Research Catalog

Title

My butch career : a memoir / Esther Newton.

Author

Newton, Esther

Publication

• Durham : Duke University Press, 2018.
• ©2018

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 274 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

During her difficult childhood, Esther Newton recalls that she "became an anti-girl, a girl refusenik, caught between genders," and that her "child body was a strong and capable instrument stuffed into the word 'girl.'" Later, in early adulthood, as she was on her way to becoming a trail-blazing figure in gay and lesbian studies, she "had already chosen higher education over the strongest passion in my life, my love for women, because the two seemed incompatible." In this book, Newton tells the compelling, disarming, and at times sexy story of her struggle to write, teach, and find love, all while coming to terms with her identity during a particularly intense time of homophobic persecution in the twentieth century. Newton recounts a series of traumas and conflicts, from being molested as a child to her failed attempts to live a "normal," straight life in high school and college. She discusses being denied tenure at Queens College - despite having written the foundational "Mother Camp" - and nearly again so at SUNY Purchase. With humor and grace, she describes the influence her father Saul's strong masculinity had on her, her introduction to middle-class gay life, and her love affairs - including one with a well-known abstract painter and another with a French academic she met on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Mexico and with whom she traveled throughout France and Switzerland. By age forty, where Newton's narrative ends, she began to achieve personal and scholarly stability in the company of the first politicized generation of out lesbian and gay scholars with whom she helped create gender and sexuality studies.

Subjects

• College teachers
• Lesbians
• Butch and femme (Lesbian culture)
• College teachers > United States > Biography
• United States
• Autobiographies
• Lesbians > United States > Biography
• Newton, Esther
• Butch and femme (Lesbian culture) > United States
• Biography

Genre/Form

• Autobiographies.
• Biography.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-263) and index.

Contents

A hard left fist -- A writer's inheritance -- Manhattan tomboy -- California trauma -- Baby butch -- Anthropology of the closet -- Lesbian feminist New York -- The island of women -- In-between dyke -- Paris France -- Butch revisited.

Call Number

JFE 19-6665

ISBN

• 9781478001294
• 1478001291

LCCN

• 2018016914
• 40028849198

OCLC

1032288241

Author

Newton, Esther, author.

Title

My butch career : a memoir / Esther Newton.

Publisher

Durham : Duke University Press, 2018.

Copyright Date

©2018

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Creator/Contributor Characteristics

Gender group: Women

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-263) and index.

Other Form:

Online version: Newton, Esther. My butch career. Durham : Duke University Press, 2018 9781478002727 (DLC) 2018019936 (OCoLC)1026251283

Other Standard Identifier

40028849198

Research Call Number

JFE 19-6665