#bookbat

A little tidbit of knowledge for all the black sapphics who may come across my blog

Source: Dagger: On Butch Women ( Edited by Lily Burana, Roxxie and Linnea Due )

Passage: The Myth and Tradition of the Black Bulldagger by SDiane A Bogus (pg 29-36 in the physical copy, pgs 30-37 on the pdf)

Author and Editor, Chandra Mayor

Harrowhark has discourse surrounding if she’s femme, butch or ‘a secret third thing’ (this is how I’ve seen it phrased) and a lot of it is bringing in the butchfemme community to have convos about butch/femme gender expression and the roles of butch and femme in the community

Gideon is a lot of people’s favorite fictional butch right next to Vi (Legaue of Legends/Arcane)

Yall are horn dogs

YALL LOVE TORTURING YOURSELVES HUH

“ During the last twenty to thirty years discussions about the gender and sexual preferences of the younger talented tenth of the Harlem Renaissance — 1924 to early 1930s — artist, performers, writers, and singers have challenged the heteronormal perception of this elite group. There is one blues singer whose reputation and image appear in discussions of literary artist from this period and in a very public way embody an insurgent encounter to conventional gender identities. Blues Cabaret singer, Gladys Bentley, who Hughes refers to in the opening epigraph, gained popularity with her spirited lyrical renditions of popular melodies that she often preformed in masculine attire. The colloquial term used for some Negro, masculine, women was bulldagger. At that time ‘bulldagger’ was not a pejorative term in the black community ; they ‘…are associated with physical strength, sexual prowess, emotional reserve, and butch chivalry. The term has roots in African American communities of the early twentieth century, especially with 1920s Harlem where sexual and gender mores were more flexible.

According to Jeanne Flash Gray, ‘who participated in Harlem gay life in the late 1930s and 1940s,… ‘There were many places run by and for Black Lesbians and Gay Men, when we were still Bull Daggers and Faggots and only whites were lesbians and homosexuals’ (qtd. in E.Garber 1989, 331) ”

Source: How Does a Bulldagger Get Out of the Footnote? or Gladys Bentley’s Blues from ninepatch: A Creative Journal for Women & Gender Studies Vol, Iss 1, Article 31

Part 1 of Waiting for No Man: Bisexual Femme Subjectivity and Cultural Repudiation by Clare Hemmings

Source: Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender Edited By Sally R Munt