Much published criticism on Leslie Feinberg’s beloved 1993 novel Stone Butch Blues focuses on gender and genre taxonomies: is Jess a transgender man or a butch lesbian woman, and does the book demand a queer studies or, instead, a trans studies analysis?1 Should we read the text as a novel or as veiled autobiography? Feinberg hirself seemed to provoke such critical engagement when ze referred to the text as an attempt to write “the kind of gender theory that we all live.”2 Feinberg was correct in regard to this text’s popular reception: this well-loved novel written by a foundational advocate of transgender liberation has been an important touchstone for testing out the politics of queer and trans methodological, aesthetic, and political claims.3 The rich development of these crucial lines of inquiry has, however, obscured the fact that the novel’s plot is formed from successive episodes in which Jess struggles to find and maintain decent wage labor as it tracks her movement from Buffalo to New York City and across different forms of collective and solitary queer and trans life. In other words, Stone Butch Blues narrates postwar, Northeastern labor history as gender history.

To be more precise: the novel elaborates specifically literary labor as a site for gender and sexual politics, revealing that Jess’s development is intertwined with distinct moments in the production and circulation of printed matter, including the novel itself. In this sense, Stone Butch Blues reflects the broader material importance of relations of literary production to left-wing feminist and queer life. Recent literary critical work has illuminated the ways that late-twentieth-century and contemporary American novelists allegorize and ironize their experiences with publishing and distribution, and scholars such as Julie Enszer, Agatha Beins, and Howard Rambsy II have shown how publishing and circulation activities were a key component of late twentieth century revolutionary social movement literatures.4 But not a great deal of scholarship has explored more pink- and blue-collar segments of literary production (binding, shipping, electronic typesetting, clerical work), including feminized aspects of the print and book trades that were equally part of the development of what would come to be called LGTBQ+ literature. Stone Butch Blues, for its part, takes precisely these social relations of literary production as the motors of its plot and character formation — literary labor is not suggested through allegory but is a basic building block of the novel’s narrative. In this sense, Stone Butch Blues is not a “representative” example of other queer and trans narrative fiction from the period, which mostly does not take literary labor quite so directly as the engine of its plotting, but it is not entirely exceptional; much queer fiction from the period, from Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name to the “New Narrative” writings of Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, and others, was replete with reference — both literal and allegorical — to the social relations of queer textual production. I read Stone Butch Blues here as part of an ongoing project to explore how shifts in the labor relations of print in the late twentieth century shaped LGBTQ+ writing, specifically focusing on the feminization of print origination work and typesetting. To this end, Stone Butch Blues is the ur-example of a fictional text that repeatedly connects leftwing queer and feminist life to relations of literary production.

Stone Butch Blues is unique in that it directly narrates dialectical relations between gender, sexuality, and literary labor writ large, in three more or less sequential phases: addressing the physical production of printed material; social networks of writing, circulation, and reading; and finally typesetting as part of an integrated print ecology. My reading of the novel homes in on how queer and trans writing has been both conditioned by and reflective of the dynamic gendering of so-called postindustrial labor relations in the Northeastern United States. This reading also aims for a broader understanding of what queer and trans literature were, are, and might become. A crucial moment from the novel’s final act helps to set out what literary labor relations entail, and their significance in this regard. Jess, who has, until this point in the novel, suffered many setbacks in her efforts to find reliable employment, finally lands relatively well-paid work as a typesetter in New York City. After one year of freelance typesetting, Jess tells Ruth, a trans woman and intimate friend,

at work, when everyone else is at lunch, I’ve been typesetting all the history I’ve found, trying to make it look as important as it feels to me. That’s what I want to leave behind, Ruth — the history of this ancient path we’re walking. I want it to help us restore our dignity.5

There are at least two ways to interpret Jess’s insistence on the dignity of composing histories of queer and trans life. One is that the professionally typeset and offset-printed book confers, by virtue of its format, a sort of legitimacy that is not otherwise granted to the history of gender variant people. A second implication is that the work of typesetting itself, which Jess is doing both for a wage and after hours on the sly, might help to restore the collective dignity of trans people in the present. The adjacency of this work to a capitalist form of textual or literary production is what, in part, confers the dignity that Jess seeks here. “Typesetting all the history” is a form of literary labor that restores dignity both because an elided history is being restored, providing a stable ground for contemporary trans life, but also because history is being written down for print in the book or pamphlet form by someone who can earn a living doing this very activity. Notably, Feinberg hirself worked as a freelance typesetter for many years, including with the Worker’s World Party, turning radical writing into printed matter, and Jess’s accounts are likely drawing on that experience and knowledge.

This passage, toward the end of the novel, makes visible that the novel has really all along been spanning the process of literary production and consumption: Jess writes letters and imagines them in archives, works in binderies, reads feminism on the sly off flyers and in a bookstore, finds proto-queer and trans histories in libraries, and finally and most significantly works as a non-unionized typesetter. At the same time, the novel documents the prominence, decline, and partial return of access to steady work for butches and transmasculine people in deindustrializing 1970s Buffalo and in 1980s New York City.6 Situations of literary labor tend to frame moments in the novel in which change, of any sort, seems possible to Jess on the basis of collective human activity from the bottom up. As I argue in what follows, these moments are especially noteworthy when they show how feminized forms of para-literary wage labor (bookbinding, secretarial work, and finally typesetting) provide fleeting but valuable opportunities for political education and solidarity. Feinberg plots LGBTQ+ literature as a site of theorization and agitation: Stone Butch Blues asks to what extent the feminization and deterioration of working conditions in any given sector might generate collective revolutionary activity, and to what extent the dynamic gendering of literary labor relations must be countered by something like Marxist-feminist organizing.

In what follows, I read Stone Butch Blues for precisely these moments in which the production, circulation, and exchange of printed texts disclose a collective labor history subject to shifting dynamics of labor, gender, and race relations. These moments amount to a gendered account of literary labor that offers both a chronology that tracks some historical tendencies and a dynamic rendering of the possibilities of literary labor to nurture revolutionary collective life.7 By literary labor, I refer to all of the activities that are yoked together, by the novel, surrounding the production and circulation of printed matter, whether notionally “literary” or otherwise. My reading of these aspects of the novel resonates with the Marxist-feminist frame of Shahrzad Mojab and Sarah Carpenter, who propose “a way of looking at how the social world and everyday/everynight experience is organized through the everyday activity of people…”8 Like Mojab and Carpenter, I find that Marxist analysis of labor requires an understanding of gender and race as “actual human active sensuous practices, concretized in our activity and consciousness through ongoing acts of racialization and gendering”; in the case of Stone Butch Blues this means looking closely atthe manifold basic activities involved in the production, circulation, and consumption of writing and print.9

This is not to say that the social relations of literary labor are, in and of themselves, necessarily revolutionary: they emphatically are not. The effort to “restore dignity” through the labor of printing and publishing can provide a ground for queer and trans collectivity, but it can also elide other possible solidarities and collective possibilities, as the novel shows. As the readings below demonstrate, Feinberg uses first-person narration of one character’s changing relationship to print and literary labor to make it felt that gender is part of historical time and that navigating gendered labor relations is a crucial dimension of historical change.

From Journal to Novel

Why would a novel allow Feinberg to approach these historiographic and political aims? Why, in particular, a novel that is susceptible to being read as veiled autobiography? One answer lies in the fact that Feinberg had published cross-genre nonfiction works addressing similar issues before; the political pamphlet Journal of a Transsexual (1980) was brought out by World View Publishers, and World View Forum brought out Feinberg’s polemical pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come in 1992, a year before the publication of Stone Butch Blues.10 Both imprints were run by the Workers World Party, a Leninist party of which Feinberg was a member from the 1970s until the end of hir life. Journal of a Transsexual opens with a politically and personally direct “Foreword” that challenges a rigid sex/gender binarism, explaining that at the time of writing Feinberg identifies as a “very masculine woman” who had “lived convincingly as a man for four years on a sex-change program before leaving that program. I am a woman. I am the way I am. It is a fine way to be.”11

Journal, like Stone Butch Blues after it, comprises episodes that depict, snapshot-like, moments of possibility or of danger in which systematic exclusion from and peripheral inclusion in wage labor make living a constant struggle. The journal also reflects on losing jobs as a result of bigoted bosses and co-workers, the basic difficulties of using gendered bathrooms at work, and the risk of violence in getting to work via public transportation. We learn, for example, about Feinberg’s working conditions at book binderies, where she is almost entirely among cisgender women: “I am still new here. I am the topic of their conversation today. Throughout the plant, there is this question: man or woman, boy or girl?”12 Feinberg describes the experience of being perpetually sized up, not knowing if one will be accepted as a masculine and gender non-conforming woman to work in an environment comprising mostly women workers. It’s not impossible, Feinberg suggests, that some sort of acceptance might follow this sizing-up, but it’s not a reliable outcome, either. Being repeatedly new at work means repeatedly facing the hypervisibility of being gender non-conforming and a vulnerability to violence from unexpected places, and in this way Feinberg’s Journal provides quotidian illustrations of M.E. O’Brien’s observation that “employment is an institution of gender violence and everyday coercion.”13

Stone Butch Blues features many scenes that could easily find a home in the Journal of a Transsexual: Jess is a victim of sexual and gender violence and harassment from strangers and coworkers (above all from police and prison guards) and is hired and fired multiple times, sometimes on the basis of perceived gender nonconformity. Moreover, Stone Butch Blues is also narrated by an internally focalized first person, whose only self-distance comes from the future, narrating Jess’s retrospection on events in her own past. Yet while the Journal and Stone Butch Blues share characteristics of episodic first-person narration by protagonists who share similar biographies, in Stone Butch Blues Feinberg swaps out memoir’s grounding in testimony for the historical purchase of character and Bildung. As Juliet Jacques argues, the memoir as genre can trap the trans writer in truth claims that hinge on their constant re-exposure, and this revelation of the self caneclipseany engagement with history. Fictionality allows Feinberg to place gender at the heart of labor history as such, rather than attaching it to the supposed truth of a specific individual. For Jacques, Feinberg’s “tacit aim [in writing a novel] was to offer a book more engaged with negotiation of ‘straight’ society, employers and trade union movements than many of its more directly autobiographical antecedents.”14 I would add that Feinberg had revolutionary communist and historical materialist ambitions, as hir political writings and deathbed words — “remember me as a revolutionary communist”— make clear.15 It is in this spirit that Stone Butch Blues sees Feinberg engage with explanatory historical and political analysis by means of a first-person narrative that spans several decades and through a character who develops radical political consciousnessunevenly and haltingly.

A sequence from the first half of the novel, in which Jess first finds wage work and community in the butch/femme scene of Western New York (Seneca territories), exemplifies this narration of class consciousness as something that happens across fraught moments of political possibility and of failed solidarity. Working at a small bindery, a subsector of book production that historically employed relatively large numbers of women, Jess finds herself under heightened gender scrutiny as “the only he-she in the plant” (77). The community and cross-racial solidarity with the other women workers at the plant appears at first as an initiation into the lessons of solidarity through shared work:

About half the women on the line were from the Six Nations. Most were Mohawk or Seneca. What we shared in common was that we worked cooperatively, day in and day out. So we remembered to ask about each other’s back or foot pains, family crises. We shared small bits of our culture, favorite foods, or revealed an embarrassing moment. It was just this potential for solidarity the foreman was always looking to sabotage.… But it was hard to split us up. The conveyor belt held us together. (78)

The lowest paid and worst treated workers at the bindery — Indigenous women and Jess, in this case — find opportunities at work for the elaboration and improvisation of solidarities. Jess’s understanding of solidarity as “sharing cultures” flattens out local Indigenous struggles for sovereignty, bypassing a reckoning with political economic bases for labor solidarity and implicitly replacing this more difficult work with multicultural exchange, as Mark Rifkin argues, and Seneca and Mohawk women are not mentioned again in the novel.16 At the same time, as workers they are “held together” by the conveyor belt, or by industrial capitalism’s self-undermining tendency of gathering workers together in one place.

As is generically typical of the Bildungsroman, such episodes sequence Jess’s political development sothat we learn alongside her, through the medium of her first-person narration. If the scene at the first bindery seems to offer an uplifting but ultimately limited and self-serving moment of cross-racial solidarity, in a subsequent episode in another, larger bindery, Jess’s incipient political consciousness comes under pressure. There Duffy, the older, straight white male local shop steward who will become her on-again-off-again mentor in political solidarity, warns her that the promotion she has been offered is not a victory for butches as Jess believes but rather a racist ploy to block the more senior man in line for promotion, a Black man named Leroy who is targeted by both management and racist coworkers. Jess manages to pass this test of solidarity by turning the promotion down, but when the bindery workers vote to strike shortly afterward, her ambitions and allegiance to butches trumps her trade union solidarity. With the other butches, she undermines the strike by leaving the bindery for a local steel plant — the pinnacle of blue-collar jobs — that announces it has been forced, presumably by legal injunction, to hire fifty women (they are then promptly dismissed from their new steel jobs). Gender and race are central to these dynamics on the shop floor, and Jess is unable to see what Feinberg shows us through this episode: a lesson that management exploits putative gains for butches to divide workers as a group without meaningfully benefiting the butches, whose relative masculinity made them hire-able in the steel plant but who are still treated “as women” first when job cuts come down the line. This harder lesson in solidarity, learned through failure, discloses how disparate episodes in the work life of butches link together in the novel, less to produce an individual consciousness whose psychological integrity is narratively paramount and more to reveal how the many seemingly isolated experiences of workers in the binderies and the steel plants constitute a single struggle. In this sense, the generic shift from the autobiographical to the fictional indexes a shift in Feinberg’s political ambitions, from a piece written for those who are already comrades, a work of much-needed propaganda on behalf of trans people, to a novel written for not-only-leftists in a broadening of propagandistic scope.

Crucially, the novel’s deployment of psychological interiority as a route into collective history binds “gender identity” to the conditions of labor. Jess’s quest for stable work is conditioned by the combined forces of misogyny, homophobia, cissexism, de-industrialization, and post-McCarthyist union busting, as well as the more intrinsic factor of Jess’s experience of bodily dysphoria. In his field-shaping work on the novel, Jay Prosser argues that Jess’s explanation, as the novel’s narrator, of these multiple factors “externalizes her motivation for beginning hormone treatment, suggesting that her transition is economic and political, a historical rather than a psychic necessity.”17 Prosser is right to see both impulses marking the text, but we don’t have to view historical necessity as an alibi for internal truth — a psychic necessity can be historical without negating its status as psychically necessary. The novel’s insistence on extrinsic factors, moreover, does not only come out of the mouth of Jess as an unreliable narrator. The form of the novel itself, through its sequencing and plotting, never shies away from this emphasis: disaster after incredible disaster befalls Jess and her loved ones each time stability and happiness seem within reach. The novel’s episodic narration thus foregrounds the way Jess’s life chances and psychic survival depend on the possibility of earning a living without being an object of derision, questioning, violence, and ostracism for her gender presentation. Feinberg may have said that one goal of the novel was to offer a work of gender theory, but in Feinberg’s gender theory, class analysis accounts for historical changes to gendered relations of production. That is to say: on this novel’s account, and on mine, labor relations shape how we all experience our bodies, and vice versa, in historically changing and changeable ways. On the one hand,then, Stone Butch Bluesnarrates late twentieth-century gendered labor in New York State through an individual character coming to a form of revolutionary proletarian consciousness (the novel as Bildungsroman), and on the other hand it provides materialist analysis by showing, across its span of decades, that both class analysis and the novelistic narration of the self require a large-scale vision of historical change that can account for relations of gender and their shifting dynamics.

These aspects of the novel’s plotting facilitate its categorization as a Bildungsromanor novel of self-formation and cultivation, and this taxonomy is useful insofar as it is used not to fix the novel in its place but rather to clarify what we can mean when we talk about “self-formation.”18 In Stone Butch Blues, this does not meana resolution of the trans self into a final fixity through either medical or social transition. Such transitions are indeed part of the story that the novel covers — an embodiment that feels right is vital for Jess, but it is only bearable when her own struggle can be openly accepted in collective processes of changing the world. Jess’s “transition” is emphatically notthe end of the story: she continues to face gender-based personal and work problems. Her expressed need for a body that feels at least tolerable is interwoven with her need for a minimal degree of social safety net, even if this is at times simply the need for a social organization that allows her to be alone and have her basic needs met. Stone Butch Blues coordinates the changing relationship between these two overarching needs —psychological/internal and social/external — as, perhaps, only the novel among genres has been generically authorized to do.

In other words, Jess’s self-formation as a character hinges on the cultivation, over time, of her (and our) realization of how social and historical change are possible. This is what drives Jess, by her own narratorial account, and this is what allows us as readers to imagine, for the duration of the novel, historical outcomes other than those we know the 1970s and 1980s delivered. The most important instance of this, in my view, is the novel’s counterfactual approach to labor history: the failures of white-male-dominated craft union trades to take an expansive approach to the racial minoritization and feminization of various sectors does not appear, in this novel, as an inevitable outcome of material conditions. Instead, as Jess’s political consciousness develops, the novel stages the conditions of possibility for more adequate revolutionary and militant leftist approaches to internationalist class struggle that might have made it otherwise. In this sense, Stone Butch Blues might be considered a worthy entry in the “canon of socialist bildungsroman” proposed by Benjamin Kohlmann, not least for the way that it challenges the status of the (bourgeois) individualism at which any protagonist could “arrive.”19 The privileged locus of this alternative is to be found in the novel’s account of print labor and of literary production as an integrated system more broadly.

The Honda and the Harley: Print Production and the Masculinities of Deindustrialization

To examine more precisely the ways that Stone Butch Blues presents gender and labor neither as opposed social categories nor as forms of domination assignable to solely psychic or social domains, I return now to the novel’s consistent engagement, at the level of plot, with variously gendered forms and relations of literary labor. It is in literary labor, as noted above, that Jess places hope for “restor[ing] dignity” to trans people; and in this way Stone Butch Blues works to explain the conditions of its own possible production. Through its elaborate plotting of queer and trans working-class engagement with texts and books, the novel shows how literary production, and the circulation of printed matter, is inextricable from gendered wage labor historically — and it also positions itself as an act of history writing that confers dignity on and perhaps instigates transformative changes to queer and trans life.

If it comes on to us slowly that Stone Butch Blues is a novel of literary labor, this is because so many of the early scenes of Jess’s literary labor take place in areas of print production whose bookishness is at least apparently incidental. Jess’s very first job, which “changed everything,” is an after-school job “setting type by hand in a print shop” where “nobody at work cared if I wore jeans and T-shirts” (25). The textual nature of the work itself is of little significance to Jess at this point in the novel; what matters is that her co-workers recognize her as “butch”; one co-worker with a queer brother tells her where to go in Niagara Falls to experience some kind of gender and sexual dissident community — this is what “changed everything.”

Working in binderies in Buffalo, Jess does not know what is being bound between the covers, and it does not matter. What Jess can learn from the books she binds lies strictly in the interactions between workers and bosses at the scene of their production. Feinberg plots out, more or less sequentially and chronologically, three frames for gendered literary labor that correspond to a series of personal crises for Jess that are also gendered. These are, briefly: print production, such as binding, that is alienated from literariness as such and is notionally continuous with other clearly non-literary labor such as work at a cannery; print circulation and consumption, associated with the vibrant feminist print cultures of the 1970s and early 1980s; and finally for Jess an integrated literary ecology that unites production labor such as typesetting with the reading and writing of literary and political texts, inaugurating the possibility of something like a trans literature. Each mode of literary labor offers new phases of political engagement for Jess.

As we have seen, it is in binderies that Jess learns that queer solidarity without a broader practice of labor solidarity is doomed to fail. Binderies were the segment of the printing sector that had historically hired women earliest and most consistently.20 Duffy is based in the binderies, not an industry associated with the working-class masculine family wage, and he is a reminder to Jess that patriarchal promises of white masculine dignity, when offered at the expense of solidarity with women, queer people, and people of color, are ultimately mirages. Work in binderies thus offers a grueling but practical pedagogy in solidarity across gender and racial lines, a kind of book-learning that depends on books as material objects tied to specific labor formations rather than on the contents of books themselves.

Yet if the labor of book production brings Jess into contact with a pedagogy of solidarity, it exists nonetheless within the context of the mid-century family (male) wage, and the family wages continues to be a desirable outcome for butches in the butch-femme communities that Jess finds both in the bars of Buffalo and in many of her workplaces. This is evident in Jess’s rejoinder to Duffy when she chooses to leave the bindery for the steel mill:

You don’t understand what it would mean to work in the steel mill, do you?… All we got is the clothes we wear, the bikes we ride, and where we work, you know? You can ride a Honda and work in a bindery or you can ride a Harley and work at the steel plant. The other butches are gonna leave sooner or later, and I don’t want to get stuck in that sweatshop with that rinky-dink union. (100)

Jess insults Duffy’s efforts to democratize and integrate the bindery’s “rinky dink” union precisely because she sees the other butches offered a rare chance to gain employment in a trade associated with family-wage masculinity, good pensions, job protections, and a sense of working-class self-sufficiency and dignity. The butches’ decision to leave the bindery for the mill is partly about the prospect of providing for femmes, of course, in ways that resemble the heterosexual couple form at least in terms of wages and styles: jobs, bikes, and clothes are all the butches have to show for themselves, Jess insists, and you need the job to get the bike you want.21 This plan doesn’t actually work out for the butches, since the steel plants were ordered to hire but not retain women, and within a few years the steel mills close down completely and put an end to the way of life that some of the butches seek to access in the first place. This gendered hierarchy of blue-collar workplaces renders the solidarities developed in the binderies fragile and unreliable — when everyone is trying to climb a rung up the ladder as an individual, everyone gets stepped on.

The decline of family-wage masculinized workplaces is presented by the novel as a direct consequence of broader political economic transformations of the period. As the 1970s take off, Jess finds it impossible to get even temporary work, and finally, “By 1973 it seemed as though everyone we knew was laid off. Theresa lost her job at the university…/ The months of me scouring for work and money getting tighter were taking their toll on us” (141). This personal unemployment crisis coincides with a broader pattern of deindustrialization, falling profit rates, and job losses in Northeastern US cities — a shift that occasions a growth in the anti-butch and transphobic street violence to which Jess is exposed: “‘You fucking he-shes. You stole our jobs,’ he shouted as I hurried away. I wondered who I could blame” (142). The novel makes plain, then, that mid-century butch/femme dynamics cannot survive the crisis of capital accumulation that, by many accounts, is pegged to the year 1973. Jess decides, along with Grant, a fellow butch, that they would have a better chance of stable employment if they took testosterone and lived as men. Theresa, a lesbian feminist who has no desire to be with men (and who has already taken flak for being with a butch), breaks things off. And, as Feinberg makes clear, the economic reasons for these events are not separable from gender’s psychic manifestations.

Jess’s period of gender transition is marked by heightened economic precarity; a decent income is all the more necessary for hormones and top surgery, even as top surgery occasions an absence from work that leads to Jess being fired from one of her many jobs. Although her mastectomy does provide significant relief from dysphoria, living as a man does not constitute a resolution for Jess; it is another phase in the ongoing struggle for work and a livable existence. The 1970s are difficult and sad years for Jess and also, notably, constitute a period of separation from literary labor of any kind as well as from queer community. Jess’s transition hardly translates to steady work in the midst of a recession that threatens the family wage conditions of secure blue-collar work for white men: “The recession was deepening. Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors had just announced massive layoffs” (158).

Going stealth is in many ways an experience of political suspension for Jess on the shop floor, and this loss proves as unbearable as the loss of queer community: indeed, they amount to the same loss. Transitioning allows Jess to feel secure enough to search for a union job, but not enough to bear the levels of scrutiny that labor organizing would entail. Working in a factory with a mold machine in unsafe conditions, Jess avoids taking on an organizing role in the union because coworkers have treated Jess as “one of the guys” on this job and the visibility of leadership in the union would put that belonging at risk (200). Duffy appears at a union organizing meeting and unwittingly refers to Jess as “she,” outing her to coworkers. Jess storms out of the meeting, humiliated and furious (200). Not long after this, Jess decides to stop taking exogenous hormones and stop living as a man; ostracism from both trade union and feminist forms of political action — and from literary labor — prove unbearable.

Feminist Print Circulation, Reading, and Gendered Labor

In contrast to some mainstream images of mid-century men of letters, literary labor is always at least partially feminized in Stone Butch Blues; this is especially the case with respect to the kinds of literary activity introduced by Theresa before she leaves Jess. During the years chronicled in the middle section of the novel, new forms of political consciousness emerge from the tensions arising from the different jobs available to Jess as a butch and to Theresa as a femme, and from the different relations to literary labor that these positions engender. For Theresa, literary labor extends to the circulation, reading, and potential writing of texts; whereas the bindery for Jess holds (unrealized) political possibilities because it is a certain kind of workplace containing certain kinds of workers, in Theresa’s feminist context the contents of texts, and how they are activated by circulation, matter. And Jess, through Theresa, comes to circulate with them. As we have seen already, Feinberg’s plotting of Bildung offers not so much the construction of an ever more integral consciousness as its gradual opening up to new working-class solidarities among those unable to keep a Harley.

The middle section of the novel, covering Jess’s passionate relationship with Theresa, deindustrialization in Buffalo, the collapse of the family wage, and Jess’s transition, traces how new relationships to literary labor are crucial to the expansion of Jess’s political consciousness, even as collective life remains out of reach for Jess. Jess and Theresa meet at a cannery, an archetypal feminized and racially minoritized workplace, shortly before Theresa is fired for resisting sexual assault by a male manager. Jess is only at the cannery briefly, but it is established straightaway as a feminized workplace that employs lesbians while differentially discriminating against them on the basis of gender presentation. Life with Theresa provides the occasion for frequent comparison of the kinds of employment available to each character after they leave the cannery, and the political possibilities opened up and closed down by these workplaces. Jess continues to cycle through temp jobs at factories, while Theresa finds a different form of pink-collar “women’s work” as a secretary at the local university, a type of job that brings very different political possibilities: Theresa returns from work with anti-war propaganda and printed materials from the Daughters of Bilitis, Black Power, and women’s liberation.

Jess finds no such political education or proliferation of printed matter forthcoming from temp jobs; her retrospective narrative voice offers an ironic historical perspective on her own past political obliviousness:

It was 1968. Revolution seemed to glimmer on the horizon. Millions took to the streets in protest. The world was exploding with change. Everywhere, that is, except in the factories where I worked. Every morning at dawn we punched in as usual. We only dreamed at night.… It was Theresa’s job as a secretary at the university that opened a window, allowing me to feel the hurricane force of change. (124)

Here it is not butch factory jobs but pink-collar university work that opens up world-historical horizons. Jess and Theresa’s differential access, through their work, to political literature is bifurcated along butch/femme lines that will themselves prove precarious, as we have already seen, contributing in part to Jess’s decision to transition and her painful break with Theresa. Theresa’s secretarial job provides her with access to the mobilizing political cultures of the post-1968 university, including the rapidly growing women’s liberation and gay liberation movements and their burgeoning print cultures. With her own growing political confidence, Theresa pushes Jess to take sides on the imperial war in Vietnam and on Black power even when it means that Jess will have to disagree with some of the butches that have been her lifeline. Taking any sort of stand at work seems impossible to Jess, who works in temporary, non-union positions and who would not likely seek out or be hired to do pink-collar work.

The drastic consequences of this bifurcated access to political educationbecome apparent when Jess fails to adequately stand with Edwin, her close friend and a Black butch/transmasculine person, against racism from other butches, a development that Theresa witnesses with dismay. Siobhan Somerville incisively reads Feinberg as part of a lineage of mostly white queer and trans writers in the US who use analogies to racialized minorities in order to denaturalize sex and gender categories: “the denaturalization of one identity category is often achieved through the naturalization of another category.”22 Somerville focuses on Edwin’s ambiguous gift of DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folks to Jess, which Jess does not even open, to argue that this unrealized/underappreciated gift signals at once an analogy between African-American double consciousness and gender transition and a rift in understanding between Ed and Jess. Indeed, Jess’s failure to read not only this book but at allis a plot device that signals her political and personal shortcomings, and this failure coincides with Jess’s separation from the worlds of feminized literary labor.23 After her break with Theresa, Jess still stands apart from the political consciousness of the New Left: “The Vietnam War had just officially ended. It seemed amazing.… Maybe all those rallies Theresa had attended had helped” (188). A political agency that was available to Theresa seems foreclosed to Jess as a transmasculine working class person, especially now that Jess has lost Theresa and her world of reading materials.

Jess’s seeming inability to attain the political consciousness to which Theresa’s job made her proximate diverges significantly from Feinberg’s own positioning during the years in which these sections of the novel are set, disclosing the craftedness of Jess’s Bildung. Feinberg, who worked for the Workers World Party’s print and journalism outlets, wrote with intimate knowledge of the large scale organizing in the late 1960s through the 1970s, including highly visible labor actions undertaken by women and people of color across the US. This was the case both in trades that were already predominantly filled either by women workers, such as flight attendants (mostly white) and teachers, or by men of color (such as the Memphis Sanitation workers) andin previously white-male-dominated trades that were slowly being forced by antiracist and feminist social movements to admit women and non-white men. Some blue collar trades like electrical work and construction, while still predominantly white and male, were forcefully integrated by social movements and by hard won federal, state, and municipal affirmative action mandates.24 That Jess’s own receptivity to radical consciousness can only become connected to these historical realities via a reckoning with gendered relationships to literary labor shows that Bildung in Stone Butch Bluesconsists not only of the story of Jess’s bodily autonomy and comfort but also her confidence that she can be a part a collective fight for revolutionary change. This confidence comes about through a changed relationship to literary labor and a reconciliation of masculinized production and feminized circulation and consumption: computerized typesetting is a central node in this reconciliation, as the next section explores.25

Literary Labor Politics

While Jess’s separation from the reading of literature during her period of living as a man is not explicitly marked, an episode that closes that segment of the novel is punctuated by her first act of poetic composition for an old femme friend, Edna, and signals her longing for queer and femme community (235). Femme discursive power, a long-standing theme of the novel, and especially femmes’ ability to “melt stone” through verbal and nonverbal communication, becomes more pointed in this crucial moment, which arrives near the end of a period of relative isolation from political organizing, feminist print culture, and queer community. “I had forgotten how much I loved femmes,” Jess reflects. “Another butch would have nodded when I sighed, content that the whole story had been articulated in the rush of air. But Edna pressed for words” (231). Reconnecting with queer community through Edna, whom Jess has admired for years, takes Jess beyond reading and starts to elicit new words — and a writing practice. Jess’s brief liaison with Edna marks the regrounding in literary labor and its political opportunities that she needs for the final phase of the novel, which explores how words on the page activate the social force of working-class queer and trans lives.

Jess’s decision to stop taking hormones and present in a visibly gender-transgressive manner thus entails a new relationship to the written word and yet another reorientation toward labor, as Jess faces the challenges of finding and keeping wage work for survival as a visibly gender nonconforming transmasculine person in early 1980s New York City. But this semi-anonymous and precarious life also opens up another avenue of sociality and political possibility via different forms of access to the consumption (and eventually the production) of politically meaningful print materials. While gender and labor are never separate in Stone Butch Blues, in this section of the narrative, episodes that Prosser argues echo moments in Journal of a Transsexual are glaringly interwoven with scenes depicting the radical upheavals in the print industry occasioned by the introduction of phototypesetting — a shift that opened literary labor up as a point of access to trans and queer workers’ history.

The period throughout which the novel takes place was one of tremendous change in print origination work. Technological changes from “hot metal” to “cold type” or phototypesetting (i.e., from mechanical to computerized processes) were introduced by bosses in part to break the strength of closed-shop, white-male craft unions and commence increasingly casualized working conditions. New jobs in phototypesetting often went to women, people of color, and queer people — including, very often, lesbians and transmasculine people.26 Feinberg, who worked as a typesetter, threads this history through Jess’s personal and political development in a manner that directly echoes hir own account of doing freelance typesetting work: “there are reasons why I was able to get typesetting work at the time when there was a union-busting drive going on and they were hiring very queer people, women and people of color on third shift, out of sight of the normal first-shift world, corporate world.”27

Feinberg seeds periodic references to Jess’s experiences of typesetting throughout the final third of the novel, alongside and as part of Jess’s engagement with feminist writing, discovery of trans history, and resurgent drive to engage in collective organizing. The discussion of typesetting begins in the final quarter of the novel with an irruption of dialogue, arriving as unexpectedly for the reader as it seemingly does for Jess (though readers with longer memories may recall that Jess’s first job as a teenager involved setting type by hand at a print shop):

“If you’re an organizer for Local 6 [of the International Typographical Union (ITU)],” the owner leaned across his desk, “you can punch in, but you may not punch out.” Ironic. He was afraid the union had sent me to organize his typesetters. I was afraid he’d find out I’d only recently learned to type. (240)

The owner of the shop is aware that there are some covert efforts taking place to unionize phototypesetting workers who were not generally part of the ITU; Jess is unaware of the changing and fraught labor relations of the trade upon which she is embarking. Through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Bertram Powers’ strategy as President of Local 6 in New York City was to treat the threat that phototypesetting posed to workers’ power with a rearguard craft unionist strategy: national ITU policy focused on negotiating contracts that guaranteed lifetime employment or early retirement for composition workers in exchange for allowing their existing jobs to be phased out. This approach won out, on the whole, over efforts to organize the women, queers, and people of color who were increasingly finding employment at nonunion shops. Such workers were soon to find gigs in open-shop typesetting businesses, and many of them pieced together work as freelancers.28

While the actual work of typesetting seems to be socially available to Jess as a gender non-conforming person, the workplace itself is not always a happy place for her. There is a lull in work for Jess over one summer — “the typesetting industry didn’t pick up till early fall, but I found work catch as catch can” (247) — and during this lull Jess suffers a violent attack on a subway platform, directly echoing scenes from Journal of a Transsexual. Ruth, who is Jess’s neighbor and new friend as well as a trans woman, takes care of Jess during a slow and painful recovery, accidentally referring to Jess as “she” on the phone with Jess’s employers and losing her chance to return to a previous typesetting job. If phototypesetting is more open to gender nonconforming people than most trades, Jess nonetheless remains subject to street violence and job insecurity related to perceived gender transgressions.

The printing and typesetting workplace also remains gender-segregated: upon starting work as a typesetter at one printshop, Jess notes with longing and excitement the social ties and laughter of women working together in the proofreading room, separated from her own isolated workstation:

I actually looked forward to being inside the proofreaders’ space for a moment — women’s space. The women stopped talking as I walked in. I held up the repros. “Put them over there,” one of the women said. She didn’t look at me as she spoke. I sighed, dropped them in the basket, and left. As I walked away, I heard their conversation resume and their voices rise in laughter once again. (264)

Jess feels this distance from “women’s space” painfully; the women’s hiatus in conversation contrasts conspicuously with the discursive generosity of femmes such as Theresa and Edna — and indeed with the singing of the Seneca and Mohawk women in the bindery — that helped Jess to expand her political consciousness. The solidarity fostered in the print shop between women workers is unavailable to Jess (who goes by Jesse at work), both structurally and due to interpersonal queerphobia: at one point, Jess overhears the women, including her crush Marija, describe her as “so effeminate,” “creepy,” and “the kind you gotta watch out for,” leading Jess to abandon that typesetting job.

Yet the world of print in 1980s New York also offers social connections: the night schedule means that Jess has time to access another repository of print, the New York Public Library, where she goes to learn more about the life of an aunt who had been an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the early twentieth century. Jess cannot find the obituary she seeks out, but in the process of scrolling through the microfilm, she comes across a sensational article with the title “Male Butler Discovered After Death to Be a Woman”:

Now I knew there was another woman in the world who had made the same complicated decision Rocco [another transmasculine worker, an old friend] and I made.… The headline chilled me — her life reduced to eight flat words. I wondered if my life would be recorded in eight words or less. I stared at a spot high up on the wall, feeling empty and small (242).

Another personal history opens up in the library, one about Jess’s working forebears, and although it painfully echoes the violence she has herself experienced and makes her feel “empty and small,” it also engenders potential solidarities across time and space, even if they are figured negatively: “Time separated me from this anonymous servant. Shame separated me from Rocco.”

Jess’s foray into the NYPL archives supplements the reading she begins almost immediately upon discovering that there is “a bookstore on practically every corner in New York City”:

[T]he Women’s Studies section tempted me. By leafing through the books I could eavesdrop on the discussions going on between women without being seen… I felt as though I was rushing into a burning building to rescue the ideas I needed in my own life. I stopped skipping over the sections in books about women controlling their own bodies. Maybe all of these things that were so important to other women would prove to have meaning for me, too. (239–240)

These engagements with print connect Jess’s specific workplace struggles with those of other women and gender nonconforming people. After overhearing Marija’s queerphobic comments, Jess retrains her affective energies on her friendship with Ruth, who gives Jess a Christmas gift of Gay American History, presumably the real volume by Jonathan Ned Katz: “Remember I told you about what I read in a drag magazine about how people like us used to be honored? Look at this whole section about Native societies. But wait, look at this.… This whole part is about women like you who lived as men” (266).

It is at this point — in the midst of her queer and trans historical discovery through print media and her development of new print-related skills at work — that Jess makes the excited announcement to Ruth with which I earlier introduced the question of dignified work:

I always wanted to leave something important behind. Remember the history book you gave me for Christmas?… I’ve been going to the library, looking up our history. There’s a ton of it in anthropology books, Ruth. We haven’t always been hated. Why didn’t we grow up knowing that?… I grew up believing the way things are now is the way they’ve always been, so why even bother trying to change the world? But just finding out that it was ever different, even if it was long ago, made me feel things could change again. Whether or not I live to see it. At work, when everyone else is at lunch, I’ve been typesetting all the history I’ve found, trying to make it look as important as it feels to me. That’s what I want to leave behind, Ruth — the history of this ancient path we’re walking. I want it to help us restore our dignity. (271)

Print is both the medium of access to this “ancient path” (albeit by way of developmentalist and primitivist ethnography) and the means of “restoring” dignity and making a contemporary world in which trans people are agents rather than historical curiosities. The work of typesetting itself is isolating and causes headache and strain, but it is also rewarding and satisfying in particular ways: “At night I lived inside the coding strings, my face illuminated by the ghostly light of the terminal. The code phrases became my poetry. The curves of type against space sang to me: the melody meant everything, the words meant very little” (263). As I have argued elsewhere, phototypesetting was experienced by some women and queer people as a pleasurable skill in spite of the pain and drudgery that could accompany it, and expressions of pleasure at the mastery of a new skill “entail … a rejection of the rhetoric of ‘deskilling’ that accompanies the encroachment of feminized labor” on a trade.29 Indeed, as noted above, phototypesetting’s adjacency to industrial capitalist literary production is a partial source of the dignity that Jess seeks here. In Stone Butch Blues, Jess acquires typesetting skills through her casualized job; like many typesetters at the time, she also acquires regular access to the machinery. It is through both her waged and her after-hours uses of typesetting machines that Jess begins to make sense of the engagements with printed matter, feminism, labor history, and trans life that have been brewing across the entire novel. Typesetting can allow Jess to put into print, and perhaps even to publish,transgender histories about the collective capacity to change the world.

Dignity and Immediacy: Beginnings, Endings, and Afterwords

So far I have mainly discussed Stone Butch Blues in terms of Bildung to highlight how its three-phase plot structure correlates to three overlapping phases in the gendered history of print labor, which Jess experiences through her embodiment and consciousness as a gender-nonconforming worker seeking, simultaneously, identity and solidarity. With the exception of occasional ironic comments in Jess’s retrospective voice, much of the narrative hews fairly closely to this diachronic unfolding. In addition to this Bildung, however, Feinberg also used paratexts, and the changing fates of the novel’s circulation, to enact a relationship of print production to “restoring dignity” for trans people — and it is just this function of the novel that has secured its reputation. In this final section, I turn to elements of the novel that depart from its diachronic plot and situate it in its own history of print: firstly, the novel’s opening “Letter to Theresa”; secondly, its “Tenth Anniversary Afterword” by Feinberg; and thirdly, the ongoing circumstances of the novel’s production and circulation. In his incisive reading of these elements of the novel, Jordy Rosenberg argues that these elements of the novel repair or compensate for limitations of the diachronic narrative such as Feinberg’s tendency to use nonwhite characters as object lessons for Jess rather than characters in their own right. On Rosenberg’s reading, the paratextual moments that refer to but disrupt the plot open the novel up to political readings via a form of “self-apostrophe” — an address to a future trans self-formation unknowable at the moment of writing. For Rosenberg, the trans poetics of the Afterword, through its open address to a yet-to-exist, collective “you,” allows for Feinberg’s writing, in the “realization of apostrophe’s most utopian modality,” to bring into question “politics as the openness of the conjuncture towards the abolition of alienation, a horizon resolved not in the diegesis of the novel, but in the poetics of its paratext.”30

Yet Rosenberg’s persuasive appeal to poetics and lyric theory does not preclude us from affirming the political character of some of the socialist Bildungsroman’s most “prosaic” elements — fabula, sjuzhet, episodic structure — in a word, its plot.31 I have been arguing throughout that the novel’s “main body” does indeed open up these political questions. The novel does this precisely through its narration of struggles in sectors where labor is being feminized and casualized, opening up contradictory opportunities for gender-minoritized workers and communities in terms both of political organizing and of the social relations of textual and literary production. The “Letter to Theresa,” the Tenth Anniversary Afterword, and Feinberg’s posthumous legacy extend the political project of the Bildung, not “resolving” the “horizon” of the “abolition of alienation,” as Rosenberg puts it, but maintaining it asa horizon that is durable and historically conditioned.

The novel’s epistolary opening, a love letter to Theresa, anticipates elements of the plot by offering a condensed panorama of a deeply personal, affectively charged history that cannot be other than a labor history:

The plants closed. Something we never could have imagined.

That’s when I began passing as a man. Strange to be exiled from your own sex to borders that will never be home. (11)

Rosenberg explains that these lines amount to a reflection on the growth of feminized and casualized service labor in a core post-industrial economy, quoting and glossing a line from the letter,

“Are you turning tricks today? Are you waiting tables or learning Word Perfect 5.1?” The catalogue of service work periodizes the moment of the text’s writing across a chasm of love lost and industrialization off-shored…”32

I would add to Rosenberg’s illuminating observation that this catalogue of post-industrial forms of service labor includes forms of literary and textual labor — Word Perfect 5.1 signals the rise of the desktop computer and office-based moments in the process of pre-press print production. It also signals the end of “typesetting” as the profession that Jess enters by the end of the novel. However speculatively, the “Letter to Theresa” envisions shifting struggles in a still-gendered scene of textual labor.

Indeed, beyond this moment of speculation, the “Letter to Theresa” insists that literary production, the making and keeping of writing, is bound up in the struggle for memory, power, and community. Jess cannot directly mail her letter to Theresa (address unknown!); instead, she will deposit it in a place that has been the outcome of such struggles for control over the written word: “Since I can’t mail you this letter, I’ll send it to a place where they keep women’s memories safe. Maybe someday, passing through this big city, you will stop and read it. Maybe you won’t” (12). While we don’t know anything in detail about this place where women’s memories are kept safe, the phrase itself and its location in “this big city” evokes the existence of a number of women’s archives and libraries, chiefly the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, as Ann Cvetkovich notes and as would be recognizable to many queer readers.33 The book immediately and subtly points our attention to the institutional and counter-institutional dynamics of textual power and to how these dynamics mediate the most intimate aspects of queer lives. Jess can deposit this letter in a lesbian archive, and while Theresa probably won’t read it in the fictional world of the novel, the fact of queer institutional keeping (the volunteer efforts of lesbians) will somehow actualize the communication. The novel drops this opening epistolary approach, but the production of the book itself is another way that any such “Theresa” might read Jess’s letter. In other words, the printed book is a social technology, that, like the archive, can uphold enable cross-generational and geographical intimacies and that needs to be struggled for. In this way, too, the letter — and the Bildungsroman that it inaugurates — becomes a way of writing back to the femme whose discursive skill is so crucial to Jess’s political Bildung, in a dialogue that is less personal (Theresa will never read it) than historical and collective (you might read it). The entire textual ecology of late-twentieth-century feminist and queer life allowsfor this allegory of apostrophe to be legible and realizable.

Stone Butch Blues was first published in 1993 by the Buffalo-based feminist publisher Firebrand Books, and the tenth anniversary second edition, in which the “Afterword” was published, by New York-based LGBT press Alyson Books.34 Each of these offset print runs was enabled by the proliferation of feminist printing that took place across the 1970s and 1980s, when feminist typesetting and printing collectives abounded as businesses that tested the literary and financial autonomy of women’s liberation ventures.35 In the Afterword, Feinberg compares the writing of the novel to the cranking out of a mimeograph: “with this novel I planted a flag: Here I am — does anyone else want to discuss these important issues? I wrote it not as an expression of individual ‘high’ art but as a working-class organizer mimeographs a leaflet — a call to action” (304). This analogy doesn’t quite track at a material level: as a novel, Stone Butch Bluesis too long to be mimeographed at scale. Mimeos duplicate pages slowly at very low cost, unlike the offset lithography used to print pretty much any novel you held in your hands in the second half of the twentieth century and most into the twenty-first. Even more obviously, Stone Butch Blues, the novel, is precisely not a leaflet that can be read on the fly; the immediacy of message and the efficacy attributed to the mimeographed leaflet as a call to action is precisely notaccorded by the slower unfolding, over reading time, that a book like Stone Butch Blues requires. Novels aren’t generally read all at once on the street, although they do of course pass between hands and have historically been part of the formation of queer sociality.36

In contrast to Feinberg’s aims for the speed in consumption and the social portability of the mimeograph, the work that Jess tells Ruth she has been privately typesetting after hours resembles professionally typeset pamphlets such as Feinberg’s own Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (which indeed features “the history of this ancient path we’re walking” and a historical materialist account of the development of anti-trans violence and oppression).37 If for Jess such professionally typeset and printed pamphlets could afford “dignity” to both the typesetting worker and to the contents set in type, as well as to those who read and recognize themselves in it, then this dignity appears to sit awkwardly alongside the agitational urgency that Feinberg would later assign to Stone Butch Blues. The novel, which generally comes in at 300 pages, wouldn’t normally be thought to have the propagandistic facility of pamphlets such as the Journals of a Transsexual or Transgender Liberation. Moreover, these pamphlets were themselves not reproduced by mimeograph but were typeset and printed using offset lithography through Workers World Party efforts; the copyright page of Journal includes a note that reads “composed, printed, and bound entirely by voluntary labor” — labor which entailed a good deal of training and access to heavy machinery.38

There is then an apparent tension between Feinberg’s desire for the novel to operate like a mimeographed leaflet and Jess’s desire for trans history to be presented in professionally set type for the purposes of collective dignity, which is closer to how the novel was actually printed. In contrast to the mimeograph analogy, the novel describes the importance of printed matter for Jess in the process of realizing herself as a political agent inserted within a longer history and trajectory. In the world of the novel, it is Jess’s typesetting shift work that enables her to move from reading theradical history of women and gender variance through libraries and bookstores to composingit herself. Thework of typesetting itself feels dignifying (even though its social dynamics are in many cases not) precisely insofar as it is linked up to the social form of the printed book or booklet; these formats are easily (if at considerable cost) mass produced and distributed, but they are also formats that last and that have an aura of historically embedded cultural authority attached to them.

Feinberg’s wish, expressed in hir Afterword, for the novel to operate with apparent immediacy of distribution and the greatest accessibility possible was perhaps more closely approached by hir actions in 2014, shortly before dying, to make the entire novel available as a pdf through hir personal website. This followed on a lengthy but ultimately successful legal battle by Feinberg and allies to regain copyright to the novel after Allyson Books, the publisher of the 2003 edition, went bankrupt. Feinberg fought for copyright precisely so the novel could be shared with everyone and not kept hidden away, a relic of queer print history. Below the link to the pdf is an explanation:

Leslie Feinberg worked up to a few days before hir death to ready the 20th anniversary Author’s Edition of Stone Butch Blues, to make it available to all, for free. This action was part of hir entire life work as a communist to “change the world” in the struggle for justice and liberation from oppression.

This Author’s Edition of Stone Butch Blues is dedicated to CeCe McDonald, a young Minneapolis (trans)woman of color organizer and activist sent to prison for defending herself against a white neo-Nazi attacker.39

This is followed by a link to a digital slideshow of solidarity actions with McDonald (Feinberg was arrested for protesting in solidarity with McDonald in 2012).40 Feinberg’s own writings on McDonald’s case were regularly published in Workers World as well. In this sense, the most recent publication of the novel as a pdf on a personal website, interwoven with calls for and examples of antiracist queer and trans working-class solidarity, is closer to the immediacy in dissemination of a mimeographed leaflet and call to action, although the activity of reading the novel will always take a different kind of time.

These same questions about the political efficacy and cultural authority of print formats are central to the final pages of Stone Butch Blues. The agitational immediacy of slogans and flyers is pivotal to the novel’s penultimate scenes, when Jess chances upon and is handed leaflets (not novels) at a gay and lesbian rights demonstration outside of the Christopher Street subway station, adjacent to the historic Stonewall Inn. Jess is then asked to speak spontaneously, and she gives a rousing and brilliant speech about being a lonely butch and about everybody’s practical need for solidarity: “I don’t know what it would take to really change the world. But couldn’t we get together and try to figure it out? Couldn’t the we be bigger? Isn’t there a way we could help each other’s battles so that we’re not always alone?” (296). After making new connections with other demonstrators and being passed more leaflets, Jess rushes to tell Ruth about the event.

Jess’s talent as a rally speaker and her newfound drive for solidarity is not presented by the novel’s sequencing of events as simple spontaneity or as the immediate product of reading a flyer. Jess has gotten to this point through the combination of reading and holding books in her hands, durational experiences of workplace exploitation and abuse, a stop-and-start history of organizing collectively at work and in communal spaces, and, finally, a covert practice of stealing time from work to typeset trans history. It’s all of this, along with Ruth’s friendship, that enables Jess to return to organizing, which she now hopes can be more hospitably configured. Jess promptly calls Duffy on the phone, and, after begging each other’s forgiveness, they catch up: Duffy reports he has been “red-baited out of the bindery where we used to work.… Then I quit drinking and got that job organizing, and I’m still working for the same union” (298). Jess, for her part, rehearses the common narrative about Bertram Powers’s industrial strategy as president of ITU Local 6: “When the computers came on the scene, the owners could see first how it was going to transform the old heat-lead industry. So they hired all the people the old craft union didn’t realize were important to organize. That’s how they broke the back of Local 6” (298). Duffy offers Jess a job as a union organizer, with an explicit promise to have Jess’s back, acknowledging that this might be necessary. Duffy explains that the world is always changing, and that Jess has always had the potential to organize: “You’ve got a power you’ve hardly used yet.… just fighting for change makes you stronger… Try imagining a world worth living in, and then ask yourself if that isn’t worth fighting for” (300).

The cumulative effect of the novel’s final pages is an optimism that is attached not only to the dream of a coalitional trans community, as Prosser argues, but also to the fight for a changed world and for the mutability of social relations more generally. Jess’s optimism is marked as a gift from Duffy, who is neither trans nor queer but who is a fighter for change and for coalitional politics: “I remembered Duffy’s challenge. Imagine a world worth living in, a world worth fighting for. I closed my eyes and allowed my hopes to soar” (301). This hope for change, within the logic of the novel’s plot, is enabled by the promise of being an openly trans union organizer.

Jess’s promised return to political organizing follows from her retrieval of trans and queer histories and origin stories and from her remaking of this readerly discovery through a finally unalienated form of labor: the stolen time of afterhours typesetting. Here, Jess engages in production directly for herself and her community. The social relations of print in the 1980s, and the labor relations of phototypesetting, that is, not only call her to action but also enable her to act. The 2003 Afterword’s announcement that Feinberg wanted the novel to be a call to action like a mimeograph, and Feinberg’s decision in 2014 to make Stone Butch Blues available for free to all to print for themselves may appear to undermine what the novel’s plotting implies about the importance of skilled literary labor and the labor relations of offset lithography and typesetting. Still, these changes in Feinberg’s approach are of a piece with the novel’s dialectical approach to plot and character development: the novel frames Jess’s needs and capacities, and the capacity of writing itself, as part of changing historical relations in which human agency exists in relational forms. If all of Feinberg’s individual provocative statements about the novel’s political efficacy are incomplete, this is not a failing. Whether it functions like an agitational mimeo, or as a work of gender theory, or as a free online pdf tribute to CeCe McDonald, Stone Butch Blues illustrates Feinberg’s dialectical approach to the agency of queer and trans writing. The novel circulates through ever-changing social relations: both changing LGBTQ+ community formations and changing relationships between literary labor and organizing as activities.

Feinberg thus reinstantiates, via the dissemination of Stone Butch Blues itself, the vision that the novel forwards through the emplotment of Jess’s complex relationship to the social relations of print. In the case of typesetting, the novel’s plot indexes the contradictory and enabling interval between union busting, feminization, and extinction of a trade altogether — a historical challenge that labor organizing failed to meet. The dialectical toggling of these crucial shifts in labor formations and gender relations constitutes the novel’s literary labor theory of gender. The enabling, fragile, and temporary gendered labor relations of print cultures are threaded through the novel but also beyond it, since the novel asks about its place in a chain of literary and print activities that shape these relations. Stone Butch Blues provides a portable frame for understanding the gendered relations of production, circulation, and consumption of LGBTQ+ literary forms and the way that these relations, in all of their variability and mutability, might be harnessed for historical change.

1. This essay has benefited tremendously from the feedback and input of a number of people: Nadya Ali, Martin Dines, Seb Franklin, Arabella Stanger and Ben Whitham helped me think through the earliest drafting stages, in 2020. Natalia Cecire prevented me from giving up by reading a way too long draft: her feedback fed into some of the essay’s most important formulations. I’m grateful to Sita Balani, Emma Heaney, Ylva Karlsson, Alisa Lebow, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Ira Terán, and comrades in QTHoMo for conversations and correspondence, to two anonymous readers for their feedback, and to Amy De’Ath who heroically stewarded the essay to publication and provided final edits. Any shortcomings are entirely mine.
2. Julie Peters, “Making Connections: Gender Prac; Advanced Course: Julie Peters Interviews Leslie Feinberg,” Screaming Hyena 7 (1996) 1, quoted in Monika I. Hogan, “‘Still Me on the Inside, Trapped’: Embodied Captivity and Ethical Narrative in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues,” Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory & Culture 3, no. 2 (2004).
3. I am thinking here of insightful works of criticism including those by Jay Prosser, J. Halberstam, Monika Hogan, Siobhan Somerville, and Mark Rifkin. Early debates between Prosser and Halberstam famously hinged on whether queer feminist celebrations of destabilizing gender were adequate to describe the kinds of trans experience featured in the novel. Cael Keegan summarizes these conflicting tendencies in terms of “the divide between queer studies’ emphasis on deconstruction/failure and trans* studies’ focus on reconstruction/recovery (perhaps not of a ‘natural’ sex but an innately sensed one).” Cáel M. Keegan, “Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?” Journal of Homosexuality 67, no. 3 (2020): 9. The novel has also been taken up as a privileged testing ground for “new” or innovative ontological claims in queer and feminist studies, including posthumanist queer approaches as with Roshaya Rodness, “Hard Road Ahead: Stone’s Queer Agency in Stone Butch Blues,” Criticism 62, no. 4 (Fall 2020).
4. For an example of the former, see Dan Sinykin, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, Literature Now (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).
5. Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1993) 271. Further references to Stone Butch Bluesare noted parenthetically in the text.
6. This fact has not been foregrounded in most published readings of the novel, with one notable exception being Cat Moses’s 1999 essay on “Queering Class,” which argues that Stone Butch Blues “examines the relationship between gender and class structures and… suggests means by which such an examination might advance a praxis of resistance” Cat Moses, “Queering Class: Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues,” Studies in the Novel 31, no. 1 (1999): 93.
7. See also Jim Holstun, “Buffalo Unsteeled: Connie Porter, Leslie Feinberg, and the Persistence of Proletarian Fiction,” The Journal of English Language and Literature 63, no. 1 (2017): 23–42, and Graham Thompson, The Business of America: The Cultural Production of a Post-War Nation (London: Pluto Press, 2004).
8. Sarah Carpenter and Shahrzad Mojab, Revolutionary Learning: Marxism, Feminism and Knowledge (London: Pluto Press, 2017) 74.
9. Carpenter and Mojab, Revolutionary Learning 75.
10. Journal of a Transsexual (1980) was brought out by World View Publishers, and World View Forum brought out Feinberg’s polemical pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come in 1992. Leslie Feinberg (as Diane Leslie Feinberg), Journal of a Transsexual (New York: World View Publishers, 1980); Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (New York: World View Forum, 1992).
11. Feinberg, Journal 2.
12. Feinberg, Journal 8–9.
13. M.E. O’Brien, “Trans Work: Employment Trajectories, Labour Discipline and Gender Freedom,” in Transgender Marxism, ed. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke (London: Pluto Press, 2021) 58.
14. Juliet Jacques, “Forms of Resistance: Uses of Memoir, Theory, and Fiction in Trans Life Writing,” Life Writing 14, no. 3 (July 2017): 199.
15. Minnie Bruce Pratt, “Transgender Pioneer Leslie Feinberg of Stone Butch Blues Has Died,” Advocate, November 17, 2014, Accessed July 20, 2023 http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/books/2014/11/17/transgender-pioneer-leslie-feinberg-stone-butch-blues-has-died. 
16. Mark Rifkin, When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (Oxford University Press, 2011) 237.
17. Jay Prosser, “No Place Like Home: The Transgendered Narrative of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 41, no. 3 (September 1995): 493.
18. Cf. e.g., Jacques, “Forms of Resistance” 361.
19. Benjamin Kohlmann, “Toward a History and Theory of the Socialist Bildungsroman,” Novel 48, no. 2 (August 2015): 167.
20. Christina Burr, “Defending ‘The Art Preservative’: Class and Gender Relations in the Printing Trades Unions, 1850–1914,” Labour / Le Travail 31 (1993): 47–73.
21. See Balay 2018 for an illuminating analysis, in the context of trucking, of the persistence and endurance of features that mark work as suitable for butch women, and of how bosses attribute these characteristics to butches, or impose them on them: “Working-class culture needs that space of endurance and sacrifice occupied by someone who harvests virility and meaning from its very perpetuation. With white straight men less willing to be that symbol, butch lesbians, indigenous people, and other marginalized bodies get pressed into service.” Anne Balay, Semi Queer: Inside the World of Gay, Trans, and Black Truck Drivers (University of North Carolina Press, 2018) 151.
22. Siobhan B. Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Duke University Press, 2000) 175.
23. Crucially, Jess fails to read even Edwin’s inscription in DuBois’s volume. Amy Olson’s “Signed Copies” project with the Leslie Feinberg Library at the Sexual Minorities Archive takes up the importance of physical books for Feinberg’s politics, considering precisely the ways that signed and inscribed books can “gesture … at the creation of a shared consciousness” Amy Olson, “About the Project — The Leslie Feinberg Library: Signed Copies,” The Leslie Feinberg Library, Accessed June 1, 2023, https://sites.smith.edu/leslie-feinberg-library/about-the-project/.
24. For rich analysis of the groundbreaking affirmative action program in the Seattle electrical trades, see Ellie Belew, High Voltage Women: Breaking Barriers at Seattle City Light (Red Letter Press, 2019). For an account of the rise of public sector unions, see Joe Burns, Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor’s Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today (IG Publishing, 2014), especially pp. 29–43 on “The Teacher Rebellion.” For a discussion of LGBT+ inroads into a range of blue-collar trades (building and bus and truck driving, for example), see Miriam Frank, Out in the Union: A Labor History of Queer America (Temple University Press, 2015), especially Chapter 1, “From Construction to Couture,” pp. 17–47.
25. Shortly after 1973 (so, following Jess’s time at the bindery), flight attendants would undertake major membership drives and strike campaigns to challenge the gendered and gendering logic of the family wage (the very logic behind Jess and the other butches’ decision to leave the binderies for the steel mill), as documented and explained in Ryan Patrick Murphy’s Deregulating Desire: Flight Attendant Activism, Family Politics, and Workplace Justice (Temple University Press, 2016).
26. For more on this history, see especially J. Dakota Brown, Ben Koditschek, and Michael Neuchatz, About the International Typographical Union, ed. Chris Crawford, Ben Koditschek, and Jess Sattell (Draw Down Books, 2021); Samuel Solomon, “Offsetting Queer Literary Labor,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 24, nos. 2–3 (2018): 239–66; Cynthia Cockburn, Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change (Pluto Press, 1991).
27. Elizabeth Bernstein, Siobhan Brooks, Leslie Feinberg, Amber Hollibaugh, and Surina Khan, “Class, Race and Sex: The Future of Difference,” The Scholar and Feminist XXX: 30th Anniversary: Present Challenges, Future Feminisms, 2005 Conference Transcript, S&F Online 3, no. 3 and 4, no. 1 (2005) https://sfonline.barnard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/sfpanel3.pdf 52.
28. For a thorough account of this era, see Frank J. Romano and Drea Achacoso, History of the Phototypesetting Era (Graphic Communication Institute, 2014); for a searching overview of the labor politics of typography across the long twentieth century, see J. Dakota Brown, Out of Sorts: Machinery, Theory, and the Revolutions in Typographical Labor (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2022).
29. Solomon, “Offsetting Queer Literary Labor” 250.
30. Jordy Rosenberg, “Afterword: One Utopia, One Dystopia,” in Transgender Marxism, ed. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke (Pluto Press, 2021) 273.
31. I recognize the irony in the fact that I, a poet, am now arguing, against Rosenberg, a sublime novelist, that plot may be more politically salient than lyric address’s tendentious status as a uniquely history-defying quality of poetic making, which I have addressed elsewhere at length. Samuel Solomon, Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism: Social Reproduction and the Institutions of Poetry(Bloomsbury, 2019).
32. Rosenberg, “Afterword” 261.
33. Ann Cvetkovich, “Untouchability and Vulnerability: Stone Butchness as Emotional Style,” in Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, ed. Sally Munt and Cherry Smyth (A&C Black, 1998), 159–69. For more about the archive, see https://lesbianherstoryarchives.org/. For more on how the LHA’s digitization practices relate to lesbian information activism, see Cait McKinney, Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke University Press, 2020) 153–204.
34. Following up on these production details evidences a rich and overlapping network of designers and typesetters working across various feminist publication efforts. As a tiny example, the Firebrand Books edition notes: “Typesetting by Bets Ltd., book design by betsy bayley”; bayley also did the book design for Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, which was co-authored by Feinberg’s long-term partner Minnie Bruce Pratt and Black socialist feminist luminary Barbara Smith. Yours in Struggle was typeset by Diane Lubarsky, who was also involved in typesetting Barbara Smith’s foundational Home Girls. Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Barbara Smith, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (Firebrand Books, 1988).
35. For more on this, see Jess Baines, “A Darn Good Idea: Feminist Printers and the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain,” in Natural Enemies of Books: A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography, ed. Maryam Fanni, Matilda Flodmark, and Sara Kaaman (Occasional Papers, 2020) 79–99; Agatha Beins and Julie R. Enszer, “‘We Couldn’t Get Them Printed,’ So We Learned to Print: Ain’t I a Woman? and the Iowa City Women’s Press,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 34, no. 2 (2013): 186–221; Solomon, “Offsetting Queer Literary Labor.”
36. For more on the long history of queer literary “circulation,” see Natasha Hurley, Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
37. Feinberg, “Transgender Liberation.”
38. Feinberg, Journal of a Transsexual.
39. “LESLIE FEINBERG,” Accessed October 6, 2022, https://www.lesliefeinberg.net/.
40. See Kris Balderas-Hamel, “Court Re-Charges Transgender Author Leslie Feinberg for Action Supporting CeCe McDonald,” Workers World, September 6, 2012, https://www.workers.org/2012/09/3812/. For further information about McDonald, visit https://supportcece.wordpress.com/