Butch Heroes

Visual artist Brodell delivers an ambitious and wonderfully celebratory ode to the lives of 28 people over many centuries ‘assigned female at birth’ who ‘had documented relationships with women, and whose gender presentation was more masculine than feminine”…This is a serious—and seriously successful—queer history recovery project.

Butch Heroes is a fascinating, intersectional, feminist art-text project, and overall a rather wonderful reclamatory book of LGBT history that subvert and resonates in the human psyche.

—The Advocate

The portraits give homage to contemporary ideas of queer ancestry, and in doing so give strength to trans and non-binary communities currently under attack. That makes Butch Heroes worth celebrating.

Brodell has created a frank, compelling, sensitive, and celebratory compendium of gender-role pioneers, telling the stories and shining light into a corner of history that has long been in darkness.

Brodell has created a frank, compelling, sensitive, and celebratory compendium of gender-role pioneers, telling the stories and shining light into a corner of history that has long been in darkness.

Butch Heroes is beautifully designed.

These stories reveal the lives of gender non-conforming individuals from many eras in history who stayed true to themselves despite living under the narrowly defined rules and roles governing gender in their particular culture.

A splendid and insightful collection.

Ria Brodell is an artist and educator based in Boston who has had solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and whose work has been featured in the Guardian, ARTNews, the Boston Globe, and New American Paintings. Brodell is a part-time lecturer at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University.