Masculinity, Rendered Lesbian

A foundational text in queer studies and masculinities is “Female Masculinity” by Jack Halberstam, a professor of gender studies and English at Columbia University and a scholar of queer philosophy. “Female Masculinity,” written in 1998, is a bit outdated now in terms of how we talk about things — terminology, stereotypes, all of it — but I love it anyway.

The book pushes back against the idea that masculinity naturally belongs to men by showing how forms of masculinity have long existed in bodies that are not male and are often dismissed, misread, or made invisible. There’s a phrase that Halberstam briefly mentions deep into the introduction — without giving it much focus — that stuck with me: “rendering the body lesbian.” By “rendering the body lesbian,” Halberstam names the process by which a body becomes legible as lesbian not through a change in anatomy, but through changes in perception, desire, gender expression, and context. It highlights how lesbian identities are socially produced and often misread, revealing the instability of the categories we use to align gender, sexuality, and bodies. This is the phrase that will ground the rest of this piece. 

I was inspired to write this after reading Shane Dillon ’26’s article from last week about life among queer men at Amherst. Reading his reflection helped me articulate something I’ve been feeling as a lesbian on this campus. Even though our experiences aren’t identical, it helped me name the particular longing that can come with being queer at Amherst, that lingers even in a place that is supposed to be accepting.

Masculinity Beyond Men

There are a lot of misconceptions about what being a lesbian is, and about queerness more generally. Some are just misunderstandings, some are stereotypes, and some are genuinely harmful. In order to function, a heteronormative society needs everyone to be easily readable, to fit neatly into categories. But queerness is less of a fixed identity and more an ongoing process of discovering oneself outside of those constraints.

“Rendering the body lesbian” isn’t an obvious or stable thing — it’s shaped through perception, context, and relation. It is a way of being that leaves room for instability, for contradiction, for the possibility that who you are can’t be fully separated from how you’re read, even when that reading feels incomplete or just flat-out wrong. This misreading happens to me more often than I’d like.

It is important to lay out the direct and undeniable connection between lesbianism and masculinity. This relationship is often overlooked or misunderstood, and there is way more nuance to this conversation than I can fit into this one article. Lesbians are not inherently masculine, but queerness opens up space to inhabit masculinity in ways that aren’t tied to being a man. To many, being a lesbian can act as a way to claim access to forms of power, expression, and aesthetic traditionally coded as masculine, without having to occupy a male body. Masculinity is not exclusive to men — it’s a set of behaviors, gestures, and possibilities that can live in women, nonbinary people, and especially in lesbians who refuse to be read only through heteronormative lenses. 

Being a lesbian makes the relationship with masculinity both visible and necessary: It’s a way of saying, “I can take up space, I can assert myself, I can move through the world with authority,” while simultaneously refusing to erase one’s womanhood. It’s messy, it’s unstable, and it’s beautiful — a constant negotiation that reveals just how socially constructed both gender and sexuality are.

Learning Masculinity in My Own Body

For a while, I thought I might be transgender, largely because I had internalized the idea that the only way to meaningfully access masculinity was to stop being a woman. I had conflated expressions of gender — masculinity, authority, assertiveness — with the need to reclassify myself entirely, as if wanting those things required a different gender label. Eventually, I realized that what I was reaching for wasn’t a different gender so much as a different relationship to masculinity. What I wanted, and still want, is access to masculinity without giving up my attachment to womanhood. This  tension hasn’t resolved so much as settled into the background of how I move through the world. It now shows as a set of small negotiations like how I dress, how I speak, how I imagine myself in relation to other people, and how I try, sometimes unsuccessfully, to make those things cohere.

I use she/they pronouns, but almost no one ever uses “they” to refer to me, which is fine (or at least I have come to terms with it), but also revealing, because it seems to say less about who I am than how I’m read. I come across as feminine: I have longer hair, I dress feminine, I’m not especially androgynous, and so my gender often gets flattened into something more immediately legible, something that can be processed quickly without much thought. 

In heteronormative spaces, I am a woman. I am attached to my womanhood and relate deeply to the female experience — and I also don’t want to have to explain my identity. In queer spaces, I might characterize myself as genderqueer or even nonbinary, though I don’t really know for sure, and I sometimes wonder if I’m reaching for language that doesn’t fully fit me. And I’m sure my understanding of myself will continue to evolve as I grow queerer and continue learning. But I also don’t know if I need words to describe myself — I worry about falling into the heteronormative trap of feeling the need to define and categorize everyone, but that’s a conversation for a different article.

Back to my original discussion: What feels most stable is my sexuality. My attachment to being a lesbian feels much more grounded than the language I reach for to describe my gender. Lesbian — maybe quite obviously — refers to who I am attracted to. Increasingly, though, I think of it as something closer to structure, or orientation in a broader sense, shaping how I understand myself in relation to other people and to my own body. It organizes things — desire, yes, but also recognition, affinity, even the kinds of futures I can imagine for myself. Sometimes the clearest way I can put it is that my gender, in some sense, is lesbian — not because it replaces gender, but because it refracts it, pulling womanhood slightly off-center, away from its conventional form.

“Lesbian” feels more stable to me than “woman,” or even “nonbinary.” It’s not that I reject womanhood entirely, but that my attachment to it feels altered, shaped by a relationship to desire and to other people that doesn’t fit neatly within its traditional boundaries. 

Being a Lesbian at Amherst

This is part of why being a lesbian at Amherst feels so difficult to pin down. From the outside, and before I came here, it seemed like Amherst was a queer haven — that everyone was gay and woke and blue-haired. I think it must be due in part to its proximity to historically women’s colleges like Smith College and Mount Holyoke College. But that assumption is also quite counterintuitive, because Amherst is historically a men’s college, and there are remnants of masculinity baked into it. Maybe it’s both. Smith and Mount Holyoke, I feel, carry the reputation of having many lesbians, or at least many people who date women. When I came to Amherst, I folded that into my image of the place, as though queerness naturally radiates across the Five College Consortium, and anyone who arrives should be able to tap into it effortlessly. And believe me, I have. There’s an assumption that the college itself functions as an incubator of queer life, that stepping onto campus means stepping into an immediate network of shared experience and understanding.

But in practice, it doesn’t always feel that way. Amherst does have some resources — the Queer Resource Center, student organizations, events, and social spaces — and I’ve made connections with queer classmates whose presence is affirming and inspiring. And yet, all of this feels dispersed, spread across various corners of campus life rather than concentrated in a single, easily navigable community. In my mind, I imagined arriving and immediately finding a tight-knit friend group made entirely of queer people — people whose experiences would reflect my own, whose company would make the challenges of navigating queerness feel less isolating. That wasn’t how it happened.

I wrote about this idea last fall in my first ever article in The Student called “Palatable Queerness,” in which I reflected on the comfort of early friendships and the absence of shared queerness, but also on queerness as inseparable from resistance — a refusal to conform to heteronormative structures, a challenge to the ways the world expects bodies and identities to align. It’s not that there are no queer people at Amherst, and it’s not that I feel unsafe. In many ways, I feel more supported here than at home. I can talk openly about being a lesbian and can tell people I have a partner without fear. Still, the broader culture remains overwhelmingly straight — not overtly hostile, but normative in a way that shapes what feels visible, ordinary, and worthy of explanation. This tension, subtle but persistent, is part of what makes navigating queerness here both exhilarating and complicated.

But, there will be moments where Amherst’s cover of openness slips that I will never forget. I will never forget here at Amherst when I was told to be a gynecologist if I like the vagina so much. Or when I had a man follow me down North Pleasant Street yelling “d*ke” at me. Or when someone tells me they will pray the gay away (yes, someone really said that). Or when someone insists that I must be “confused” because I like women. Or when a supposed friend jokes that I must secretly want men or how my sexuality is fluid. Or when people ask invasive questions about my sex life. Or when someone said “you’re so brave for being a lesbian,” as if existing in my body is an act of courage. 

None of these experiences define my time at Amherst, but together they layer into a persistent awareness that shapes my posture, my humor, my stories, and even the way I carry myself.

Learning Queer Joy from “Stone Butch Blues”

Despite all of these experiences and the many more that I likely will have, being a lesbian is not a burden. If you know anything about queer literature, you know about “Stone Butch Blues,” which is one of my favorite novels ever. There are such intense moments of struggle, pain, and violence in it that will stay with me forever. But I think what stayed with me the most were moments of joy that are juxtaposed with violence. That joy is never simple or permanent. It exists because people make it for one another, often in spaces that were never designed with them in mind. If you’ve read it, you probably know what I mean. 

That precarious kind of joy feels deeply familiar at Amherst. Though queer joy here, unfortunately to my dismay, does not look like a grand, unified community. Like in “Stone Butch Blues,” the joy doesn’t come because the environment is fully welcoming, but because queer people keep finding one another anyway. I have been lucky to experience the most affirming, most supportive people here, and have the most deeply affirming experiences both on campus and off, but being queer at Amherst means holding those moments alongside everything else: the straightness that shapes classrooms and social life, the casual assumptions people make, and many more.

There is such joy embedded in the queer experience, and the search for joy is a vital part of queerness. And that, I think, is the core of what it means to inhabit a queer life — to live with awareness of our struggles, the misunderstandings, the assumptions, and the occasional violence, while also staying attuned to the moments that affirm who we are.