Ccinquième(s)

I moved my stuff into Bus Stop House at 2332 Fulton [& Stanyon] San Francisco, CA. I had quite an enjoyable evening. There was some bomb-ass food at the potluck and I met so many excellent new people. We made some scrumptious wheat flour pancakes this morning and French-pressed a like 3 pitchers of Fazenda Esperança.



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Wrote out some more questions for my interviews. Let me know what you think.
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Do you think there are specific symbolic practices, rituals and discourses which effectively promote bonding of identity-based groups in opposition to a hegemonic social order? Do these promote an internal equality or serve rather as merely a mythical rhetoric within that oppositional discourse? For example: patriarchal dynamics within queer contexts, authentic versus inauthentic aesthetics of queerness, etc.

Does this sort of nationalism of the sexual subaltern, the sexual ‘other’ in some ways promote the hetero/homo binary that queer theory seeks to dismantle?

Does the ‘shock’ aesthetic of queer direct action pose a serious threat to the status quo or act as merely another disruptive spectacle amongst many? For example, during the carnival atmosphere of pride parade.

While the purposes of the solidarity of the signified in a political context might be to remain as a permanent site of contest , those that view, understand or receive the event may well opt to understand those involved as constituting coherent subjects with fixed unquestionable identities based not on an opposition to intersectional hegemonies, but on their coherent ‘disruptive’ aesthetic. That a coalitional group can be read against their intentions shores up potential identitarian subversion, and forecloses the possibility for those who cannot affiliate with the presumed identities from joining that seemingly unified coalition.

What are your thoughts on the argument that males are no less gendered than females or that masculinity is no less a social construction or performative masquerade than is femininity?

Is this complacent with the assumption that men and women are equally installed into symmetrically gendered positions?

Does the social and symbolic process of gendering sexed bodies maintain unequal and asymmetrical relations of power?

To leave masculinity unstudied is to leave it naturalized and thus render it less permeable to change. A ‘gender studies’ that focuses on masculinity can designate the critical process by which males learn from feminism in order to subvert the perpetuation/reproduction of normative/hegemonic masculinity.

How might a pro-feminist reconstitution or reconfiguration of male subjectivity proceed? I would argue that it must begin with prefiguring a variable masculine aesthetic that can operate either independently from or in conjunction with the phallic male body. This initial recognition of a variable masculine aesthetic as separate from the phallic male body allows for interrogating hegemonic/normative organs operating with outside and through the body. Only then can the body be reinscribed with what Lee Edelman calls, “A category-subverting alterity within the conceptual framework of the masculine.”

Is there an aversion to penetratrability or to vulnerability associated with masculinity? Does this prevent self-identifying men from embodying feminist struggles?

Catherine Waldby writes that “anal eroticism carries disturbing feminizing connotations” in our society. Could the male anus have the potential to become a site of significant disturbance and deconstruction of hegemonic/normative masculinity? I believe it could because it allows access to the vulnerable interior space. It deterritorializes male bodies and masculinity, extracting and projecting sexed and gendered bodies from patriarchal, normative histories.

It is the constitutive relationship between misogyny and homophobia in the formation of the ‘properly’ phallic, straight male subjects that makes the link between feminism and queer theory crucial for those interested in de-forming and transforming masculinity.