‘A roadmap to myself’: Disrupting and Reimagining the Boundaries of ‘Female Masculinity’ in Butch and Transmasculine Autobiographical Narratives.

Abstract

This research project interrogates how the boundaries of female masculinity are established, affirmed and contested in butch and transmasculine autobiographical writing. The term ‘female masculinity’ is used with deliberate intention to recall the so-called ‘butch/ftm border wars’ of the 1990s that served as a trigger point for claims of butch disappearance or ‘butch flight’ and to trace the continuing ripples of this debate. In a contemporary cultural moment focused on identity politics where butchness, defined by Gayle Rubin as ‘a category of lesbian gender that is constituted through the deployment and manipulation of masculine gender codes and symbols’, is often configured as a step towards a transgender identification, the discussion of the porous and overlapping nature of identity categories is essential and timely. Tensions around the UK Supreme Court’s recent ruling over the definitional terms of ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 and the continuing hostility of the Trump administration towards the trans population, combined with changing cultural dialogues of gender and sexuality, make it essential to trace the shifting discourses of female masculinity whilst also resituating it within academic discussions of gender variability. Whereas queer and feminist academic work on the variable nature of gender and sexuality have worked towards destabilising identity categories, the butch often gets overlooked or subsumed under other identity categorisations. The arguments and discussions set out in this project mobilise a queer theoretical approach, combining theories of queer temporality, queer archives, and queer object orientations, to intervene in and contribute to ongoing academic work that seeks to understand the current cultural relevance of butch and trans masculinities and their nebulous and contested boundaries. Engaging in dialogue with theories of lesbian, queer and trans autobiography, this project argues that the boundaries of female masculinity and the boundaries of the butch or trans body are negotiated and contested through the telling of a life story. The majority of the primary texts under interrogation have been published in the past two decades and includes writers and creators whose work has so far fallen under the radar of academic attention. This includes the work of Esther Newton, Ivan Coyote, Annie Lanzillotto, Darcy Leigh, S Bear Bergman, and Loren Cameron. These texts are examined alongside other, more well-known work from Alison Bechdel and Cassils. Each chapter considers the different ways in which the autobiographical butch or transmasculine subject is constructed through various forms of autobiographical cultural production, including graphic novels, zines, photography, archives and objects, and how the methods and processes involved are shaped by historical and cultural discourses of gender, sexuality and the body. To intervene in existing dialogue, this project also follows the threads of disappointment and anxiety over the supposed decline of the butch (and the femme through proximity) that linger in these texts, as well as mechanisms of idealisation which work recover the specificity of butch identity and embodiment.

Date of Award	16 Oct 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Monica Pearl (Main Supervisor) & Jacqueline Stacey (Co Supervisor)