Feinberg, Leslie: Stone Butch Blues - 20th Anniversary Authors Edition

"Stone Butch Blues," Leslie Feinberg’s 1993 first novel, is considered in and outside the U.S. to be a groundbreaking work about the complexities of gender. Feinberg was the first theorist to advance a Marxist concept of “transgender liberation.”

Woman or man? That's the question that rages like a storm around Jess Goldberg, clouding her life and her identity. Growing up differently gendered in a blue--collar town in the 1950's, coming out as a butch in the bars and factories of the prefeminist '60s, deciding to pass as a man in order to survive when she is left without work or a community in the early '70s. This powerful, provocative and deeply moving novel sees Jess coming full circle, she learns to accept the complexities of being a transgendered person in a world demanding simple explanations: a he-she emerging whole, weathering the turbulence.

Sold by hundreds of thousands of copies, passed hand-to-hand inside prisons, the novel has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Hebrew--with earnings from that edition going to ASWAT Palestinian Gay Women--and won the 1994 American Library Association Stonewall Book Award and 1994 Lambda Literary Award.

Feinberg said in hir Author’s Note to the 2003 edition: "Like my own life, this novel defies easy classification. If you found 'Stone Butch Blues' in a bookstore or library, what category was it in? Lesbian fiction? Gender studies? Like the germinal novel 'The Well of Loneliness' by Radclyffe/John Hall, this is a lesbian novel and a transgender novel—making ‘trans’ genre a verb, as well as an adjective."