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Leslie Feinberg: Stone Butch Blues

Leslie Feinberg: Stone Butch Blues

USA 2014, 431 pp, brochure, € 39.95
Kostenloser Versand innerhalb Europas.
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Leslie Feinberg
Inhalt
Leslie Feinberg mastered a huge success in the LGBT-community with her first novel, »Stone Butch Blues«. The book is now considered one of the absolute gay and lesbian milestones of the 90s and has contributed like no other to the discussion of the topic of gender identity. The author has succeeded in describing the upheaval that the Stonewall Riots triggered in the USA in a very convincing way. She cleverly mixes the rapid social development that led to the beginning of the feminist and gay and lesbian emancipation movement and a fictional private perspective on the movement's first, self-confident attempts to stand up. At the center of her descriptions is the young lesbian Jess Goldberg, who grew up in the social thaw period of the early 1960s (keyword flower power). In the industrial city of Buffalo in the far west of the US state of New York, life as a lesbian was still something that was best kept secret. At 15 years old, Jess can no longer stand it at home. She was raised with strict ideas about what is male and what is female and has internalized them deeply, even though it has already dawned on her that she doesn't quite fit into this black and white grid. She feels like she's caught between two chairs. It happens to her again and again that complete strangers ask her whether she is a boy or a girl. Sometimes she feels the urge to try on her father's suits-the first steps towards becoming a butch femme. But at the beginning it is not entirely clear to her which direction the journey should take. And the fears associated with this uncertainty seem insurmountable to Jess. Jess increasingly tries to escape the stuffiness of her parents' home. The Abba's bar, where a colorful crowd of lesbians, prostitutes, drag kings and drag queens meet every day, is increasingly becoming a refuge for them. The skin color of the guests there is also diverse. But homosexual life in the time before the Stonewall Riots was characterized by constant raids and other harassment by the police. If two women are caught dancing next to each other in a bar, that's reason enough for an arrest. The police are trying to intimidate the Buffalo community with constant attacks. Even Abba's is not spared from this. It then also affects Jess, who is temporarily arrested. Things only got better for the Buffalo community when the shock waves of the Stonewall Riots gradually reached Buffalo and the way the police dealt with lesbians and gays changed fundamentally. For Jess, Abba's not only becomes a meeting place where she can meet like-minded people and look out for potential first sexual contacts-it also means a space for her in which she can develop as a transgender, initially timidly and later more and more courageously. Over time, the 15-year-old girl becomes a real butch femme with her own dildo. After all, she decides to become a man: she takes hormones and has her breasts reduced in order to pass as a man. At first, being a man seems easy to her: she enjoys going to the barber. Using the men's room also gives her a secret kick. When Jess has sex with a woman, she doesn't even realize that she isn't dealing with a cis-man: a great sense of achievement for Jess. But then the difficulties gradually begin: when she stops taking hormones, her emotional balance is completely thrown off course-the beard and the deeper voice remain, but the feeling of being caught between two sides increases massively. Jess and her friends also can't shake the feeling that, with their gender presentations, they don't really fit into the world of the feminist or lesbian movement, because there the women stick to the traditional male-female schema and people like Jess become viewed as a foreign body. Feinberg's book shows how difficult it has been to be different in a world that is completely hostile to lesbianism or any deviant gender identity. The author processes her experiences as a female-to-male transsexual who experienced the upheaval of the Stonewall Riots. Nevertheless, Leslie Feinberg has always emphasized that »Dreams of an Awakening Tomorrow« is not an autobiographical novel. It may have helped her to have had similar experiences. For many drag kings-as we hear-»Stone Butch Blues« was the novel that opened their eyes and had a formative effect on them.
Sortiment
Lesbisch > Romane
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