Hammer K Allison
a Department of Women's and Gender Studies , Vanderbilt University , Nashville , Tennessee , USA.
J Lesbian Stud. 2019;23(2):279-293. doi: 10.1080/10894160.2019.1562284. Epub 2019 Jan 30.
This article pays homage to the antique term "B.D. (bulldyke) Woman" of the 1920s and 1930s, at a moment when the rise of a universal queer subject threatens to erase specific lesbian histories. Characterized by an aggressive stance and an enormousness that confronts rather than merely protests, Black B.D. artists "stole" both masculinity and White privilege to accumulate power and cultural capital. B.D. is therefore a multilayered response to sexism, racism, and homophobia. This performance style is a product of outrage at the oppressive conditions that marked the legacy of slavery, to which B.D. blues must be viewed as a response rather than a more static sexual aesthetic style belonging to lesbian women. Such masculine bravado in Black women disrupted gender/sex alignments and notions of cisnormativity embedded in African American communities. In order to think through this historical legacy, I perform close readings of song lyrics performed by Gertrude "Ma" Rainey and Bessie Smith. The rejection of oppressive conditions occurs most acutely through the theme of travelling in songs that decenter racialized and heteronormative conceptions of home. Through this theme, Rainey and Smith expanded the phallic possibilities of their time period, and for the 2010s, these artists tamper with our staid notions of what gender, sex, and sexuality have meant in the past.
本文致敬20世纪20年代和30年代的古老词汇“B.D.（女同性恋者）女性”，此时普遍的酷儿主体的兴起有可能抹去特定的女同性恋历史。以激进的姿态和直面而非仅仅抗议的强大力量为特征，黑人B.D.艺术家“窃取”男性气质和白人特权以积累权力和文化资本。因此，B.D.是对性别歧视、种族主义和恐同症的多层次回应。这种表演风格是对标志着奴隶制遗产的压迫性状况的愤怒产物，B.D.布鲁斯必须被视为一种回应，而非属于女同性恋女性的更静态的性审美风格。黑人女性中的这种男性化虚张声势扰乱了非裔美国社区中嵌入的性别/性取向的一致性和顺性别规范观念。为了思考这段历史遗产，我对格特鲁德·“妈妈”·雷尼和贝西·史密斯演唱的歌曲歌词进行了仔细研读。对压迫性状况的拒绝最强烈地体现在歌曲中旅行的主题上，这些主题打破了以种族为中心和异性恋规范的家的概念。通过这个主题，雷尼和史密斯拓展了她们那个时代的阳具可能性，而对于21世纪10年代来说，这些艺术家扰乱了我们对过去性别、性和性取向含义的刻板观念。
