A review by plumeriade
Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme by Ivan Coyote, Zena Sharman
2.0
with something so heavily theorized, it's nice to get personal narratives; but then, personal narratives can also be just as grating, self-indulgent, and/or obnoxious as theory sometimes. I liked a handful of these essays: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a wonderful, powerful, smart writer; Victoria Brownworth's commentary on how lesbian identities in the mainstream are being so straightwashed, and the forcing of lesbians to be viewed as sexually available to men, is extremely important; I also enjoyed Sasha T. Goldberg's and Chandra Mayor's pieces, and while I wasn't personally drawn to their essays, Amy Fox's and Elizabeth Marston's inclusion are notable.
that said... now there's a whole lot of essays left that I don't like and/or find terrible. There's the inclusion of a self-centered misogynist (who will go unnamed... their essay in the book may not be so grossly misogynist -- I refuse to read it -- but they sure are on their popular blog); the debatable inclusion of people who are not queer women (by which I mean men); blaming feminism for setting back butch identification by the feminist practice of hating all things male/masculine (Ivan Coyote in the introduction, and also Jeanne Cordova in "The New Politics of Butch"); offering these identities up to cis straight people ("Rogue Femininity"); and then there's the bizarre essay where a gay man talks about doing lesbian porn with his bisexual woman friend -- no, you identify as a man, she identifies as a woman, that is not lesbian in any way!
I wish there was a place for people to read the essays individually, because the essays that are good are really good, but I'm not sure that they're good enough to justify buying the whole thing in all its messy undefined glory.
p.s. alright, I'll admit "Hats Off" still gives me butterflies sometimes.
that said... now there's a whole lot of essays left that I don't like and/or find terrible. There's the inclusion of a self-centered misogynist (who will go unnamed... their essay in the book may not be so grossly misogynist -- I refuse to read it -- but they sure are on their popular blog); the debatable inclusion of people who are not queer women (by which I mean men); blaming feminism for setting back butch identification by the feminist practice of hating all things male/masculine (Ivan Coyote in the introduction, and also Jeanne Cordova in "The New Politics of Butch"); offering these identities up to cis straight people ("Rogue Femininity"); and then there's the bizarre essay where a gay man talks about doing lesbian porn with his bisexual woman friend -- no, you identify as a man, she identifies as a woman, that is not lesbian in any way!
I wish there was a place for people to read the essays individually, because the essays that are good are really good, but I'm not sure that they're good enough to justify buying the whole thing in all its messy undefined glory.
p.s. alright, I'll admit "Hats Off" still gives me butterflies sometimes.