If you know me or my partner Avery, you will know our many dissatisfactions with Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues and the odd online culture that has grown up around it. I will not waste space on rehashing them again here - though this article by Lou Cornum is one I return to often, and is worth it for far more than just their insightful commentary on Feinberg’s settler communism.
It is worth pausing, however, to consider how Feinberg came to assume the importance ze now possesses. Despite never working with a major publisher, nor possessing the funds for marketing campaigns for hir books, hir work is a key touchstone in conversations about trans liberation, Marxism, and radical perspectives on “the LGBT+ movement” as such. If this engagement is not always particularly deep - there are very few questions to which “read Stone Butch Blues!” is an answer - it is certainly wide, perhaps wider than nearly any other writer in this context.
Some of this is, undoubtedly, down to the lack of accessible materials on LGBT+ history. As an anecdotal example, I would say the next most recommended book on the butch/femme bar scene is Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, which is out of print and hard to find as a pdf.[1] By contrast, all of Feinberg’s work is available for free online, and by writing a novel that encapsulates hir political programme in a easily digestible (if sentimental) narrative style, ze has provided a valuable resource in a scarcely populated field. It is likely that much of the superficiality of popular reading of the work is down to precisely the lack of wider material that might complement or contrast with Feinberg’s writing.
However, in my cynicism, I think I have a tendency to overlook that for Feinberg, hir writing was always situated in wider networks of organising ze actively sought out and cultivated. You will find interviews with Feinberg in nearly any magazine or journal of LGBT+ activism in the 90s that would have hir; ze was a familiar face at picket lines and demonstrations against US imperialism; and ze made a name for hirself in networks of trans prisoners, especially Black trans women, for hir attention to their cases. (Feinberg hints at this hirself in the afterword when ze notes that copies of Stone Butch Blues had been handed from cell to cell). One might - and should - criticise some of these networks of organising. The Workers World Party is by no means an exemplary communist organisation, and Feinberg’s understanding of trade unionism, as expressed in SBB and elsewhere, is distinctly economist. But this model of work puts contemporary conversations about trans literature in a harsh light. Every new chapbook or novel is radical, if your points of comparison are cis literature; if you are bored of classifying new releases by their ‘assimilation’ to or ‘subversion’ of the pressures of cis readership, less so. But even the most talented of trans writers cannot ignore these pressures if they seek to be published and reviewed by the publishing industry as it actually exists.
Lenin observed of the German left Communists that they loved to praise the Bolsheviks, but quickly added that he would prefer they praised the Bolsheviks less and imitated them more.
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[1] Though it’s a useful source, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers is also a bad book.