Gender Incongruity and Trans-identity: A Reading of Leslie Fienberg’s Stone Butch Blues

Abstract

The word Transgender is often used as an aggregate term for those who transgressconventional binary gender boundaries. Based on Simon de Beauvoir’s pronouncement in The Second Sex, “one is not born but rather becomes a woman” (283), Judith Butler affirms that gender is fluid. Butler, by deconstructing the binary of male-female, demonstrates that the boundary implied inside this pair is ‘inalienably flimsy.’ The perspectives of the queer community are often unheard in an atmosphere where heterosexual hegemony is active. The hostile surroundings in which the trans-people live and the traumatic experiences they undergo fill them with constant fear and anxiety in confronting their real selves and asserting their identities. People who are marginalised because of their sexuality have always had to seek mainstream acceptance to get the rights and freedoms they need for a dignified life. The purpose of this study is to explore the resistance strategies that trans-genders adopt when met with adversity and the ways in which they see their trans-identity as providing them with a form of strength and resilience. Leslie Feinberg, an American author, in Stone Butch Blues, carves out the entire existence of Jess Goldberg, a butch lesbian who undergoes physical and mental transformation.