Since the lesbian subculture of 1940s America, "butch" has been present as a way for lesbians to circumvent traditional gender roles of women in society and distinguish their masculine attributes and characteristics from feminine women.[a]
Starting in the 1940s and 1950s, butch became a central identity in the lesbian community.[5] It was often understood in conjunction with femme identity, and butch-femme relations have been studied at great length.[6] As a result, butch identity on its own remains somewhat ill-defined.[6] Butch people are often described as sexually dominant lesbians who are interested in having sex with femmes.[6]The Queen's Vernacular claimed a butch was "a lesbian with masculine characteristics."[7] In Of Catamites and Kings, Rubin describes a butch as those lesbians who use masculine mannerisms, and/or who wear traditionally male clothing, and/or who experience gender dysphoria.[8] The defining characteristic that most scholars agree on is that butch people are lesbians who are to some degree aligned with masculine traits.
In the mid 20th century, butch people were usually limited to a few jobs, such as factory work and cab driving, that had no dress codes for women.[9] During the 1950s with the anti-gay politics of the McCarthy era, there was an increase in violent attacks on gay and bisexual women, while at the same time the increasingly strong and defiant bar culture became more willing to respond with force.[citation needed] Although femmes also fought back, it became primarily the role of butches to defend against attacks and hold the bars as gay women's space.[10] The prevailing butch image was severe but gentle, while it became increasingly tough and aggressive as violent confrontation became a fact of life.[11]Leslie Feinberg's novel Stone Butch Blues is a predominant piece of butch literature, and offers a window into butch bar culture, police brutality towards transvestites (both drag queens and butch people), and butch eroticism in the 1970s.[12]
Transgender butch identity
One of the subcategories of the butch identity was and is people who experience gender dysphoria.[8] In the mid 20th century, butch was a group that included most lesbians who identified with masculine characteristics; unsurprisingly, this was a space that included many transmasculine identities.[13] In the words of butch, transgender man S. Bear Bergman, "butch and transgender are the same thing with different names, except that butch is not a trans identity, unless it is."[14] However, there is something of a "border war" between butch and FTM identities, as renowned butch scholar Jack Halberstam put it in Transgender Butch.[13] Some butch people identify as women and undergo some amount of medical transition, and some FTM individuals identify as butch men.[15] The difference between the two groups is nuanced and has as many interpretations as there are butch people.[8] Halberstam argues that in "making concrete distinctions between butch women and transsexual males, all too often such distinctions serve the cause of heteronormativity."[15]
^According to Heidi M. Levitt and Sara K. Bridges: "The terms femme and butch began infiltrating bisexual communities, and women began writing about their experiences as bisexual femmes...Although essayists have begun to explore this identity, very little empirical research has been conducted looking at the expression and experience of gender expression and gender identity within bisexual women."[3] According to some academic studies about the butch/femme subculture, "Femmes were sometimes bisexual."[4]
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