Jack Halberstam (1961–) academic. Part II

Continued from Part 1.

The next year, 1999, in an interview in Genders, Halberstam wrote:

"The term 'female masculinity' stages several different kinds of interventions into contemporary gender theory and practice. First, it challenges the notion that genders are symmetrical - in other words saying that gender is "performative" may be particularly helpful when thinking about femininity but less useful in relation to masculinity. Masculinity, in fact, often presents as non-performative or anti-performative (think of Clint Eastwood's laconic roles for example). Second, female masculinity disrupts contemporary cultural studies' accounts of masculinity within which masculinity always boils down to something like 'the social, cultural and political effects of male embodiment and male privilege'. I hope my book will force masculinity studies to make a radical break from white men's studies."

and

"I embrace categorization as a way of creating places for acts, identities and modes of being which otherwise remain unnamable. I also think that the proliferation of categories offers an alternative to the mundane humanist claim that categories inhibit the unique self and creates boxes for an otherwise indomitable spirit. People who don't think they inhabit categories usually benefit from not naming their location. I try to offer some new names for formerly uninhabitable locations."

The same year, Halberstam (using the name 'Jack' for the first time in a book credit) published The Drag King Book with photographs by Del LaGrace Volcano, which encountered resistance from drag kings who insisted that they were just having fun, and that their behavior would not bear the theoretical weight that she was putting on it.

Halberstam also appeared in the documentary films Venuz Boyz and Boy I Am.

In the 2005 book, In a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. Halberstam analyses the murder of Brandon Teens and its representation in mainstream media, considers the transgender gaze, and the influence of drag king culture on hetero-male films.

In 2007, Halberstam was co-author of Rrose Irrose, a 700+ page catalogue of an exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum devoted to gender variant photography.

Maracena & Jack in Oprah magazine

In 2008, Halberstam, having broken up with a lover of 12 years, took up with Chilean immigrant sociologist Macarena Gomez-Barris, mother of two, who had broken up with her husband. The next year their relationship was featured in an edition of Oprah magazine.


In the 2011 book, The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam explores loss, forgetting and failure as alternatives to the capitalist heteronormative model. He offers queer analyses of Finding Nemo and Dude, Where's My Car, and explores 'shadow feminisms' grounded in negation, refusal, passivity, absence and silence, and looks at a thread in the history of male homosexuality that has been significantly downplayed: that of homosexuality and fascism.

The 2012 book, Gaga Feninism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal, which lists the author as J. Jack Halberstam, advocates creative mayhem using the image of Lady Gaga, an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity.

Later that year, on his blog, Jack sort of explained his gender:

"first, I have not transitioned in any formal sense and there certainly many differences between my gender and those of transgender men on hormones. Second, the back and forth between he and she sort of captures the form that my gender takes nowadays. Not that I am often an unambiguous 'she' but nor am I often an unambiguous he. Third, I think my floating gender pronouns capture well the refusal to resolve my gender ambiguity that has become a kind of identity for me. I watch friends, one after the other, transition, mostly from butch to TG male and I wonder whether I am just sitting on a fence and not wanting to jump. … I still use women’s restrooms and I avoid any and all contact on going in or coming out. If someone looks frightened when they see me, I say 'excuse me' and allow my 'fluty' voice to gender me. If someone looks angry, I turn away but mostly I just ignore what is going on around me in the restroom and do what I am there to do. … I also wish more people would adapt to a pronoun system based on gender and not on sex, based on comfort rather than biology, based on the presumption that there are many gendered bodies in the world and 'male' and 'female' does not even begin the hard work of classifying them. … And ps: grouping me with someone else who seems to have a female embodiment and then calling us LADIES, is never, ever ok!" (September 3, 2012).

• Judith M. Halberstam. Parasites and perverts: anti-Semitism and sexuality in nineteenth-century gothic fiction. PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1991.
  
• Judith Halberstam. "F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity". In Laura L. Doan, The Lesbian Postmodern. Columbia University Press, 1994.
  
• Judith Halberstam and Ira Livingston (eds). Posthuman bodies. Indiana University Press, 1995.
  
• Judith Halberstam. Skin shows: gothic horror and the technology of monsters. Duke University Press, x,215 pp1995.
  
• Jenni Olson & Judith Halberstam (dir). Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film. US 100 mins. 1995.
  
• Judith Halberstam. Female Masculinity. Duke University Press, xiv,329 pp 1998.
  
• Annamarie Jagose. “Masculinity Without Men: interview with Judith Halberstam”. Genders Online Journal. 29 1999. Online at: http://web.archive.org/web/20131206153420/http://www.genders.org/g29/g29_halberstam.html.
  
• Del LaGrace Volcano & Judith 'Jack' Halberstam. The Drag King Book. Serpent's Tail, 1999.
  
• Rachel Adams. "Masculinity without man" A review of Female Masculinity. GLQ, 6,3, 2000: 467-478.
  
• Gabrielle Baur (dir & scr). Venus Boyz, with Judith Halberstam, Del Lagrace Volcano, Dianne Torr and many other drag kings and masculine females. US/Switzerland 102 mins 2002.
  
• Judith Halberstam. “What's That Smell?: Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives”. S&F Online - Public Sentiments. Summer 2003. www.barnard.columbia.edu/sfonline/ps/halberst.htm.
  
• Judith Halberstam. “Foreword”. In Claudine Griggs. Journal Of A Sex Change: Passage through Trinidad. Berg, 2005.
  
• Judith Halberstam. In a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York University Press. 256 pp 2005.
  
• Sam Feder & Julie Hollar (dirs). Boy I Am, with Nicco, Norie, Keegan and Judith Halberstam, US 2006.
  
• Jennifer Blessing, Judith Halberstam, Lyle Ashton Harris, Nancy Spector, Carole-Anne Tylor, Sarah Wilson. Rrose Irrose. Harry N. Abrams, 2007.
  
• Mary A Fischer. "Why Women Are Leaving Men for Other Women". O, The Oprah Magazine, April 2009. www.oprah.com/relationships/Normal-Women-and-Gender-Identities-Gender-Stereotypes.
  
• Judith Halberstam. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.
  
• Philip Gambone. "Judith (Jack) Halberstem". Travels in a Gay Nation: Portraits of LGBTQ Americans. University of Wisconsin Press, 2010: 138-144.
  
• J. Jack Halberstam. Gaga Feninism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Beacon Press, 2012.
  
• Judith Halberstam. "Heini Halberstam obituary". The Guardian, 30 January 2014. www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jan/30/heini-halberstam-obituary.
  

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Around the same time as Halberstam published Female Masculinity, Riki Wilchins published Read My Lips: Sexual Subversion and the End of Gender. What they have in common is that they both pay attention to persons who fall between the standard gender categories. I have not found any account that compares the two.


In the Female Masculinity chapter on John Radclyffe Hall, Halberstam has interesting things to say about the rich English masculine women who spent time in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. I would have liked Halberstam's comments on the Parisian masculine women such as Violet Morris and Madeleine Pelletier who so much resemble trans men and yet retained their female name.

Judith Jack Halberstam (1961 - ) academic. Part 1

Halberstam's grandfather was the Rabbi in the town of Most in the Sudetenland. He died of a heart attack in 1936.   After the Nazi occupation, it was permitted that some Jewish children be allowed to leave without their parents.  The Rabbi's widow put their child Heini on a Kindertransport train to London in 1939.  She herself was later deported to a Nazi work camp, where she died.

Encouraged by his English foster parents, Heini pursued his education and did a PhD in mathematics at the University of London. He specialised in the distribution of prime numbers, and taught at Trinity College Dublin 1962-4, and the University of Nottingham 1964-80. He and his wife, Heather had four children, of whom Judith was the second. Heather died in a car accident in 1971.

Judith was frequently taken to be a boy:

"Nearly every day. I didn't go around correcting people. … [I] just though I was a boy. I thought that eventually somebody would figure that out." (Gambone: 139)

This created problems with school classmates. She kept her hair as short as possible and fell into the punk rock scene.

Heini Halberstam took a position as head of the Mathematics Department at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1980 and emigrated with his second wife. Judith followed, and ended up in the San Francisco area:

"the New Agey, leftover stuff from the hippie era and the intense focus on gay men, was so not my scene" (Gambone:141).

But she did find and appreciate the dyke-bar scene. On a whim she applied to the University of California at Berkeley and was accepted. She earned a BA in English at in 1985. She followed this with an MA, 1989, and PhD, 1991, at the University of Minnesota. In Minneapolis she found a vibrant butch-femme scene.

"I suddenly got what I thought my role was. I could be queer, interested in women and masculine. The word 'butch' was a lifesaver. Even though 'butch' was already being vilified by the feminists, I took it up anyway because there was no other term"(Gambone:141).

She began to see more female-to-male persons.

"The difference between me and a trans man is not much. I just never pursued the surgery and the hormones." (Gambone:141)

Halberstam's thesis was Parasites and perverts: anti-Semitism and sexuality in nineteenth-century gothic fiction, and she found a position as Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, San Diego, and became the film reviewer for Girlfriends magazine.

In 1994 she contributed an essay "F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity" to Laura L. Doan's anthology, The Lesbian Postmodern, which contains the paragraph:

"We are all transsexuals except that the referent of the trans becomes less and less clear (and more and more queer). We are all cross-dressers but where are we crossing from and to what? There is no 'other side' , no 'opposite' sex, no natural divide to be spanned by surgery, by disguise, by passing. We all pass or we don't, we all wear our drag, and we all derive a different degree of pleasure – sexual or otherwise – from our costumes. It is just that for some of us our costumes are made of fabric or material, while for others they are made of skin; for some an outfit can be changed; for others skin must be resewn. There are no transsexuals."(Doan:212)

The article was criticized by trans men who insisted on the difference between themselves and butches who were women, and many butches wanted to deny that difference in order to suggest that there exists an element of choice in relation to the question of whether or not to transition. Jamison 'James' Green, the editor of FTM Newsletter, took Halberstam to task for speaking for trans men, and a writer, Isabella, suggested that Halberstam was a lesbian feminist who wanted transsexuals to disappear within a postmodern proliferation of queer identities.

"I took this criticism very seriously, if only because I had been trying to do the very opposite of what she accused me of doing." (p147)

Jordy Jones, the performance artist, supported Halberstam in the newsletter pointing out that transsexual experience cannot be represented in any one totalizing or universal way.

In 1995 Halberstam temporarily left UCSD to do a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University, and a visiting professorship of gay and lesbian studies at Yale.

Her first book was Skin shows: gothic horror and the technology of monsters, which does a queer reading of gothic fiction and horror movies, and posits post-human bodies. The latter idea was further explored in the anthology Posthuman bodies, which she co-edited.

The same year she and Jenni Olson created a documentary, Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film, a compilation of images of butch women from the earliest days of Hollywood, including tomboys from the '60s and recent transgender FTMs. And asked why are they less common now that we have a lesbian cinema?

By 1998 she was able to publish the seminal Female Masculinity, which gained two Lambda Book Award nominations. Halberstam is open about her own masculinity, and introduces her other persona, Jack. She asks about female-born persons who are not really lesbian or trans:

"female-born people who think of themselves as masculine but not necessarily male and certainly not female". (Gambone:142)

Halberstam provides the hitherto hidden history of masculine women: Anne Lister, Radclyffe Hall, stone butches, drag kings and transgender dykes. Furthermore:

"I claim in this book that far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity."(p1) “This study professes a degree of indifference to the whiteness of the male and the masculinity of the white male and the project of naming his power. Male masculinity figures in my project as a hermeneutic, and as a counterexample to the kinds of masculinity that seem most informative about gender relations and most generative of social change”. (p3) “Female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders". (Back cover).

It also considers the border wars between butch and FTM, and butches in films. As Adams says in her review of the book:

"One valuable lesson of Halberstam’s work is that granting white men ownership of masculinity has elided more progressive versions of the masculine and has enabled the condemnation of female masculinity by both straight and lesbian feminists". (p468) "Drawing examples from the early nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth, Halberstam demonstrates the unacknowledged contribution of female masculinity to modern understandings of masculinity. Moreover, she shows how previous scholarship, eager to secure the historical foundations of lesbianism, has oversimplified, misunderstood, or elided a wide range of gender-deviant behaviors." (p469)

Continued in Part II.

Norah Vincent (1968 - 2022) journalist.

Norah grew up in Detroit, the only daughter of Ford Motor Company attorney Robert Vincent and minor actress Juliet Randall (whose biggest gig was The Beachcombers, 1973-6). Norah was a tomboy with an "instinctive loathing of dresses, dolls and frills of any kind". When she was 10, her father was transferred to the UK and they lived there for seven years.

Norah did a philosophy degree at Williams College, Massachusetts, where she came out as lesbian. After some freelance journalism she worked at The Free Press during its neoconservative phase.

In 1994 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

In 1996 she wrote "Beyond Lesbian" which was published in The New Republic, in which she was critical of what she saw as lesbian conformity, and she started getting her writings published in conservative publications. In 1999 she was controversially hired to do a weekly column in The Village Voice. One of her first articles was a sympathetic article on Drew, a New York trans man. Vincent has also had columns at Salon.com, The Advocate, The Los Angeles Times at all of which she established her reputation of being a conservative lesbian.

In June 2000 in The Advocate, she described transsexuals as “the most draconian arm of the PC language police”, and concluded:

“So why, as adults, do transsexuals mutilate their bodies in order to make them conform to the fashionable version of the opposite sex and gender? That only reinforces oppressive stereotypes every bit as much as liposuction or a bimbo's boob job. If you're a man in a woman's body, then live androgynously if you're such a revolutionary. Don't conform. I do it every day, and it isn't particularly easy. Half the time I'm sir, and half the time I'm ma'am, and that's how it should be when sex and gender don't matter. 

If you truly want to thwart gender norms, don't pull a fast one on the dictionary or your poor blameless privates. Live with all the polymorphy God gave you, body and soul. It's a lot more radical.”

In February 2001 she wrote up an approving article about an evening about male masculinities at Pace University. However a few months after that she blamed San Francisco giving transition costs as part of a health benefit package for employees on postmodernism and the death of the self:

"If you take seriously the idea that a person cannot be himself without the intervention of modern technology, then you have lost the notion of a self altogether".

Vincent was a senior fellow at the neoconservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies 2001-3. Richard Goldstein featured Vincent in his 2001 book on gay conservatives, along with Andrew Sullivan and Camille Paglia.

In 2002 she moved to Philadelphia to be with her girlfriend, and was writing with candor about her struggles with multiple sclerosis and depression.

After experimenting with male drag at the urging of a drag-king friend, she lived as a man, Ned Vincent, for eighteen months from 2004-5. She is 5'10" (1.82m). She consulted a make-up artist and used a stubble beard. She also hired a voice coach. As an act of participant observation, Ned then joined an all-male bowling club, joined a men’s therapy group, went to strip clubs and visited Catholic monks in a cloister. She found men as much as women to be victims of the gender system and women as active as men in building it. Ned was assumed to be gay, often for the same features that lead to people thinking that Norah is butch. She published this as Self-Made Man, 2006. She concludes the book with:

"I, Meanwhile, am staying right where I am: fortunate, proud, free and glad in every way to be a woman".

However, afterwards she slipped into depression and on the advice of a psychologist spent time in three different mental hospitals: one urban, public and ill-funded; one small-town; and one private and expensive. She turned this into her second book.

The depression continued.  Vincent was admitted to a Swiss euthanasia clinic where her life ended age 53.

• Norah Vincent. "Beyond Lesbian". The New Republic, Jan 8, 1996. Online at: http://igfculturewatch.com/1996/01/08/beyond-lesbian.
  
• Norah Vincent. “A Real Man: Brooklyn girl grows hair on her chest”. The Village Voice. Nov 16, 1999. www.villagevoice.com/1999-11-16/news/a-real-man/1.
  
• Norah Vincent. “Cunning linguists”.  The Advocate, June 20, 2000.  Online at:  www.thefreelibrary.com/Cunning+linguists.-a062741813.
  
• Norah Vincent. “The Big Switch: Trans-sexuals, Without the P.C.” The Village Voice. Feb 27, 2001. www.villagevoice.com/2001-02-27/nyc-life/the-big-switch/http.
  
• Norah Vincent. “Welcome to the Transsexual Age: San Francisco Gives In to Theorists”. The Village Voice. May 22, 2001. www.villagevoice.com/2001-05-22/nyc-life/welcome-to-the-transsexual-age.
  
• Richard Goldstein. Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right. Verso, 2001 – reissued as Homocons: The Rise of the Gay Right. Verso Press, 2003.
• Kevin Riordan. "Conservative contrarian amidst lgbt liberalism: An interview with Norah Vincent". PrideSource, 2/27/2003. www.pridesource.com/article.html?article=2736.
  
• Norah Vincent. Self-Made Man: one woman's journey into manhood and back again. New York: Viking 2006. London: Atlantic 2006.
  
• Norah Vincent. "Double Agent". The Guardian, 18 March 2006. www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/mar/18/gender.bookextracts.
  
• Norah Vincent. Voluntary Madness: My Year Lost and Found in the Loony Bin. New York: Viking, 2008.
  
• Diane Torr & Stephen J. Bottoms. Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender As Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010: 212-3.
   

 EN.WIKIPEDIA     WORLDCAT     SALON     VILLAGEVOICE

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Vincent seems to have an ambivalence concerning trans issues, but is more sympathetic to female transvestites and trans men than to those of the other direction.

Self-Made Man is an odd book in that it is mainly a book for women who want to know what men do and say when women are not around.  As Diane Torr says: “She makes little sustained effort to reflect critically on her own experiences as a woman passing in male-oriented environments … Moreover, she seems intent on reinforcing precisely the gender binaries that drag kings and trans performers have sought to challenge”.

I have elsewhere criticized the reluctance of sociologists and other academics (e.g Richard Ekins, David Valentine) making studies of trans people but not even being willing to cross-dress.  So kudos to Vincent for doing so.   If only more cis people would do so.

Vincent does seem to have an attraction to greater expression of her masculinity, but without having the whatever that makes a trans man.  In this she is an interesting example of cis gender variance and female transvestity.

Vincent documents well how heteronormativity can oppress men, and admires their resiliance, but pays little attention to male strategies for escaping heteronormativity such as homosexuality, although she does have a chapter on monks.  And thus there is no discussion at all as to whether some trans women are more motivated by escaping male heteronormativity than by 'gender identity'.   Of course trans people rarely discuss this either.