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

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is a private scholar, writing and
editing in Souris, Manitoba.

This latest volume in the Sexuality Studies series considers the issue
of transgendered and transsexual masculinity as a literary category that
is distinct from lesbian and female masculinity. Through her examination
of the construction of the sex–gender system, and its deconstruction
in the novels of Radclyffe Hall, Leslie Feinberg, and Rose Tremain and
in Kimberly Peirce’s film Boys Don’t Cry, Noble charts the journey
of her subjects through what she describes as “a No Man’s Land of
gender.” She considers her critical project to be as much a study in
masculinity as a study in sexual subjectivities, yet she divorces
“masculinity” from its traditional site in the male body, citing
instead her “No Man’s Land” where ontological status based on
one’s physical body is suspended. Thus she points to female
masculinity as an “irreducible contradiction between (de)constructions
of ‘bodies’ misread in a certain way as female and yet masculine.”

In her attempt to highlight the limitations of heteronormative
configurations of gender and identities, and to rethink gender
essentialism, Noble posits four axioms of gender studies that allow her
to chart the proximities of male and female masculinities, and the
historical development of the idea of the masculine in the 20th century.
She argues that the very study of masculinity suggests that
masculinity—and, by extension, female masculinity—is a category that
transcends time, region, social class, and ethnicity, a shifting
subjectivity that evades the normative definition of naturalized
biological essentialism and can be accessed and articulated only through
a shifting variety of “positions, discourses, institutions, and
apparatuses.”

Noble’s work is certainly groundbreaking in its examination of
parallels in the cultural and literary representation of masculinity in
the 20th century, from modernism to postmodernism. The denseness of the
writing and research, however, has produced a work that is almost as
difficult to access as the problematic subject of masculinity itself.
While a queer- and gender-theory devotee might revel in the multiplicity
of references, both cultural and literary, and the broad expanse of
gender and sexual identities that are addressed, this is hardly a volume
that will enlighten a scholar who is new to this material.