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April, 2001 In the first sentence of the preface to her book, Female Masculinity (1998), Judith Halberstam clearly articulates one of the central problems of her project. She states, "There is something all too obvious about the concept of 'female masculinity'" (xi). Indeed, when I read this statement and turned back to the front cover of the book, I knew that what I was about to read was a book about the experiences of Euro-American, biologically-born females who identify as masculine. What I had hoped to read was something less obvious—a cross-cultural critique of masculinity and gender performativity, or perhaps a discussion of gender as it relates to broader categories, such as race, class, religion, marriage and labor. Finally, I hoped to read an analysis of masculinity that embraced the female, but that did not need to be qualified by the term female. This was not the book I read, however. In her book, Halberstam seeks to demonstrate that female masculinity is "a specific gender with its own cultural history" (77) rather than "an imitation of maleness" (1) or "a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment" (9). The evidence for her argument stems primarily from literary and dramatic sources—novels, diaries, film and theatre—and is arranged by what she calls "a logic of embodiment," that is, by how the individuals presented in these genres position(ed) themselves within the gender discourses of their day (41). The first two examples she presents are from the nineteenth century—the court case of two schoolteachers, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, and the diaries of Anne Lister. Next, she explores the facts and fictions of John Radclyffe Hall's life and its relation to Havelock Ellis's sexological analyses and the prevailing notions of "sexual inversion" at that time. Following these chapters, Halberstam fast-forwards to the second half of the twentieth century, where she explores stone butch fiction, the "border wars" of butches and female-to-male transsexuals, butches on film, and finally, butches on stage. Throughout her book, Halberstam emphasizes the need for a new language, a new "taxonomy" to more accurately describe the many forms and varieties of female masculinity. She asserts that terms such as "tribade," "androgyne," "hermaphrodite," "female husband" and "lesbian" are discursive, not descriptive; they are mired in historical contexts that have lost their meaning in today's complicated gender arenas. Philosophers Michel Foucault and Judith Butler are frequently invoked by Halberstam to assist in her claim that a new language is warranted in order to more accurately articulate today's same-sex desires and practices. In explaining the limitations and the historicity of language, Foucault seems useful for her arguments, but Butler perhaps less so. As an example, in one passage, Halberstam quotes Butler in order to demonstrate the inefficacy of the term, "lesbian." Halberstam states:
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