
by Leslie Feinberg
Lulu.com
1993, 2014, paperback
SKU: n/a
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.” Selling 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."
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.
Leslie has made this book free on hir website lesliefeinberg.net and you can download a free pdf here Stone-Butch-Blues-by-Leslie-Feinberg.pdf (906616 downloads).
You can also get a copy in print at cost from Lulu.com.
This book is such an important piece of Buffalo Queer history and it's important to us at Burning Books to have it on our shelves! We want to honor Leslie's wishes that it be free and accessible to all. We've included the links above where you can get it for free and printed at cost. We are selling it for a little more than you'll get it at Lulu because we've added in all of the extra shipping and handling costs they charge and something to cover our labor expenses. We're essentially breaking even on this one but we're happy to have it back and available for you all as an easy grab.
Reviews:
"Stone Butch Blues has probably touched your life even if you haven’t read it yet." —Alison Bechdel, creator of Dykes to Watch Out For and Fun Home
"Stone Butch Blues is a powerful novel written by a founder of the contemporary transgender movement." —Susan Stryker, former executive director, GLBT Historical Society
"[Feinberg is] a historian, an activist, a relentless bridge-builder. The one whose 1993 novel, Stone Butch Blues, gave the word transgender legs." —Village Voice
"Stone Butch Blues is a gift from one of the most inspiring and revolutionary voices of our time." —Emanuel Xavier, author of Americano