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Re: 'Queering' puberty?
Posted by Pharmakon on 2024-December-22 05:04:22, SundayIn reply to 'Queering' puberty? posted by Sick Rose on 2024-December-20 20:53:14, Friday
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Queer is nothing if not a highly contested term. I try to employ it usefully, but without claiming expertise. It had not occurred to me that I was "queering" puberty. I took myself to be a staking out a liberationist stance on a salient political controversy, blocker bans. If queering means subverting binaries, queering puberty would be subverting the binary of before and after puberty. Giving youth agency to move that boundary would tend to subvert it. And it deserves to be subverted (puberty is not a moment, it's a process, an engagement with brute forces of nature whose power we cannot deny but which as a highly agentive species we seek to control). The pubertal binary is already scientifically and academically discredited. But it survives in popular imagination, and underpins the mythology of childhood sexual innocence. So by all means, let's queer puberty. I apologize for not replying to the post you mentioned. I read anything you post, and if you tell me to watch a Thai TV program I will, just as I read a chunk of Parfit because Diogenes said I should. My intellectual life over the past decade has been guided primarily by colleagues here at BC, of whom none has been more valued than yourself. I spoke about "re-queering" masculinity, implying it was previously queer and needs to become queer again. But pre-modern masculinity -- the one that felt free to love boys and had its fear of women better under control -- wasn't queer at the time, because it was normative. An equivalent masculinity, if we can construct one, would be queer today, since norms have changed, and not for the better. I didn't argue that masculinity should disappear. I argued that it needs to be re-conceptualized. This has happened before, and it needs to happen again. Conceptions like masculinity resist re-conceptualization, they became hegemonic for a reason. Gynophobia (a better term, I think, than misogyny, because the crux is fear of change, understandable after millennia of institutionalized patriarchy) gave rise to homophobia -- men must not "become like" women -- and these two elements link today's hegemonic masculinity to the one that developed in the "long" sixteenth century in England and has been exported through US imperialism around the world. As the history you recount in the post you cited demonstrates, pre-modern societies constructed a masculinity that was, in its time, functional. Recounting its features is useful and, to a degree, inspiring, but its central characteristic -- patriarchy -- lapsed into dysfunction as the home based economic model it had sustained disappeared and was replaced by a regime of wage labor, which both places men and women in competition for jobs and makes them fungible for the employer. For better or worse, that isn't going to change. Fungibility of labor is a basic characteristic of the modern world. A woman is as good as a man. An immigrant is as good as a native. Labor a half a world away is as good as labor down the street from wherever the product of that labor comes to market. If pederasty depends on society's need for the male group bond, then pederasty is dead, because that bond is not needed. Who does need us? Women do, because they care about their sons (and their daughters of course, which maybe is where Sam's bisexual responsiveness comes in) and because fathers either aren't around or can't be bothered. Rich women don't want our help, and are the core of the movement to track us down and lock us up. They can just pay poor women to care for their kids. But who's caring for the poor women's kids? They need us. Rich women will try to stop us from helping them, because the rich women are greedy and want the poor women as desperate as possible so that their labor can be had cheaply. This role bears sparse resemblance to pederasties past. Bold chieftan of a troupe of boy warriors? Romantic, but unless our future is some kind of gangsterism it's hard to see that working well. We once found roles as mentors, and those may still be available for the very circumspect among us. Freelance working class fake dad with benefits including junior, and if you are too fussy to fuck mom once in a while if she needs it, then aren't you a selfish bitch. I mean, where's your bisexual responsiveness? I have gotten this far without addressing trans. Let's address it. Is trans like the castrati? As you point out, the castrati may often have rationally chosen that role, which offered significant social and economic benefits. How much were they giving up for how much gain? And did they have "free choice," if such a thing even exists? Are today's transitioners making a similar choice? I don't know, but if they are, I would argue they are less constrained in making that choice than the castrati were. No boy is being forced into transition. Did the castrati (did Sporus, recently much discussed here) have as much agency? You also advance a slogan: "[T]here is no such thing as the 'wrong' puberty." But if there are trans people, isn't natal puberty "wrong" for them? Doesn't this slogan amount to denying that trans people really exist? It "feels" wrong to them. Some among us are comfortable enough with arguing that the feelings of others command no deference whatever. But how is that anything but arrogant? I have left Buddhism to last, perhaps because on that topic I already owe Diogenes a grateful response for encouraging me to read the second part of Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons, in which he brilliantly demonstrates the plausibility of the Buddhist doctrine of "anatta," or "no soul," using the methodology of British analytic philosophy. Anatta implies detachment from desire, and primarily this is the desire that things be otherwise than they actually are. This does require acceptance of the limits imposed by reality. And often, according to Buddhism, who does least does best. But Buddhism, at least as I have come to understand it, is quietistic only to the extent that opportunities to alleviate suffering are not presented. My brother, who introduced me to Buddhism through the work of the Catholic monk Thomas Merton, also became a member of Alcoholic Anonymous, whose slogan is the Serenity Prayer of German theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Alcoholics are characterized by their grandiosity, so the first part of this admonition is one the often most need to hear. But in the AA context, the second part is too often ignored. We must change what we can. We can change our masculinity. And we must. hugzu ;-p  |
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