‘Tiny bisexual women are realising masculinity doesn’t have to be attached to men’, Chloe Petts observes in a sly aside, and as a bit of a geezer, she’s clearly delighted. And it’s not just the tiny bisexual women: due in part to the work of stand-ups like Petts, there’s an increasingly widespread awareness of the possibility of de-coupling masculinity from men. Beyond masculinity, stand-up is also a key platform for alternative, non-binary identities, the art form playing a crucial part in developing the ‘social recognizability and intelligibility’ of the full spectrum of gender variance (Gardiner, 618).
Jack Halberstam’s notion of ‘female masculinity’, or the female performance of identities and actions considered masculine, is helpful here. Halberstam argues that when performed by women, masculinity is denaturalised – useful when ‘men derive enormous power from assuming and confirming the nonperformative nature of masculinity’ (234). Whereas femininity is often presented as a matter of costume, ‘masculinity manifests as realism or as body’ (258); ‘femininity reeks of the artificial’; ‘masculinity “just is”‘ (234). In Petts’ hands, masculinity is shown to be equally performative. In her tales of school dominance, for example, there is a sense she is simultaneously mocking both her own masculinity and masculinity in general: the empty performance of power (striding around as head girl, with the deputy head girl doing all the actual work), the posturing (so much finger clicking, she’s now got arthritis in one finger). Petts describes swaggering up to the front of the assembly hall with ‘the rest of the leadership team’ (a phrase delivered with beautiful complacency), then proceeding to spend the whole assembly covertly making rude gestures at her friends, gestures which are laughably basic, but underwritten by an absurd self-seriousness.
These scenes from adolescence are characteristic of Petts’ world building, establishing a sense of rooted assurance – a largely happy ‘child-geezer’ surrounded by acceptance, even if the language wasn’t always there to fully articulate her identity. In the swagger and the relish of her masculinity, there’s a confidence and a comfort that’s at one with Halberstam’s revisionist aims in fortifying the idea of female masculinity – honouring it as a valid identity position rather than ‘as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment’ (9). But the mockery is important, too, puncturing the cultural practices of male embodiment that tend to be mythologised by instead satirising the unjustified confidence and deluded self-importance that attends male privilege. Her masculine identification means that Petts’ self-satire is also a satire of masculinity – which makes for an interesting take on self-deprecation, a mode that can be problematic for female comedians as they seek to accommodate the perceptions of others; a means to ‘recognise (and neutralise) audience resistance’ (Russell). Here it’s both the more conventional accommodation and a subtly subversive critique of the dominant forms of masculinity.
Some suggest that Halberstam valorises masculinity at the cost of other alternatives – when defending a woman’s impulse to ‘get in touch with her masculinity’, for example, she equates it rather uncritically as the pursuit of ‘skill, strength, speed, physical dominance, uninhibited use of space and motion’ (cited in Gardiner, 609). ‘Thus’, Judith Gardiner argues, ‘the revisionary concept continues a broader devaluation of femininities, and reinforces the cultural failure to develop alternative, nonbinary gendered identities … that are not validated on the old masculine model’ (610). Petts’ subtle satire (along with other, more overtly mocking material, about men’s chat at football matches – motorway services largely – and their behaviour at weddings – overgrown children, essentially), effectively undermines any sense of reverence.
Anxiety about ‘a broader devaluation of femininities’ as well as the ‘correct’ alignment of identities is very much a live issue, and Petts’ relaxed identification as a ‘masculine lesbian’ is important in publicly staking out a position that might otherwise feel fraught. In arguing for the social utility of such delineation, the example of another comedian, Robby Hoffman, offers some support. Like Petts, Hoffman also identifies as a masculine lesbian and uses she/her pronouns, but she’s distinctive in having had top surgery – and is very vocal about it. The usefulness of her public visibility is attested to by the many social media comments which express gratitude for the affirmation offered by her plain speaking. One online exchange is particularly interesting: a reddit thread initiated by a user identifying as a masculine lesbian and who wants top surgery, but worries that it’s strictly the domain of those who identify as male or non-binary. More particularly, she’s concerned that if ‘I say I’m a woman, get top surgery, then take my shirt off in public I’m “making a statement” about other women’s bodies … I’d be basically saying “they have breasts so they have to cover up, but I can show my chest because I don’t have them anymore”‘. The anxiety is that her action would belittle conventional feminine corporeality, situating shame in the torso with breasts, and freedom from shame in the torso without. In response, another user cites Hoffman as a possible model: ‘Google the comedian Robby Hoffman, she/her pronouns, top surgery, goes shirtless often’. It’s a good call: shame is not something Hoffman does. She also doesn’t do circumspect: in an interview (which she does largely shirtless), she shrugs, ‘I’m frankensteining my body in a way that I like’, acknowledging that others might not like the language, but blithely unconcerned.
The significance of comedians publicly articulating identity positions is critical in the development of the ‘social recognizability and intelligibility’ of the full spectrum of gender variance (Gardiner 618). This also extends to the ‘alternative, nonbinary gendered identities’ that Gardiner worries are being ignored. Hannah Gadsby, Sarah Keyworth, Mae Martin, and Rachel WD and Ruby Clyde of the duo Shelf are just a few of the non-binary comedians who are currently on the contemporary scene, all of whom are expressing their individual identities and corporalities, bringing crucial specificity to a subject that is too often theoretical or abstract.
References:
Crowfiee and NailSuspicious3680 (2024) ‘Question for butches who got top surgery but are read as women and/or identify as women’, reddit, February.
https://www.reddit.com/r/butchlesbians/comments/1aq9n5o/question_for_butches_who_got_top_surgery_but_are/
Gardiner, Judith Kegan (2012) ‘Female Masculinity and Phallic Women— Unruly Concepts’, Feminist Studies, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 597-624
Halberstam Jack (1998) Female Masculinity, Duke University Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/open/detail.action?docID=3007808.
Hoffman, Robby (2023) “Is Top Surgery Right for You? w/ Robby Hoffman” Annie Wood Podcast Ep. 20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydDxOO6-aYo
Petts, Chloe (2024), How You See Me, How You Don’t, Pleasance, August. [Pleasance, Edinburgh. 15 August].
Russell, Danielle (2002), ‘Self-deprecatory Humour and the Female Comic: Self-destruction or Comedic Construction?’ Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory & Culture, 2.1. https://journals.lib.sfu.ca/index.php/thirdspace/article/view/d_russell/3117
Humour in the Arts 