Spring 2004
Trans: Dangerous Border Violations >> Cunt Brother, Je Hye's Home

3rd Project >>

This is my critical paper on butch masculinity. Peggy Shaw’s You’re Just Like My Father was published in O SOLO HOMO edited by Holly Huge and David Roman, in 1998 (Grove Press).

Peggy Shaw’s You’re Just Like My Father

Queering the heterosexual family

I have a funny episode about Shaw’s You’re Just Like My Father (YF). I saw Lois Weaver’s Faith and Dancing and Weaver and Shaw’s Lust and Comfort at the Club LaMaMa in 1997. A few weeks later, Shaw’s YF was supposed to be presented, but I decided not to see the performance. Simply, I did not like the title. Why father? Not mother or sister? An out lesbian performer’s story about her father did not intrigue me at all. I did not know the fact that YF is a play about Shaw’s butch identity and her “mother.” Shaw says:

The part about my father?the smell of his shirts, the feel of his cheeks, his shiny shoes and creased pants (he said if a man had shiny shoes and a crease in his pants, no one would notice his poverty) ?was a catalyst to my relationship with my mother and to my relationship with her husband’s
clothes that I loved so much (Shaw 178).

What she was really fascinated with is the clothes and masculinity of her father. It has nothing to do with a typical girl’s romantic adoration of her father. Against Freudian framework, Shaw’s father is an object of her identification, not that of her desire. It is her mother who Shaw’s desire drives toward. She says:

Hey!
I’m Eddie.
My father wouldn’t call me Eddie, he called me Margaret.
Margaret means pearl. I was his pearl of a girl.
But pearls didn’t match my outfit.”

The boyish-pearl became a hard butch performer with a muscled body who reminds people of Sean Penn, and she recollects her childhood, shadowboxing on stage. She exhibits playfully “the disjuncture between femaleness (female body) and masculinity

(masculine self)” (Halberstam 1996: 62, 66).

More importantly, her masculinity overlaps with a connotation of class. Tracing lesbian herstory, Gayle Rubin writes that within the lesbian community, the most commonly recognized butch styles are based on the models of white, “working-class”, youthful masculinity (Rubin 469). Also, Shaw’s own class background involves her representation of masculinity. She says:

My family was very poor. […] My father said the world is a very rough place and you have to ready for it. So the image I had was a boxing ring; […] it does have that feeling (DeLombard 1).

Her shadowboxing and spitting are not only the expression of gender bending but also the

metaphor of survival and struggle as a working-class. As her father said, the neat masculinity, like shiny shoes and crease in pants, is associated with a class disguise. It illustrates that forms of masculinities are molded by the experiences and expectations of class, race, ethnicity, religion, occupation…etc (Rubin 470).
Shaw’s queering the heterosexual family culminates in her depiction of the romantic relationship with her mother.

My mother used to watch me getting dressed. […]
She loved me, my mother.
She recognized me.
You look just like your father,” she said.
I put on a starched shirt.
And I was my father.
[…]
“Do you want a pair of his cuff link? I know where they are.
[…]
“But don’t let your sisters see you, […] I don’t want them dressing like that, And I worry about you, that you’re going to hell because of the way you dress, eternal hell to burn with devil. And I don’t want you bring your sisters with you” [my Italic].

The relationship with her mother blurs the border between heterosexuality and lesbian sexuality within the heterosexual family. As Shaw’s mother says, “You look just like your father.”, the “like” evokes not only the physical resemblance between her daughter and husband but also arousal of sexual desire by them. Shaw’s mother admires her daughter’s butch qualities while continually warning her that she had better conceal them
(Holden C19). She oscillates between the mother-daughter relationship, as normalization of Shaw’s gender practice, and butch-femme attraction. This ambivalence resonates poignantly with Shaw’s ending song, “I’m confessing that I love you.”

I’m confessing that I love you.
Tell me, do you love me too? [...]
In your eyes I read such strange things,
But your lips deny they’re true. […]

Shaw reads her mother’s extraordinary love, but her mother denies it by accusing of her daughter’s (abnormal) gender display. In the meantime, Shaw becomes her lover’s substitute fathers and brothers as well as her mother’s substitute husband (Halberstam 1998: 32).

My mother always held his hand in church. […]
Keeping the world from caving her in.
Just the idea of the world could cave in my mother.
That’s why I chose a boy. […]
To keep the ugly world away from girls,
And so girls could hold my hand
And rest their head on my shoulder,
My clean white shoulder, stiff with pleasure[my Italic].

In this way, Shaw’s family story imbricates butch-femme relationship. Her relationship with her parents was a queer nutrition for developing her lesbian desire and butch masculinity. Also, Shaw’s flirtation with her mother juxtaposes with her desire for other

people’s mothers as old (heterosexual) femmes.
However, the relevance between heterosexuality and lesbianism does not imply that Shaw “imitates” of her parent’s “original” heterosexuality. Tackling on lesbianism as a copy and heterosexuality as “the” origin, Judith Butler asserts that lesbian sexuality is neither to copy nor to emulate heterosexuality and she defines lesbianism’s reference to heterosexuality as “imitative parody.”

To claim that gay and lesbian identities are implicated in heterosexual norms or in hegemonic culture generally is not to derive gayness from the straightness. On the contrary, imitation does not copy that which is prior,
but produces and inverts the very terms of priority and derivativeness (Butler 1991:22).

According to Butler, since heterosexuality is constituted through an impossible imitation of itself, the imitative parody of heterosexuality is a copy of copy without origin (22). In other words, Shaw’s butch identity as a “protector” in reference to her father is not a copy of the origin. Also, her mother’s (romantic) love for her butch daughter is as “real” as love for her husband. In addition, Shaw did not learn masculinity only from her father,
and her father’s masculinity also is neither innate nor original. Ultimately, she deviates from heteronormativity in that she practices her masculinity between women. To put it another way, it is pertinent to consider the relationship between butchness and male masculinity in terms of “active disidentification.” Judith Halberstam points out:

(butch) Masculinity is neither assimilated into maleness nor opposed to it: rather it involves an active disidentification with dominant forms of masculinity, which are subsequently recycled into alternative masculinities (Halberstam 1998: 248).

To take a cue from Jose Munoz, Halberstam accounts for butch masculinity on the ground that it is a mode of dealing with dominant ideology within the creative contradictions between assimilation and opposition. In this respect, Shaw’s ongoing process of active disidentifications generate reconfigurations of fixed, binary categories
of origin/copy within her own family narrative.

Butch as a gender-bending performer.
Halberstam notes that dominant representation of masculinity rests on the stable notion of (male) masculinity as “nonperformative” and “real” and (female) femininity as artificial and derivative (234). Accordingly, performing female masculinity undermines the notion of authentic masculinity and reveals the arbitrariness of it. Alisa Solomon argues about butchness, and masculinity as an artifice in a more specifically theatrical context. Defining butchness as an epic acting, she notes that butches do not adopt masculinity but put “quotation marks” around it (Solomon 170). Shaw becomes a boxer, soldier and crooner in male suit, and her masculine personae are constructed in the quotation from male stars in popular culture. She says that she got her fantasy of a successful man with a beautiful woman from Jimmy Cagney, and Elvis Presley taught her to pay attention to her lips and to sneer. Her drag performances expose the structure of dominant masculinity by making it theatrical and by rehearsing the repertoire of roles and types on which such masculinity depends (Halberstam 1998: 239).The images of male celebrity are already constructed and manipulated in TV and film industry. Thus, Shaw exposes the double layers of constructed masculinity (male celebrities’ and her own ones) and puts quotation marks around masculinity by wearing the masculine personae on her female body. Also, her “multiple” personae destabilize “the” authentic masculinity. Consequently, Shaw’s cross-dressing demonstrates that “all gendering is a kind of impersonation and approximation, and genders are appropriated, theatricalized, worn and done” (Butler 1991: 21).

However, she makes it clear that she is a female-bodied person inhabiting each role and that each role is part of her gender identity (Halberstam 1998:32). YF begins with the scene where Shaw, who wears box shorts with “bare” breasts, sits on a chair. Also, she wears an “army uniform,” while talking about her ovaries and cervix. Furthermore, since Shaw changes all the clothes on stage and shows audience her female body and the process of becoming or doing masculine genders. In this context, the coexistence of masculine traits with a female anatomy is a highly charged, eroticized, and consequential lesbian signal (Rubin 468).
Solomon articulates pointedly the coexistence of masculinity and femaleness in a butch body and its presentation in terms of lesbian eroticism.

The butch reveals the conventions of masculinity while at the same
time her self-presentation allows the possibility of femininity, the role
she is refusing, to be inferred. [...]: at once the butch demonstrates the
choice she's refusing and claims the ground she can't have. [...]The
butch's eroticism comes not from her looking like a man, but from her
not being one?that is, from her transgression, from the disruption
(Solomon 171) [My Italic].

The scene where Shaw sings “It’s a man’s world” echoes Solomon’s point. For the scene

spotlights V-effekt and irony of butch performance. She foregrounds the contradiction

between masculine subject position of the lyric and her female body or between

conventional masculine gestures and her banded breasts while singing the song.

Ironically, her banded breasts emphasize her femininity that she is refusing. The lyric of

the song is as follows.

This is a man's man's man’s world
But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl
And after man has made everything, everything he can...
This is a man’s a world but it wouldn't be nothing
[…]
A man hates a woman. A man hates a woman. […]

The irony maximizes in the sense that Shaw is neither a man who “made everything” nor

an ordinary woman or girl. She confounds audiences if she is a powerful man or a devalued woman or girl in gender dysphoria and, at the same time, divorces her female masculinity from men’s misogyny in her explicit lesbian desire/identity. She is not a feminine woman or girl and embodies masculinity on and off stage, but it does not mean that she can become an omnipotent man in male-dominant world.
There is another exemplary gender-bending scene with a queer humor and irony. Shaw narrates her episode about gender-bending and passing. She says that a drag queen was dressed butch to pass as a man and she was dressed femme to pass as a girl. Here, the assigned genders to their sex, in her notion, are regarded as a “drag passing”, not a natural or normal gender expression. She is a female, but her hard butchness needs a feminine masquerade to pass as a girl. Indeed, she switched her suitcase with the gay drag queen when they were required to open their suitcase by someone. In his suitcase, there were dress and high heels and poems to boy. Finally, they were passed normal heterosexuals. This anecdote encapsulates that there are no direct expressive or casual lines between sex, gender, gender presentation, sexual practice, fantasy and sexuality (Butler 1991:25).
Moreover, Shaw makes comment on gun and dildo in addition to the anecdote.

I always pack a gun.
That gives me the I’m okay, […]
. . .
Packing, I call it, in both cases
I carry the gun, unlike my dildo. […]
I keep the dildo in my drawers with my neatly folded white boxer shorts
Knowing I’m safe makes me a trustworthy person.
. . .
Cervixes aren’t measured up to any standard of beauty,
[…]
It’s just like my gun. I know it’s there.

Unlike the conventional connotation of a gun as a penis, she juxtaposes a gun with a

dildo and even ovaries or cervixes, female anatomy. And she uses the same term,

“packing” for both a gun and dildo and makes analogy between them in terms of safety.
This lesbian resignification of a gun, dildo and ovary corresponds with Butler’s concept, “lesbian phallus.” According to her, since the phallus is a privileged signifier, it has nothing to do with a penis (a specific body part) and there is no inherent chain or identity between the phallus and a penis. Thus, any part of body can be symbolized as “having” the phallus. As she writes:

The displaceability of the phallus, its capacity to symbolize in relation to other body parts or other body-like things, opens the new way of for the lesbian phallus. […] because the phallus is a transferable phantasm, and its naturalized link to masculine morphology can be called into question through an aggressive reterritorialization (Butler 1991: 84, 86) [my Italic].

Shaw reprivileges the phallus and plays with its displacebility or plasticity. She says that she uses the gun for borders (Shaw 186). Interestingly enough, her resignification of a gun is used for crossing gender borders. There is no doubt that the border-crossing is her subversive “joy of life.” ( She writes, “I know that en los ovarios is my luz de la vida (joy of life)” (Shaw 187).)

Butch lesbian body and desire
Shaw highlights her hands as a sexual organ/tool. Also her hands as a general connotation of lesbian sex are connected with her childhood and father.

He had big hands. I have his big hands.
I like to touch things and people. Once a shrink asked me where my desire comes from. I said, “From my hands.”
[…]
When we visited people’s houses we all had to hold our hands behind our backs …
I have to control my hands all the time [my Italic].

Butler’s lesbian phallus recurs here, as Shaw mentions the “size” of her hands and sexualize them. She breaks the naturalized chain between a penis and universal sexual subjectivity and instead, foregrounds lesbian sexuality in the split rupture. Her grand father used his hands in knocking out someone (physical strength), and her grand mother thought Shaw would play the piano well (artistic technique ( Shaw’s grandmother told her Shaw would do “great things” with her hands (183).)). In contrast, the great things that Shaw does with her hands are sexual contacts with women. In her childhood, her hands had to be controlled for propriety or discipline. However, as a butch lesbian adult, her hands become a language of “lust” and “indulgence.”

Moreover, when she was five years old, Shaw has drawn a picture of a woman tied to a tree with her hands behind her and her breasts were naked, and another woman kissing her breasts. Tying hands as pleasure in the lesbian S&M fantasy contrasts with holding hands as behavior control within the heterosexual family. Through the metaphor of hands across her childhood and lesbian experiences, Shaw bridges non-conformist sexuality and lesbian desire against (sexual) morality. It extends to her critical commentary on politically correct sex of feminism.

My father’s dick looked like a dolphin
[…]
Feminists made me hate dolphins, I mean dildos.
They tried to make me hate boxer shorts.

Feminist accusation of “male identification” has conflicted with sex radicalism, female masculinities and FTM transgender identity. Anti-penetration or gender-centric feminists mistake gender-bending or using dildo as misogynist male identification or the manifestation of “wannabe a man.” However, Rubin pinpoints the feminist
conflation regarding male identification:

The point here is not a political critique of the concept of male identification. It is simply to register that a similarity in terminology has often led to a conflation of political positions with gender identities. A strongly masculine butch will not necessarily identify politically with men
(Rubin 468).

Due to the conflation of political male identification and queer genders, the feminist

antipathy of Shaw’s dolphin (dildo) is in line with that of masculine attire (boxer shorts).

Also, the feminist demand for women identification (not as a political position, but as a

(non-masculine) gender display/presentation overlaps with her family pressure for

discipline in her childhood.

On a different note, what is the most interesting is that Shaw keeps her hands wrapped with ace bandage while talking about her hands and throughout the performance. Besides, she interprets her hands as her “feminine” side.

My fingers
My hands
These are the butch queer feminine parts
Of me

Her hyper masculine presence and the delicate depiction of her sexuality (hands) maintain an alluring tension and draw a queer attraction. For her feminine part (hands)is covered with a masculine surface (a boxer’s ace bandage), and her tough shadowboxing contrasts (body or behavior) with the eroticization of her hands (words). Besides, she adds, “I associate everything with cars, except my sexuality I attribute to my hands”
(Shaw 192). Generally, cars are associated with men or masculinity, and specifically, in her own fantasy, driving a 1962 Corvette is a symbol of power and success. Despite all these masculine identifications, her lesbian sexuality implicates “the feminine.”

Furthermore, she likens her hands to a baby for the womb by combining female imagery of fetus/womb relation with lesbian sensuality. She says, “Reaching for her womb…Big old hands that want to get sucked into you, sliding uncontrollably up into you, too big to get in, like a ‘new born baby,’ ready for the womb, not the world” (Shaw 194). It is fascinating that whereas she is a butch, a sexual initiator and giver, she represents her desire as a baby in a femme’s womb, deconstructing the essentialized heterosexual notion of women’s reproduction. It blurs a clear distinction between activeness and passiveness of butch-femme role playing. In so doing, Shaw complicates the discontinuous flows between sex (body), fluid gender identities/presentations and multiple sexualities. After the queer feminine reappropriation of her hands, Shaw explores another body part of her own sexual origin.

I got really excited when I realized that my sexuality was also in my lips
The man I am today still thinks all desire starts at the mouth. It comes from right inside the lip, the inside part of the lips that are always moist.
[…]
Love is an oral thing,
Trying to put your whole body into my mouth.

Along with her description of lips, it is not hard to find an analogy between lips and vagina. Also, the adjectives, “vulnerable and naked, and dangerous and out of control” for her lips hint at the images of female genitalia, but Shaw positions her initial sexual drive in her lips in connection to butch-femme role playing. Moreover, she says, “I felt like people were staring at my lips at a time when most girls thought people were staring at their breasts” (Shaw 193). She dislocates the convention of male gaze and sexual objectification of women’s breasts into lesbian context, by comparing lips with breasts.

Therefore, butch lesbian sexuality makes it possible to redefine and re-perceive women’s bodies and aging. The only part of getting old that she worry about is that her lips will dry up and be hard and wrinkly. Her anxiety of aging is far from gaining weight or hanged down “breasts” or crow’s feet or wrinkles on her neck.

My blood is volcano. […] I have high blood pressure. My
acupuncturist…is trying to lower my fire. […] But I’m afraid that the combination of that and menopause will make me a boring person. What would a volcano be without her lava? Without her blood?

She connects the image of blood with passion and sensuality. Hence, for her, menopauseis not the sign of loss of young femininity and determination of reproduction ability but that of the reduction of heat wave in her body. In this way, Shaw creates new queermeaning from a female body through the subversive signification of her gender
dysfunction or dysphoria. Shaw’s gender performances “produce radically reconfigured notions of proper gender and map new genders onto a utopian vision of radically different bodies and sexualities” (Halberstam 1998:41).

Finally, she flirts with audiences while singing “To all the girls I’ve loved
before” in the auditorium.

To all the girls I’ve loved before
Who traveled in and out my door.
I dedicate this song.
To all the girls I once caressed…
To all the girls I’ve loved before.
To all the girls who cared for me
Who filled my nights with ecstasy.
They live within my heart.

Actually, the original song entails a (heterosexual) male subject position. However, Shaw reclaims it cleverly as a butch lesbian anthem by taking advantage of non-gendered “I-You” mode in the lyric. Maybe, the song is dedicated to her friend, Joanne whose between the legs Shaw touched in gym class, a girl who whispered “Peggy” while she was making out with her boyfriend, other people’s mothers in their fifties who made Shaw be full of desire and Shaw’s mother. As well, she dedicates her song to lesbian audiences while she interacts with them just as a male crooner do with his women fans ina live concert. And lesbian audiences might recollect their memory of all the girls whothey have loved before while listening to her song and watching her seduction.

In the last scene, Shaw leaves with her suitcase (with drag stuffs including male costumes) and disappears in the dark. She would travel all the borders with the suitcase, changing different genders?playful journeys of gender dysphoria? and come back to stage to bring audiences a souvenir of lesbian humor, irony and pleasure.

Work Cited
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993.
– – –. “Imitation and Gender Insurbordination.” Inside/Out. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York:
Routledge, 1991.
DeLombard, Jeannine. Interview with Peggy Shaw. Philadelphia Citypaper on the Web
10-17 April 1997 <http://citypaper.net/articles/041097/article001/shtml>.
Halberstam, Judith. Female Masculinity. Durham and London: Duke, 1998.
– – –. “Lesbian Masculinity Or Even Stone Butches Get the Blues.” Women &
Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 8:2 (1996): 61-73.
Holden, Stephen. “Recalling a Masculine Self, With a Voice Like Cagney’s.” New York
Times 26 May. 1994: C 19.
Rubin, Gayle. “Of Catamites and Kings: Reflections on Butch, Gender, and Boundaries.”
The Persistent Desire. Ed. Joan Nestle. Boston: Alyson, 1992.
Scarlet Woman, “Dress Shirt.” The Persistent Desire. Ed. Joan Nestle. Boston: Alyson,
1992.
Shaw, Peggy. “You’re Just Like My Father.” O Solo Homo. Ed. Holly Hughes and
David Roman. New York: Grove, 1998.
– – –. You’re Just Like My Father. Dir. Stacy Makishi and James Neal-Kennedy. Perf.
Peggy Shaw. Videocassette (Unknown for the place, city and year).
Solomon, Alisa. Re-dressing the Cannon. New York: Routledge, 1997.