The Queer Homes and Communities of Stone Butch Blues: On Violence, Intimacy, and Queer Possibilities

Abstract

[eng] Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues (1993) follows the life of Jess, a Jewish, working-class, and butch protagonist. Through first-person narration, the novel explores issues of intersectional community-building, negotiation of difference and sameness, and the possibility of queer alternatives to home and domesticity. Amidst constant and unbearable police brutality, social punishment and verbal threats, the characters of the novel struggle to survive both on a physical level—keeping their bodies alive—and on a psychological one—developing a sense of self and self-worth. This Master’s thesis analyzes both the novel’s depiction of police violence, framed as torture, and the survival strategies that develop around it, which involve community-building and intimacy between traumatized characters. The analysis is structured in two parts: the first part explores what makes community necessary and how it works through close readings of the text alongside theoretical works on community, such as Zigmunt Bauman’s, and on torture, such as Elaine Scarry’s. The second part of the analysis focuses on the limitations of community, the delineation of its boundaries, and the consequences of being without community through works on queer and bisexual theory, such as Jack Halberstam’s and Claire Hemmings’. Lastly, this thesis turns to the utopic drive of the novel, focusing on hope and the celebration of difference as essential to queer, class-conscious politics.