“I want to be her when I grow up”

Someone turns the lights off. Another pair of people

lower the blinds. For a moment, the class is only lit by the

hall lights before the projector boots up. My professor plays

a video for us, entitled, “Butch Women Talk About What It

Means to Be Butch”. At this point, I’ve never met someone

who identified as butch. I know what it means, of course. Or

I think I do. But that’s not me.

Except I recognize the women in the video. They

look powerful in their suits, call them their armor. They talk

about how sexy it is to be butch. They describe the inten-

tionality of their masculinity; this didn’t just happen to them,

they do it on purpose. They call themselves all sorts of things.

Butch woman, dyke, genderfluid, bulldagger. I lean forward

in my seat. I know this. And one of them looks like me. Her

face is rounder, her body wide and sturdy and packed beau-

tifully into the sharp lines of her suit. She says, “Butch is nu-

anced. Butch is more than I think we’ve been talking about”

(00:02:00 – 00:02:07). I think I want to be her when I grow up.

The video is over, and I’m temporarily blinded as someone

turns on the lights. We turn to discussion, but I’m not pay-

ing attention. I leave class uneasy. I spend too long torturing

myself, questioning if I can have this word that feels so right.

I have a confession. I don’t know what butch means!

Or, to be honest, most of the words that my community

members use to describe their life and love. Of course, I

could come up with a definition for most of these words.

I could come up with several definitions, even. Some defi-

nitions of bisexual off the top of my head, in no particular

order:

a) Attraction to two genders

b) Attraction to two or more genders, but not all

c) Attraction regardless of gender

d) Attraction to all genders, but with different things being

attractive about separate genders

I could probably keep going if I tried hard enough. I could do

this with a lot of queer words. When I was running my high

school’s Gender and Sexuality Alliance, we spent a lot of time

and resources just giving definitions to people. But then the

definitions would change, or the ones we had in our heads

would change, and we would have to correct ourselves, or

we would argue. It was a headache. But still, I love how our

definitions lack stability.

But wait. If the definition is unstable, how does it

mean anything? Well, it’s a little complicated. First, how do we

get to having definitions in the first place? In “Discourses and

Social Languages” James Gee writes, “The key to Discours-

es is ‘recognition.’ If you put language, action, interaction,

values, beliefs, symbols, objects, tools, and places together

in such a way that others recognize you as a particular type of

who (identity) engaged in a particular type of what (activ-

ity) here and now, then you have pulled off a Discourse”.

By this explanation, a Discourse group is a set of particular

types of people doing a specific thing. People in these groups

use language to convey all sorts of meanings – not just the

literal definitions of words and sentences, but other cultural

fragments, including our values. When we think about this, it

suddenly makes sense why the queer community has so many

unstable words. We highly value autonomy. The ability to

decide for yourself who you are and what that means to you.

We recognize that identity, gender, and sexuality are often in

flux. It only makes sense that our words reflect that!

But Gee also emphasizes the importance of recog-

nition. It is not just enough to decide that you are part of a

Discourse, he says. You must be recognized by other mem-

bers. They should be able to tell what sort of identity you’re

playing at. This is part of why I spent so much of my time

worried about whether or not I should use butch for myself.

Queer terms are in flux, but it’s not as if they mean nothing

(although I have said this myself in a fit of explosive hyper-

bolicity). I was worried about stepping into a place where I

didn’t belong, where my attempt at butchness wouldn’t be

recognized, viewed as an interloper by the people I admired

and wanted to be in solidarity with.

And my worries were not without merit! I spend a lot

of time (and perhaps too much) interacting with the queer

community online. You can find endless amounts of people

arguing about who can use what words and when and how.

I’ve seen lots of people arguing about whether or not non-les-

bians can use femme, ignoring the fact that people from all

over the gender and sexuality spectrums have been using

it for decades. But these arguments all stem from a central

question – where are the boundaries of identity? Although

these arguments often become inane and pointless, their root

is in a fair question.

We might turn back to Gee. As he points out, Dis-

courses are not static. They can be expanded. He writes,

“Discourses have no discrete boundaries because people are

always, in history, creating new Discourses, changing old

ones, and contesting and pushing the boundaries of Dis-

courses” (21). He goes on to explain that you might perform

a Discourse in a way that is slightly unusual. But, if you are

recognized as this Discourse nonetheless, then you have

succeeded in pushing the boundaries. There’s a root to butch

– an admiration for masculinity and the purposeful pursuit

of it. A touch of chivalry, maybe. And it’s certainly queer –

we can’t divorce the word from our automatic association

with lesbians, even if it might expand to include gay men and

certain trans masculine folks. But it can mean so many more

things.

Of course, this expansion of Discourse business

requires that your audience is willing to meet you halfway.

In any group, there are going to be pedants who will accept

no deviation from what they have decided is the “norm”.

These are the people who would lock me out from butch. But

there are people who recognize me as butch, and I recognize

them in turn. Some of them are my friends. Some of them

are strangers, and we share shy glances across a public space.

It was only through talking with these people that I got the

courage to take this word for myself. Butch probably means

something different to them, but we’re close enough to share

stories and hardships and loves. So I’ll keep being butch, and

maybe someday someone will hear me talking about what

that means and think, I want to be him when I grow up.

What does butch mean to me? Well, it means that I’m

not a man and I’m not a woman. It means that I’m attracted

to typically masculine outfits – sometimes with a feminine

touch. It means that I use the women’s bathroom, but on

occasion little girls walk in and turn to their mothers and say,

“Is that a boy?”. It means that even after running at manhood

full speed, I cannot leave behind my ties to womanhood

entirely. How could I, when being perceived as a woman has

shaped so much of my life? It means being strong and gentle

at the same time. It’s contradictory. It doesn’t always make

sense to other people. It can be a little rough. It’s butch.