Read This Book: Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

There are those books that people recommend to you over the years, but that always remain forgotten at the bottom of your "to-read" list, because you're not quite sure what they're going to be about or what you're going to get out of them or exactly why you should invest the time to find out -- until one day, for no apparent reason, you remember a title in the bookstore or at the library and then the book is in your hands and you have no choice but to read it.

For me, Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg is one of those books. It was first recommended over a year ago by someone whose taste in literature I trust implicitly -- possibly because she is the only other person in the world who obsesses over both of my obscure favorite authors -- but though I even went so far as to text the title to myself (so that I would have it with me the next time I was in a bookstore or library), I never actually thought to purchase or borrow it when I had the opportunity. It took the actions of another friend to remind me of this book, and my desire to procrastinate on my thesis research fueled my decision to search it out at the local library.

I started this book less than six hours ago, at the start of a work-out on one of the elliptical machines at the gym and not knowing what to expect. Half an hour and forty-some-odd pages later, I had to cut my work-out short because I didn't particularly want to start crying in the middle of the UC Berkeley Recreational Sports Facility. Feinberg's portrayal of the seemingly insurmountable barriers faced by the protagonist Jess -- a Jewish butch girl from a working-class family growing up in the 1950s -- made me angry at history. But the tears didn't threaten to start until I remembered that, for some people, many of whom I am proud to call my friends, the kind of discrimination the novel depicts is anything but history. Sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, transphobia, class prejudice: all of these are just as alive in the present as they were in 1950. Derogatory slurs, employer discrimination, physical abuse, and sexual assault still face people who are perceived as "different."

Feinberg's novel is ultimately a bildungsroman, a story that follows the growth and development of an individual from childhood to maturity and beyond, but its power comes from the intersection of this basic form and its unflinching (and historically informed) depiction of the butch-femme subculture with which I, for one, was completely unfamiliar. Although the account is fictional, I feel like being inside Jess's head for a few hundred pages introduced me to more of the butch experience than any non-fictional format could have. I'm certainly not presuming to really know what it's really like to be butch simply because I've read one person's take on it, but I've always believed that one of the first steps towards increased understanding and acceptance of any ostracized or excluded group is to give that presumed "other" a voice. For a few hundred pages I felt Jess's pains and joys, lived inside Jess's mind and dealt with Jess's problems and questions, and through this fiction I was able to be let into an interior world with which I'd otherwise have little to no contact.

What's more, the form of the novel, rather than drawing rigid distinctions and placing uncomplicated labels on people and forms of behavior, presents the reader with something that I would consider truer to the complex and complicated intersections between these labels and the real results of their inadequacies. It made me question the labels that I use and the assumptions that I make about individuals based upon appearance or behavior, and it did so without trying to give me "answers" -- which are often just a new set of labels. Jess identifies as butch, but it's obvious this word has different meanings to different individuals, and rather than try to codify it or provide it with a specific, exclusive meaning, Feinberg's book explores the nuanced ways in which different characters may perform the same label.

The novel is also incredibly brilliant for the way it made me look twice at pronouns. In case you haven't noticed, so far in this post I have yet to assign a gendered pronoun to either Feinberg or Jess. In Feinberg's "About the Author" blurb, ze discusses hir life and accomplishments using commonly-accepted gender-neutral pronouns (a great introduction to which can be found here). But Jess's case seems more complicated. At birth, Jess is biologically female. However, as a butch Jess's character can often come across as masculine, and later in the novel Jess begins to take male hormones and successfully "passes" as a man for several years before deciding to stop hormone treatments. Since the novel is narrated from Jess's first person point of view, the only pronoun Jess ever uses to refer to hirself is "I": all of the gendered pronouns of the novel are bestowed upon Jess by others around hir (though I was interested to note that to Jess, fellow butches were still "shes").

Some people scoff at the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun and may be inclined to think that those who use them or demand their use are simply trying to making a political statement. But pronoun use isn't just a political act for Jess. The pronouns people use to describe and discuss hir have a great effect on hir life and hir own self-concept. When growing up, Jess is frequently called a "he-she," and though the term is used in an incredibly derogatory manner it becomes the only one with which Jess can fully identify. Later on, Jess has to deal with other people on the streets, confused by hir gender ambiguity, referring to hir as "it." But the pain of an improper pronoun isn't just emotional: when passing as a man, being referred to by others as "she" could lose Jess hir job.

The real glory of this novel is that it manages to tackle such massive political and personal issues without becoming a manifesto. Feinberg doesn't tell hir readers what to think. Instead, ze presents hir readers with an account of the way the world looks through Jess's eyes, and asks the reader to make his, her, or hir own judgments regarding the politics of the situation. I can't speak for all of the readers who have encountered this novel since its publication, but for me, Stone Butch Blues ultimately reaffirmed two important ideas about the world: first, that hate, anger, and violence are real things that affect real people, but second (and more importantly) that love, respect, and understanding are powerful counter-forces that, if marshaled correctly, can encourage and support necessary action.

Still, in the end, nothing I say about Stone Butch Blues can explain the powerful experience of reading it, and reading this post is no substitute for going out and getting yourself a copy of the novel. I meant what I said in the title: read this book. And if you have (or when you do), please leave a comment behind -- I'd love to hear what others have to say on the subject.