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Re-Queering Masculinity
Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-December-13 22:32:35, FridayIn reply to Escaping Orientation? posted by Sick Rose on 2024-December-12 23:50:21, Thursday
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Can I suggest that queering involves subverting the binaries that underlie our constructions around human gender and sexuality and replacing them with continua that better express our biologically and environmentally conditioned potential for diversity? I can suggest it, and I do. The open minded reader will provisionally entertain the suggestion. Let’s see where it leads us. What masculinity are we going to seek to queer, or re-queer? The one that blocks boylove, of course. (If you are inclined at this point to object that feminism, not masculinity, blocks boylove, provisionally entertain the alternative. Today’s feminism is at least in part a reaction to today’s masculinity, and both are products of social changes that neither men nor women particularly sought or welcomed.) Our starting point will be Randolph Trumbach, who tells us in Sex and the Gender Revolution that in north-western Europe, after 1700: …men no longer had sex with boys and women – they now had sex either with females or with males. They were now supposed to be either exclusively homosexual or heterosexual. The majority of men now desired only women. This necessarily brought them into more intimate relations with women, and their intimacy could threaten the continuing male desire to establish domination. This dilemma was in part resolved by assigning those men who desired males to a third gender role that was held in great contempt. This role played its necessary part in the new relations between men and women produced by the emergence of individualism and equality in eighteenth-century society since it guaranteed that, however far equality between men and women might go, men would never become like women since they would never desire men. Only women and sodomites desired men, and this was true for males from adolescence to old age. [p9] As TPKA Sam Hall noted some six years ago, “many intriguing effects feed into and result from this change.” (As BLs, we may wish to use 1642 – the year the London theaters closed at the outset of the English Civil War, bringing an end to the queer era of boys-playing-girls-playing-boys on the English stage, rather than Trumbach’s 1700, to mark this transition, which in any case was certainly not at all abrupt.) 1. It’s not about men and boys. It’s about men and women. The suppression of man-boy sexuality is a side effect of a crisis in male-female relations. 2. It’s not about feminism, which did not in any sense we would recognize today exist in England at the end of the 17th Century. The “dilemma” Trumbach identifies is a challenge to male domination posed by the changing social status of women. Men reacted by reconceptualizing masculinity. 3. The new masculinity was pervasively homophobic. Men who desired men were excluded from the newly hegemonic definition of the masculine. Homophobia is invented as a part of this process. 4. But underlying the novel homophobia is an equally pervasive misogyny. The new masculinity is deeply threatened by femininity and by women. It is fearful and angry in a way that the “traditional” masculinity, one that had been relatively stable for millennia, had not needed to be. Though Trumbach does not in the quoted passage use the term “patriarchy,” this is the institution that begins at this point in history to find itself seriously challenged and struggles to maintain itself, warping masculinity in the process. Its struggles continue today, and the pathologies introduced into the hegemonic masculinity to cope with these struggles are more acute than ever. Patriarchy was a functional social structure when economic production was organized primarily around the household. If the extended family is to sustain itself by producing socially useful goods, it is at least arguably helpful for someone to be in charge of organizing the activity. (Matriarchy could also work, and voices as disparate as the Bronze Age Pervert and Friedrich Engels have argued that when human economic activity has been organized around the tribe, rather than the household, matriarchy has been common.) In the household economy, labor is divided according to age and gender. But as the factory economy emerged to replace it, labor became fungible. The family was reduced to a living arrangement, not a method of organizing production. Labor was performed outside the home, for a wage, and increasingly this labor could be performed equally well by males and females. Patriarchy became atavistic. Refusing to die, its only function today is to distort masculinity. Are you with me so far? I didn’t think so. So let’s move back to friendlier ground. What can re-queering masculinity do for boylove? We can’t call masculinity before 1642 traditional. The “new” masculinity has been with us for going on four centuries, so its claim to be traditional is too strong to dispute. We will call the old masculinity queer, since it was comparatively free of the binaries that structure masculinity today. Men were not “supposed to be either exclusively homosexual or heterosexual” – in fact those terms, had they existed, would have been more or less incomprehensible. If there was a common pattern to male sexual life, it was structured by age. As a boy, your first sex was with other boys and young men. As a young man, you likely had sex with boys. Later, you married a girl much younger than yourself, had children, and likely had sex with both your wife and other women and also, if having sex was something you did a lot, with boys. Notable here is the absence of a “sexual orientation.” For the pre-modern queer masculinity, this notion would have been incomprehensibly limiting. Re-queering masculinity will subvert the notion of sexual orientation. As TPKA Sam Hall put it, commenting on the Trumbach passage I have quoted: The goal is clear: Love the one you're not with. RESURRECT BISEXUAL RESPONSIVENESS. Personally and politically. Now. hugzu ;-p  |
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