A Female-Gendered Anatomical Female

By Betsy Holder | Monday, June 2, 2003

As I sauntered into Silsby for the 'My Butch Career: My Life as a Butch Lesbian' lecture, I felt out of place. I was neither butch—at the time, I was flaunting an adorable pink ensemble—nor was I a lesbian. I was confident about my sexuality because I have a boyfriend, and, according to several sources, he is not a lesbian.

Imported from the State University of New York by the Center for Women and Gender, the lecturer was anthropology professor Ester Muster, who was in town to speak about her sensational life story. Ms(?). Muster, as the title of her talk subtly implied, was a 'butch lesbian.' Her story checked out—her loutish demeanor left nothing to the imagination.

During her talk, she attempted to draw a parallel between her own sexual orientation and that of Gertrude Stein. She exhibited a pastiche of slides chronicling her life experiences and her quest for the holy grail of lesbianism: an 'Alice'(Gertrude Stein's imagined female partner). After much soul-searching, Ms. Muster came to the conclusion that she must accept Sally Munt's belief that 'the butch is either the magical sign of lesbianism or a failed emasculated and abdicated male.' Whatever that means.

Ms. Muster felt that her mother, a mainliner from Greenwich, Connecticut, 'had a thing for Jewish men.' Despite her parent's erstwhile marriage, Ms. Muster's father, a European Jew—no surprise there—was her role model throughout her childhood. She found it hard to identify with her peers in upper middle-class Manhattan because she was a 'WASP in Jewish clothing.' She was also an athletic child who dreamed of becoming a boy and idolized male sports icons.

While Ms. Muster was unmistakably a 'butch lesbian'—clad in lumberjack flannel, pressed khakis, and beefy hiking boots, in stark contrast to my darling tailoring—her path to 'discovering her sexuality' did, in fact, involve several ill-fated heterosexual relationships, as well as an ill-fated encounter with a drag queen.

When she was ten years old, she became angered after engaging in 'sex games' with a slightly older male friend. As a result, she concluded that heterosexual sexuality is 'savage,' while her lifestyle—and masculine self-awareness—is the more 'civilized' alternative. Her comment evoked an outburst of chuckles from the predominately female audience. Mouth ajar, I could only envision the response had a white, heterosexual male suggested that Ms. Muster and her cohorts lifestyles were 'savage.' The 'civil' way of life, as she further elucidated, is rooted in the theories of Judith Butler. Butler, a post-modern gender theorist, believes that gender is socially constructed and not a product of an individual's biological sex. The world of the 'savages' is a place where people ignorantly adhere to a belief that anatomical differences between females and males dictate a person's gender. One, apparently, can no longer be just a man or a woman. Rather, humans are anatomical males or females but can choose to conform to masculine or feminine gender roles. For example, Ms. Muster is a masculine-gendered anatomical female, just as I am a female-gendered anatomical female.

While the title of the Women's Studies Department has given way to the more verbose Women and Gender Studies, the department remains very much the same: ardent seventies feminist wolves in post-modern flanel clothing. The abrasive tendencies of this department were highlighted during the question and answer session following Ms. Muster's presentation. While she only briefly discussed feminism in her lecture—as it pertained to her lesbian lifestyle in Manhattan during the swingin' seventies—the majority of the questions raised, from both students and faculty, related to feminist dogma. Ms. Muster, who appeared uncomfortable with many of these questions, was clearly attempting to avoid the subject, yet the audience was relentless in pressing her to discuss her views on feminism. This disrespectful behavior is all too typical of the Women's and Gender Studies department.

A Female-Gendered Anatomical Female

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