Super hit or miss. Some gross gender politics (TERFy things, bizarrely essentialist things), some crappy, meandering writing. Also, and this is the strangest part for me personally, I'm in the book - as a character referred to as "S" in someone's essay about their gender development. Very strange to see a conversation I remember described and interpreted by the other person, on the page. Also makes me feel famous 💃

brilliant anthology. this collection of personal stories is thoughtful, relevant, insightful and frequently powerful. anyone interested in gender studies will find a goldmine of valuable material in this book. my one criticism is the same criticism i have for most gender studies books: where the heck are the bisexuals? in only a small selection of these essays is bisexuality mentioned or addressed. i valued those essays that much more for including us. on the whole, however, this book is incredi...

This thick collection of essays and manifestoes, with some poems, short fiction and brief autobiographies mixed in, is a current report on the diversity of queer gender identities in the twenty-first century. Its title is similar to that of an earlier book, The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader, originally published in 1992. Joan Nestle, a legendary femme writer who remembers the early Gay Rights movement, edited the first anthology. As she says in the foreword to the current book:"When Iv...

3.5 mostly good but some of the essays were so weird about transness i can’t go higheranyway. Women. that is all folks

I really liked to read a book that validated femme identity as more than just a choice to wear fabulous clothing. I also appreciated that most of the essays were personal stories as opposed to academic takes on gender theory. The anthology had a number of different voices that took part to create a more textured vision of the butch-femme dynamic. I do appreciate the effort, though it had its flaws.

with something so heavily theorized, it's nice to get personal narratives; but then, personal narratives can also be just as grating, self-indulgent, and/or obnoxious as theory sometimes. I liked a handful of these essays: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a wonderful, powerful, smart writer; Victoria Brownworth's commentary on how lesbian identities in the mainstream are being so straightwashed, and the forcing of lesbians to be viewed as sexually available to men, is extremely important; I a...

I always like to think about what audience the author had in mind when I’m reading something, whether it be a short story, essay, or full-length novel. While reading this, I struggled with that question.I identify as a non-binary gay person, “queer” when I’m feeling extra radical, and I identified with a couple of the stories in this, especially the first few (shoutout to “Home/Sickness: Self-Diagnosis” by romham padraig gallacher!) . But as I kept reading, they begun to feel...for lack of a bet...

3.5 stars. Some of the essays here were fantastic, but mostly I felt like they were written for a different crowd. As you can guess from the title, the essays here talk about butch and femme - being one or both or bouncing between the two. But there wasn't much about being neither, which is something I've been aching to read about. Not the fault of the book, but an explanation for why it wasn't a personal 5-star read.Still, a lot of good writing, and I appreciated the diversity of voices, even i...

If I could guarantee one thing, it's that at least one entry in this collection will piss you off. There are opinions all over the spectrum in this collection, and there is a lot to be debated. For example: do butch and femme constitute each other, or can you be a butch without a femme and vice versa? Are femmes more privileged by having "passing privilege", or are they invisibilized, or are people just not looking hard enough for femmes? Is the concept of "butch" too tied to whiteness to be use...

Edited by the impressive team of Ivan E. Coyote and Zena Sharman—an adorable married couple (see photo below)—the collection Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme (2011) certainly does live up to its name. It’s refreshing to see an anthology reflect a remarkable diversity of perspectives on these two loaded concepts and identities. It’s exactly what you’d expect from the Vancouver-based Ivan—a storyteller and writer—and Zena—a radical government bureaucrat and gender researcher, and from the fan...

I would say about 25% of the essays I really liked, 50% were forgettable, and 25% made me extremely uncomfortable. Things that I loved: reading about different kinds of gender expression and gendered desire. Things I didn't like: oppression Olympics, the who's-more-radical-than-who competition, anyone complaining about "butch flight" or resenting transgender or genderqueer people for abandoning "real butches." Some essays were wonderful.

This is an anthology of writings on femme, butch, and more. It looks at how these identities have evolved and what they mean to individuals. With an excellent forward by Joan Nestle and two fantastic editors--Zena Sharman and Ivan E Coyote--I was very excited for this anthology. As a young person in Vancouver, Coyote's novels represented an universe I dreamed of accessing. I remembered the euphoria at seeing how my high school librarians loved them. However, it took me this long to finally pick

Picked up a copy of this at my friend Dave’s house in Santa Barbara – never met the roommate who it belonged to. A mix of stories, analysis, & stories-as-analysis, some very good, some much less so. The personal is political, etc.

it's weird seeing the low ratings for this book based on the pieces from trans-exclusionist lesbians, when i feel like those pieces exist purely to provide the context needed for the clear, concise, and entirely necessary rebuttals that follow. the anxiety and prejudice that make up the former don't hold up once you encounter the warmth and surety of the latter, but you still need to see the journey. terf stuff is anxious and angry and defensive, and it sticks out like a sore thumb. seeing it ja...

Some of these were powerful and beautiful and great, and some of these just seemed to valorise (cis women) butch and femme identities at the expense of androgyny, trans* and other queer identities, which was just effing punishing, tbh. There really was a broad spectrum of essays and pieces, though, and many that I really enjoyed reading.

loved it. a few words of my greatest appreciation: thanks for helping me learn the names of my ancestors and remember to remember them. our butch and femme and genderfucked, trans, genderqueer, in-between stories are all too easily silenced and whitewashed over even over a decade, a generation. books like this are important for young queers to read (and without having read it yet, "persistent desire" is now definitely on my reading list for the same reason.)this book broadened my understanding o...

There were a small handful of essays that I really loved and more that actually made me pretty uncomfortable or angry, like the ones that argued that cis women femmes are "straight-passing" or that butches and femme men are the only people transgressing gender.

"At times simplistic, at times sentimental, at times uncomfortable and alienating, despite its flaws overall Persistence makes for fascinating reading. With a contributors’ list featuring authors, performers, artists and activists, there’s a diverse range of identities and experiences represented, from butch pregnancy to femme invisibility to sex work and all sorts that’s inbetween."(Excerpt from review of Persistence: All Ways Butch & Femme at For Books' Sake)

fascinating takes on butch and femme as identities

This hit me like a tonne of bricks, like a comet from out of space, like any other cliche you can think of.I’ve only recently begun putting effort into my outward appearance regularly. It’s embarrassing to say that my teens traumatised me this thoroughly...but they did. It was a combination of never wanting to be seen to make too much effort (because then the ridicule hurts more right?) and my clumsy understanding of what feminism meant. I spent years in overalls, hair shaved off, no makeup on,