Masculinities without Men?: Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions

Sexuality Studies

by Jean Bobby Noble

Conventional ideas about gender and sexuality dictate that people born with male bodies naturally possess both a man’s identity and a man’s right to authority. Recent scholarship in the field of gender studies, however, exposes the complex political technologies that construct gender as a supposedly unchanging biological essence with self-evident links to physicality, identity, and power. In Masculinities without Men? Jean Bobby Noble explores how the construction of gender was thrown into crisis during the twentieth century, resulting in a permanent rupture in the sex/gender system, and how masculinity became an unstable category, altered across time, region, social class, and ethnicity.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT

222 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2003

Reviews

[mr. kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noble is my new academic brain-licking crush.

I find ze's articulation of fe(em)minity in relation to trans-masculinity and female masculinity supremely interesting and heart-warming.