My butch career : a memoir / Esther Newton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Newton, Esther, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Lesbians--United States--Biography.

Lesbians.

Butch and femme (Lesbian culture).

United States.

College teachers--United States--Biography.

College teachers.

Butch and femme (Lesbian culture)--United States.

Newton, Esther.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

x, 274 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2018.

Summary:

During her difficult childhood, Esther Newton recalls that she "became an anti-girl, a girl refusenik, caught between genders," and that her "child body was a strong and capable instrument stuffed into the word 'girl.'" Later, in early adulthood, as she was on her way to becoming a trail-blazing figure in gay and lesbian studies, she "had already chosen higher education over the strongest passion in my life, my love for women, because the two seemed incompatible." In this book, Newton tells the compelling, disarming, and at times sexy story of her struggle to write, teach, and find love, all while coming to terms with her identity during a particularly intense time of homophobic persecution in the twentieth century. Newton recounts a series of traumas and conflicts, from being molested as a child to her failed attempts to live a "normal," straight life in high school and college. She discusses being denied tenure at Queens College - despite having written the foundational "Mother Camp" - and nearly again so at SUNY Purchase. With humor and grace, she describes the influence her father Saul's strong masculinity had on her, her introduction to middle-class gay life, and her love affairs - including one with a well-known abstract painter and another with a French academic she met on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Mexico and with whom she traveled throughout France and Switzerland. By age forty, where Newton's narrative ends, she began to achieve personal and scholarly stability in the company of the first politicized generation of out lesbian and gay scholars with whom she helped create gender and sexuality studies.

Contents:

A hard left fist

A writer's inheritance

Manhattan tomboy

California trauma

Baby butch

Anthropology of the closet

Lesbian feminist New York

The island of women

In-between dyke

Paris France

Butch revisited.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Newton, Esther. My butch career.

ISBN:

9781478001294

1478001291

OCLC:

1032288241