[ceramicdyke]

i can’t sleep so i’m making an intro post!

☆ 25

★ delicate stone butch, a kind-of woman

☆ top surgery 2/2025, covid conscious 😷

★ mostly dyke posting, art/media i appreciate, VERY occasionally myself (tagged #me me me). most of my posts are queued.

☆ i love queer history/theory & lesbian imagery (#lesbian archive), being a mediocre potter, and weed.

★ dms open to mutuals, asks open to all!

i block generously. put ur age somewhere.

[thededfa]

Listen, maybe I can’t change the world, but I can pass eggs over the fence to my neighbor to save them a few dollars. I can cross the street and fix another neighbor’s cabinets. I can send my kid to the house next door with a can of tomato sauce they need and they’ll come back with a box of cocoa powder they weren’t going to use. We can leave our old furniture at the curb and one of us will drive by and pick it up to fix and sell or keep. I’ll plant a garden since I have the space and time and I’ll share what I can and I’ll get calls from someone else asking if I can use a crate of oranges.

I may not be able to change the world but I can do something

[delicate-viscera]

once you start noticing how fatphobic everyone and everything is, there will never be a moment you're not filled with rage

[love-ardour-anarchism]

This post is NOT safe for radfems, transandrophobes, transmisogynists and wannabe identity and label mall-cops.

[b1rd1e]

tmi doesn't exist to me. I love information

[theartofmadeline]

happy pride to the gay people in my computer <3

[cy-lindric]

sketch

[genderkoolaid]

description of the "Butch" gender / performance category in the Detroit Ballroom scene, from Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit by Marlon M. Bailey (2013):

Like the Femme Queen, the Butch is explicitly a gender category, while multiple sexualities are implied. Butches are transgender men at various stages of FTM gender transition. At balls, Butches compete in various performance categories, but mostly in Butch Realness. Butches identify as gay or lesbian, straight, bisexual, or sexually fluid. Butches in the Ballroom scene have become more prominent recently, in part due to the re-lease of the documentary film, The Aggressives, which features Black, Latina, and Asian American Butches, lesbians, and female-bodied women who are masculine or identify as “aggressive.” Some of the Butches in the film are involved in the Ballroom community. Interestingly, in Black LGBT communities, drag king performance does not enjoy the same prominence as does drag queen performance. Again, in the Ballroom scene there is no butches up in drag category. Instead, the Butch is a kind of catchall gender category for biological females that consists of FTM transgender men, masculine lesbians, aggressives, tomboys, studs, drag kings, and so on. There is, however, at least a tacit acknowledgment of a difference between an FTM who lives as a man and one who only performs and competes as one. Over the course of my study of and participation in the Detroit Ball-room scene, only a few members of the community identified and competed as Butches. Most Butches take hormones to produce body hair, particularly facial hair, a lower voice, and other physical changes, such as clitoral growth. Many Butches wrap or bind their breasts, or have them removed altogether, but this is usually the extent of the surgery they are willing to undergo. As is the case with most Femme Queens, surgery is cost prohibitive for Butches, so hormones are the cheapest and most accessible means of undergoing a gender transition. All of these changes produce what is believed to be masculine bodily characteristics. They also prepare the Butch body to compete in Butch Realness categories, as it is common for a Butch to remove his shirt and reveal a muscular chest and chiseled torso. As I discuss in chapter 4, Godfather Reno, a member of the Philadelphia chapter of The Legendary House of Prestige, was famous for winning Butch Realness categories at balls. [...]

More under the cut:

It is worth noting how members of the community use performance to work within the system to transgress and expand even the categories that are most often delimited and policed. Moreover, as I have suggested, many Ballroom members’ gender and sexual identities within the system are different from what they live in the outside world. Paradoxically, in The Aggressives, Tiffany identifies as a faggot—a Butch Queen—who has heterosexual sex with transgender women or those who are “female appearing.” She is not attracted to male-bodied men, male-appearing females, or masculine women. Tiffany is represented as a Butch in the film, yet the activities in which she participates in the Ballroom scene are more associated with Butch Queens. She is shown commentating at balls and doing street outreach for HIV/AIDS prevention in the scene. These activities are typical of those undertaken by and associated with Butch Queens in the Ballroom scene. A slight variation on this example would be Onyx, a Butch, who suggested that his gender and sexual identities are based on his current romantic relationship: “I usually just say I’m queer, but I identify depending on who I’m with. It’s emotionally safer and easier to identify as a Black gay man.” Nevertheless, Onyx’s partner, when I spoke with him, was a female-bodied woman who was, according to Onyx, “attracted to boys.” She, too, identified as queer. In the Ballroom scene, Onyx is a Butch, but it is worth noting that he said that emotionally, in the outside world, it is easier to identify as a gay man. Yet he is not considered a Butch Queen in the Ballroom scene, and it is safe to assume that he can freely identify as a Butch. [...] Some categories are arranged in groups based on the criterion of realness. Members of the Ballroom community call them realness categories and call the members who walk them realness kids. Realness most commonly includes Butch Queen Realness (sometimes thug realness), Executive Realness, Schoolboy Realness, Femme Queen Realness, Butch Realness, and Butch Queens Up in Drag Realness. For all of these categories, to be “real” is to minimize or eliminate any sign of deviation from gender and sexual norms that are dominant in heteronormative society. For Butch Queen, Femme Queen, Butch, and Butch Queens Up in Drag realness categories, the person must not only perform heteronormative gender and sexuality, but he or she must also embody the so- called markings of masculinity or femininity by altering the body through, for example, hormone therapy and body modifications, such as breast implants and padding for hips and buttocks. The central goal here is to be undifferentiated from the rest of Black working-class people in the urban space—particularly in Detroit for most of my interlocutors.

Realness criteria for various categories are often spelled out in flyers and are reiterated and enforced at balls by commentators and judges. Here I enumerate typical descriptions that appear in ball flyers. Ball participants use flyers for upcoming balls as guides as they prepare their performances and presentations for the given categories in which they plan to compete. For Butch Queen Realness categories, typically, variations on the same criteria appear on all flyers. Butch Queen Realness competitors need to “bring it” like “The Athletic Man (Basketball, Football, Boxing etc.)” or “Ovah trade,” performing a rough straight thug from the streets. Considering the category Butch Queen Realness as a Team, The Inter-national House of Supreme’s ball flyer describes Butch Queen Realness or Thug Realness as a way to “bring it so that people cannot figure out ‘who’s zooming who’” or, in other words, who is fucking whom. This presumes, of course, that thug masculinity is enacted by a sexual top. Again, in Ballroom, gender performance always implies sexual identity as well as sexual position (in this case top) and practice (penetrator). The aim for the Executive Realness category is to perform heteromasculinity for “Wall Street,” to be seen as a gender- normative businessman. Flyers describe this category thusly: “The Board of Directors is having a meeting and it’s your day to give the presentation.” Executive Realness also allows one to perform masculinity as an academic or professor. I walked this category, for instance, and snatched a trophy at the Love is the Message ball in LA in 2005. The Detroit chapter of The Legendary House of Prestige gave me the Ballroom name “Professah Prestige” because of the unique performance I created for this category as a university professor. Similarly, as in Executive Realness, the primarily Butch Queen competitor walks the runway as though he is going to work on Wall Street. In the Schoolboy Realness category, one has to perform “grade school aged” normative masculinity. As the commentator Junior LaBeija says in reference to the schoolboy category in Paris Is Burning, he should be “going to school, not here,” as in not going to a ball. On flyers the description for the Schoolboy Realness category reads, “Whether you’re prep, nerd or thug, you must bring the judges something to show that you’re in school.” Or “Come with books, bags, backpacks, school ID, laptops, and a lunch pail.” For these categories, realness is achieved if the competitor unmarks himself as sexually queer through his gender performance. The emphasis is primarily on sexuality and using racialized and classed performances of gender to perform straightness. However, for Femme Queens, Butch Queens Up in Drag, and Butches, the focus of realness is primarily on gender identity and unmarking one-self as gender nonconforming or as transgender. For example, the same guidelines appear for the Butch Realness category; however, the difference is that Butches are not Butch Queens. For the “Eric ‘Zontae’ Dior” ball in Detroit, the expectation for Butches on the flyer read, “Butch Realness [must be] unstoppable and unclockable. You look like a thug from the hood.” On other flyers, the criteria for the category reads, “Your mother can’t tell; your father can’t tell.” This means the Butch must be “unclockable” as a transgender man. Criteria for the Femme Queen Realness and Butch Queens Up in Drag categories require that participants be “unspookable” as transgen-der women. Regardless of the important distinction between Femme Queens—people who live as women—and Butch Queens Up in Drag—gay men who perform and compete as women—both of these realness categories require participants to appear as female-bodied or cisgender women. Moreover, to perform effectively as female-bodied women these competitors must be able to be seen as “real women” in the outside world. [...]

[spendabuckq]

[butchjaycadence]

whiny femmes, when they don't get what they want, i am your biggest fan

[fatartappreciation]

Lift (2017) by artist Erin Sandsmark

[gesiye-blog]

Me, in the little town of Dyke, VA

[lalunafemme]

best.

[uncleromeo]

if you don't do anything else today,

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.

[myselfandsomeotherbeing]

"Lesbian welders, San Francisco", n.d. From the Visual Arts Legacy Collection (JSTOR)

[trans-masculine-saint]

[wiionme]

Hogan McLaughlin

[ooo-silly-worms]

Pottery sounds terrifying to me. Every post I see is like "Here's this awesome art I made!! Pray for me that it survives The Kiln™ :')" I don't think I could cope with making art that could quite easily blow up and I have no way of controlling that. You guys are true heroes.

[claypigeonpottery]

@bazanite you are so correct