Judith Halberstam, "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly"

Judith Halberstam

For a large part of my life, I have been stigmatized by a masculinity that marked me as ambiguous and illegible. Like many other tomboys, I was mistaken for a boy throughout my childhood, and like many other tomboy adolescents, I was forced into some semblance of femininity for my teenage years. When gender-ambiguous children are constantly challenged about their gender identity, the chain of misrecognitions can actually produce a new recognition: in other words, to be constantly mistaken for a boy, for many tomboys, can contribute to the production of a masculine identity. It was not until my midtwenties that I finally found a word for my particular gender configuration: butch.
—Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinities (1998), p. 19


We've looked over the past couple of weeks at arguments that resist traditional categories of gender and sexuality: Wittig argues that "lesbians are not women," that the whole binary structure of gender (and sex) needs to be left behind. Judith Butler argues that gender identities are lived moment to moment, only as real as the series of acts and perceptions that approximate them.

Del Grace, "Jack's Back II" (1994)

While Halberstam praises and draws upon Butler's work, her strategy rather depends on making use of gender and sexual identities in particular and (relative to heteronormative assumptions) defamiliarizing ways. Instead of challenging the reality or the ontological ground of masculinity, she proceeds as if there is a way of being identifiable as "masculine," and studies how that identity manifests itself in bodies that aren't straight or male. This isn't, it seems fair to say, a return to essentialism (the idea that there's a masculine essence, a 'real' thing). Halberstam rather takes for granted (works on the basis of) Butler's claims about gender's unreality. Instead of showing in general that gender is unreal or constructed, she works through particular cases in which it's clearly so. In "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" (2002), she makes a succinct case for the critical value of studying non-male masculinities, a project she had undertaken at length in Female Masculinities (1998).

In Paris is Burning, we saw several of the men talk about drag as an aspiration to "pass," to look like a woman in spite of having an anatomically male body or, in some cases, to surgically alter a male body so as to become convincingly female. Yet we considered in discussing the film how these aspirations sometimes led to performances of femininity that read as exaggerated or excessive; the two people on the beach, for example, on of them a post-operative transexual with a still recognizably male voice, as her transgendered friend mockingly points out, end up laughing at the distance that still separates them from the 'real' thing. That laughter is hard to read, I think: it sounds rather joyous--"I'm free as the wind," one of them says--and yet it may be somewhat cathartic, registering a failure to attain the desired sort of naturalness. Insofar as drag or transgendered behavior is understood as aspiring to "pass," it seems doomed to mere approximation (as is, for that matter, even a female body's performance of femininity, on Butler's reading).

Jake (1991), photograph by Catherine Opie.
Halberstam reproduces several photographs
from this series in Female Masculinities.

Halberstam seems to have a quite different experience of gender identification in her sights, one whose goal isn't at all to pass, but to inhabit an identity that is recognizably neither male nor female. To be butch isn't to wish to pass for a man; it is rather to be a recognizably masculine woman. Not to fall neatly into either category isn't a failure--it's the point. When Halberstam discusses those bathroom doors that Lacan uses to show the power of signification in producing gender identity--the "women's" sign gets you to put your body through the door--what she focuses on isn't the transgendered person's wish to pass in the bathroom, but rather the fear of not passing: "the bathroom problem is much more than a glitch in the machinery of gender segregation and is better described in terms of the violent enforcement of our current gender system" (Female Masculinities, 25). One goal of her work, then, is not (as in Wittig) the eradication of gender categories, but their multiplication:

The "It's Pat" character produced laughs by consistently sidestepping gender fixity--Pat's partner had a neutral name, and everything Pat did or said was designed to be read either way. Of course, the enigma that Pat represented could have been solved very easily; Pat's coworkers could simply have asked Pat what gender s/he was or preferred. [My] project on female masculinity is designed to produce more than two answers to that question and even to argue for a concept of "gender preference" as opposed to compulsory gender binarism. (FM, 27)

"Pat," played on Saturday Night Live
in the '90s by Julia Sweeney

In "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly," Halberstam looks back at a series of films released during the years when she was completing that 1998 book that feature gay characters who either facilitate or become involved in straight relationships. Halberstam calls these "heterosexual conversion narratives" (or "fantasies") -- "a fairly repulsive genre of films" (2640), she says by way of introduction. This characterization may be surprising, in that these films are not what would usually be called homophobic or anti-gay; as Halberstam points out, As Good As It Gets was even recognized at the Academy Awards by a Hollywood establishment that has been in many ways out in front of middle America in its acceptance of queers. I suspect the Academy would be surprised to hear that it nominated Jack Nicholson "for playing America's most endearing racist, homophobic, sexist white guy" (N 2641n1, my italics). Indeed, they almost surely intended to nominate him for a role that criticized those views, in that they're exactly what the character needs to unlearn before he can be an acceptable love object for the female lead (played by Helen Hunt).

Jo Calderone, aka Lady Gaga, at the
2011 Video Music Awards

Yet this might not be critical enough, or not criticism of the right kind, and Halberstam begins from the premise that "to keep pace with changes in the social and political recognition of queers, homophobic response has become ever more subtle and devious" (2638). This group of films needs to be criticized, in other words, precisely because they pass off a subtilized homophobia beneath a gay-friendly façade. What are Halberstam's grounds for this critique? In what way do these films reaffirm rather than critique white male masculinity? Why is As Good As It Gets not good enough?

The next step in Halberstam's argument is to suggest that female masculinity, excluded from these films, would pose a potent threat to their normalizing love plots (it "would be or could be cataclysmic"--2642). She works through this idea in the second section of her essay, largely on the basis of two psychoanalytic accounts of the relationship between anatomical sex and phallic power, by Paul Smith and Judith Butler. (Halberstam gives a good example here of the sort of exposition of other critics' work that you'll be attempting in your second papers).  Again, what's the argument here--why is female masculinity potentially "cataclysmic" for heteronormative culture?

Catherine Opie, Bo

Finally, we might wish to ask whether Halberstam's use of identity categories, albeit for the purpose of unsettling them, escapes the cultural baggage that goes with those categories. What place is there here, for example, for female (or male) femininity?

(Halberstam writes occasionally, as Jack Halberstam, on politics and popular culture at bullybloggers).



Below, the trailer for
As Good As It Gets