BUTCH-ERED: butch.world
Thesis Faculty:
Clarinda Mac Low, Namreta Kumar, Harpreet SareenUsing interviews as its backbone, “Butch-ered” explores the butch identity across two varying different locations: Knoxville, Tennessee and New York, New York. This project is three stages: a web archive, a publication, and community events. The interactive archive is a space where users can explore the locations while talking to the interviewed subjects in a choose-your-own adventure mechanism. Combining oral history, participatory design, and interactive media, “Butch-ered” culminates to create a multi-format archive. Though this work, "Butch-ered" investigates how the butch identity changes depending on access to technology, community, political surroundings, and geography. “Butch-ered” sits at the intersection of Southern queer studies, community formation, and anthropological research.
Butch
adjective • noun
a lesbian with traditionally masculine aesthetic, behavior, or identity
a historical subculture emerging in the United States in the 1940s by working class lesbians
Related: lesbian, femme, transgender, trans-masculine, queer, LGBTQ+
How is identity formed? Is it something internal and fixed, or is it continuously shaped by the environments, people, and surrounding systems? This project begins with the assumption that identity is not stable, nor self-contained, but rather produced through an ongoing interaction between the self and the external world. Personality, behavior, and self-concept do not emerge in isolation; they are constructed through perception, social feedback, and the conditions of place.
“Butch-ered” explores the butch label in its relationship to time, political surroundings, technology, and geographic location.
“Butch-ered” includes a book on the butch identity and history. Throughout this publication, butchness is explained through its relationship to community and surroundings. Included in the making of “Butch-ered”, a community event was held in Knoxville, Tennessee for eastern Tennesseean butch/ masculine identifying sapphics. This event was the first of its kind in its region and continues to grow.
