Identity Intersections in "Stone Butch Blues"
Erin Northern

Class can be defined as a continuously fluctuating identity based on one’s access, choice, and privilege in the world. Throughout Leslie Feinberg’s novel Stone Butch Blues the main character, Jess, is constantly negotiating her class identity, always striving for more means in society. However, this process is convoluted by her oscillating gender identity which reinforces access, or denial thereof. These combined struggles of class and gender identities continuously intersect and fade into each other, culminating in a harmonious balance through Jess’s newly found voice of true and complete self-expression. At the novel’s conclusion, she is able to speak freely, both within the queer community and also in the labor force as a union organizer; each realm builds upon the other to contribute exponentially to her gained mobility and power in the world.

In the beginning of the novel, Jess’s outward gender expression is a butch woman. This gender identity allows her access within part of the queer community. She is welcomed as family in the popular working-class bar scene in Buffalo, New York. Here Jess finds community; she is mentored as a baby butch and finds love among the femmes. Within this environment, Jess is encouraged and free to express her sexuality as she begins dating and loving other women. However, just as her gender identity as a butch woman is liberating, it is also detrimental in another environment: the labor world. Jess has much difficulty finding and maintaining jobs during this period of her life. Her gender expression is always a factor in obtaining and keeping work. It limits her choices, as she cannot work in traditional female jobs, such as secretarial positions. Even though she is biologically a woman, she does not fit the social mold due to her lack of femininity, and she cannot get hired for these positions. Therefore, she is forced to constantly rely on temp agencies for work in factories, where she is expected to prove herself as being just as strong as her male co-workers. Upon entering the work force, Jess quickly learns that she must embrace her masculinity in order to obtain the high-paying factory wages and to survive in these positions. The labor market appears to naturally divide employees according to gender (expression) and keeps their dichotomous work spheres rigidly separated.

An experience at one temp agency triggers Jess to question exactly which group she does belong in: “‘You want to wait around Jess? Maybe by 10:30 we’ll need a couple of guys.’ I wondered if I fit into that work category – one of the guys.” (Feinberg, 141) Through employment, Jess’s already blurred gender identity becomes even further convoluted as she does not feel a comfortable or natural fit in either sphere. Either way she has to work at maintaining her gender performance, playing more feminine or more masculine to adhere to the job situation. She keenly discovers that these two aspects are intertwined, as her gender is the keystone to her access in the labor force. At one point, Jess and other butch women, in a long stretch of desperate unemployment, contemplate the drastic measure of dressing feminine in order to have more work opportunities: “This is a real crisis. We either got to change how we look or we’re gonna starve to death.” (143) Their financial crisis, partly caused by their gender expression, bleeds into an identity crisis. At this point, the two crises cannot be separated; each adds to the severity of the other.

With this relationship in mind, that gender identity can provide or limit access to employment, Jess makes the difficult decision to begin taking male hormones. She hopes that passing as a man will provide her with stable jobs which were previously not available to her because of her perceived female weakness. She is relatively successful; within the realm of factory work, Jess is able to obtain more steady employment. Eventually, she achieves more humane working conditions as well, when she is transferred to the shipping and receiving open-air dock at one factory. In this position Jess becomes one of the guys and for the first time is able to enjoy the safety and benefits of long-term employment. Now it is not her constant lack of work that plagues her, rather her constant fear of being discovered, as well as the loneliness that accompanies her new gender expression. Passing as a man helps Jess obtain work; however, it limits her ability to express herself sexually. She is now denied access to her previous community, since the world no longer sees her as queer but rather as a straight man. When Jess begins taking male hormones, her longtime partner, Theresa, ends their relationship; later, Gloria, a close friend, also rejects her.

Jess is walking alone in the social world but is gaining camaraderie with the men at work. She is now forced to utilize her male gender expression as a vehicle to sexual freedom, but Jess is constantly tormented by the thought of being discovered: “She could make real trouble for me if she found out; I’d have to quit my job. But I was desperately lonely.” (186) In Jess’s dating experience with Annie, she is mainly concerned about the economic repercussions if her true gender surfaces. Later, Jess’s fears are actualized as Duffy, an old friend, accidentally outs Jess as a “she” to the men in her department. Ironically, the moment in which her female gender is discovered is rooted in a union meeting that could lead to more rights and privileges for the labor force. However, this possibility is stripped away as her gender identity as a butch woman now denies her this access; she is no longer one of the guys and is forced to abandon the now unsafe work environment. She reacts harshly toward Duffy: “It doesn’t matter what you meant to do. I’m out of this job now.” (207) Jess is angry about both the loss of her current gender identity and the loss of steady employment. The double loss is devastating; eventually Jess must re-evaluate her position and enter a new realm in her life.

She decides that passing as a man for economic reasons is not sufficient, since she is miserably lonely without any personal connections and potential for sexual expression. Jess moves to New York City to begin afresh: “It wasn’t just the hope of steady work that drew me there, however; it was partly the anonymity that attracted me. Somehow it seemed easier to be a stranger in a city of strangers. And I hoped I might find others like me there.” (225) Previously Jess had sacrificed one access for the other: sexuality or employment. Now for the first time, she is fully acknowledging their interdependency and is attempting to juggle both freedoms simultaneously. It turns out to be a roller-coaster for Jess, as she experiences many extreme ups and downs financially along the way. She starts out homeless, unemployed, and broke, yet finds semi-regular employment. Through a series of jobs, she becomes a skilled typesetter and has the financial resources to decorate an apartment; for the first time she has made a home for herself. This period of economic prosperity also allows her to begin experimenting with creativity and self-expression through the arts. She discovers bookstores, explores various genres of music, and spends quality time doing remodeling projects and interior decorating at home. However, this all comes to a tragic end when a fire burns everything she owns, forcing her to start from scratch once again.
Her time in New York City is full of constant fluctuations in economic standing, as it is similarly a time of uncertain gender identity. Jess explains her new job working as a typesetter on the third shift, saying: “I feel like I’m living between the cracks of today and tomorrow.” (241) She is literally living a different time frame from the majority of Americans. She feels that she is living an abnormal life, as she just wants to leave work and grab dinner and a beer. Instead, leaving her job at daybreak, the only choices available to her are bacon and eggs and morning game shows. Jess’s feeling that she is not living in today or tomorrow, but in the tight space overlooked and somewhere caught between the two, is a metaphor for her gender identity as well. This again reinforces that her mobility in class and gender expression are forever fading together. Jess finds herself living somewhere in between the gender lines, not quite a man and yet not a woman either. Jess has stopped taking male hormones; however, she continues to pass as a man. She still has the ability to confuse outsiders as they struggle to somehow categorize her gender (expression). However, she personally seems to be questioning less and less hir position outside the binary gender roles and is becoming more comfortable with hir undefined existence. This place which causes outsiders so much confusion and fear is the same space which will provide hir with more inner peace as time passes.
Jess grows stronger and more confident in New York City, and eventually steps away from hir life of anonymity and silence. For the first time, s/he speaks out and defines hirself publicly as a butch, a he-she. The power of this personal transformation is reflected through an equally powerful balance of access and freedom in both employment and gender identity expression. This development is completely and perfectly intertwined. First, as Jess acquires access to the queer community as a he-she, s/he thinks of it in labor terms. S/he tells Duffy about speaking at the gay pride festival, “I got up in front of a rally and talked over a microphone. I wanted to tell them how it was in the plants…I didn’t know if they’d get what I meant if I said it took the whole membership to win the strike.” (299) Later, when Duffy discusses Jess’s potential for a career as a union organizer, he incorporates Jess’s gender identity. Duffy explains, saying: “I know it would be hard for you to organize openly as a woman. But maybe you could. I’d back you up all the way. There’s some others I think also would.” (299) Duffy articulates that Jess has choices available to hir; the union organizer position will not be denied based on hir gender expression, s/he is free to be hirself.
Jess has come full circle. In the beginning, hir gender expression as a butch woman worked against hir in the labor market but allowed hir sexual freedom. Then, passing as a man, s/he gained access to employment but was denied access to hir previous queer community. Moving to New York, Jess silently rode the great divide between gender roles and simultaneously experienced fluctuations in economic standing. Now s/he has found the perfect balance, as s/he is able to publicly integrate employment and true gender expression, resulting in more power and privilege in all realms of hir life, particularly in the form of inner peace. Jess summarizes the culmination of hir struggles in hir dream, saying, “There were people who were different like me inside. We could all see our reflections in the faces of those who sat in this circle. I looked around. It was hard to say who was a woman, who was a man. Their faces radiated with a different kind of beauty…It’s a beauty one isn’t born with, but must fight to construct at great sacrifice.” (300) Jess made these sacrifices throughout the course of hir life, and was able to express the beauty of hir true inner self in all aspects of hir intersecting life.

Bibliography

Feinberg, Leslie. Stone Butch Blues. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1993.

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