Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme [Paperback]

Ivan E. Coyote (Editor), Zena Sharman (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 3, 2011

Lambda Literary Award finalist

American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book

In the summer of 2009, butch writer and storyteller Ivan Coyote and gender researcher and femme dynamo Zena Sharman wrote down a wish-list of their favourite queer authors; they wanted to continue and expand the butch-femme conversation. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme. The stories in these pages resist simple definitions. The people in these stories defy reductive stereotypes and inflexible categories. The pages in this book describe the lives of an incredible diversity of people whose hearts also pounded for some reason the first time they read or heard the words "butch" or "femme."

Contributors such as Jewelle Gomez (The Gilda Stories), Thea Hillman (Intersex), S. Bear Bergman (Butch is a Noun), Chandra Mayor (All the Pretty Girls), Amber Dawn (Sub Rosa), Anna Camilleri (Brazen Femme), Debra Anderson (Code White), Anne Fleming (Anomaly), Michael V. Smith (Cumberland), and Zoe Whittall (Bottle Rocket Hearts) explore the parameters, history, and power of a multitude of butch and femme realities. It's a raucous, insightful, sexy, and sometimes dangerous look at what the words butch and femme can mean in today’s ever-shifting gender landscape, with one eye on the past and the other on what is to come.

Includes a foreword by Joan Nestle, renowned femme author and editor of The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, a landmark anthology originally published in 1992.

Ivan E. Coyote is the author of seven books (including the novel Bow Grip, an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book) and a long-time muser on the trappings of the two-party gender system.

Zena Sharman is the assistant director of Canada's national Institute of Gender and Health.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Reading Persistence is like attending a dinner party with people you never got the chance to talk to before—fascinating, brave, insightful people—some of whom are very well known and others are simply the people you want to get to know. All of them talk frankly and with genuine courage about what it means to live outside the norms of society." —Dorothy Allison

"The rowdy, queer contributors to Persistence address the immediate, often loaded, topic of butch-femme from every angle, confirming once again just how central this label-and-experience is to queer history. Persistence excels in the extreme sport of queer truth-telling, thanks to its ambitious editors Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman. The book feels fresh and radical throughout." —Lambda Literary

"A new collection of essays exploring the funny, messy, confusing, contradictory, liberating, confining, wet wild ride of gender from a powerhouse cross-section of the queer world’s smartest and sexiest writers, poets, musicians, activists and scholars." —Autostraddle

"Touching on a wide range of colors in the prism of butch and femme sexuality and identity, this compilation is indispensable to the lesbian community as an emblem of how far the female gay community has come, and in what direction their mighty assembly is headed." —Bay Area Reporter

"A collection of pieces that refutes the idea that butch and femme identities are outdated, and asserts the timelessness and importance of their vibrancy and complexity." —Bitch

About the Author

Ivan E. Coyote: Ivan E. Coyote is the author of six books, including the award-winning novel Bow Grip and the story collections The Slow Fix and Missed Her; Ivan has also released two spoken-word CDs and four short films. A renowned storyteller, Ivan frequently performs live across Canada and the US.

Zena Sharman: Zena Sharman is a queer femme who works in gender and health research and is in the midst of completing her PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press (May 3, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1551523973
• ISBN-13: 978-1551523972
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #633,108 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous! October 15, 2011

By wildflowerboy

Format:Paperback

I really had a great time reading this anthology. The essays are smart, thought-provoking, sexy, groundbreaking, and very well written. Certainly if you're interested in gender politics and LGBT issues, you will want this in your personal library. I can't tell you how refreshing it was to read a book that challenges sexual orientation and gender dichotomies that wasn't written in elitist postmodern academic jargon. Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick could learn a thing or two from this excellent book which proves that queer theory doesn't have to be dry or boring. In fact, it can be fun and exciting!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Contemporary Gender Revolutionaries February 6, 2012

By Story Circle Book Reviews

Format:Paperback

In the summer of 2009, Ivan E. Coyote and her co-editor, Zena Sharman, set out to collect stories by their favorite queer authors. The result is Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, an edgy, sexy and poignant mix of genre, form and gender that defies labeling. The book's contributors have written fiction, essays complete with source references and poetry. It is the personal stories that are my favorites: particularly those of Ivan E. Coyote, Zena Sharman, Anne Fleming and Rae Spoon.

Spoon's "Femme Cowboy" is a sensitively written piece that describes his upbringing as a girl "in a fundamentalist Christian home in Alberta" and coming out as trans in Vancouver in 2001. Spoon hopes "that the space for diversity will continue to open up" and knows "that we are all changing combinations of many things, with a fluidity that is very human."(Although Rae Spoon's bio uses the pronoun "he," more recently I've seen the use of "they" as the "transgendered indie-folk musician's" pronoun of choice.)

What I have realized from reading the book is the importance of self-identification. Essential to our well-being is not the label given to us by someone else but the name we give ourselves.

Coyote and Sharman found words for who they are--butch and femme--when they read Joan Nestle's The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader published in 1992. She wrote the foreword to Coyote's and Sharman's collection. At seventy and as a self-defined '50s bar lesbian, Nestle continues to be "an activist, a theorist, and a femme."

Zena Sharman, "a gender researcher and femme dynamo," writes in "Looking Straight at You" about the privilege that comes with passing as straight: "Sometimes being queer while looking straight is about blending in, which has the potential to be a powerful and subversive act. You find out who your allies and your enemies are pretty quickly when they assume you're 'one of us' (instead of 'one of them')."

"Femme invisibility or passing can help keep you and your loves ones safe," Sharman points out. She gives the example of being the one to speak to two police officers when they thought a "raucous Pride party" might get out of control.

As Anne Fleming writes in "A Dad Called Mum": ...butch is a self-definition." At the end of her personal essay she writes: "...butch is not a faked or pretended masculinity but a distinct masculinity, with its own fluidity and give, depending on who's inhabiting it."

As for the word "butch," Nairne Holtz in her essay, "Slide Rules," says "today in the queer community we are more likely to hear the terms 'bois' and 'transmen.'

To offer some insight on terms, Jeanne Cordova includes a chart with her essay. It reveals a "continuum of masculinity" and "visually explains the new politics of butch."

Reading the bios of the contributors is as fascinating as their stories. They do much good work in the world. Anna Camilleri is engaged in a creative writing residency with students at the Triangle Program, Canada's only alternative high school for LGBTQ youth. Miriam Zoila Perez is a reproductive justice activist and a trained doula. Stacy Milbern pours all of her time into "radical disability organizing."

Books like this one save lives in that the life experiences of the various contributors are saved and the lives of people who read the book are saved. Literally, especially in the case of queer youth, it's possible they have found the courage to live when they find out they're not alone. There is someone else in the world just like them.

by Mary Ann Moore
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars breaking ground again... July 5, 2011

By Lady Hilary

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This post-modern peek into a sub culture of a sub culture direct from the front lines is refreshing, it's predecessor The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader broke the ground of it's time, may Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme do the same for this and the next generations of of the butch/femme paradigm introducing more trans awareness and great sexy stories.