The other night I had the (dis)pleasure of being in the company of 5 of Kingston's butchest young butches for about an hour. If butchness were a virus my feeble, effete frame would be catatonic just from exposure. They were that serious.
The occasion was closing time at one of Kingston's popular entertainment spots frequented by the LGBT community and as fate would have it I felt the urge to put on my anthropologist hat (I wear several hats, crowns, and tiaras these days).
What I witnessed was fascinating to me, but I imagine it would have also been highly disturbing to the uninitiated. These psuedo-men were parroting the lingo, posture, and attitude of the most misogynistic dancehall personas. They loudly and quite explicitly described their sexual exploits, physical discipline of their girlfriends, knife fights with rivals, and personal philosophies on how girls think and how ought to be treated.
It was obvious to me that they (as women ironically) had not escaped the hegemony of Jamaican manhood but further, that the masculine role models they were emulating were the very misogynistic and homophobic dancehall artists that call fire and brimstone on their heads and would likely justify corrective rape as just recompense for their abandonment of the feminine gift.
Anyway, long story short they were disgustingly vulgar, crude, disrespectful, and I felt ashamed that the quality they held most sacred and did their best to portray was one that is innate to me as a male.
I felt like I was in a house with trick mirrors that exaggerate your worst features.
This caricatured impression of gender as adopted by the opposite sex is not unique to lesbians. Gay men have long been accused of adopting the most negative aspects of femininity and holding them as identifying qualities for male homosexuality.
The sassy queen typifies the gay stereotype.
This was a necessary experience for me in order to put my own gender identity in context and I expect further discourse on this topic in the weeks and months to come.
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