A quest for authenticity: contemporary butch gender

Sex Roles: A Journal of Research,  May, 2004  by Heidi M. Levitt,  Katherine R. Hiestand

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The process of consensus between researchers strengthens the claim to credibility. The researchers met weekly for a period of 1 year while the analysis of this project was underway in order to discuss the generation of categories and the labeling of concepts. The researchers offered different perspectives to this process of analysis; one as a femme-identified lesbian who had lived in the community in question and interviewed the women, and the other as a butch-identified lesbian who brought her lived gender experience to the process of analysis.

After the model was complete, the first author returned to the community and met with three women there (one butch-identified participant, one femme-identified, and one androgynous-identified woman) in order to seek feedback on the results of the present study, as well as those of a corresponding study on femme identity (Levitt et al., 2003). The three women were asked to give their impressions of how well the results of the two studies captured the unique identities of "femme" and "butch" women. Although the femme and androgynous women did not share the internal experience of being butch, they had both engaged in the process of striving to understand butch identity within their relationships and community interactions (and, indeed, discussion of gender identities was common throughout the community). Although some grounded theory researchers have argued that it is unnecessary to "check" findings with others as the results reflect the hermeneutic understanding of the data from the perspective of the researcher who has sole access to all reports (see Rennie, 2000), the convergence of the four different vantage points allowed for further strengthening of the credibility of the findings. The three women strongly endorsed both models. The butch consultant, who was a participant in the present study, responded to the core category by saying that, although she had not herself articulated authenticity as the driving force behind being butch, the conceptualization resonated with her past experiences and helped her to articulate her sense of her gender.

RESULTS

Innate-Choice Debates: An Essential Experience

Most respondents strongly believed that their lesbianism was entirely innate (see Table I). Although there were some participants who expressed some uncertainty about whether socialization contributed to their lesbian orientation, none felt that being a lesbian was a choice. All respondents agreed even more vociferously that being butch is an essential aspect of who they are. None of the women had ever decided to be butch, rather it was described as simply being themselves: "I've always been butch, [although] it's like I didn't have that word until I came into the gay community. I'd always been attracted to femmey girls ... [I knew] from when I was 4" (P-09). Only one of the 12 participants described trying to become romantically or sexually involved with men, and this brief experience occurred only after she had already claimed a lesbian identity as the conscious result of a spiritual quest to broaden her sense of self. For all participants, being butch was experienced as an unmalleable aspect of self, so essential that it even preceded their awareness of that label.