Desiring Butches: Butch Sex and Butch Embodiment in Modern Lesbian History

Within modern lesbian subcultures, the butch is tightly bound up in narratives of desire. In the lesbian pulp fiction that proliferated in the US in the 1950s and 60s, butches are all smouldering eyes and smouldering cigarettes, turning femmes to quivering wrecks with a gaze across a smoky basement bar. In the groundswell of lesbian erotica in the 1990s, butches are irresistible powerhouses of sexual agency and sexual prowess. In the space between, during the so-called lesbian sex wars of the 1980s, butches were similarly posited as synonymous with sexual power and performance, albeit as critique. Here, lesbian feminist discourse cast butches (and femmes) as complicit tools of patriarchy, their masculine identity and sexual practice aping and therefore benefitting from hetero-patriarchy and male violence. But how do butches themselves conceptualise their desire, and their desirability? In what ways is the masculinity that sits at the heart of butchness part of butch sexual selfhood? How does being butch shape sexual practice? Moreover, in what ways do lived experiences of butches relate to or challenge popular depictions of the butch as a sexual agent? In this chapter, I analyse oral histories I have conducted with AFAB (assigned female at birth) butches in the UK and US to explore the ways in which butches articulate desire; both their own and the experience of being desired as someone moving through the world in a female body in a masculine way.