Taking Her Name: On Queer Male "Woman-Identification" and Feminist Theory‪.‬

For several years I've wanted to return to a naive but earnest essay--about the position of the "woman-identified male" in feminism--that constituted my final project for a Women's Studies course called Philosophical Perspectives of Women. The year was 1989, and I was a sophomore English major, one of two males in the class. This essay, like that one, will bring together the personal and the theoretical, but now, in hindsight and with the horizon still shifting, feminist theory seems as fluid as "the personal," as the daily lives from out of which theory speaks and to which theory speaks. This essay challenges my original argument for "woman-identified male" as an identity category. I do not seek to disavow what anyone might claim or name as a lived experience, but to focus, instead, on my own act of claiming and the name I gave my experience. Reading over the original essay, I am surprised that I wasn't more blind-spotted or defensive. What strikes me as the essay's primary essentialism is my consistent deferral to what I perceived as the more authentic experience of the biological female as a culturally-constructed woman.