Inclusive Space for a Cajun, Genderqueer Butch
As someone who continues to explore my gender as a Genderqueer Butch, I continue to look for spaces that are inclusive to all aspects of me. Those spaces have been few and far between for me. I’m Southern born and raised, originally from the suburbs of New Orleans, or N’awlins as we say back home. I grew up a tomboy. I dated boys and later men, and then came out as a lesbian at the age of 22. So many different times over my life trying to fit in with who I thought I should be, instead of who I actually was inside. Often times pushing and pulling with various points of masculinity and femininity in my life, coming to a sense of place, a home within the past few years to where I am today. Coming into Butch hasn’t been something that happened overnight. It also continues to be a struggle and an evolution for me.
I’ve attended and presented at conferences looking to find tribe and build community. I’ve attended transgender conferences and also attended other queer conferences as an ally to others. The spaces I’m hoping to create with Butch Voices are for self identified Butches, Studs, and Aggressives.
The organization and conference are centered in the same vision, to create space to allow for shared personal experiences to mingle with theory, support, and entertainment in an effort to evolve identities beyond just being visual stereotypes.
Announcing Butch Voices 2009
A conference for ALL self identified Butches, Studs, Aggressives and their Allies
We will be holding our first conference in 2009. In working towards meeting our mission, this conference seeks to bring together various identities who are often divided, by gender, sexuality, language, biology, race, age, size, ability, religion, geography, and class. We want to come together to honor and explore our diversity by creating a safe space to discuss, examine, and deconstruct our commonalities, our differences, and the places they intersect.
Check back — details are coming soon! Be sure to sign up for our email list for updates.
BUTCH Voices: The Organization
The identities of Butch, Stud and Aggressive are complicated beyond the concepts of femininity and masculinity, which are further limited by language to fully describe them. These identities and others along the same lines cannot be defined in this mission statement. Our identities are layered and influenced by race, class, ethnicity, access, ability, sexual boundaries, and age, as well as by our bodies. BUTCH Voices seeks to celebrate and honor our diversity by bonding together and building community across our perceived divisions due to identity.
Butch, Stud, and Aggressive have traditionally been assumed to be predominantly visual identities and not as often heard or understood. BUTCH Voices is committed to increasing positive visibility and providing support and space to those willing to share their voices through activism, performance, media, oral history, spoken word, art, photography, and other collaborative means. BUTCH Voices is intended to be by, for, and about self identified Butches, Studs, Aggressives, and their allies.
The identities surrounding Butch, Stud, and Aggressive have been used to describe various communities and intersecting groups, including — but by no means limited to — lesbian, same-gender-loving, queer, bisexual, homosexual, and heterosexual. Identities within this community can be female, male, intersex, transgender, genderqueer, gender neutral, genderf*cked, all of the above, and none of the above. It would be impossible to list all of the identities that may fit us as a tribe. Our identities are often labeled as butches, AG’s, drag kings, dykes, birls, tombois, studs, queers, bulldaggers, diesel dykes, bois, grrls, touch-me-nots, stone, soft, hard, fags, lesbians, boys, Daddies, men, myn, bois, womyn, women, wimmin, she-bois, he-shes, and many other terms.
BUTCH Voices is dedicated to creating a positive and accepting environment for those identifying along the spectrum of Butches, Studs, and Aggressives, in part by selecting programming that will respect our differences, yet create opportunities for discussion. We hope to bring together people of various identities and backgrounds, inclusive of our differences, to create safe space to discover, discuss, examine, and deconstruct our concept of self and others.
