Invited to gaze: butch characters and the trope of mental illness in American postwar film

ABSTRACT

Due in part to the psychiatric model of homosexuality, American postwar films often depict butch masculinity through the trope of mental illness. Films utilize what disability theorist Elizabeth Donaldson calls the ‘psychiatric gaze,’ a technique in which the camera diagnoses a butch character as ‘sick’ or ‘crazy’ and invites the viewer to participate vicariously in this diagnosis. I establish in this article an historical context for a postwar psychiatric gaze, and analyze two examples of films that pathologize butch characters through this gaze: Young Man with a Horn (1949), and The Member of the Wedding (1952). Both films were released in close proximity to the publication of the original 1953 American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) which included homosexuality as a ‘sociopathic personality disturbance.’ Butch subjects were targets in the postwar era because of the ways they expressed ‘deviant’ gender and sexuality, and thus undermined both heteronormativity and cisnormativity. Butch therefore posed a unique threat to homophobic, ableist, and transphobic discourses. This analysis therefore engages an intersectional approach and utilizes feminist film theory, and recent work in disability and transgender studies in order to gain a precise understanding of the operation of this psychiatric gaze against butch subjectivity.

KEYWORDS:

• Butch
• female masculinity
• transmasculinity
• feminist theory
• transgender studies
• disability studies
• film studies
• post-1945 U.S

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. By using the term ‘butch,’ I do not intend to overlook the current proliferation of transmasculinities and female masculinities, including ‘transbutch,’ which describes a butch who opposes the traditional gender binary but wants to announce her lesbian-specific orientation. Some approach butch as a third gender category (see the work of S. Bear Bergman, such as Butch is a Noun (2006/2010)). I also acknowledge that butch has a fraught past. In debates of the late 1990s referred to at the time as the ‘butch/FTM border wars,’ some questioned the queerness of ‘transsexual’ identities. Jack Halberstam advocated a ‘transgender queer’ approach to masculine variability, arguing against a ‘continuum model’ that promotes the notion that ‘butch’ progresses toward ‘FTM.’ (Elliot, 2016, p. 48). Halberstam accused ‘FTM’s’ of homophobia because transsexuality was seen a ‘solution to gender deviance.’ (p. 50). This equaled a ‘valorization’ of transgender identities and politics over those of transsexuals (p. 51).

2. Here, I refer to the definition for ‘cisgenderism’ provided by Erica Lennon and Brian J. Mistler in the ‘Keywords’ issue of TSQ; ‘cisgender’ refers to the ‘cultural and systemic ideology that denies, denigrates, or pathologizes self-identified gender identities that do not align with assigned gender at birth as well as resulting behavior, expression, and community’ (2014, p. 63).

3. In this historical discussion, I follow the lead of Paisley Currah and Susan Stryker who argue that to call certain historical behaviors, patterns or embodiments ‘transgender’ would be anachronistic. However, elsewhere in this article, I do use the term ‘transgender’ critically in order to examine historical patterns that confirm the ‘utter contingency and fraught conditions of intelligibility of all embodied subjectivity’ (2014, p. 8).

4. I define ‘norms and normalization’ using the entry provided by Dean Spade and Craig Willse in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory. Based on the work of Michel Foucault, they define these terms to mean ‘both disciplinary subjection of individuals and their bodies and minds as well as biopolitical regulation of population dynamics’ (2016, p. 1). I define ‘transgender’ using Christan Williams’ entry in the ‘Keywords’ issue of TSQ: ‘an umbrella term for describing a range of gender-variant identities and communities within the United States [since] the early 1990s’ (2014, p. 232).