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

Holdings

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

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

Genre/Form

• Autobiographies.
• Biographies.

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.

ISBN

• 9781478001294
• 1478001291
• 9781478008330
• 0147800838
• 9781478002727 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

• 2018016914
• 40028849198

OCLC

• on1032288241
• 1032288241
• SCSB-9693317

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries