Quote from: Padma on January 08, 2013, 01:21:18 AM
For me, tomboy is just as much a queer identity as butch is - to me, it implies being female but not feminine (but not masculine either - and to be a woman without gender stereotypicality is very queer) whereas butch does have this aura in my mind of conscious masculinity. This is clearly not the definition the panel has in mind. This is really fascinating!
When I started following this and related conversations, it was not as someone who identifies as butch or tomboy, but someone attracted to at least many of those who do identify as such (and some who have been identified by others as such).
Initially, I had the mis-impression that "tomboy" was a term that others tended to use to describe someone, while "butch" was an identity that someone claimed for herself (or himself, since the word also has a slightly different meaning in gay male circles).
One of my earliest close female contacts was an aunt who was often described by family members as a tomboy... she was the youngest daughter of my paternal grandmother, and someone I was very close to as a child, since I was raised in early childhood almost as a youngest child of my grandmother, for the period when both my mother and father were both working outside the home a great deal. These were the years from my birth until roughly age 4, but we lived next door to my grandparents, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, until I was 7. I've always felt that the bond with my aunt, and some of the tangled up stuff that happened between us (she was old enough to babysit me, but the relationship often had more of a playmates character to it)... anyway, I've long assumed this had a lot to do with the attraction that I developed for tomboys and butches as time went on.
Much later, after college, in fact, I became very interested in the dialogue in lesbian circle about butch-femme in general. I would have been interesting during college, but I was at college at the height of lesbian attachment to almost lockstep androgyny and so much defensiveness about confusing butch-femme with some sort of imitation of heterosexist notions of gender, that the subject was generally avoided or ignored.
It seems to me that, much as the dialogue has revealed commonalities in how we define these terms, in the end, each person has their own definition. Seems to me that panel discussion is one of the more obvious examples of that... many different individuals, each with her own definition. Personally I think that's the way it should be. It only adds depth to the conversation... people are still going to have their own definitions, and the discussions generally serve to clarify, and give others opportunities to share their own perspectives and personal histories.
