Summary

Halberstam’s fourth chapter focuses on the importance of talking about sexual practices and how those practices can influence and be influenced by female masculinities. As such, Halberstam chooses to focus on the identity of the “stone butch”: a masculine woman who does not allow her sexual partners to pleasure her.

In the section “Talking Sex,” Halberstam introduces the issues that have surrounded scholarly work surrounding sex, most notably a distinct lack of any analytical discourse. Sex is influenced by “intricate webs of racial, class, and gendered identities,” and so untangling one specific aspect of sexual practice is difficult (116). Halberstam then presents and supports Esther Newton and Shirley Walton’s solution from “The Misunderstanding”: Newton, Walton, and Halberstam argue that “more precise sexual vocabularies” would solve the problems surrounding the analytical study of sex, as well as...