The Temporal and Working-Class Butch: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home on Stage

Abstract From its origins as a slur for masculine presenting women and its reclamation in the lesbian working-class bars of the US to its current association with being an old-fashioned idea of lesbianism and a sticky identifier in the “gender wars,” butch has become a word of multiple meanings and uses within and without the LGBTQ+ community. The starting point of this article asks where all the butches are in contemporary theatre. For a gender and sexuality category that is seemingly so recognisable and visible in the public space, there appear to be few examples of representations of butch people in performance. Nevertheless, this contribution contends that the anachronistic, invisible, and indefinable butch holds the potential to be a figure that defies assimilation into, and the reproduction of, oppressive power structures. By utilising Jack Halberstam’s notion of the butch as a bodily catachresis, I argue that the butch is unrepresentable and illegible and that it is therein that their potential as a disrupter lies. In particular, I argue that butch is also a specifically working-class term. I look to the musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s 2006 graphic novel Fun Home and assert that in this example, butches are presented as bodies that cut across class boundaries and refuse a comfortable definition. In these butch presentations, gender, sexuality, and identities collide as a much-needed antidote to the current wave of conservative legislation against queer and trans bodies.