Jack Halberstam is a masculine female, and recognizes his personal stake within his arguments. What is your relationship to female masculinity? How has that relationship affected your reading of Female Masculinity?

This topic asks the students to consolidate their understandings of Halberstam’s definitions and explanations of female masculinity, while also applying that understanding to their own experiences. This question is meant to stimulate discussion from various points of view: masculine females themselves, feminine females, feminine and masculine males, and all others will have different relationships to and experiences with the categories of both “masculine” and “female”.

Female Masculinity was published in 1998 and written in the early and mid 1990s. What parts of Halberstam’s arguments have become dated in the last 20 years? What parts are still relevant? How would his arguments have changed if Female Masculinity were written this year?

The goal of this topic is...