Living in the Marginal In-Between: A Study on the Multiplicity of Spatiality in Stone Butch Blues

Set in the geographical context of Buffalo and New York City in the 1960s and 1970s, Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues narrates the un-homed life from childhood to late adulthood of working-class Jewish transgender lesbian Jess Goldberg as she struggles to survive her socially transgressive body. Facing quotidian instances of bigotry, class prejudice, loneliness and searching for a home in her own body, Jess tries to create her identity and survive through marginalized community-formation spaces in Buffalo. Framing this analysis in the notion of the social dimension of space theorized by Henri Lefebvre (1991), Michel De Certeau (1984), Doreen Massey (2005) and Manzanas and Benito (2011, 2014), this article aims to explore the spatiality of the house and the city as environments capable to shape the lives of the subjects that inhabit them. It intends to do so by analysing the spatial perspective of the novel and how these multiple spaces shape the identity of the socially transgressive protagonist, whose body is analysed as the ground zero of spatiality.