Sass, p.17
Sass, page 17
At this point, D. Lo made an explicit distinction between what it means to personify the butch aesthetic and the kind of “toxic masculinity” associated with violence, fighting, and “being a man.” She pointed toward herself when she said, “Don’t let none of this fool you,” using her body to convey that distinction to the audience. D. Lo is not a man, a fact often belied by the masculinity she presents in the world. When Black butch women invoke this theme in their stand-up comedy, which they very often do from the beginning of their sets and throughout for emphasis, they enact sass in ways politically and affectively similar to, yet aesthetically distinct from, other Black women comics. Building on Avilez, we might think of butch sass as a form of “aesthetic redress,” which offers “the queer body the space to unfold in many directions”48 within conditions of limited agency. It is in the intention to speak back to authority by enacting one’s humanity where we can understand Black masculine women as prolific sass artists working in the same spirit as other Black women who make use of the discursive registers of sass in ways that are legible in the sense of racialized gender normativity.
“I Got the Real Dick!”
The dialectic of failure and freedom looms large in the comedy of Black butch lesbians, including my own work. We must engage with that tension as a Black queer method for managing the indeterminacy of living Black female masculinity, which, in the current cultural moment, feels ambivalent: politically progressive and personally brave on the one hand, while on the other hand outdated, apolitical, and risking bodily and psychic injury. J. Jack Halberstam sums up butch embodiment and subjectivity as both failure and a threat: “She threatens the male viewer with the horrifying spectacle of the uncastrated woman and challenges the straight female viewer because she refuses to participate in the conventional masquerade of heterofemininity as weak, unskilled, and unthreatening.”49 For me specifically, failure is the special, awful position of being asked what my pronoun is over and over—which feels like being repeatedly “sirred.” It is the experience of perennial overdetermination, the insinuation of or outright declaration that butch women want to be men or that we are what Bailey and Richardson term “penis pretenders/frauds” in their genderqueer-phobic taxonomy.50 We subsequently fail to adequately perform that overdetermination, “You aren’t a real man.” Butch failure encompasses the idea that somehow our gender variation renders us unintelligible in one way or another.
Sam Jay spotlights this issue in 3 in the Morning. Riffing on the universal experience of bickering with one’s significant other in public, Jay tells the story of being at the airport with her girlfriend, who has brought too many bags, when a man comes to offer help. “When men see a masculine woman. That’s their favorite shit. They try to come in [stomping, grimacing like a super-masculine man], ‘I got the real dick!’ Goofy fucks! ‘I got the real dick, where you want the dick?! What bag my dick gotta pick up?!’ [Laughter.]” Jay slightly chuckles to herself. “And he jacks up the bag and looks at me like ‘Now what?!’ . . . Like, nigga, get mine too! [Huge laugh.] You getting bags, [get] all the bitches’ bags! [Laughter.] The fuck do you think? I’m a lady, carry my shit. Be a fucking gentleman. [Laughter.]” Jay leans into failure, enlivening it and forcing spectators to contend with the interconnections between fear, discipline, and hegemonic power. This sets up a liberatory collision between their ideas about Black womanhood. What is the role of failure in Black butch women’s stand-up, and how do they strategically use its dialectical relationship with freedom as pathway toward an otherwise-world where at the very least there is an alternative to the disciplinary norms of gender?
When D. Lo hit the stage at the Hi-Ho Lounge in New Orleans for the Black Girl Giggles LGBTQ+ show, her audience was in many ways prepared for her masculine presentation of self. She performed a series of jokes for which her masculinity was the main theme, especially the way it signals her desire for women and revulsion toward sexual relationships with men. “I could never be with a dude. Picture me and a guy together,” she joked. “We laying in the bed. We done split a pack of wife beaters and boxer briefs and shit.” The crowd was already laughing. “He want me to shape up his beard, and I’m like, ‘Can you hit me off, too?’ That’s gay, I can’t do it. [Laughter.]” This bit came off somewhat self-deprecatory toward her own masculinity, but D. Lo purposefully took what was seemingly a lack (of femininity, given her comedic facial hair) and turned that lack into a celebratory flex.
Instead of being inadequate at meeting the standards of proper femininity, D. Lo flipped inadequacy on its head, instilling a sense of confidence and self-compassion as she told the joke. Her failure to meet the standard of female femininity—of not being enough—was inverted, and her masculinity was not only affirmed but transformed into a new norm (that some women do not mind having features associated with masculinity) that created a space for personal vulnerability, sociopolitical consciousness, and a sense of liberation from hegemonic norms. When Black butch self-deprecation turns into the flex, it can become an enactment of butch sass wherein comics instrumentalize failure to speak back to disciplinary powers that constrain the fullness of their humanity. In so doing, D. Lo was the fantasy-bound subject who created a new avenue for understanding Black womanhood as a highly nuanced, dynamic category of existence, which was the surprise of the joke that inspired connection and laughter.
A sense of feminine inadequacy is prominent in my own comedy, and many times I have used the public stage as a space to be vulnerable and talk about my experiences and feelings about my masculine gender expression. “Whenever I’m not in a city, I start to feel like such a big dyke. I really notice how different I look. So dykey!” This is how I began my set at an open mic comedy show at Bucknell University in 2017. “Any dykier, I’d be Rob Gronkowski.” Gronkowski is a highly decorated tight end in the NFL who is popularly known for his incredible athleticism on the field but also for his viral antics off it in which he performs a form of hypermasculinity that is flamboyant, bordering on campy. For example, when he caught a touchdown pass, he performed the “Gronk Spike,” where he spiked the ball with incredible force in the end zone to celebrate scoring. The setup of my joke hinged on the self-deprecatory construction of myself as “such a big dyke” and the implication that my butchness is somehow a personal flaw. Of course, it is not actually a flaw; my butchness is, however, highly visible, regularly commented on by strangers, and a site of ongoing internal and external struggle. Yet in the punch line of my joke, my goal was to flip the script and turn that fraught dykiness, my seeming failure of femininity, into a send-up of (Gronk’s) extravagant masculinity and an open flex of the way my masculinity goes right up to the edge but does not become something of a caricature.
“I Got Titties, Too!”
“My best friends are straight,” D. Lo joked in her Black Girls Giggle show, setting herself up as the foil to proper feminine womanhood (straight). “They be calling me when they be having man problems and shit. Like I’m the one you should call when you need to handle your man problems. And they always call me like ‘Bitch, you need to get over here, Tyrone is fucking up! You need to come whip his ass!’ And I’m like, ‘Bitch why, I got titties, too! He gon’ whip my ass like he whip yours!’ Excuse me, pass me my bonnet please.” D. Lo’s reference to her titties signaled her comfort with and affirmation of her womanhood, an invocation of butch sass in action—in a way, D. Lo talked back to the sites of discipline that would cast her as an illegitimate woman (her straight friends who see her masculinity as serving their femininity at the expense of D. Lo’s own womanhood). The way she made explicit reference to her titties was like giving the middle finger to those who would cast her as an illegible woman and shed light on her condition as a Black queer subject—she perpetually walks through life marked by multiple forms of embodiment (Blackness, femaleness, butchness) that render her subject to an ass-whipping. It seems like Black butch women endure a kind of tripartite condition of injury-bound subjectivity.
Similarly, Sam Jay calls on her titties to invite a conversation about how butches fit within and exhaust existing ideas of Black womanhood. A running joke in Jay’s 3 in the Morning special is the way her girlfriend engages with Jay’s masculinity, for better or for worse.51 “The other day I was in the shower. She went to the store, and she didn’t lock the fucking door. That’s how I know she thinks I can handle everything.” Here, because of her butch appearance, the supposed traditional qualities of femininity (the assumption of physical vulnerability, entitlement of protection, and the like) are not afforded to Jay, a predicament she challenges head-on. “That’s crazy, to leave a woman in the shower. Titties soaped up . . . I’m in the shower, my titties is soapy! I got soapy titties in the shower. And my shits is perky. . . . These is good titties. Not a lot of wear and tear ’cause I don’t take dick. [Laughter.] They not bouncing around.” Over and over, Jay utters the word “titties,” drawing a connection between her female body and her gender as a woman. We once again see the Black butch comic oscillate between the injury-bound and fantasy-bound subject—the tension between Jay’s apparent failed femininity creates space for the imagination of womanhood and masculinity to coexist, and it is not in the shower but in the figure of the butch openly laying bare (no pun intended) her vulnerability as “a woman in the shower. Titties soaped up.”
“I get out the shower, I check the door, it was unlocked. I was livid. I was like yo! That’s fucked up. She was like, ‘How did you even know it was unlocked?’ I’m like, ‘Bitch ’cause I’m a bitch and I checked. I’m petty. . . . Whenever you’re in the house and I leave the house I lock up the house.’ ’Cause that’s the rules of pussy. When there’s pussy in the house, lock it up. [Laughter.]” Jay’s use of the terms “titties” and “pussy” are critical, insurgent even. They are the utterances that performatively enact her womanhood and speak back to her partner, who has explicitly marked her womanhood as illegitimate vis-à-vis her butch appearance. Furthermore, her invocation of her titties and pussy signify a calculated disrespect toward her girlfriend and hegemonic discourses of Black womanhood that cast butch women out of the fold.
The last part of this bit is challenging and painful because it illuminates the fear and anxiety that many Black masculine women face about being subject to sexual violence yet not taken seriously as targets of that violence on account of our masculinity. “She left me ass-naked in the shower as if the rapist is gonna come in and be like, [peers into the shower] ‘Nah, she got a fade, I ain’t gon’ do it.’ [Big laugh.] What I don’t do is take fade pussy. [Laughter.] That’s what I don’t do. I take all types of ass, but not the one that’s faded. [Laughter.]” Her “fade pussy” is an affirmation of her masculine womanhood, a site of butch sass where Sam Jay enacts her humanity as she speaks truth to power and enables a path toward liberation from hegemonic disciplinary structures that instantiate some women as gender failures or unworthy of certain kinds of rights, privileges, protections, and care.
Sam Jay’s shower bit stretches and adds nuance to Keeling’s theorization of Black butchness and is aimed at undoing some of the work of ghettocentric common sense where Black female masculinity is visible only via the silencing and sexualization she would force onto a Black femme. She does this by insisting that her womanhood is commensurate with her “fine lady’s,” to use Keeling’s term, and that her masculinity does not in fact “consolidate hegemonic heterosexual sociality.”52 The way Sam Jay makes space in the Black lesbian commonsense dyad of butch-femme for Black female masculinity that embraces certain aspects of femininity undercuts commonsense assumptions. In the process, Sam Jay also reincorporates some forms of hegemonic common sense in the way her jokes about trans women seem to draw a distinction between trans women and “real” or “regular” women: “What are we gonna do when trans women start beatin’ up regular bitches? [Laughter.] As a regular bitch, I’m a tad bit concerned. [Laughter.] . . . I don’t wanna be in a fight with one of these motherfuckers . . . let them fight! No, get this nigga off me! [Laughter and applause.]” At this point, Sam Jay performs some cut-eye, calling to her competency in the feminine tropes of sass that almost says that there is a distinction between “trans bitches” and “regular bitches,” the latter of which she aligns herself with. “This motherfucker is strong in ways I did not expect. [Laughter and applause.] Please help. [Laughter.]” To be generous, even if Sam Jay calls on hegemonic common sense to frame her legitimate womanhood, could it be that her bit that has been lambasted as transphobic raises the question, What do we do when the concerns (however so contested or problematic) of two marginalized groups might be in conflict with each other? And how might butch sass, which is what Sam Jay is enacting, enable us to grapple with questions of power, authenticity, and what it means to be “free” to be who you are?
One thing I learned about writing jokes has been to try to find problems that can be “solved” in the joke work. I knew I was going to get a lot of mileage out of my experience with men trying to hit on me. Like most of the other Black butch comics I have seen, I have a whole set of jokes reserved for the unwanted sexual advances of men. Many times, these experiences are comical, but they often veer into and overlap with a sense of fear about physical safety and anger at the insults that often accompany or precede the come-ons. “A woman with a shaved head is like a closed KFC,” I told an audience at my first comedy show in Oakland, California. “You can see all the breasts and thighs inside, but the door is locked tight.” Earlier that day I had gotten my head shaved at the barber college that used to be on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. The clippers vibrated over my skull, and the barber asked, “Does this feel right to you?” I caught his eye in the mirror, and I knew he was not talking about the way the clippers felt on my head. He was referring to my masculinity and to the way him cutting my hair inaugurated a sense in him that he was an instrument of my failed female femininity. He was going against Black gender common sense, the disciplinary logics he had learned and internalized about what and who Black women are, what they should look like, and what hairstyles are appropriate for us.
My bald head rendered me inappropriate, and it made him uncomfortable. “Yeah, usually I do it myself.” The crowd was laughing. I became more comfortable. “I mean, I’m shaving my head, not my whole pussy off!” There was no ambivalence here; the remark about my pussy was a political act. It was not simply vulgarity for the sake of cheap laughs. This joke was about asserting my humanity before the barber and before the audience. If the barber was uncomfortable by my act of upholding my masculine womanhood by asking him to shave my head bald, perhaps the audience was too with the explicit reference to my pussy—my womanhood in that moment.
I opened this chapter discussing a set I did in Los Angeles where I had a joke about scented tampons and a professional comic expressed that the discussion of my period was unexpected given my butch appearance. To that comic, I was illegible as a woman, and therefore there were certain aspects of womanhood that would be unlikely for me to touch on in my comedy. This is convenient for a comic because it allows space to create jokes that both are surprising and do a certain kind of political work in the revelation of logics of discipline that constrain ideas about what womanhood should look like and talk about. People of various genders and bodies experience menstruation, but most of the masculine women comics I have observed invoke menstrual periods and the language around periods (for example, “feminine products”) to affirm womanhood and create a surprising way to humorously challenge audiences to examine their conceptions of masculine womanhood.
Just before she began her position as a Saturday Night Live cast member, Punkie Johnson, a comic from New Orleans, took the stage at the Black Girl Giggles LGBTQ+ show. It is not surprising that Johnson took as a major theme of her set the way she is perceived in the world as a masculine woman. “I’m a grown-ass dyke out here in these streets,” Johnson told us. “Like, these young dykes look up to me. I can’t be out here changing no pad, nigga that shit is gay! I can’t be out here having no period, nigga.” The crowd was laughing and applauding. “I’m all in the middle of a conversation with my boys and then I gotta excuse myself ’cause I gotta go to the bathroom. You know what I’m saying? We talking about Drew Brees hitting a record and shit. . . . I’ll be right back, player, I gotta go to the bathroom. . . . I gotta change my pad, nigga. One of y’all got a super? I left the tamps at the crib.” There was no single punch line of this joke, but clearly the setup was Johnson’s masculinity, and the way she talked about having a period in such a familiar way served as the gag that destroyed any expectations that Johnson was not a “real” woman.
When Johnson uttered the words associated with her period with such comfort and familiarity, the crowd laughed hardest. In those moments when Johnson countered the idea that butch women were unwomen, she spoke back to those who might consider her version of womanhood illegitimate. When she claimed, “These young dykes look up to me” and then went on to talk about how her “boys” might react to her having a period, she was embracing her masculinity and locating it as a site of ambivalences, which produced the laughter. This kind of ambivalent humor is an antidote to the way female masculinity is often surveilled and disciplined.
The butch body politics that came out were about not hiding and refusing to accept illegibility. Afterall, Johnson could have been going to the bathroom to perform a variety of functions, yet she chose to explicitly discuss her period. This was about challenging the idea that Black butch women do not want to be women or have the impulse to hide their womanhood in response to a variety of social, cultural, and interpersonal pressures. Johnson’s joke and others of its kind traffic and delight in ambivalence. They often enact butch sass from the ambiguous, marginal position of female masculinity, bringing butch embodiment to the center of the conversation about sass as a genre of discourse, even and especially if it makes audiences uncomfortable, and opens space to imagine otherwise-genders as a social norm. The interaction between failure and freedom is the hallmark of butch sass that highlights its political and affective work.
