D e ll a G r a c e

I rf prim, 24
C k m r iï m o ï ' i.he au Ui
 B a th r o o m s , B u t c h e s , a n d th e A e s t h e t i c s of F e m a l e M a s c u l i n i t y

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Recently, on my way to give a talk in Minneapolis, I had to make a connection at Chicago’s O ’Hare
airport. Feeling the need to use the facilities, to freshen up, to relieve myself, and other euphemisms,
I strode purposefully into the women’s bathroom. No sooner had I entered the stall than someone
was knocking on the door: “ Open up, security here!” As soon as I spoke, the two guards realized
their error, mumbled apologies, and took off. I understood immediately what had happened. Once
again, I had been mistaken for a man or a boy, and some woman (fearing what exactly?) had called
security. On that same trip, in Denver’s new airport, the same sequence o f events was repeated.
Needless to say, the policing o f gender within bathrooms is intensified in the realm o f the air­
port, where people are literally moving through space and time in ways that cause them to want to
stabilize some boundaries (gender) even as they traverse others (state). However, having one’s gender
challenged in the women’s rest room is a frequent occurrence in the lives o f many androgynous or
masculine women. Indeed, it is so frequent that one wonders whether the category “woman” when
used to designate public functions is completely outmoded.'
It is no accident that travel hubs become zones o f intense scrutiny and observation. But gen­
der policing within airport bathrooms is merely an intensified version of a larger “bathroom prob­
lem.” The bathroom problem makes all its participants aware o f otherwise invisible gender standards
and their violation and brings us all up against the laws that bind women to femininity. The accusa­
tion, “You’re in the wrong bathroom,” really says two different things. First, it announces that your
gender seems at odds with your sex (your apparent masculinity or androgyny is at odds with your
supposed femaleness); second, it suggests that single-gender bathrooms are only for those who fit
clearly into one category (male) or the other (female).
The frequency with which 1 and others I know are mistaken for men in public bathrooms
suggests that a large number o f feminine women spend a large amount o f time and energy policing
masculine women. Something very different happens, o f course, in the men’s public toilet, where the
space is more likely to become a sexual cruising zone than a site for gender repression. Lee Edelman,
in an essay about the interpenetration o f nationalism and sexuality, argues that “the institutional
men’s room constitutes a site at which the zones o f public and private cross with a distinctive psychic
charge.”2 Noting the significance o f the juxtaposition o f public urinals with private stalls, Edelman
comments: “ Indeed, the effort to provide a space o f privacy interior to the men’s room itself, a space
that would still be subject to some degree o f public regulation and control, had encouraged by 1964
the increasing popularity o f the coin-operated toilet stall within the public washroom.”3 The men’s
room, in other words, constitutes both an architecture o f surveillance and an incitement to desire, a
space o f potential homosocial interaction and homoerotic interaction.

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 Sex-segregated bathrooms may be necessary to protect women from male predations, but they
also produce and extend a rather outdated notion of a public/private split between male and female
society.4 The bathroom is a domestic space beyond the home that comes to represent domestic order,
or a parody of it, out in the world. The women’s bathroom accordingly becomes a sanctuary of
enhanced femininity, a “little-girl’s room” to which one retreats to powder one’s nose or fix one’s hair.
The men’s bathroom signifies as the extension o f the public nature o f masculinity— it is precisely not
domestic even though the names given to the sexual space o f the bathroom— such as “cottage” or
“tearoom”— suggest it is a parody o f the domestic. The codes that dominate within the women’s
bathroom are primarily gender codes; in the men’s room they are sexual codes. Private gender versus
public sex, discretely repressive versus openly sexual, bathrooms beyond the home take on the pro­
portions o f a gender factory. Marjorie Garber comments upon the liminality o f the bathroom in
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety in a chapter on the perils and privileges of cross-
dressing. Here, Garber discusses the very different modes o f passing and cross-dressing for cross­
identified genetic males and females,5 and she observes that the rest room is a “potential Waterloo” for
both female-to-male (FTM) and male-to-female (MTF) cross-dressers and transsexuals." For the
FTM, the men’s room represents the most severe test o f his ability to pass, and advice frequently cir­
culates within FTM communities about how to go unnoticed in male-only spaces. Garber notes: “The
cultural paranoia o f being caught in the ultimately wrong place, which may be inseparable from the
pleasure o f ‘passing’ in that same place, depends in part on the same cultural binarism, the idea that
gender categories are sufficiently uncomplicated to permit self-assortment into one of the two
‘rooms’ without deconstructive reading.”7 It is worth pointing out here (if only because Garber does
not) that the perils for passing FTMs in the men’s room are very different from the perils of passing
MTFs in the women’s room. On the one hand, the FTM in the men’s room is likely to be less scruti­
nized because men are not quite as vigilant about intruders as women, for obvious reasons. On the
other hand, if caught, the FTM may face some version o f gender panic from the man who discovers
him, and it is quite reasonable to expect and fear violence in the wake o f such a discovery. The MTF,
by comparison, will be more scrutinized in the women’s room but possibly less open to punishment
if caught. Because the FTM ventures into male territory with the potential threat o f violence hanging
over his head, it is crucial to recognize that the bathroom problem is much more than a glitch in the
machinery of gender segregation and is better described in terms o f the violent enforcement of our
current gender system.
Garber’s reading of the perilous risks o f using rest rooms for both FTMs and MTFs develops
out of her introductory discussion o f what Jacques Lacan calls “urinary segregation.”8Lacan, we may
recall, uses the term to describe the relations between identities and signifiers, choosing the simple
diagram o f the rest-room signs “Ladies” and “Gentlemen” to show that, within the production of sex­
ual difference, primacy is granted to the signifier over that which it signifies; in more simple terms,
naming confers rather than reflects meaning. In the same way, the system o f urinary segregation cre­
ates the very functionality o f the categories “men” and “women.” W hile rest-room signs seem to serve
and ratify distinctions that already exist, in actual fact these markers produce identifications within
these constructed categories. Garber latches onto the notion o f urinary segregation because it helps
her to describe the processes o f cultural binarism within the production o f gender; for Garber, trans­
vestites and transsexuals challenge this system by resisting the literal translation o f the signs “ Ladies”
and “Gentlemen.” Garber uses the figures o f the transvestite and the transsexual to show the obvious
flaws and gaps in a binary gender system; the transvestite as interloper creates, for Garber, a “third
space o f possibility” within which all binaries become unstable.’ Unfortunately, as in all attempts to
break a binary by producing a third term, Garber’s third space tends to stabilize the other two.
Edelman also turns to Lacan’s term “ urinary segregation” in his discussion o f the “ tearoom,” but he
uses Lacan’s diagram to mark heterosexual anxiety “about the potential inscriptions of homosexual
desire and about the possibility of knowing or recognizing whatever might constitute ‘homosexual
difference.’” "’ While for Garber, it is the transvestite who marks the instability o f the markers
“ Ladies” and “Gentlemen,” for Edelman, it is the passing homosexual who does so.
Both Garber and Edelman, interestingly enough, seem to fix upon the men’s room as the site
of these various destabilizing performances. As I am arguing here, however, focusing exclusively on
the drama o f the men’s room avoids the much more complicated theater o f the women’s room.
Garber writes o f urinary segregation: “For transvestites and transsexuals, the ‘men’s room’ problem is
really a challenge to the way in which such cultural binarism is read.” " She goes on to list some cine­
matic examples o f the perils o f urinary segregation, discussing scenes from Tootsie (Sydney Pollack,
1982), Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972), and Female Impersonator Pageant (1975). Garber’s examples are odd
illustrations o f “the men’s-room problem” if only because at least one o f her examples, Tootsie,
demonstrates gender policing in the women’s room. Also, Garber makes it sound as if vigorous gen­
der policing happens in the men’s room while the women’s room is a more benign zone. She notes,
“ In fact, the urinal has appeared in a number o f fairly recent films as a marker o f the ultimate
‘difference’— or studied indifference.” " Obviously, Garber is drawing a parallel here between the con­
ventions o f gender attribution within which the penis marks the “ultimate difference” ; however, by
not moving beyond this remarkably predictable description o f gender differentiation, she overlooks
the main distinction between gender policing in the men’s room and in the women’s room. Namely,
in the women’s room, not only the M TF but all gender-ambiguous females are scrutinized, while in
the men’s room, biological men are rarely deemed out o f place. Garber’s insistence that there is a
third space o f possibility occupied by the transvestite closes down the possibility that there may be a
fourth, fifth, sixth, or one-hundredth space beyond the binary. In fact, the “women’s-room problem”
(as opposed to the “men’s-room problem” ) indicates a multiplicity o f gender displays even within the
supposedly stable category o f “ woman.”
What gender, then, are the hundreds o f people born female who are consistently not read as
female in the women’s room? And since so many women clearly fail the women’s-room test, why have
we not begun to count and name the genders that are clearly emerging at this time? One could
answer this question in two ways: On the one hand, we do not name and notice new genders because
as a society we are committed to maintaining a binary gender system. On the other hand, we could
also say that the failure of “male” and “female” to exhaust the field o f gender variation actually
ensures the continued dominance o f these terms. Precisely because virtually nobody fits the defini­
tions o f male and female, the categories gain power and currency. Finally, as I suggested in relation to
Garber’s arguments about transvestism, “thirdness” merely balances the binary system and, further­
more, tends to homogenize many different gender variations under the banner o f “other.”
It is remarkably easy in this society to not look like a woman; it is relatively difficult, by com ­
parison, to not look like a man. So another question posed by the bathroom problem might be, what
makes femininity so approximate and masculinity so precise? O r to pose the question with a different
spin, why is femininity easily impersonated or performed while masculinity seems resistant to imita-
W /itS fr fc / (jcn< /c

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 tion? O f course, this formulation does not easily hold and, indeed, quickly collapses into the exact
opposite: Wiry is it, in the case o f the masculine woman in the bathroom, that one finds the limits of
femininity so quickly while the limits o f masculinity in the men’s room seem fairly expansive?
We might tackle these questions by thinking about the effects, social and cultural, o f reversing
gender typing. In other words, what are the implications o f male femininity and female masculinity?
In “ Reading the Male Body,” Susan Bordo laments that “when masculinity gets symbolically ‘undone’
in this culture, the deconstruction nearly always lands us in the territory o f the degraded, while when
femininity gets symbolically undone, the result is an immense elevation in status.” 13This changes the
terms o f gender irreversibility slightly; here Bordo seems to suggest that even a hint o f the feminine
sullies male masculinity while all masculinizations o f femaleness are elevating. (I think my bathroom
example proves that this is not so.) Her examples o f elevated masculine females include the heroines
o f Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott, 1991), Linda Hamilton in The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984),
i and Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (Ridley Scgtt^gSe). It is not difficult to see that what renders these
1 performances o f female masculinity quite tame Is their resolutefheterosexuality, When and where
female masculinity conjoins with possibly queer identities, it is far less likely to meet with approval. It
is important when thinking about gender variations like male femininity and female masculinity not
. r- - -
! simply to create another binary. In Bordo’s reading, masculinity everywhere and always signifies
power; in alternative models o f gender variation, female masculinity is not simply the opposite of
female femininity nor is it a female version of male masculinity. Rather, as we shall see in some o f the
artwork and gender performances discussed below, very often the unholy union o f femaleness and
masculinity produces wildly unpredictable results.

3B iifc/es

Many theorists have observed that gender is a technology, one that works to obscure the mechanisms
by which gender is rendered natural. In other words, the apparent “givenness” o f gender is its tech­
nology, and while femininity often manifests as technical effect or simply as artificial, masculinity
draws its power from its seeming stability and organic qualities. Judith Butler, for example, following
Monique Wittig, writes in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion o f Identity. “ To be male is not
to be ‘sexed’; to be ‘sexed’ is always a way o f becoming particular and relative, and males within this
system participate in the form o f the universal person.” 1’ The systems that sustain the conflation of
maleness and universality are various, o f course, but can generally be described as compulsory het­
erosexuality within Capitalism. While Garber, as we saw, feels that the only way out o f the cultural
binarism o f gender is to valorize a disruptive third term, W ittig believes that the very categories
“man” and “woman” must be refused and resisted. Butler, on the other hand, refuses to invest in
either thirdness or the utopian ungendered space, arguing for the proliferation o f gender perfor­
mances within parodic repetition. In a project on alternative masculinities, such as mine, it does not
make sense to go with W ittig’s call for the abolition of gender or with Garber’s “third space o f possi­
bility”; and yet, while the notion o f parodic performance as theorized in Gender Trouble may be the
obvious starting point for all attempts to cast masculinities without men, we need a more descriptive
' 1 account than Butler’s o f the places within representation where corporeality and performance con­
spire to produce masculinity with a difference.
 One might begin by pointing out that it is relatively simple to expose the mechanisms o f even
dominant male masculinity; indeed, the most masculinist o f film genres, the action-adventure film,
does so all the time. For example, we could look to the most recent James I^ondjfilm, Goldeneye
(Martin Campbell, 1995), for a representation o f the technology o f masculinity. In Goldeneye, Bond
battles the usual array o f bad guys: Commies, Nazis, mercenaries, and a superaggressive, violent
femme type. He puts on his usual performance o f debonair action-adventure hero and has his usual
supply o f gadgetry to aid him— a retractable belt, a bomb disguised as a pen, a laser-weapon watch,
and so on. But there is something curiously lacking in this latest Bond flick, namely, credible mascu­
If line power. Bond’s boss, M, is a noticeably butch older woman who calls Bond a dinosaur and chas­
V
tises him for being a misogynist and a sexist. His secretary, Miss Moneypenny, accuses him o f sexual
harassment, his male buddy betrays him and calls him a dupe, and, ultimately, women seem not to go
for his charms— bad suits and lots o f sexual innuendo— which seem as old and as ineffective as his
gadgets. Masculinity, in this rather actionless film, is primarily prosthetic and, in it and countless
other action films, has little if anything to do with biological maleness. It signifies more often as a
technical special effect. In Goldeneye, it is M who most convincingly performs masculinity, and she
does so partly by exposing the sham o f Bond’s own performance. It is M who convinces us that sex­
ism and misogyny are not necessarily part and parcel o f masculinity even though historically it has
become difficult, if not impossible, to separate masculinity from the oppression o f women. The
action-adventure hero should embody an extreme version o f normative masculinity, but, instead, we
find that excessive masculinity turns into a parody or exposure o f the norm. Since masculinity tends
to manifest as natural gender itself, the action flick, with its emphasis on prosthetic extension, actual­
ly undermines the heterosexuality o f the hero even as it extends his masculinity. So, in Goldeneye,
Bond’s masculinity is linked not only to a profoundly unnatural form o f masculine embodiment but
also to gay masculinities. In the scene in which Bond goes to pick up his newest set o f gadgets, a
campy and almost queeny science nerd gives Bond his brand-new accessories and demonstrates each
one with great enthusiasm. It is no accident that the science nerd is called Agent Q. We might read
Agent Q as a perfect model o f the interpenetration of queer and dominant regimes. Q is indeed an
agent— a queer subject who exposes the workings of dominant heterosexual masculinity. The gay
masculinity o f Agent Q and the female masculinity o f M provide a remarkable representation o f the
absolute dependence o f dominant masculinities upon m inority masculinities.
Minority masculinities and femininities destabilize binary gender systems in many different
locations. As many feminist and antiracist critics have commented, femininity and masculinity signi­
fy as normative within and through white, middle-class, heterosexual bodies. Richard Fung, for
example, writing about gay male porn, suggests that pornographic narrative structures assume a
white male viewer who embodies a normative standard o f male beauty and male desirability. Within
this scopic field, porn characterizes black men as excessively sexual and wholly phallic and Asian men
as passive and asexual.15 Films by artists o f color that disrupt this representational code— Looking for
Langston (Isaac Julien, 1988) and Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989), for example— can undo the
hierarchic relations between dominant and minority sexualities. They also have the power to reorga­
nize masculinity itself.
Other assaults upon dominant gender regimes come from queer butch art and performance,
which might include drag Icing shows, butch theatrical roles, or art featuring gender-variant subjects.
In terms o f drag king performances, stars like Elvis Herselvis or Tony Las Vegas (performed by Julie

181
 Wheeler) turn dominant masculinity around by parodying male
superstardom and working conventional modes o f performed sexism
and misogyny into successful comedy routines. As Tony Las Vegas, for
example, Wheeler manages to parody masculinity by performing its
most unnatural and obviously staged aspect: sexism. Exhorting the
audiences in dyke clubs to “show us yer tits” and standing far too
close to other women onstage with him, Tony reeks of the tricks of
misogyny. Tony’s manipulations o f a stagy and theatrical masculinity
draw attention not simply to the performative aspect o f masculinity
but also to the places where nonperformativity has ideological impli­
cations. In other words, by exposing smarmy male attentions to
females as staged, the drag king refuses any construction o f misogyny
as the natural order of things.
In one o f the very few articles in print on the topic o f drag
kings, Sarah M urray asks provocatively: “W hy hasn’t drag developed
into a distinct theatrical genre among lesbians in the United States?” 14
She answers her own question by drawing upon conventional notions
o f lesbian invisibility and by remarking on the “naturalization o f the
masculine.” She states correctly, “A woman has less to grab on to when
doing individual drag.” 17
E lv is H e r s e lv is
1990 Obviously, m y argument about the apparent stability o f male masculinity concurs with
Ph o to grap h ed b y Phyllis
Murray’s analysis. I also agree with her that the forms o f masculinity available for parody tend to be
C hristo ph er
either working-class masculinities (the construction worker, for example) or explicitly performative
middle-class masculinities like the lounge lizard. Furthermore, the masculinities that offer up subver­
sions of recognizably dominant male masculinity tend to be nonwhite. Where we diverge, however, is
on the topic o f lesbian masculinities themselves. Murray finds butch iconicity to be less about
redefining masculinity and more about appropriating male power. She reduces butchness to an his­
torical marker o f lesbian visibility that belongs to 1950s lesbian communities but notjto contempo­
rary queer dyke culture, and she suggests that lesbians, ultimately, “don’t feel free to play with the
masculine the way gay men play with the feminine.” "
I would respond to these arguments by saying, first, that it is crucial to recognize that mas­
culinity does not belong to men, has not only been produced by men, and does not properly express
patriarchy. A popular misunderstanding o f lesbian butchness depicts it as either an appropriation of
dominant male masculinity or an instance o f false consciousness in which the butch simply lacks
strong models of lesbian identity. W hat I am trying to show in this essay (and what is demonstrated
in the longer project o f which it is a part) is that what we call “masculinity” has also been produced
by women,'by specifically m'asculine women, who are gender deviants and often lesbians.- For this
reason, it is inaccurate and indeed regressive to make masculinity into a general term for “behavior
associated with males.” To argue then, as Murray does, that women do not feel free to play with mas­
culinity is to position masculinity as something separate from all lesbian women, as something they
may play with but not a quality they may express or embody. Second, in relation to Murray, butch
identity has a complicated relation to notions o f lesbian comm unity and lesbian visibility and, partic-
 B e ts e y L. A . G a lla g h e r
ularly, to lesbian drag. Since so little has been written on lesbian masculinity that does not reduce it M urray H ill and Penelope Tuesdae
as John Travolta and Olivia
to a stereotype of the lesbian or a pathetic parody of maleness, we have yet to determine what its rela­
N ew ton-John,i996
tions might be to either lesbian or transgender definition. Furthermore, butches may not be the most G elatin-silver print,
16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm )
appropriate women to do male drag. Murray avoids any substantive discussion of transgenderism in
P h o to gra p h ed b y Tanya Braganti
her article because she cannot account for what happens when drag is not a costume but represents
part o f an identity effect. W hen she does mention transgender figures like Billy Tipton, she incorrect­
ly and imprecisely characterizes them as “ female” and uses feminine pronouns to talk about their per­
formed identities. To be perfectly clear, butches, and transgender butches in particular, do not wear
male clothing as drag— the/qm body masculinity. For this reason, some o f the best drag king perfor­
mances may actually come from femme drag kings like Shelley Mars, performers who maintain a dis-
juncture between gender and performed gender.
In a slightly different land o f butch theater, a queer performance-art piece called You’re Just
Like My Father (1995), Peggy ^haw represents female masculinity as a pugnacious and gritty staging—
that is, restaging— o f family dynamics via the butch daughter. There is no question here that Shaw’s
masculinity is jpart and parcel d f Her lesbianism rather than a drag identity. Shaw becomes her
m other’s substitute husband and her lovers’ substitute fathers and brothers and constructs her own
masculinity by reworking and improving the masculinities she observes around her. She moves
easily back and forth between various personae: she is the fighter, the crooner, the soldier, the bread­
winner, the romeo, the patriarch. In each o f these roles, Shaw makes it clear that she is a female­
bodied person inhabiting each role and that each role is part o f her gender identity. In order to
play among a variety o f masculine identifications, Shaw, furthermore, is not forced to become her
father or to appropriate his maleness; she is already “just like” her father and their masculinities
exist on parallel planes.
 W /ie S 'f y f o^'&encleK

The fleshing out o f female masculinities has not been limited to theatrical arenas. In the photograph­
ic work o f artists like Catherine Opie and Della Grace, we can watch the female body becoming mas­
culine in stunning and powerful ways. Opie’s lush photographic portraits o f members o f dyke, trans­
gender, and S/M communities put a particular version o f female masculinity on display. In one o f her
early projects, entitled Being and Having, Opie created a series o f framed portraits o f mustachioed or
bearded faces set against startling yellow backdrops. In each shot, the camera zooms in on the
model’s face (often even cropping the top of the head), bringing the spectator right up against a face
that, despite its proximity, remains gender ambiguous. The close-up articulates what feels like an inti­
macy between model and artist, an intimacy, moreover, that is not readily available to the viewer.
In many of the portraits, the camera comes close enough to the model’s face to reveal the arti­
ficiality o f the facial hair; in others, the facial hair appears to be real, setting up a visual trap: we may
pause to wonder whether we are looking at a male or a female face. In many o f the commentaries on
j Opie’s work, in fact, critics insist that its complexity relies upon the “operations that almost uncon-
; sciously take place when we determine whether we are looking at a man or a woman.” '9 But, if we
look at her photographs within a larger context o f productions o f female masculinity, the ambiguity,
or binarism, of gender seems spectacularly irrelevant. Indeed, in this context, these portraits are not
simply ambiguous— they are resolute images o f fefiufle masculinity, in which, as Opie puts it, her
cross-dressing models take their performances “both into the bedroom and out to public spaces.
They are, I suppose, exhibitionists, and their scene has become a public spectator sport.” 20
Opie’s images o f bearded, pierced, and tattooed dykes and transgender men create a powerful
visual aesthetic o f alternative masculinities. While Opie’s work is often compared to Diane Arbus’s
because both take as subject so-called misfits and freaks, she vigorously denies such a comparison:
I try to present people with an extreme amount of dignity. I mean, they’re always going to be
stared at, but I try to make the portraits stare back. That’s what the relationship is all about.
I mean, it’s not like Diane Arbus or anything like that. Some of the portraits look very sad,
I think they have this distant gaze but they are never pathetic.2'
Opie’s insistence that her portraits “stare back” creates an interesting power dynamic not only
between photographer and model but also between image and spectator. The power o f the gaze in an
rf) [ Opie portrait always, and literally, rests with the image: the perpetual stare challenges the spectator’s
0 1 own sense o f gender congruity, even o f self. Indeed, this gaze replicates the hostile stares that the
model probably faces every day in the street. One reviewer o f Opie’s 1994 show, Portraits, commented
that the isolation o f each subject within the stylized frame of the photograph, with its brilliant color
backdrop, transforms them into “abstract signs” and leaves the spectator free to be a voyeur.22 But
such an assessment ignores the disorienting effect o f these pictures— the subjects are positively regal
in their opulent settings, and their colorful displays o f tattoos and body markings single them out for
photographic glory. The stare of the spectator is forced to be admiring and appreciative rather than
simply objectifying and voyeuristic. The tattoos, piercings, and body modifications that mark the
Opie model become in her portraits far more than the signifiers of outlaw status. W hether we are
confronted with the hormonally and surgically altered bodies o f transgender men or the tattooed and
pierced and scarred skin of the butch dyke, we look at bodies that display layered and multiple identi­
fications, adding a gender dimension unassimilable within the boundaries o f “man” or “woman.”
 C a t h e r in e O p ie
Wolfe, fro m th e B eing and Having
series, 1991
Grace’s images o f gender-ambiguous bodies are, like Opie’s, stylized portraits in the C h ro m o g e n ic p rin t, fram ed,

Mapplethorpe tradition. However, in many o f Grace’s photographs an action defines gender ambigui­ 17 x 22 inches (43.2 x 55.9 cm )
C o u rtesy o f Regen Projects,
ty in relation to a set o f sexual practices. Her photos often feature two or more bodies in play, and Los A ngeles

we thus see gender as a complex set o f negotiations between bodies, identities, and desire. In
C a t h e r in e O p ie
Triad (1992), for example, three shaven and bald female bodies are intertwined in a three-way
ƒ., from the Being and Having
embrace. The pallor o f the bodies and the smoothness o f the shaven skin turn skin to marble, refus­ series, 1991
C h ro m o g e n ic p rin t, fram ed,
ing the traditional softness o f femininity. Grace frequently affords her subjects an almost mythical
17 x 22 inches (43.2 x 55.9 cm )
treatment, photographing them in classical costume or titling the photographs after mythological C o u rtesy o f Regen Projects,
Los Angeles
subjects, and, as does Opie, she always grants her models dignity, power, and beauty even as she
exposes them to the gaze.
In her photographs o f butch bodies, Grace borrows from gay male erotic imagery to construct
a context for an unself-conscious female masculinity. In Jack’s Back (1994), we see a sailor with his
back toward us. He wears white Navy-issue pants and a white cap and has a hand tucked into his
waistband. The back o f the head is closely shaven, the shoulders are broad and manly. This image
could have been plucked from Paul Cadmus or Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Qucrelle (1982) or the
image bank o f gay erotica. However, the back belongs to Jackie, a beautifully built and tightly mus­
cled butch whom Grace has photographed repeatedly. In Jack Unveiled (1994), we now see Jackie head
on, wearing khaki pants and pulling an army T-shirt over her head. W hile the m odel’s face is still
partially obscured, her torso (Jack’s front) is exposed. The breasts are just pronounced enough to
mark Jackie as a “woman,” but they are small enough and the torso is muscular enough to keep
the ambiguity intact.
Opie also uses back shots to make gender unreadable. In Dyke (1994), we see a torso set
against an elaborate backdrop. The word “ DYKE” is tattooed in Gothic script just below the neckline
o f a head o f very short hair. On the one hand, the inscription dispels gender ambiguity by declaring
the body lesbian, but on the other hand, given the many multigendered images o f dykes that Opie
has produced, the word “ D YKE” gives very few clues as to what the front o f this body might look like.
 C a t h e r in e O p ie
D yke, 1992
C h ro m o g e n ic print,
Opie’s and Grace’s “back art” is a refusal to engage with the all-too-easy game o f gender ambiguity. 40 x 30 inches (101.6 x 76.2 cm )

They want gender literally to be a surface for inscriptions, words and drawings, art and desire. In C o u rtesy o f Regen Projects,
Los A ngeles
another back shot, Self-Portrait (1993), Opie exposes her own back to view. Cut into the skin is a
childlike image o f two stick figures in skirts holding hands, standing in front o f a stick house, below a C a t h e r in e O p ie
Self-Portrait, 1993
bubble cloud. The picture, seemingly etched in blood, sits uncomfortably, close to one of Opie’s arm
C h ro m o g e n ic print,
tattoos. Turning the back into a canvas, Opie dispels curiosity about what the front o f the body might 40 x 30 inches (101.6 x 76.2 cm )
C o u rtesy o f Regen Projects,
reveal. As the artist notes about this self-portrait: “ It says a lot o f different things. One o f them is that
L os Angeles
I have my back to you.”23W hile so many o f Opie’s photographs literally return the gaze with piercing
stares, the back shots circumvent the question o f the gaze, allowing a space to open up for both gen­
der variation and different inscriptions o f the sexed body.
Opie’s cuttings and the tattoos and scars on the bodies o f both Opie’s and Grace’s models
stand in direct opposition to another recent and popular image o f gender bending created by the
photographer Annie Leibovitz. Demi Moore appeared on the cover o f the August 1992 Vanity Fair,
naked but for a painted man’s suit. Inside the magazine were further pictures o f Moore, still wearing
the painted suit and leaning over the body o f a sleeping man, her husband, Bruce Willis. These pho­
tographs were considered innovative and challenging when they were first published, but if we juxta­
pose Leibovitzj, images o f M oore’s painted body with the gender art of Opie and Grace, we will be
reminded o f how fiercely l^eterosexual and gender invariant popular culture tends to be. M oore’s
body suit precisely fails to suggest even a mild representation o f female masculinity precisely because
it so anxiously emphasizes the femaleness o f her body. While Opie’s and Grace’s portraits often make
no effort to make femaleness visible, the Moore images represent femaleness as that which confers
femininity upon even the most conventional o f masculine facades (the suit). By contrast, the female
masculinity in the work of Opie and Grace offers a glimpse into worlds where alternative masculini­
ties make an art o f gender.

cfWr/' .''■/'rtfarpj

In this essay, I have tried to chart the implications o f gender policing and gender performances with­
in public spaces and to map them onto a utopian vision o f radically different bodies and sexualities.
By making such a move, I do not wish to suggest that we can magically wish into being a new set of
properly descriptive genders that would put pressure on the outm oded categories of male and
female. Nor do I mean to suggest that by simply desegregating public toilets, we will change the func­
tion o f dominant genders within heteropatriarchal cultures. However, it seems to me that there are
some very obvious spaces in which gender difference, as conventionally described, simply does not
work and that the breakdown o f gender as a signifying system in these arenas can be exploited to
hasten the proliferation of alternate gender regimes in other locations. From drag kings to spies with
gadgets, from butch bodies to FTM bodies, gender and sexuality and their technologies are already
excessively strange. It is simply a matter of keeping them that way.
A n earlier, and su bstan tially different, version o f
this essay, entitled “ T ech n o -H o m o : B athroom s,
B u tches, and Sex w ith Furniture,” w as p u b ­
lished in M elo dy C a lv ert and Jennifer Terry,
eds., Processed Lives (N e w York: R outledge,
' 997)-
1. T h e co n tin u ed v ia b ility o f the category
“ w o m a n ” has already been ch allenged in a
v a rie ty o f acad em ic locations: M o n iq u e W ittig,
m o st notably, argu ed that “ lesbians are not
w o m e n ” in her essay “ T h e Straight M ind ,” in
W ittig , T he Straight M in d and O ther Essays
(B o ston : Beacon Press, 1992), p. 121. W ittig
claim s that since lesbians are refusin g prim a ry
relations to m en , th ey ca n n o t o cc u p y the p o si­
tio n “ w om an.” In an o th er p hilo so ph ical ch al­
lenge to the ca te g ory “ w om an,” transgen der
p h ilo so p h er Jacob H ale uses W ittig ’s radical
claim to theorize th e po ssib ility o f gendered
e m b o d im en ts that exceed m ale a n d fem ale; see
H ale, “A re Lesbians W om en?” H ypatia 11, no. 2
(sp rin g 1996), pp. 94-121. Elsew here, C heshire
C a lh o u n suggests that the ca te g ory “ w o m a n ”
m ay actu ally “o perate as a lesbian closet” ; see
C a lh o u n , “ T h e G en d e r C loset: Lesbian
D isa p p ea ran ce u n d er the Sign ‘W om an,’”
Fem inist Studies 21, no. 1 (spring 1995),
PP. 7- 34-
2. Lee Ed elm an, “ T ea roo m s and Sym p ath y or,
T h e E pistem o lo gy o f the W ater Closet,” in
Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and
Cu ltural Theory (N e w York: R o u tledge, 1994),
p. 158.
3. Ibid., p. 159.
4. S o m e peo p le are cu rren tly w ritin g ab o u t the
so cial co n stru ctio n o f gen d er w ith in the o p er­
atio n o f sex-segregated bath ro o m s. Barbara
C ru ik sh an k , for ex am p le, is presently w o rkin g
o n a p ro ject, called “ F lushin g G ender: Public
Toilets an d P u blic Life,” that tries to expand
u p o n gender-based exclusio n in p u b lic toilets
to th in k ab o u t o th e r ex clu sio n ary p u b lic space.
5. F or an exam ination o f differin g n o tio n s o f
gen etic and b io lo g ica l gender, see, fo r exam ple,
A n n e Fau sto-Sterling, “ T h e Five Sexes: W h y
M ale an d Female A re N o t E nou gh,” The
Sciences 33 (M a rch -A p ril 1993), pp. 20-24.
6. M a rjo rie G arber, Vested Interests: Cross-
Dressing & Cultural A n xiety (N e w York:
R o u tledge, 1992), p. 47. O b vio u sly, G a rb er’s use
o f the term “ W aterloo” m akes a p u n o u t o f the
d ra m a o f b a th ro o m su rveillance. W h ile the
p u n is clever and even am u sing, it is also tro u ­
bling. T h e constant use o f pu ns th ro u g h o u t
th e b o o k has the overall effect o f m ak in g gen ­
der cro ssin g so u n d like a gam e o r at least trivi­
alizes the often life-o r-d ea th processes involved
in cro ss-id en tifica tion . T h is is n o t to say that
g en d er can never b e a “ lau gh in g m atter” and
m u st alw ays be treated seriously b u t o n ly to
q u estio n the use o f th e pu n as a theoretical
m eth o d .
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid. pp. 13-16.
9. A lth o u g h G arb er never u ses this precise term
in her text, it do es ap p ear in the index (ibid .,
p. 441). F o r a discu ssion o f th e “ third” in m ore
general term s, see ibid., pp. 9-13.
10. E delm an, “ T earoo m s and Sym pathy,” p. 160.
11. G arber, Vested Interests, p. 14.
12. Ibid.
13. Susan B ord o, “ R eading the M ale Body,”
M ichigan Quarterly Review 32, no. 4 (fall 1993),
p. 721.
14. Judith Butler, G ender Trouble: Fem inism and
the Subversion o f Identity (N e w York:
R ou tledge, 1990), p. 113.
15. R ichard F un g, “ L o o k in g fo r M y Penis: T h e
Eroticized A sian in G ay V id e o Porn,” in Bad
O b ject C h o ices, ed ., How D o I Look? Q ueer
Video and Film (Seattle: B ay Press, 1991),
pp. 145-68.
16. Sarah M urray, “ D rag o n Ladies, D raggin’ M en:
So m e Reflections o n G en der, D rag and
H o m o sexu al C o m m u n ities,” Public Culture 6,
no. 2 (w in ter 1994), p. 344.
17. Ibid., p. 356.
18. Ibid., p. 360.
19. D av id Pagel, “ C ath e rin e O p ie,” A rt Issues
(S ep tem b er-O c to b er 1994), p. 45.
20. A n n a M aria S m ith, “ T h e Fem inine Gaze:
Ph o to grap h er C a th e rin e O p ie D o cu m en ts
Lesbian D ad dy/B o y Su bcu lture,” T he Advocate,
N o vem ber 19,1991, p. 83. T h is is a great early
review o f O p ie ’s w o rk, alth o u g h the title “ T h e
F em inine G aze” seem s to insist o n the fem i­
n in ity o f all th in gs p ro d u ce d b y w om en. Let’s
face it, there is n o th ing fem in in e abo ut this
w ork.
21. Russell F ergu son, “ C a th e rin e O p ie w ith Russell
Ferguson” (in terview ), Index 1, no. 2 (A pril
199(5), p. 29.
22. M ich ael C o h e n , “ C ath e rin e O p ie— Regen
Projects,” Flash A r t 27, no. 179 (D ecem ber
1994), P- 98.
23. F erguson, “ C a th e rin e O p ie,” p. 30.
189