There are many identities within the LGBTQI community. Among these are butch and femme. Both of these identities date back to the beginning of the 20th century and are a part of the lesbian and bisexual subculture. Both have taken on many definitions. In this collection of photographs, people from across the United States and Canada who claim these identities today share their own definitions and describe how they express themselves uniquely.

Essays on the butch-femme designations, respecting the power that these categories have in the lesbian community while at the same time avoiding the cliched romanticism often inherent in their representation.

What are the meanings behind constructed lesbian identities? This unique collection brings together writing, photography, artwork, and poetry about lesbian butch and femme gender. Femme/Butch: New Considerations of the Way We Want to Go distinguishes itself by celebrating a wide span of intellectual engagement, from reflection to traditional academic work, including both disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches. In addition to more “serious” writing, lesbian comediennes offer their irreverent takes on femme/butch in this book. Their perspectives are almost never found in academic publications, but what Lea DeLaria, Vickie Shaw, Karen Williams, and other edgy comics have to say about femme/butch sexuality deserves to be heard. You’ll also find that Femme/Butch is essential for the global perspective it brings to lesbian gender. With chapters focused on lesbians in Chinese cultures and on the emerging lesbian community in Bulgaria, this book explores the role of femme/butch identification in cultures without recognizable lesbian institutions. Here are a few of the questions the contributors to Femme/Butch examine in this remarkable book: Can theory about femme/butch exist in the electric realm of sex and sexuality, or does theory necessarily neutralize sexuality? What role does popular culture play in helping us to theorize about lesbian gender? What are the relationships between history and femme/butch lesbian gender? Does lesbian identity development come in individual stages or is it more of a free-flowing process? How does social class relate to how we think about femme/butch race, ethnicity, and butch-femme? Femme/Butch is an ideal guide to understanding: the similarities between stone-butch and transgender identities—using Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues as a reference point the erotically resignified roles of Mommy, Daddy, girl, and boy in butch-femme femme/butch issues of power, trust, love, and loss the “female husbands” of the 18th century and their “wives” the meanings of cross-dressing for lesbians the variety of lesbian-queer genders—butch, femme, androgynous, and “other” and much more!

Femme seeks to redress the ways that femme identities have been elided, idealized, or not fully historicized in a productive reconsideration of lesbian and butch-femme history, of feminism, and of queer thought. As a feminist project, Femme offers an alliance between many communities of women previously passed over by feminism. Contributors: Leah Lilith Albrecht-Samarasinha, Barbara Cruikshank, Madeline Davis, Heather Findlay, Jewelle Gomez, Kelly Hankin, Leslie Henson, Amber Hollibaugh, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Mabel Maney, Katherine Millersdaughter, Joan Nestle, Lisa Ortiz, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rebecca Ann Rugg, Gaby Sandoval, Marcy Sheiner, Alex Robertson Textor.

Features the work of five contemporary lesbian photographers, together with a selection of historical photographs from the Lesbian Herstory Archives (some of which date back to 1910). Accompanying the photographs is an essay on being butch by Judy Grahn and one on being femme by Nisa Donnelly. A beautifully produced collection celebrating the gender roles, erotic desires, and self-perceptions of lesbian life. Illustrated throughout with duotone photographs. 6 X 4''

When written sources are scarce, historians often turn to oral histories for evidence. Bodies of Evidence: The Practice of Queer Oral History is the first book to provide serious scholarly insight into the methodological practices that shape lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer oral histories. The volume opens up a critical dialogue on the challenges of creating an archive of queer lives. Highlighting the work of fourteen authors who focus their research on queer community history, culture, and politics, each chapter pairs an oral history excerpt with an original essay in which the oral historian addresses his or her methods and practices. With an afterword by the preeminent scholar in the field, John D'Emilio, this collection enables readers to examine both a series of oral histories and analysis of the role memory, desire, sexuality, and gender play in documenting LGBTQ communities and cultures. The historical themes addressed within include lesbian bar history in San Francisco (c. 1940s, 1950s); early homophile organizing and social activism in Los Angeles (c. 1950s and 1960s); Third World Liberation and feminist antiwar activism in the U.S. and Canada (c. 1960s, 1970s); electoral politics and the career of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in San Francisco (1970s); Latino AIDS memory and activism in San Francisco (1980s, 1990s); and the war in Iraq (2000s). The methodological themes addressed in this book that are relevant to the practice of oral history include questions of sexual self-disclosure and voyeurism in the uses of oral history methods by queer studies scholars; the intimacy between researcher and narrator negotiated through multiple oral history interviews and on-going casual conversations; the production of comparative racial and sexual identities within the context of oral history interviews; the production of in-group mythology by same-sexuality interviewing--and the possible benefits of cross-sexuality and cross-ideology interviewing; what heterosexually-identified narrators can tell us about LGBTQ life and death; the silences imposed by repressive U.S. government policy about sexual self-disclosure and the limits of permissible speech in highly politicized discourses such as "gays in the military." These themes provide new and insightful structures for thinking about oral history methods--both in general and in relation to the production of LGBTQ history.