Are you attracted to feminine lesbians but doubting they could be into you?
Sick of shuffling through a never-ending cycle of gender euphoria and gender dysphoria? (Not to worry, those are made-up.)
Plagued by the need to explain to the internet how you’re butch?
Keep naming the thing, but can’t feel a damn thing?
After thoroughly attempting (and giving up on) the 21st century quest to stick a flag in “euphoria” wherever it can be labeled, we present an alternative to the dopamine mirage of something like “butch euphoria”: living over naming. We choose the quest to live a good life over the quest to publicly inventory ourselves and our emotions.
We’re bored by the consumerist impulse of “If I want it, I can have it” being imported into identity as “Whatever I name, we are the same.” Naming ourselves doesn’t teach us anything, and actually runs the risk of stultification. The upside of naming, of course, is community. But the only way we’ve learned what “butch” actually means is to dig underneath the signs, to explore the self within the messiness of life alongside another, rather than planting an identity-flag on signifiers of butch. This makes butchness a space of action and connection rather than a function of self-idealization. In our lives, what “butch” means is co-constructed daily with our femme partners. The only reason we wave the butch flag on this podcast is so other butch-femme butches know they can trust themselves. They’re not making it up. They’re right when they feel like the freedom to be a different woman than their partner has pulled them through a portal into a hidden realm of feminism and fulfillment.
In this episode, we discuss the pressures of postmodern self-making to turn the real, grounded, lesbian, emotional, sexual meaning of butch and femme into cultural commodities that anyone, male or female, gay or straight, can buy off the shelf (or accumulate online) and thus perform ownership of. We know lesbians don’t intend complicity with this anything-goes remix, but aesthetic definitions of butch and femme cannot help but bolster it. The flattening of butch-femme’s embodied, emotional, sexual reality into memes or isolated traits on either side of the hyphen is a huge reason this podcast exists in the first place, but also why it’s easy to misread us as having a “dog in that fight” when we defend the value of the concepts “butch” and “femme.” However, the arrow of meaning for us goes the opposite way: the identities “butch” and “femme” enable post facto examination and description of the reality of our intimate lives, and most importantly, the ability to find others like ourselves. Butch and femme are not a priori concepts we can index, see, look at, point to in individuals or from any amount of distance. Butch and femme live so near to us that they’re under our skin; they’re who we are intimately, with the humans we let closest to us.
We explain why aesthetic definitions of butch or femme, even when addressed to female humans alone, are a slippery slope in postmodernland, and how that slope slipped us to this godforsaken 2025 wasteland in which butch-femme sexual specificity has to answer to everything else, and our real existence is still up for debate or submersion beneath the surface of “similar” signs.
Later, a tour of our bookshelves elucidates how our literary lineage — from the Well of Loneliness and Orlando to Ann Bannon and Stone Butch Blues — built a (false) narrative of butch/femme dysfunction, reassuring the heteros (and titillating the queers) with the thought that stability in lesbian relationships is inherently fleeting and illusory. At the root is the question of female embodiment and women’s capacity to author signs of the real in the realm of sexuality.
Before we ”sign” off, we take on Gayle Rubin’s “Charmed Circle,” or as we prefer to call it, the “Bad Wheel of Sex” — a fundamentally strange diagram, both emblematic and foundational of the toxic queer theory that argued having morals and being a homosexual were incompatible experiences. No one should have created something so aligned with male-authored continental philosophy and then have asked lesbians to accept it.
Ergo, no more letting dead/old white men tell us nothing means anything (that includes you, Ray Blanchard). All women share a realm of female sexuality, structured by our own, not male, embodiment — and orientations like butch-femme deserve exclusive territory to explore it. No gatekeeping = no depth. We’ll take the living of life over getting our butch parking ticket validated, any day.
Website:
https://www.StoneButchDisco.com
Substack:
Get in touch with us at stonebutchdisco@gmail.com
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