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  • The Drag of Masculinity: An Interview with Judith “Jack” Halberstam
  • Jeffrey J. Williams (bio)

Attention to gender was a lynchpin of feminist criticism from the 1960s to the 1980s, and it usually criticized the masculine bias of society. After that, attention turned more to sexuality than gender, and to queer than to masculine-feminine dynamics. Judith “Jack” Halberstam represents a new wave of gender studies, analyzing the ways in which women use masculinity, for instance in drag king performances, notably in her book Female Masculinity (1998). She also turns to “low theory,” looking at a range of representations of transgender in high and low literature, film, and life. Halberstam predicts a reinvigorated future for the study of gender, remarking in Keywords for American Cultural Studies that “gender studies may provide a better way of framing, asking and even answering hard questions about ideology, social formations, political movements, and shifts in perceptions of embodiment and community.”

Halberstam’s first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), is a study of novels such as Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897), as well as films like Silence of the Lambs (1991), which show “a switch in emphasis within the representation and interpretation of monstrous bodies from class, race, and nationality to a primary focus upon sexuality and gender.” Following upon Female Masculinity, Halberstam offers her observations on drag king life in The Drag King Book (1999), which is paired with photos by Del LaGrace Volcano. Halberstam’s next book, In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), collects essays on transgender in fiction and film, and she has recently completed The Queer Art of Failure (2011). Halberstam also co-edited Posthuman Bodies (1995), co-edits the series Perverse Modernities (Duke UP) with Lisa Lowe, and blogs at http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com.

Born in England in 1961, Halberstam migrated to the US in her teens. She attended University of California-Berkeley (BA, 1985) and University of Minnesota (MA, 1989; PhD, 1991). After teaching at UC-San Diego from 1991 to 2003, she moved to USC, where she is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies. [End Page 361]

This interview took place in the J. W. Marriott Hotel in Los Angeles on 6 January 2011. It was conducted and edited by Jeffrey J. Williams, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, and transcribed by Jennifer Beno, an MA student at Carnegie Mellon.

Jeffrey J. Williams:

Your work points out that one thing that wasn’t talked about in relation to gender was female masculinity. It was a gap in feminism and gender studies, so hence your book Female Masculinity. Could you tell me in a nutshell what female masculinity is?

Judith “Jack” Halberstam:

You’re exactly right that there was a gaping hole in feminism. When I started writing my book, there was an abstract formulation of other kinds of subjects who might make claims on masculinity that would then trouble the category of woman, but they were only abstract. Butler did that in Gender Trouble, and Gender Trouble had an enormous impact on the environment within which I began to do gender studies. To me, it was obvious that the book was about female masculinity, but it sure wasn’t obvious to other people. In the poststructuralist moment that Butler opened up, it was weird to me that the category of womanhood had fallen into question without the topic of masculinity coming up. So it was into that conversation that I decided to just go ahead, and as is my wont, be quite blunt about what forms of womanhood fell out of this universalizing category that feminism assumed to speak for women.

One subject for whom feminism has always had a hard time speaking is the masculine woman. There are a lot of good reasons for why feminism and female masculinity have been at odds. Just as an example, at the beginning of the twentieth century, under the influence of people like Otto Weininger, there was a sense that women could only be powerful and intelligent to the extent that they were like men, and to the extent that a woman...

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