JJ Levine
In Urbania magazine issue #32 devoted to theme of lesbians, we come across the noun la butch used to refer to a lesbian with butch mannerisms: la butch, les butchs. We also find butch used as an adjective.
Is the word butch offensive? One woman interviewed in the magazine said that it was. Another woman, JJ Levine (read bio here), said that it wasn’t, and that she used the word a lot. She said that the only women who’d be offended by it were probably the ones that people considered to be butch but who didn’t identify as butch themselves.
JJ Levine cuts hair. She specialises in la coupe butch, the “butch cut.” She also calls it la coupe lesbienne. To do une coupe butch, on rase sur le côté. JJ Levine says that k.d. lang has really ugly hair, and that she’d like to give her une coupe butch classique.
When asked what she felt was THE lesbian haircut in its most clichéd form, JJ Levine mentioned a few: la coupe Longueuil (it’s a mullet: short in the front avec le pad en arrière, which the Longueuil people have the reputation of sporting; read more here), le buzzcut and la coupe emo (the emo cut).
You can read an older conversation from 2009 with JJ Levine on the Urbania website: JJ Levine, coiffeuse queer.
la butch, les butchs1, butch, butches
la coupe butch, butch cut
la coupe lesbienne, lesbian cut
raser2 sur le côté, to shave the side
la coupe Longueuil3, mullet
le pad, long hair in the back; also used to refer to a mullet
le buzzcut, buzzcut
la coupe emo, emo cut
1 the s in butchs isn’t pronounced
2 raser and rasé are pronounced râzé; the â sounds like “aww”
3 Longueuil is a city across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal
[The vocabulary in this entry comes from “JJ Levine, spécialiste des coupes butch” by Nadia Essadiqi, Urbania, numéro 32, hiver 2012, Montréal, p. 11.]
