(Draft Intro) "PHENOMENAL MALE BODIES"

The definitional indeterminacy of queer theory is simultaneously the most problematic and most important aspect of it. In addressing gender, chromosomal sex and desire —the degrees and assemblages of femininity, of masculinity, of female/male inter-trans corporality, of racial/ethnic intersectionality, of our neurological and corporeal plasticity —it provides the most adequate framework for understanding the multifarious manifestations of our ever fluctuating identities. Resisting the heteronormative model of stability—which it should be noted, claims heterosexuality as its origin, when it is more properly its effect (I will elaborate on this point later)—queer focuses on the mismatches. Whether as a trans-man with a gay boyfriend or the deconstructive methodology of Judith Butler, queer locates and exploits the incoherencies inherent and glaringly apparent in the fallacy of heteronormative consistency.

Contemporary cultural accounts of masculinity within which it boils owns to the social, cultural, and political effects of male embodiment and male privilege can only read masculinity as dominant, hegemonic, male subjectivity situated as a counterpart to feminine passivity. That there might be more than one type of masculinity or that masculinity be dynamic, multiple and transgressive is hard to coalesce with traditional notions of gender, sex, and feminist theories. This reflects a greater tendency in our culture to polarize, dichotomize, and oversimplify issues of se, gender, sexuality and corporeality. According to Judith Butler (1990), gender is, “not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration” (p. xv). The culturally perceived link between a specific gender performance i.e. masculinity and male bodies is thus problematic. I think that a feminist (re/con)stitution/figuration of male subjectivity is necessary in order for feminists to dismantle the ways in which people participate in patriarchal normativity. The problem I’ve consistently run into how we understand and describe people both from within or without the language that currently exists. What does it mean to say that someone ‘looks masculine’ as opposed to ‘acts masculine’? I think there is marked and important difference. Through queering our idea of the masculine, we can exploit this difference and allow masculinity to break out of the patriarchal binarism that oppresses us all.

Simone’s de Beauvoir and Judith Butler provide a basis from which to interrogate the formulations embodiment, male corporality and the problematic conflation of masculine visual signification with patriarchal normativity. Given that the female body is only an “arbitrary locus” of the feminine, there is subsequently nothing, according to Butler, that might restrict the possibility of that body “becoming the locus of other constructions of gender” (Butler 1986: 35). “At its limit,” she states, the distinction Beauvoir makes between sex and gender implies a “radical heteronomy of natural bodies and constructed genders with the consequence that ‘being’ female and ‘being’ a woman are two very different sorts of being” (35). As a result of Beauvoir’s monumental formulation that “one is not born but becomes a woman,” to be a gender is to participate in a continual cultural construction of the body, to be invested with the dynamic power of malleability within a field of cultural possibilities. According to Butler, “Gender must be understood as a modality of taking on or realizing cultural possibilities,” of forming and articulating a bodily aesthetic in reference to a continuum of cultural codes (Butler 1986: 36).

Elizabeth Grosz goes so far as to wager that all the effects of subjectivity, “all the significant facets and complexities of subjects,” can be amply explicated through the use of the subject’s corporeality as a framework instead of consciousness or the unconscious. Indeed Grosz asserts, “All the effects of depth and interiority can be explained in terms of the inscriptions and transformations of the subjects corporeal surface” (vii). This would subvert both feminist and non-feminist traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, and psychoanalysis which historically have been disinterested or incredulous toward the viability of focusing on bodies in accounts of subjectivity. If recognized as a corporeal being, the subject cannot readily submit to “neutralization and neutering of its specificity” which has happened to women as a result of female submission to male definition (ix). Despite that fact the body until now has remain “colonized” by the sciences and humanities as a blank, originary, “natural” site of sex, gender and sexuality, the body is key to affirming the continuum of sexual difference. Through it, we can question the centrality of multiple phallocentric presumptions which have hidden the cultural and intellectual “effacement” of women. Grosz elaborates:

“It helps to problematize the universalist and universalizing assumptions of humanism, through which women’s—and all other groups’—specificities, positions, and histories are rendered irrelevant or redundant; it resists the tendency to attribute a human nature to the subject’s interior; and it resists tendencies to dualism, which splits subjectivity into two mutually exclusive domains” (Grosz 1994: ix-x).

Grosz asserts that “the body has thus far remained colonized through the discursive practices of the natural sciences [medical, biological, chemical].” This colonization has had tangible effect which are apparent in the pervasiveness of the idea that there is a “real” material body separate from the body of cultural and historical interpretation. This is an entirely inadequate formulation. Part of the body’s “nature” is both an organic and ontological lack of finality, a characteristic continuum of morphology, an “amenability to social completion, social ordering and organization” (xi). Bodies function interactively and productively. They are not inert. They are peculiar, plural. They are both things and a nonthings, they are never merely things, yet never can be more than a thing. They are objects and subjects, however as objects they also contain an interiority—organs of the Deleuzian sort—while simultaneously taking itself and others as subjects, a utterly unique object. The mind is part of the body and bodies are always sexually and racially distinct; they are incapable of being incorporated into a singular universal model. But they are also malleable, changeable, aesthetic, visual, and thus resist the fixity of binary signification. Only when the dynamics between body and mind are sufficiently retheorized will it be possible to comprehend the role of bodies in the production of knowledge systems, regimes of representation, cultural production, and socioeconomic exchange. “Forms of subjectivity are not generalizable” (Grosz 1994: 19).

I would like to work toward a new formulation of the aesthetics of masculinity by deconstructing maleness through (post)feminist theory, a corporeal phenomenology, and queer theory. For feminism to move forward, the male body must separated from the aesthetics of masculinity, and furthermore masculinity—normative, queer etc.—from patriarchal comportment. Masculinity is only possible in terms of a visuality, the surface, the disguise. If bodily inscriptions have thus far served to constitute female bodies as a lack relative to male capacity, a mode of debility in terms of male abilities, a form of feminine immanence compared with masculine transcendence, then the potential for reinscription, for transformation, for lives being lived and bodies represented in quite different terms is possible if not immanent in . Feminine visuality will be granted the capacity for independence, autonomy, becoming-subject while the masculine will be granted the capacity for corporality, emotion, and becoming-object.

Today's first thought.

If feminists are to resuscitate a concept of the body for their own purposes, it must be disentangled from the biological and pseudo-naturalist appropriations from which it historically suffered. There are other ways in which sexually specific corporeal differences may be conceptualized other than those developed in conventional phenomenological or ‘scientific’ representational contexts. Given the amount of investment in the regulation and restriction of corporality to biological sphere (rather than say, the neurological, ontological epistemic, or socio-cultural alternatives) the formulation of new modes of bodily signature may create upheavals in the structure of existing knowledges, may undermine relations of power based on sexual determinism, and may induce an opening-up which multiplies the possibilities involving the bodily capacity for resignification and physical ‘metamorphism.’

Excising Chunks: Time Turned In

We say that photography freezes time or capture the moment, as though such a thing were possible. Time that is frozen is no time at all. Photography is actually based on a passage of time, a chunk excised from linear time according to the whim of photons. It has a beginning and an ending and therefore is an event, or a duration, be it twelve minutes or one one-thousandth of a second. At the same time, a photograph is the record not simply of duration but of a duration made to resemble a "moment," a time outside of time, time turned in on itself, because the beginning and end of its duration are collapsed into an object, the photogaph. The final image seems still and is made in that wy to resemble eternity.


Abou Farman -"Clerks of Passage" in The Believer: Issue 58, Nov/Dec 2008. pg. 14

Male Femininity?

If it is possible to speak of “man” with a masculine attribute and to understand that attribute as a happy but accidental feature of that man, then it is also possible to speak of a “man” with a feminine attribute, whatever it is, but to still maintain the integrity of the gender. But once we dispense with the priority of “man” and “woman” as abiding substances, then it is no longer possible to subordinate dissonant gendered features as so many secondary and accidental characteristics of a gender ontology that is fundamental intact. If the notion of an abiding substance is a fictive constructions produced through the compulsory ordering of attributes into coherent gender sequences, then it seems that gender as a substance, the viability of man and woman as nouns, is called into question by the dissonant play of attributes that fail to conform to causal models of intelligibility.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. pg. 33