PMA/LSP Associate Professor Karen Jaime has published an article called ""It Ain't Easy Being Green": Race and Time in Stormé DeLarverie's Butch Swagger and Presence" in a special issue of QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking entitled “The Queer 1990s.”
The essay appears here through Michigan State University Press.
Jaime took some time to speak with us about her work:
What inspired you to create ""It Ain't Easy Being Green": Race and Time in Stormé DeLarverie's Butch Swagger and Presence"?
“Stormé was someone that I knew, was in community with, and that I was mentored by when working as a door person/security/bounced in downtown NYC while in graduate school. She was someone that I was inspired by in the lesbian and queer communities, in particular because of how she moved through space as a masculine presenting person assigned female at birth. Her gender performance and presentation made her an ideal person for me to focus on and write about in one of my manuscripts in progress entitled The Anachronistic Butch. As an important figure involved in the Stonewall Riots, I felt that her performances and contributions needed to be highlighted.”
What was your approach in crafting this article?
“I drew from my interactions with Stormé along with research conducted while a fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I approached it as an opportunity to critically examine the performances—on stage, on screen, and in the everyday— of an iconic figure.”
What would you like readers to know about your work?
“My work attends to researching and writing about the too often ignored marginalized communities who challenge rigid, and fixed, identitarian boundaries. I seek to build community through an interrogation of the performative potential of culturally informed art making practices and productions.”
Read more about Karen Jaime.
