberstam asks, Why shouldnt
a woman get in touch with her masculinity? a query that presupposes that all or some women have an inner predisposition for activity and social power that is separate or opposite to what is female or
feminine in them. Even the pornographic chicks with dicks, those
most feminine of phallic women, presumably derive erotic appeal
from their transgressive rejection of the social power usually accruing to persons born male. We might say the phallus is always under
erasure, described as independent of the penis while always recalling
it. Like the phallus, the concept of female masculinity is a confusing
formulation to be used, if at all, in carefully specified contexts, since
it may act either to confirm or disrupt heteronormativity and the
gender binary. Athena Nguyen comments that severing the naturalized connection between masculinity and male bodies may not succeed as a strategy for challenging patriarchal power without the aid of
feminism as a political force. Thus the incoherent concept of female
masculinity partially detaches masculinity from being the exclusive
property of biological males but leaves untouched both its oppositional superiority to femininity and its critical vagueness. It continues the devaluation of femininities and reinforces the cultural failure
to develop alternative genders and un- or less gendered identities that
are not validated on the old masculine model. Yet in both the case of
phallic power and of female masculinity, reference to mens bodies
continues, so that such formulations advance the project of destabilizing gender binaries but not necessarily of minimizing gender
as a social hierarchy. Thus, whereas Halberstam states her goal as
making maleness nonessential to masculinity, I hope instead for

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making masculinity nonessential to the distribution of power and for

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

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21. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York:
Routledge, [1990], 1999) 24 25.
22. Butler, The Lesbian Phallus, 262n26.
23. Ibid., 85, all quotations this paragraph.
24. Ibid., 86, all quotations this paragraph.
25. Ibid., 88.
26. Ibid., 89.
27. Ibid., 90.
28. Ibid., 91 both quotations this paragraph (emphasis in original).
29. Ibid., 80.
30. Ibid.
31. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 231.
32. Butler, Phantasmatic Identification and the Assumption of Sex, in her
Bodies that Matter, 102.
33. Ibid., 103.
34. Butler, The Lesbian Phallus, 57.
35. Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999), 19.
36. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, xi, both quotations this paragraph.
37. Ibid., 356, 357.
38. Ibid., 68.
39. Ibid., 72.
40. Ibid., 17.
41. Ibid., 58, 266.
42. Ibid., 41, 27, 269.
43. Judith Halberstam, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Men, Women, and
Masculinity, in Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory: New Directions, ed. Judith
Kegan Gardiner (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 345.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 349.
46. Ibid., 355.
47. Ibid., 357.
48. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 269, 272.
49. Chodorow, 169, 218.
50. C. J. Pascoe, Dude, Youre a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), 5.
51. Ibid., 115.

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

Judith Kegan Gardiner

68.
69.
70.

71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.

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Kulicks anthropological studies of travesties, The Gender of Brazilian

Transgendered Prostitutes, American Anthropologist 99, no. 3: 574 85.
R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept, Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 853.
Robert Nye, Locating Masculinity: Some Recent Work on Men, Signs 30,
no. 3 (Spring 2005): 1939.
Lori Rifkin, The Suit Suits Whom? Lesbian Gender, Female Masculinity,
and Women-in-Suits, in FemmeButch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to
Go, ed. Michelle Gibson and Deborah T. Meem (New York: Harrington
Park: 2002), 158.
Connell and Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity, 852.
Stoller, Splitting, 196.
Butler, The Lesbian Phallus, 73, 89.
Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 269.
Athena Nguyen, Patriarchy, Power, and Female Masculinity, Journal of
Homosexuality 55, no. 4 (2008): 665.
Halberstam, The Good, the Bad, 355.

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