User:KKohn00/Stone Butch Blues (draft)

Publication History
The book was first published in 1993 by Firebrand Books. It was re-released by Alyson Books in 2003. A 20th anniversary edition was released in 2014 A free e-book edition is currently available.

Awards
1994 Lambda Literary Award, finalist in the category of Lesbian Fiction, tied for win in the category of Small Press Books http://www.lambdaliterary.org/winners-finalists/07/13/lambda-literary-awards-1993/ 1994 American Library Association Gay & Lesbian Book Award (now Stonewall Book Awards) http://www.ala.org/rt/glbtrt/award/stonewall/honored#1994

Major Themes
Stone Butch Blues is most commonly described as a transsexual narrative. It is sometimes seen as postmodern because of the ways it presents gender as a signifier lacking a fixed referent in the body, and the way Jess's identity breaks down the categories of male and female. As such, it is also about crossing boundaries and seeking home. Jay Prosser writes that, "Jess does not feel at home in her female body in the world and attempts to remake it with hormones and surgery." Because of her masculinity, she is also not at home in her community of origin, and thus the search for home becomes a theme as well. While physical changes help Jess to feel more at home in her body, Jess has greater difficulty finding a home in the world. Ultimately the book takes a stance of supporting coalitions.

Stone Butch Blues is also a novel of the working class. Much of it takes place in factories in Buffalo, NY. The novel shows how gender and class intersect to shape Jess's identity, by portraying her discomfort with the middle-class feminists who disdain both the butch and femme identities that are standards of Jess's working-class community. Cat Moses writes that, "Stone Butch Blues is informed by an underlying yearning for the development of a revolutionary class consciousness among the proletariat, across gender and racial divisions."

Translations
Stone Butch Blues has been translated into Chinese, German , Italian , Hebrew , and Slovenian.