Desire work, performativity, and the structuring of a community: Butch/fem relations of the 1940s and 1950s

Frontiers, 1996 by Kraus, Natasha

The breakdown into the mommies and daddies was an important part of lesbian relationships in the Bagatelle [a working-class lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, New York, during the 1950s]. If you asked the wrong woman to dance, you could get your nose broken in the alley down the street by her butch, who had followed you out of the Bag for exactly that purpose.... And you were never supposed to ask who was who, which is why there was such heavy emphasis upon correct garb. The well-dressed gay girl was supposed to give you enough cues for you to know.

-Audre Lorde

Some people went so far as to say that one never really knew a woman's role identity until they went to bed with her. "You can't tell butch-fem by peopie's dress. . . [even] in the fifties. I knew women with long hair, fem clothes, and found out they were butches. Actually, I even knew one who wore men's clothes, haircuts and ties, who was a fem."

-Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy

I can spot a butch 50 feet away.

-Joan Nestle

In fact, if the category were to offer no trouble, it would cease to be interesting to me: it is precisely the pleasure produced by the instability of those categories which sustains the very erotic practices which make me a candidate for the category to begin with.

-Judith Butler

Women's self-identification as butch and fem and the community's construction of butch and fem identities were a central institution of the 1940s and 1950s lesbian community, playing an important role in both the community's emergence and the daily lives of the butch and fem women. Substantial difference in opinion existed as to what exactly constituted butch and fem identities, however. As the above quotes make clear, communities ordained both an appropriate relation between butch and fem and an appropriate manner of signaling an individual's identification as butch or fem, consisting of dress, mannerisms, and sexuality. Yet, the possibility of misrecognition persistently remained a threat in individual interactions: a fight might ensue or a woman might end up in bed with the "wrong" woman (butch instead of fem or vice-versa). A heightened threat existed as well: a community whose rules of internal social interaction were based on distinctions between butch and fem might end up in disarray if the distinctions were not clear to members.

This article contends that the story of butch/fem relationships in the I940s and I950s is as much a tale of the emergence and rigidification of a community, with structured rules and expectations for social interaction between its members, as it is a tale of the social and sexual interactions occurring between individual lesbian women. As Lillian Faderman remarked, "the possibility of a life as a lesbian had to be socially constructed in order for women to be able to choose such a life."1 The history of the emergence of butch/fem communities in the mid-twentieth century, the first public lesbian communities in the United States, is a story of identities, community, and the crucial negotiations between these levels.

I suggest that in order to maintain clear community- and self-definitions of butch and fem identities, individual butches and fems were continuously engaged in the complex task of managing self-presentation. They were constantly involved in communicating their chosen identities: (1) to each other individually, enabling smooth interaction, (2) to the community at large, maintaining and reproducing community structure, (3) to the heterosexual world, signaling lesbian existence and the autonomy of female desire, and, not least of all, (4) each to herself, sustaining and reproducing femness or butchness. I argue that self-presentations formed a crucial link between individual identity and community existence. These communications were part and parcel of daily life; they formed the basis of lesbian identification and the crux of butch/fem eroticism.

B. Ruby Rich and Cheshire Calhoun have suggested that the stigma accorded to lesbianism in the pre-Stonewall era was precisely the center of lesbian eroticism, that a forbidden status created the tension that was desire.2 This forbidden status was conveyed to the lesbian and heterosexual worlds alike through the self-presentation of butches in the I940s and 1950s. Using Esther Newton and Shirley Walton's concepts of erotic identity and erotic role, I explore this tension along with those created by the fem's presentation of herself as the epitome of womanhood. I discuss these tensions as a dialogue that sustained a community and community members' desirous lives.

Sustenance was not unproblematic, however. Not only did women sometimes misrecognize others as butch or fem (or, in the case of fems, as heterosexuals), but individual butches and fems also often had trouble keeping their desires within prescribed limits based on the community definitions of butch and fem. In order to realign their desires with their identities, these women undertook a process I call desire work, continuously making and remaking their identities as fem and butch. I suggest that desire work was a continual process necessitated by contradictions inherent in butch/fem identities and practice. This clearly suggests a process of social construction of these roles, rather than the argument for innateness that many butch and fem women preferred.3 The ubiquitous nature of this process, as well as the entanglement between community and individual identity, manifests precisely what Judith Butler has theorized as the performativity of gendered and sexual identities: