. . . Maybe Helen still wouldn't see anything here to disagree with; she admits, after all, that "there are many very different ways to be quintessentially man or woman." But I think butch has to be a problem case for her, given her analogy with nationality and the claim that "there are a million different ways to be quintessentially American, but being quintessentially French is not and could never be one of them." And this strikes me as something of a reductio; if butch doesn't count as a gender role, something has gone wrong in the argument.Not so fast. If I can run with the analogy for a moment longer, consider the options: there's such a thing as an American and a Frenchman, but also such thing as an American expatriate in France (a long and rich tradition, n'est-ce pas?) and a French expatriate in America. This speaks to what BDFAR says earlier in the post: "It's not just that one can be butch in spite of one's breasts, but that breasts can be butch just so long as one's sense of butch encompasses rather than downplays or ignores them, their femaleness."
Speaking of expatriates, that's the topic of the current issue of Stop Smiling. Interview with Ray Davies? Feature on Lee Miller? Where do I sign?
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