34 pages • 1 hour read
Leslie FeinbergStone Butch Blues
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 19-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary
Jess decides that she is done passing, that life is a man is not the answer to who she is. She stops taking hormones and watches her transformation back into her own self. Once again, people begin to stare at and harass her. She takes this as a cue to leave Buffalo, where she feels she now has no lasting significant ties. She boards a train to New York City and disembarks in Harlem with a sense of hopefulness and excitement.
Chapter 20 Summary
Life in New York City is less idyllic than Jess imagines it will be. She is used to riding her motorcycle and finds travelling by bus and subway difficult to adjust to. While on the subway, she watches cops harass drag queens and is harassed some herself. It is expensive and difficult for her to find a place to live, and as soon as she does get settled, a fire in the building claims most of her worldly belongings. She gets a job driving a forklift at a sewing machine factory but the pay is not great. Then she gets sick multiple times, and in both instances struggles to get adequate medical attention. First a doctor doles her out pills without any advice to treat a bad cough and fever. Later, she tries to get medicine for a vaginal infection but is nearly laughed out of the women’s health clinic.
Chapter 21 Summary
Jess begins pursuing new pastimes, including listening to classical music and reading a great deal of fiction and poetry. With Theresa in mind, she gives the writings of women’s liberation a fresh try. She gets a new job where management is plainly hostile to union organizing but she and her co-workers stick together and try their best to move ahead with petitioning for better working conditions. Feeling alone, Jess spends a lot of time walking around NYC. She witnesses a hit and run in which a homeless man is killed. Jess watches as the police dismiss the woman who found the dead man, telling the crying woman to get over it, that he was “only a bum” (243). Jess also connects with a deaf juggler who seems to understand the intensity of her loneliness and feelings of social isolation.
Chapters 19-21 Analysis
Jess’s decision to relocate to New York City is an attempt at complete reinvention. She is not prepared for the loneliness that she finds in the city. Though she is surrounded by people, she struggles to truly connect. She spends much of her time walking the city and missing the freedom that her motorcycle used to afford her.
Life is also more expensive in New York City than she had bargained on. Though she finds work more easily now that she is passing as male, it is difficult and expensive to find a place to live. The fire that breaks out in her building effectively sets her back to zero, as she loses most of her worldly possessions. Poverty, loneliness and human desperation are now plainly visible to her as she witnesses a homeless man get run over and left for a dead and a deaf street performer largely ignored by the public.
Her outlook on life seems to hit rock bottom when she gets ill and cannot get adequate medical attention. It is plain that being neither definitively male or female means that many healthcare professionals will overlook her. When Jess turns to a women’s health center for assistance, most of the women there treat her cruelly, telling her she is not female enough to qualify for their help. Luckily, one nurse intervenes and gives Jess the medicine she requires.
