Language

As with all literature-based analyses, language plays a major role in Halberstam’s arguments. Significantly, though, much of the language that Halberstam uses has been outmoded in the past two decades. As such, a study of the theme of language within Female Masculinity necessarily analyzes Halberstam’s arguments about language as well as the diction he chooses to use within those arguments.

Language becomes particularly important when Halberstam discusses the history of female homosexual relationships. To use the term “lesbianism” to refer to all relationships between women is to erase the complexities of those historical relationships and conflate concepts such as the female husband and gender inversion with modern lesbianism. As Halberstam explains, “’lesbian’ constitutes a term for same-sex desire produced…within the highly politicized context of the rise of feminism”; as such, the term “lesbian” “cannot be the transhistorical label for all same-sex activity between women” (51). This...