Female Masculinity

In 1998, Judith Halberstam in her study of female masculinity posted a problem on the construction of the term female masculinity for its existence has only offered a distinct alternative to male masculinity, thereby protecting male’s masculinity itself. Thus, she offered a different approach in looking at female masculinity by tracing the history of female masculinities and considering the politics acting in the roles of butch/femme within lesbian communities. Halberstam (1998) claims that female masculinity is not a bad copy of males’ virility but rather a lively and dramatic representations of hybrid and “minor” genders. Noble (2004) states that female masculinity is repeatedly misread but is also persistently entrenched within the studies

Banking on Halberstam’s notion of butch or masculine women, she points out that these new men of 1998 challenge the “naturalness” and biological essentialism of the sex/gender system while lesbian and bisexual femmes trouble the necessary alignment of gender (femininity) with the over-determined object choice (male-embodied masculinity). And in many of the scrutiny and debates, of then female masculinity erroneously becomes coterminous with lesbianism. However, not all female masculinities are lesbianism (i.e., not all lesbians are masculine and not all lesbians are female) [Sedgwick (1995) in Berger, et al. (1995)]. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points this out in “Constructing Masculinity,” as she worked on four axioms of gender studies. First, that sometimes masculinity has got nothing to do with men and when something is about masculinity, it is not always with men. Sedgwick asks everyone to strongly resist the presumption that what women have to do with masculinity is mainly to be treated less or more oppressively by the men to whom masculinity more directly pertains. Second, masculinity and femininity are in many respects orthogonal to each other, that is, instead of being at opposite poles of the same axis, they are actually in different perpendicular