by Chase Dimock

(This essay was originally published in 2012 on The Qouch in honor of Turing’s 100th birthday. With the resurgence of interest in Turing’s life following the Oscar buzz surrounding The Imitation Game, we wanted to reprint this piece to focus more attention on what Turing’s career, philosophy, and iconic status means for Queer Studies and LGBT politics)

This weekend marks the 100^th anniversary of British mathematician Alan Turing’s birth. In celebration of his enormous contributions to the fields of mathematics, computational science, cryptology, and artificial intelligence, the scientific community has dubbed 2012 the “Alan Turing Year”, commemorating the occasion with numerous conferences, museum exhibitions, a series of articles on his life in the Guardian and BBC, a Google doodle, and even a functional model of his famous Turing Machine made of Legos. By his mid 20s Turing developed his theory of the “Universal Machine”, thus ushering in the age of modern computer science. A decade later, Turing devoted his studies in cryptology toward cracking the German naval enigma. By developing machines known as “bombes” that could decrypt the messages the Nazis relayed to their U-boats, Turing’s intelligence gathering re-shaped World War II. Historians have argued that cracking the Nazi code shortened the war by two years and saved millions of lives.

Such accolades coming 58 years after his death evidence not only his importance as a historical figure, but also how his ideas continue to influence contemporary research and debate on computer science in our increasingly digitized society. As the “Father of Artificial Intelligence”, Turing’s 1950 article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” foresaw how rapid advances in information science would produce a future in which the line between human intelligence and artificial intelligence would become blurred. Asking, “can machines think”, Turing postulated that ultimately the true mark of artificial intelligence would be whether or not one could tell the difference between communication with a human versus a machine. Turing’s standards for evaluating artificial intelligence have not only framed the scholarly and ethical debate in the scientific community for the past six decades, but they have also proven to be a prophesy of daily life in the 21^st century. Living amongst automated phone banks, internet chatterboxes, GPS navigators, and Apple’s Siri app, everyday life has become a series of Turing tests as we increasingly rely upon forms of artificial intelligence and speak to it as if it were real.

Yet, less emphasis has been placed on the tragedy of his untimely death. In 1952, Turing was arrested and convicted of gross indecency for a consensual sexual relationship with another man, the same 1885 statute under which Oscar Wilde was imprisoned more than half a century earlier. Instead of serving prison time, Turing chose to undergo an experimental hormonal treatment prescribed by the British government. While this chemical castration via a synthetic oestrogen hormone curbed his sex-drive, it had dire side effects. Turing began to grow breasts and developed a deep depression. His conviction also caused him to lose his security clearance, thus barring him from continuing to work with the British intelligence agencies. The man who did as much from inside a laboratory to defeat the Nazis as any general did on the battlefield was now considered a threat to national security solely by virtue of his sexuality. Two years later, on June 8^th, 1954, Turing took a few bites from a cyanide-laced apple–an elaborate end designed to let his mother believe that his suicide was actually an accident due to careless storage of laboratory chemicals. In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued an official apology for Turing’s “appalling” treatment, but a 2011 petition to pardon Turing’s conviction was officially denied by the British Government.

While infinitely more qualified scientific minds have written amazing tributes to Turing’s contributions to computer science and mathematics this year, I am interested in what Turing’s life and legacy mean to gay history and queer thought. I first heard of Alan Turing when I was 14 years old and just starting to reconcile my sexuality with the images and stereotypes of gay men in the media. He was mentioned in Time Magazine’s list of the “100 Persons of the Century” and with just a brief blurb on his life and death my concept of what a gay man could achieve and contribute to the world was forever changed. I came of age in an era of unprecedented gay visibility, but the Elton John and “Will and Grace” imagery of an ostentatious, campy gay world did not seem to fit my shy, nerdy bookishness. Although I never excelled in math and science, Turing became one of my first gay heroes because he proved to me that a gay man—a nerdy man, can change the world through the power of his intellect, invent the future, defeat the Nazis, and stand up for his rights.

This brings me to the first of my appeals for Turing’s importance to the modern gay rights movement: Gay nerds deserve a gay icon. In this month of June, the month of LGBT pride I am reminded of our community’s production of iconography. From Mae West to Lady Gaga, we have been inspired by strong, sexually transgressive women that challenge gender roles and have supported their gay followers. Entertainers have Freddie Mercury, Ian McKellen, and a new generation of young talent like Neil Patrick Harris to look up to. Literary gays like me have Oscar Wilde. Gus Van Sant’s film Milk sold Hollywood on the idea that Harvey Milk was the gay Martin Luther King Jr. and Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign has launched him as the digital gay guidance counselor for queer teenagers. Yet, no place in the world of gay iconography has been carved for Alan Turing.

As I stood two weeks ago and watched a heavily commercialized gay pride parade trumpet reality TV stars, shill major beer companies, and celebrate banks that crashed our economy, I realized that the notion of gay pride has become more about celebrating the materialism of the present than honoring the past and galvanizing the community toward the cause of social justice for all individuals. This is not to say that we should cut down on the frivolity, merriment, and general debauchery of Pride. One of the most important liberties that the LGBT movement has helped to realize is an expanded right of the individual over the use of his own body, including pleasure and bodily expression. Rather, I am arguing for the de-commodification of pleasure (i.e.: using sex to sell) and the integration of the intellectual into sexual. If knowledge is power, and power is sexy, then we must renew our focus on how sexuality informs the genius of an individual like Turing. What made Turing gay and what made Turing a brilliant scientist were not exclusive or accidental traits; they informed and nurtured one another. It is not an accident that the defining essay on artificial intelligence was written by a man who inhabited a human mind that some psychologists and biologists would have deemed degenerate or corrupted by human vice. Rather, it is outsider status—the ability to demystify the “normal” as a gay man, as a nerdy man, that fortified Turing’s genius.

For the balance of this essay I have four arguments for the importance of Turing as a gay icon. The first two are from his biography, what we can learn historically from his persecution as a gay man, and the second two are ways in which his philosophy of determining artificial intelligence have prophesized issues of gender and sexuality in the 21^st century. In short, Alan Turing is part martyr, part theorist and an inspiration beyond the sum of those parts.

Turing’s Hormonal Treatment and Sexual Orientation

As mentioned earlier, Turing opted to take hormonal injections as a treatment for his homosexuality in order to avoid a prison sentence. Although the injections curtailed his sex-drive because they amounted to a chemical castration, they did nothing to treat the real root of his homosexuality. The rationale behind the injections conflates homosexual acts with homosexual identity, assuming that annihilating the libidinal desire for sex somehow freed the individual of the effects of homosexuality. In the 1950s, the concept of a sexual orientation independent of all other behaviors was still yet to become universal knowledge. Previously, homosexuality was widely considered a gender disorder. Gender identity was so tied to desire for the opposite sex that it was naturally assumed that a man who would desire another man would have to somehow be a woman on the inside. Homosexuals were often called “inverts”, individuals with the body of a man, but the soul of a woman. Turing, was by most accounts, not particularly feminine and thus he was not legibly homosexual according to the standards of his era. His guilty plea to gross indecency came as a surprise to many because he did not fit the accepted profile of the homosexual.

What we understand today is that a homosexual orientation is more than just an act or an urge. While we know that there is a biological component that predestines most to a proclivity toward attraction to the same sex, gay identity also includes one’s individual history. Same sex desire may be in-born, but the way in which that desire is channeled, what types of men, what kinds of acts, how one thinks of one’s self in relation to other men, and all of the infinite characteristics of our sexuality are products of attachments and affects that we develop over the course of our lives. While the injections may have curbed Turing’s interest in a sexual act, they did nothing to reverse his attachment to men as figures of desire that informed his sense of self and world around him. Turing’s case is a reminder of both the resilience and malleability of sexual orientation and the dehumanization that ensues when we reduce the human mind to a mere organ running on hormones.

Cold War Paranoia and the Problems of Queer Citizenship

Due to his conviction, Turing was stripped of his security clearance and thus he was barred from his work on cryptography with the British intelligence agencies with which he collaborated during World War Two. This revocation of his clearance was not due to having a criminal record, but instead because of fear that his homosexual identity would make him easily corruptible. It is important to remember that Turing’s conviction happened at the dawn of the Cold War. The British government worried that Soviet spies could easily blackmail government agents with shady personal lives. This fear was not unfounded, at least not as a fact. Turing’s conviction came on the heels of the discovery of Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean (both gay) as spies for the KGB. This paranoia was echoed in America with the Red Scare ushered in by the McCarthy hearings and the House Committee on Un-American Activities that sought to root out communists from government positions, the media, and Hollywood. The Red Scare was paralleled by what David K. Johnson terms “The Lavender Scare”, characterized by a series of purges of homosexuals from government offices and renewed enforcement of sodomy laws. Johnson writes:

In popular discourse, communists and homosexuals were often conflated. Both groups were perceived as hidden subcultures with their own meeting places, literature, cultural codes, and bonds of loyalty. Both groups were thought to recruit to their ranks the psychologically weak or disturbed. And both groups were considered immoral and godless. Many people believed that the two groups were working together to undermine the government.

During the Cold War, to be homosexual was not just contrary to social standards or vice laws, but many considered it treason. The homosexual’s morality and physiology had always been in question and now his very citizenship was questioned as well.

Turing’s descent from war hero to potential traitor in less than a decade solely on the basis of his sexual identity dramatically illustrates how deeply society had come to see sexual practices as constitutive of one’s essential identity. Homosexuality signified the complete break from any moral fortitude, leaving the individual not only susceptible to, but also craving of corruption and destruction of all forms, including treason. Turing’s treatment during the Cold War also sheds light on why the modern gay rights movement that developed 15 years after his death was perceived as so radical. If the homosexual’s allegiance to his own nation was in doubt, then seeing gay men exercise their civil liberties as a citizen seemed to be a radical departure from the accepted image of the homosexual. Harvey Milk’s “radical” gay activism, which consisted of public gatherings and running for elected office appeared radical because he was using classic, democratic measures protected by the constitution in order to campaign for civil rights. Turing’s story reminds us that not long ago, the question was not if homosexuals should be granted equal rights to marriage, adoptions, etc., but whether or not they could even be considered loyal citizens.

Gender, Closeting, and Online Communication

In an article from 2010, I used the Turing Test as a way to make sense of a job I once had posing as a female sales agent on an online retail store. What I found fascinating was how when customers typed their questions to me, they conducted their own Turing test to determine if I was real or just a computer program. The fact that my chats were accompanied by the image of a blonde woman named Jessica attempted to use gender to not only assure them of my humanity, but to use femininity to “soften” internet retail. In reality, “Jessica” was a real person, a marketing ploy, and a computer program all rolled into one. What Turing’s essay on artificial intelligence made me realize is that the difficulty of telling the difference between man and machine resides in the fact that so much of our human responses are practically mechanical—rehashed clichés, talking points, and stereotypes that we employ to make our ideal self legible to and validated by others. Humans try just as hard as machines and in equally artificial ways to prove our humanity. “Jessica” ultimately signifies the co-operation of human and machine to prove “human” to others so as to seem trustworthy and to ease the consumer on the other end into purchasing a product.

Turing’s inspiration for his determination of artificial intelligence was based on a parlor game called “The Imitation Game” in which individuals guess the gender of a hidden individual based on responses to questions. Turing defines it by the following:

“It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator(C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart from the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either ‘X is A and Y is B’ or ‘X is B and Y is A. The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B thus:

C: Will X please tell me the length of his or her hair?

Now suppose X is actually A, then A must answer. It is A’s object in the game to try and cause C to make the wrong identification. His answer might therefore be:

“My hair is shingled, and the longest strands are about nine inches long.”

In order that tones of voice may not help the interrogator the answers should be written, or better still, typewritten. The ideal arrangement is to have a teleprinter communicating between the two rooms. Alternatively the question and answers can be repeated by an intermediary. The object of the game for the third player (B) is to help the interrogator. The best strategy for her is probably to give truthful answers. She can add such things as “I am the woman, don’t listen to him!” to her answers, but it will avail nothing as the man can make  similar remarks”.

Turing’s model relies upon the subject of speculation being closeted. This closet, which can be seen by the interrogator, presupposes the content of either a female body, a male body, or in the case of the AI test, a machine or computer of some sort. The ability to detect the contents of the closet depends on the player’s ability to visualize a presence, knowing that something must be there to send the notes. Even when the machine is nothing but a box that can produce a tickertape, we project our sense of agency upon it. Because the mind works with sound images and visual signifiers, we cannot possibly imagine pure information without a visualization of authorship or some origin of the words. Therefore, we must attribute some sense of our selves via personification onto the product that produces the information in order to understand it

With the goal of the game as to fool as many people as possible, gender performativity becomes the ultimate modus operandi for victory. Without the context of voice or handwriting due to a neutral individual or teleprinter reading the responses, the only way to prove gender results from the content and phrasing of the information given. Per Turing’s example, if a woman were to have short hair, it would be in her best interest to lie and talk of long hair if she believes that the audience would expect a woman to have long hair. Therefore, the actual woman may not be bodily woman enough to correspond the signifier of woman formulated in the mind of the interrogator and must perform to what the interrogator pictures as a woman so as to prove her own authenticity

Just as artificial intelligence uses repeated programmed responses contoured around the expectations of the user to appear natural, so too does a woman’s gender appear natural as it countlessly repeats the same gestures and affects that we have come to associate with authentic femininity. The more a gesture is repeated, the more natural it feels until that gesture becomes ingrained in the unconscious as instinctual when it is in fact learned behavior. Thus, gender performance is both an unconscious involuntary process and a tactical employment of signifying acts of masquerade

As a final point, what I find additionally fascinating about the Turing test and the gender imitation game that inspired it is how closely it resembles the forms of online communication that we use to meet others on social networking sites. This is especially true for gay men because we increasingly use gay-targeted sites to meet other gays because of the stigma of attempting to meet in public. Just as the gender imitation game occurs in a closet, so too do chats on a gay social networking site happen in a digital closet. We must make our ideal ego (or at least what we think the other man may want) legible and attractive via online communication. We can send textual descriptions, pictures, and even live chat via Skype, but the interaction we have is always managed to present the self in the most flattering light possible and supported by various forms of (soft) artificial intelligence such as the computer programs that broadcast us and the digital manipulation of photos. The person in Turing’s gender imitation game must prove he is male, while online, we must prove through technology that we are a specific type of male that the other would want.

Turing’s Onion Model and the Queer Mind

One of Turing’s most startling, yet overlooked arguments in the aforementioned article “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” is his questioning of how we define human intelligence and the human mind in opposition to artificial intelligence:

In considering the functions of the mind or the brain we find certain operations that we can explain in purely mechanical terms. This we say does not correspond to the real mind: it is a sort of skin that we must strip off if we are to find the real mind. But then in what remains we find a further skin to be stripped off, and so on. Proceeding in this way do we ever come to the “real” mind, or do we eventually come to the skin which has nothing in it? In the latter case the whole mind is mechanical.

Here, Turing creates a distinction between the anatomy of the brain and its compartmentalized functions and what we may call the “mind” as the psychology of the individual composed of thoughts, emotions, memories, etc. The mechanical functions of the brain resemble the capacities of information storage and mechanical operations of a machine like a computer. Just like how we know which parts of the brain control certain motor functions, so to do we know the role of each part of a machine and where information is stored on it. Yet “the mind”, which we presume a machine not to have, is not merely the sum of these motor functions and stored information in the brain. The mind is metaphysical; it is a social construction, a product of individual consciousness, and a subjective experience. The mind is an onion because it has no true core; just mutually informing layers of consciousness.

What I am arguing here is that Turing justifies his subjective model of determining artificial intelligence by reminding us that the “mind” that we all have that separates us from the artificial is itself a mysterious, socially constructed concept. The brain is naturally organic, but the mind is as artificial as the language, ideology, and various embodied states of subjective consciousness that we use to understand it and inhabit it. In this process, Turing “queers” the mind. Turing reminds us that there is no such thing as a normal or stable mind that we can access or locate if we just peel away the layers of subjectivity. Instead, this subjectivity defines the mind itself.

For a gay individual, the demystification of a “normal” or a “real” mind is the key toward dismantling the notion that heterosexuality is the natural state of human sexuality and that homosexuality is an unnatural degeneration. As a function of the mind, homosexuality is as much of an invention of the cultural as heterosexuality (both words that did not exist prior to 1869) and thus both are “artificial” or “unnatural” because they are categories we fabricated to describe and categorize human psychology. To call one man’s mind natural and the other unnatural is to attempt to take human constructions and concepts and somehow force the rules of nature to comply with ideology. In featuring subjective judgment as the determining factor between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, Turing opens the door for an argument that all forms of intelligence and all faculties of the human mind including sexuality are products of subjective reasoning and individual consciousness.

About the Author

Chase Dimock teaches in the English Department at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. He holds a PhD in Comparative and World Literature from the University of Illinois. He specializes in 20^th century American, French, and German literature with an emphasis in Queer Theory, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. The courses he has taught include classes on western literature spanning the ancients to the existentialists as well as courses on gender studies, queer literature, post 1945 European politics, and representations of the Holocaust.  His research is devoted to exploring interwar queer sexualities in the works of lost and forgotten American expatriate authors and how the established French canon of gay authors and French gay culture influenced the construction of an American queer subject. Chase Dimock is also a regular contributor to the arts and politics magazine As It Ought To Be and he writes reviews of Queer Studies publications for the Lambda Literary Review

The Final Article in our series: “The End of Heterosexuality?”                                         

Dixon Miller, New Orleans, 1996

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by Michael Angelo Tata

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If the edifying Versace Bildungsroman has taught us anything, it is that fashion evokes and invites death, that to be chic is to court death as the lusty courtesan flashes the inflamed King, that death is the ultimate reward for being fashionable, for being fashioned, for being able — and willing — to be made and remade time and time gain in the kinds of self-fashioning that epitomize the restless self of capital, eternal shopper looking to alienate his subjectivity in just the right foreign material, perhaps even arriving at the point when, as if emulating a pop princess whose psyche has circled back upon itself one too any times, he is finally able to claim he has renounced identity altogether in the pursuit of pure egolessness, the greatest illusion of territoriality.

Beverly Kills
“Dee, when your gluten allergies act up, take out your nose ring!”
(Daily Mail)

True, the death of Gianni Versace is a morality tale on almost every level, but the lesson to be learned from his demise is not a homophobic story about vulgarity and sexual favors in which demented gay men reap what they sow, as Maureen Orth presents in her facile exposé Vulgar Favors, but instead a larger and more genetic lesson about the implicit connection between fashion and death, the one tied inextricably to the other like a sparrow stapled to a shadow or a cinderblock roped to a cankle, the effect being that the more we embrace fashion, the louder we call out to death, who awaits the sound of our voices and finds us all the quicker simply by following the light reflecting from the embellishments of our surfaces (yes, this is also how the sun finds the moon). For it is only via the stuttering, chatterbox language of ephemerality that we may communicate with death — and by embracing the transitory that we turn our bodies into so many transistor radios searching for just the right frequency to deliver a message that can never be recalled once its syllables achieve telepoetic status, radiating out into space along with every other radiowaved record of human civilization broadcast to the furthest reaches of the cosmos.

Maurice Blanchot has much to say about the chatterbox in the essays grouped joyously under the title Friendship: for him, the one who chatters paradoxically redeems the “idle talk” (Gerede) lamented by Heidegger in his Being and Time as discardable stage along the path to authentic Da-sein, at its best a productive social obstacle that must be superseded — yet another trap put forward by the world to ensnare a being-there which is really a being-here-and-now (what I refer to as Spacetime Da_sein), preventing it from coming to a knowledge of itself through the simple, seductive ruse of distraction.

Little Miss Blanchot
rawrzammm to infinity & beyond <3

 Like Blanchot, I’ve always found a charm in idle talk, in particular as I discuss in my work on Existentialism at the Mall, myself unsure that discourses priding themselves on clarity, like logic or the philosophy of mathematics, ever go beyond the strange circularity of idle talk, this infinitely recursive yet clueless and a-discursive stammering that is first and foremost a playing for time, as in the title of Perf Art troublemakers Kiki and Herb’s smash 2000 show. In Blanchot’s words:

This is, as it were, the point of departure, an empty need to speak, made of this void and in order to fill it at all costs, and the void is himself having become this need and this desire that still treads only emptiness. A pure force of sorts, of melting snow, of drunken rupture, and often obtained under the cover of drunkenness, where the being who speaks find nothing to say but the flimsy affirmation of himself: A Me, Me, Me, mot vain, not glorious, but broken, unhappy, barely breathing, although appealing in the force of its weakness (“Battle with the Angel,” 131).

For Blanchot, the point is to find beauty in this bastardized, desperately mortal and randy speech that propels itself forward motivated purely by a linguistic horror vacui, not to oppose it to more authentic, genuine, immortal modes of verbal communication as good infinity confronts bad, but to embrace it in its cluttered majesty and to revel in the ambiguities it authors. And it is the vestimentary chatter between death and fashion that marks both the Chelsea Boy and Metrosexual as creatures flirting with disaster. 

Dancing down the Number Line with Kiki and Herb
Vulture.com Carnegie Hall Review

For the later Lacan of Encore, the capitalist subject also babbles, speaking lalangue, a sonorous nonsense at the discursive limits of speech, and yet so very much at the core of the linguistic project without which there would be no socially meaningful symbolism, no Borromean knot, no need to ever abandon oneself to the tortures of a mirror. And yet unlike the Chelsea Boy, who cannot step outside the circle of language, the Metrosexual does not babble: in fact, he barely speaks at all, except to grunt, chic Caveman ever on the verge of inventing a system of referents, yet lost hopelessly in the red and orange play of flames lapping the wall of a troglodyte’s paradise. Yet while his lips swallow their syllables, except to utter DUDE, his fashion cannot help but prattle on, and death is nothing if not skilled in interpreting the silent speech of the inorganic as it reaches out toward a kindred spirit, there two allies, privately aligned in a constellation lighting up the night sky of identification with all the irony of a reality TV producer who knows in advance his masterpiece will never air, never bothering to inform its cast that their stunts, challenges and juries will be left on a memory stick inhabiting a shelf next to the Mob Wives digital archive to decompose slowly and silently while a holographic Big Ang who might also be a grounded weather balloon smokes a Nat Sherman menthol, nonplussed by the flammability of helium. 

At Home with Big Ang
Reality Nation

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Behind the Pleasure Principle

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That fashion and death have struck an accord Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi intuitively grasped when he wrote his famous “Dialogue between Fashion and Death” (1827), and that this accord is only deepened by an advanced culture of getting and spending far exceeding the predictions of Romanticism Walter Benjamin comprehended when he took Leopardi’s observations at their word and incorporated the poet’s skewed dynamic into his famously fragmented Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk), laying out a vista of social optics in which fashion becomes phantasmagoria, the unseemly pornography of the visual delighting the eye in the disarrangement of its many elements, uncountable as a Cantor set and just as promiscuous in its blossoming.

Cantor Set Benedict
Mathforum

In the words of Eugenia Paulicelli from her masterful Fashion under Fascism, Leopardi’s version of la moda “…expresses a new sense of time in capitalist society that is epitomized by the close relationship between fashion and death and by the race in which both compete…This is how Leopardi draws attention to his sense of the non-linear time and narrative of both fashion and history that questions the celebration of progress” (Conclusion, “Beyond the Black Shirt,” 151). In uncovering the mutual complicities of fashion and death — a system in which death reaches out to fashion at the same time that fashion summons death, for clearly the relationship is symbiotic — Paulicelli underscores the existence of a politics of fashion that applies to Mussolini and Ferragamo as much as to the Metro, as he co-opts a pre-existing look after first draining it of sexual content much as an enterprising beignet mogul might squeeze the raspberry jam out of a jelly doughnut only to fill it with dulce de leche and call it Cuban Fusion: and yet what in the fashion world does not bespeak the anxiety of influence or betray the open secret of cultural theft? In the sumptuary War of All Against All, it’s all smash and grab at the core. We play fast and loose with semiotics in this, a world where the real and the virtual have ceased being terms capable of demarcating experiential zones and instead only obliquely refer to a time when the global had not yet gone digital and it was possible to believe in a reserve of meaning outside reproducibility, bone-hard in the density of a truth we quietly feared it could never deliver — for after all, truth requires expression, and we only express what can be repeated. 

The Delirious Chaos of the Paris Arcades
3:am magazine

This notion is a direct consequence of the logic put to use by Walter Benjamin in the Convolutes of his Arcades Project, the ultimate repository for modern reflections on appearance and obviation, a precious safe where the tacit alliance between the fashionable and the corruptible is stashed, along with copies of their wedding vows and a slice of rotting cake. Of course, for Benjamin, corruptibility is a female problem, as it is her silhouette which summons death and its various corruptions, her habitation of the moment which finds itself one precarious step away from total subsumption — Edmund Burke’s beautiful object of delectation, regularly curvaceous and above all smooth, identical with a passing of time that interests men (for Flügel, the Ugly; for Burke, the Sublime) differently, as neither the Ugly nor the Sublime can aspire to Beauty’s synonymity with the immediate.                                                                               

The Leopardi Dyad
The Vestoj Blog: the Journal of Sartorial Matters

The condition of possibility of the silhouette’s beauty is the promise of her disappearance, as fashion and death enter into a heavily choreographed skirmish according to whose rules the chic woman dances from one moment to another as she reinvents herself continually in the face of a voracious death which can only consume her when she stops moving. Convolutes read: “And boredom is the grating before which the courtesan teases death,” and “Here fashion has opened the business of dialectical exchange between woman and ware — between carnal pleasure and the corpse. The clerk, death, tall and loutish, measures the century by the yard, serves as mannequin himself to save costs, and manages single-handedly the liquidation that in France is called revolution” (B, 62-63). As “bitter colloquy with decay,” fashion articulates itself only through the schizoid call to death and simultaneous sprint from it (B, 63), a race not without its cheekiness as both parties know in advance what the outcome will be, and in every sense embrace the final demolition of the chic as death’s most precious gift — the kind of present one fears to open, as if it might release a jack-in-the-box wielding a razor, true pharmakon that is at the same time cure and contagion, sugar and strychnine. 

Fierce Death
Warhol Auction, Ambulance Disaster

In addition, fashion’s interrelated tasks of revealing the body at the same time that it conceals it and of transforming the body into an instrument of culture place beauty and death within striking distance of one another, since the body’s fleshy material is alive, and hence temporal: vitally and viciously plastic. In Leopardi’s dialogue, Fashion articulates its multiform tortures:

Fashion. …I brand the flesh of man with hot red stamps which I make them impress on themselves for ornament. I fashion babies’ heads with bandages, and other contrivances, making it a rule that all the men in a country must have their heads of one shape, as I have done in America and in Asia. I lame folk with small boots. I choke the breath and make the eyes start out with tight lacing and a hundred other things of the same sort (49).

Fashion is not the grand finale of death, but rather a series of obligatory sufferings that allude to the looming end: through fashion, we learn the value of pain, as we contort ourselves according to its capricious dictates. Leopardi’s words also speak to Flügel, whose comments on the insalubrious effects of fashion constitute a further admission of the collusion between beauty rituals and death, as it is never with an eye to wellbeing that fashion issues its edicts (this even Oscar Wilde as Dress Reformer realized). Specifically, in opposition to the argument that fashion serves the purpose of implementing hygiene and protection, as the anthropological argument goes, and as any visit to Tierra del Fuego disproves, Flügel comments with no shortage of irony: “Up to a few years ago, when women appeared in décolleté dresses or ‘pneumonia blouses’, men might envy them their coolness, but could take comfort in the fact that they themselves were not courting disease and death as were their sisters” (“Individual and Sexual Differentiation,” 206). 

Big Daddy Dandy
Writers in London in the 1890s

The pneumonia blouse is no longer the express property of women, or of gay men: it is now the metrosexuals who flaunt their cleavage, exposing their décolletage to the world which tracks its manifestations and showings, and it is thus they who on a biological level literalize what transpires on a metaphorical level: that is, they court death, and not merely through a physical exposure to the elements. The pneumonia blouse is ever with us: for to be chic is to flaunt one’s calling forth of death, to put on display that one has the luxury of dying, as one announces to the world that death simply does not matter: literally, that it laterally transcends the material, so far beyond the place where extended and thinking matter can achieve any significance that its indifference becomes an object of difference, causing it to be hastened, not avoided, heralded with a bear hug and not hidden from in the night’s obscure corridors and alleyways. To be chic is thus to accede to mortality, to accept, embrace and accelerate death, and in doing so breaking the cycle of frailty: the Chelsea Boy and Metro know this each in kind, the one explicit in his dark flirtation with a grim reaper whose pectoral implants have just arrived from Brazil, the other implicitly winking at an abyss he has mistaken for an orchestra pit, blissfully unaware that his clothes will one day get him killed. 

Inviting Death to Tea: The Pneumonia Blouse
Fashion in the Edwardian Era, 1901-1919 (Tudor Links)

 .

Beyond this innate fetishism of fashion, there is in addition the promise of contemporaneousness, of presiding autarchically over the present, of freezing its flux for just long enough to dominate it, of dissipating death through a conquest of display — and this domination is existentially enough. Consequently, “To be contemporaine de tout le monde—that is the keenest and most secret satisfaction that fashion can offer a woman” (B, 66). As such, the fashionable woman becomes everyone’s courtesan, trafficking with the present and its presence through an engagement of the Everyone, an Odette Swann concoursing with space and time themselves.

Death’s Horizontal Dissipation
Catherine Deneuve as Odette Swann, Le Temps Retrouvé
This Week in New York

With the case of the metrosexual, the burden of the contemporary is now his, as is the role of courtesan which accompanies it into realms where the fetish, corpselike, orchestrates an anemic dominion over the living. As with all friendships, the alliance of metrosexuality and beauty will one day disintegrate, for beauty is the most fickle of partners, ever exhausting its supply of mannequins. Its epitaph will be written with protein shakes, gothic t-shirts littered with studded Celtic crosses and Gotti-worthy mounds of hair gelnthe hue of punk rock jellybeans. To be worldly, the metrosexual must accept and risk death, just as his Chelsea Boy predecessors did, and fabulously so. His end promises to be similarly spectacular — a true spectacle to behold, and to be televised, and to be reprised in the crypts of fashion history, where his bold monopoly of the moment squeezes the juice out of life along with the pulverized pulp of sun-drenched oranges and one or two soaked cashmere Juicy Couture tracksuits tossed cavalierly on the sands of a Pacific beach where stereotyped revelry plays out like a surf movie marathon witnessed only by extraterrestrials whose planets are completely dry. 

Let’s Get Hemofabulous!
Dsquared2, Fall 2010

 .

Branes

.

Bataille, Georges. The Cradle of Humanity: Pre-historic Art and Culture. Trans. Michelle and Stuart Kendall. New York: zone Books, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999.

Blanchot, Maurice. Friendship. Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Burke, Edmund. “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful”, in Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry and Other Pre-revolutionary Writings. London: Penguin, 1998.

Derrida, Jacques.  The Politics of Friendship.  Trans. George Collins.  London: Verso,  2005.

_______.  The Work of Mourning.  Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault.  Chicago: The University  of Chicago Press, 2001. 

Flügel, J.C. The Psychology of Clothes. London: Hogarth Press, 1950.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989.

Hebdige, Dick.  Subculture: The Meaning of Style.  London: Routledge, 1988. 

Heidegger, Martin.  Being and Time.  Trans, Joan Stambaugh.  Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

Lacan, Jacques. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-1973, Book XX. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Leopardi, Giacomo. “Fashion and Death,” in Twelve Dialogues. Trans. J. Thomson. London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1893.

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien.  Primitive Mentality.  Trans. Lilian A. Clare.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. 

 _______.  The “Soul” of the Primitive.  Trans. Lilian A. Clare.  Chicago: Henry Regnery  Company, 1966. 

Orth, Maureen. Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest Failed Manhunt in U.S. History. New York: Dell, 1999.

Paulicelli, Eugenia. Fashion under Fascism. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

Proust, Marcel. At Home with Madame Swann, in Within a Budding Grove. Remembrance of Things Past, Vol 1. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York: Vintage Books, 1982.

Sartre, Jean Paul.  Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenal Essay on Ontology. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984. 

Wilde, Oscar.  “Slaves of Fashion,” “Woman’s Dress,” “More Radical Ideas upon Dress  Reform,” “Costume.”  In Oscar Wilde—Shorter Prose Pieces.  Ed. David Price.   E-book: http://www.fullbooks.com/Shorter-Prose-Pieces.html. 

…

About the Author

.

Michael Angelo Tata is the Executive Editor of the Sydney-based electronic journal of literature, art and new media nebu[lab] and a member of the editorial collectives of the journals Kritikos and rhizomes. His Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality arrived to critical acclaim from Intertheory Press in 2010. His lyric essays on poetics, psychoanalysis and philosophy appear most recently in the collections The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein and Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950 as well as the British journal Parallax (Routledge). His poetry and graffiti are featured in the British journal Rattle and in the American journal Xanadu. He also writes reviews of contemporary Aesthetics titles for Temple University’s and Mount Holyoke College’s Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

…

by Michael Angelo Tata 

.

Which is the history of the epicene, the eerie man-child who retains a certain softness which may be read as feminine, but which also might resist such a reading, as with the Mafioso prince, the Chicano figure of the Pachuco, or the Spanish Don — even when that don is Don Ed Hardy, as the designer’s studded t-shirts boldly used to announce down the boulevards of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills circa 2006, back when it really seemed that Southern California might inherit the earth?

Vintage Ed Hardy Meathead
(RapGenius.com. Photo Courtesy of lyricist Earl Sweatshirt)

The affiliation of these smooth criminals with beauty seems to indicate that even if no infraction has occurred, it is still a crime for men to be beautiful, that to be beautiful, they must steal beauty from women, who are the proper keepers of this phenomenon of sensuality, their murders and burglaries of a piece with the aesthetic softness and smoothness they pilfer from the other side of a gender divide they raid in a project of corporeal and sartorial upbuilding.[1] For them, the beautiful remains foreign to masculinity at the same time that it is most at home there, as we learn from ornithology, producing a certain exoticism, their delicate features arriving from another place, a different land, a foreign clime: that is, from the zone of the feminine, where to be beautiful is to present a curvy and unencumbered landscape giving vision and touch the power to proceed without the hindrance of physical obstacle (the scratchy hair follicle) or the failure to form a viable expectation of repeating form or pattern (epidermal roughness and its inherent patchiness).

The various suavités and smoothnesses of these men mark their gender as thoroughly steeped in crime, the softness of their actions and apparitions not necessarily detracting from their masculinity, which is in fact enhanced by the infusion of attitude and action with qualities more traditionally feminine. For these men, the beautiful, the exotic and the criminal all flow together, their turgid waters creating a violent and vicious swirl whose eddies wash away the ‘natural’ roughness cleanly disassociated from femininity by 18^th-century European aesthetic theory. These déluges erode the awkwardness of traditional masculinity, a state famously lamented by psychoanalyst J.C. Flügel, as I will shortly discuss, evening it out in the fabrication of a beauty that would completely feminize, were it not for the presence of criminal misconduct and ethical misbehavior in the form of cultural appropriation — or at minimum the potential for such an action to break out within the realm of aesthetic judgment, where a theory of beauty is toppled, quietly and smoothly, glossy yellow tape cordoning off an area where the philosopher forensically collects clues, as if he were the Dominick Dunne of delectation. As I will also examine in the work of Edmund Burke, for these creatures, male smoothness is the core disruptive quality, in that it obscures the rough or uneven, the true masculine aesthetic heritage, covering it over with a slick, calming veneer that is a tempting lure for the unsuspecting, tantalizing honey trap for the beauty of confused Sunday girls the world over, some of whom have a Y chromosome, but all of whom have at least one X. Whitney Houston beware: Bobby gonna getchya. If only these words weren’t retroactive.

How Could She Know?
(Top Five Celebrity Cocaine Mistakes. Gawker.com)

Undercover Sublimity

Outside of the ostensibly criminal, which announces an obvious connection between the aesthetically illicit and male beauty, as with the quintessential Dorian Gray paradigm, how are we to chart the transgressiveness of the man whose features defy the roughness and hirsuteness of masculinity at its darkness and most primal, this individual whose only crime is to reject his relegation to the realms of repulsion identified by J.C. Flügel in his Psychology of Clothes as beauty’s gutter and surfacing as, of all things, attractive? If he were to speak — and he might — what would the man who steals beauty, this beautiful criminal, he who criminalizes beauty, have to say to the metrosexual, this secret fire thief standing before us with smoothed cuticles, shrunken pores and just the right fabric to launch him into visibility? For, as I would argue, the metrosexual’s greatest crime is to warp the axis connecting the beautiful with the sublime, in doing so wreaking a variety of havoc on the gender scission whose furrows follow the split restraining a femininity defined by containability and impotence from a masculinity which defies containment in and of its magnitude and power. Hence the metrosexual risks incredulity and demands only submission, the purchasing of its credos on credit. Within a Western culture in which to be beautiful is to be dominated, he cannot be believed; within an American context in which masculinity and femininity operate according to a more divisive polarity, he is that mystical spot throwing social unity into paroxysm, the ultimate American Psycho whose schizoid capitalism smooths out and docilizes the social-symbolic in the name of an expediency that is narcissism’s motor.

Masculine Psychoglamour
(American Psycho: Materialism, Misogyny and Machismo. Keith Phipps, et al.)

Within the confines of the aesthetics of the 18^th-century English philosopher, political theorist and statesman Edmund Burke, the beautiful and the sublime find themselves at opposite ends of an abyss separating them permanently from one another, tied together by virtue of the experiences and encounters each describes as these arrange themselves on a spectrum according to whose optics a richly deranging sublimity remains radically apart from a delicate and comforting beauty: so beyond anything Newton, always the stranger in a dark room acting in the name of empirical neutrality, and yet paraphilically sharing a sensory register with the voyeur, could prismatize. Here, the classically beautiful is paradigmatically defined as an encounter between masculine subject and feminine object, the sublime as the contact which occurs between a masculine subject and masculine object, making the experience of beauty an interaction between male and female elements and hence fundamentally heterogenous, while leaving the experience of sublimity an interaction between and among male elements, and hence implicitly homogenous.[2]   Within the sexual mechanics accompanying Burke’s gendering of aesthetics, the problem of the metrosexual’s disruptiveness looms large, his unholy entente with beauty, and not sublimity, altering aesthetic as much as sexual and political history through his unexpected choices and the mondo alla riverso they usher in.

For Flügel, the irregularity of the male body had undergone a sort of repression, separated from beauty and kept hidden behind the drab garb of renunciation, which covered up the uncathectable in a package equally unattractive and drained of desirability, literally an/orexic: “In conformity with the ruling convention that woman is beautiful and man is not, there has grown up a very considerable intolerance of the male body; the characteristic signs of maleness, e.g. the greater hairiness, muscularity and angularity, are in some ways more apt to arouse embarrassment or repulsion than is the rounder and smoother (and of course much more familiar) female form” (208). The reason for this dis-affinity and disgust? For Flügel, the culprit is the phallus itself, which appears to exist in a relationship of inverse proportion with the penis in an adumbration of gender warrior Valerie Solanas’ famous theory of pussy envy presented in her pivotal SCUM Manifesto: “As previously suggested, this is perhaps due, at least in part, to a repression of phallicism; the worship of the phallus, so common at an earlier cultural level, has given place to an abhorrence of the male genitals, an abhorrence which has spread to some extent to the whole male body, which demands that it be decently hid in thick garments, non-provocative in form and colour” (209).

Consequently, as fashion revolutionaries and visionaries, perhaps even luminaries, if we play our cards right, “We must learn to tolerate the make body, and perhaps even to admire it — if only as counterpart to the female body, which we already idolise” (211-212). Disentangling male physique and fashion from the inhibitions weighing it down in this body which has taken on the stigma of the phallus, Flügel valiantly attempts to liberate men and to increase their virility, as the truest manliness “can be achieved by freedom rather than by a slavish subserviency to convention, ” and hence mandates innovation, free-thinking and nonconformity with rigid gender standards and mores that are in the end de-masculinizing, as they only require a thoughtless submission that is more the strategy of beauty (212).

Penisneid Takes a Bullet
(Lili Taylor in I Shot Andy Warhol (1996)
Comcast.net)

In Burke’s account, smoothness figures largely in the experience of beauty as an aesthetic quality, as encoded into the precepts of his foundational 1757 treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, there being an implicit connection and consonance among frictionlessness, regularity, evenness and expectation. As I have already mentioned, the beautiful and the sublime inhabit opposite sides of an aesthetic divide separating the containable from the uncontainable, the submissive from that which demands our submission; inferentially, if it is women who are beautiful, then it must be men who are sublime, their angularities forming the harsh perpendiculars that characterize the powerful, the grand, the infinite.[3] The binarism of Burke’s text seems to mandate such a conclusion, especially when it is read projectively, even anachronistically, against Flügel’s sumptuary complaint, his argument that men have been relegated not to sublimity, but to ugliness, raising important interrogatives about what the sublime and the ugly have to say to one another – as if they were trapped in a Borgata elevator and forced to communicate against their will.

Oddly, in the thought of Burke, ugliness of this sort generates a proto-sublimity: “Ugliness I imagine likewise to be consistent enough with an idea of the sublime. But I would by no means insinuate that ugliness of itself is a sublime idea, unless united with such qualities as excite a strong terror” (III, XXI, Ugliness, 153).[4] Within Burke’s thought, we are thus presented with the dual paradigms of female beauty and a sublimity which reads as male or masculine. By examining the divide separating the two phenomena closer, we can gain valuable insights into the metrosexual theft of beauty, into what is particularly radical about the transformation of the masculine into a site of beauty where body and clothing achieve their most comprehensive rehabilitation to date, both in terms of the two renunciations they straddle: the tainted metonymy of the abjected phallus discussed by Flügel and the post-revolutionary sartorial reversal effected by the Great Male Renunciation as it re-codified male fashion into an experiment in ennui. This purloining is also generational, as first the Chelsea Boy took beauty from the feminine for himself, and the metrosexual then appropriated it for his own purposes; the chain of contraband marks the metrosexual as a secondary criminal, the individual through whom crime itself is criminalized.

Seen in this light, the smoothness of the manscaped and manicured metrosexual — hair removal rituals leaving his surfaces relatively friction-free and gym time causing the curves of his musculature to get “swole,” in the Bro Code — evoke Burke’s reflections on smoothness in general and its primary role in generating beauty. For Burke, the case is simple. Smoothness is “[a] quality so essential to beauty, that I do not now recollect any thing beautiful that is not smooth” (III, XIV, Smoothness, 148). In fact, so critical to beauty is smoothness that its effects can even operate synaesthetically, as demonstrated by Burke’s redefinition of gustatory sweetness as a species of smoothness.  For Burke’s speculative chemistry, sweetness, which of necessity involves the “perfect globe” that is sugar, conquers the palate by smoothing and soothing it:

Edmund Burke’s Dreamboat
(“Wolf Boy Larry Gomez Hopes New Genetic Findings Can Care ‘Werewolf Syndrome”
Huffingpost.com)

If you have tried how smooth globular bodies, as the marbles with which boys amuse themselves, have affected the touch when they are rolled backward and forward and over one another, you will easily conceive how sweetness, which consists in a salt of such nature, affects the taste; for a single globe, (though somewhat pleasant to the feeling) yet by the regularity of its form, and the somewhat too sudden deviation of its parts from a right line, it is nothing near so pleasant to the touch as several globes, where the hand gently rises to one and falls to another; and this pleasure is greatly increased if the globes are in motion, and sliding over one another; for this soft variety prevents that weariness, which the uniform disposition of the several globes would otherwise produce (IV, XXI, Sweetness, Its Nature, 180).

The smooth is the sweet, each quality a reflection, perhaps a vision or version, of the other, leaving no room for secondary masculine features, like facial/body hair, or even the hardness of muscle, which disrupt the gratifying softness of the sucrescent and are hence expelled from the zone of the beautiful, which will tolerate no obstruction to movement.

As this passage evinces, for Burke, smoothness is so essential a quality to the phenomenon of beauty that other beautiful qualities, like sweetness, are able to be translated into it without remainder: it’s as if we are attempting to get two languages to correspond in an attempt to inspire the appropriate action. As regards beauty, that action would be renunciation, since with smoothness comes submission, as the words of the conclusion to Part III manifest: “For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth, and polished; the great, rugged and negligent; beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line, and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation; beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, even massive” (XXVII, The Sublime and Beautiful Compared, 157). And so beauty, as if by a principle of wabisabi, programmatically flashes its imperfections, lisping, simpering and openly flaunting its various weaknesses, all as a prelude to submitting to us via the logic of a “Beauty of Distress”: “Women are very sensible of this; for which reason, they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness, and even sickness” (III, IX, Perfection not the Cause of Beauty, 144). Small wonder that the affective state best exemplifying this aesthetic quality is melancholy, mourning’s torqued refraction.

Jacko Suave
(Michael Jackson, “Smooth Criminal”
Fanpop.com)

This Disquieting Relaxation

Pure Instrumentality
(Tool Academy Season 2. Eonline.com)

The metrosexual is smooth, both in terms of his body — removal of the      hairiness that Flügel identified as male quality rendered repulsive, curvature of the muscles, even bronzing of his skin, all in an effort to even out the complexion and render it visually unperturbed, making him a sort of aesthetic geodesic — and attitude, as any glimpse of the products of Reality TV reveals: take, for example, the philandering of the men of Tool Academy 1 and 2, most of whom identify as smooth operators (it is no accident that they enter Season 1 thinking they are competing for the title “Mr. Awesome”). This logic is very much at work in Michael Jackson’s formulation of a “Smooth Criminal” (1987), and is so clearly what made him both “Bad” and “Dangerous,” as his album titles accurately proclaimed and as superstar Quilter Faith Ringgold recognized in her homage to the Prince of Pop in her hyperkinetic “Who’s Bad?” (1988).[5] The metrosexual’s master stroke is to remain in the position of the dark and powerful which Burke ascribed to sublimity proper, yet to take on the physical characteristics of this lisping, tottering creature whose softness, sweetness and delicacy melt us, our dissolution into its surfaces paralleling the disappearance of their gradations into one another silently, deftly and without apparent interruption. In this situation, the beautiful appears in the slot assigned to the sublime, therein introducing the immediate problem of novelty: how does this move affect us, and what, specifically, is the affect we experience in the wake of its grand switcheroo?

Moonwalking across the Point de Capiton
(Who’s Bad? (1988) Faith Ringgold, Faithringgold.com)

At the root, Burke’s dyadic approach to aesthetic and somatic experience creates two massive psychosexual pivots: the self-preservation on which sublimity turns, and the love on which beauty turns. These fixed points dictate the mechanics of Burke’s system-machine, which, once the initial passions are laid out, acts with the effect of billiard balls rolling around a pool table, or gears spinning in the interior of a watch, its horology marking time with surprising passion – and precision. In this system, desire operates according to a principle of pain-avoidance that would be simple, were the core of the sublime not this uncanny delight that we are able to feel when threatened with the prospect of annihilation which the sublime seems to promise imminently, insulating us from real danger through an always neutralizing distance.[6] All in all, “There can be no doubt that bodies that are rough and angular, rouse and vellicate the organs of feeling, causing a sense of pain, which consists in the violent tension or contradiction of the musclar fibres. On the contrary, the application of smooth bodies relax; gentle stroking with a smooth hand allays violent pains and cramps, and relaxes the suffering parts from their unnatural tension; and it has therefore very often no mean effect in removing swellings and obstructions” (IV, XX, Why Smoothness Is Beautiful, 178-179). The metro obviates a physical form of vellication at the same time that, metaphysically, he causes us to twitch, while beauty, thoroughly non-threatening and relaxing, relaxes us so much we lose even our grammar, as well as our senses of singularity and plurality. In Burke’s words, the application of smooth bodies relaxes, although, technically they should relax: evidently, in submitting to us, the beautiful object softens us a bit too much, causing us to lose our grip on order: this buttery smoothness ends up smoothing us out as well, a chocolate laxative we have mistaken for a Hershey Bar.

If the sublime makes us terrified, then it is the beautiful which causes us to be giddy, a word Burke never tires of using in this context: “Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or wither it is carried” (III, XV, Gradual Variation, 149).   For this en-giddied Burke, beauty finally leads from smooth bodies to smooth beds: “The sense of feeling is highly gratified with smooth bodies. A bed smoothly laid, and soft, that is, where the resistance is every way inconsiderable, is a great luxury, disposing to an universal relaxation, and inducing beyond any thing else, that species of it called sleep” (179). In this context, the metrosexual is our mattress, a place where we might sleep, or be prevented from sleeping, his smooth body melting into the corresponding smoothness of Egyptian cotton sheets undisturbed by the presence of bodies, a Lockean blank canvas disrupting claims to innatism while making of pleasure a source of novelty and openness.

Aunt Barbara: Beautiful Containment
(New York Magazine
Nymag.com)

Like it or not, but this criminal is ours, and we must find a way of incorporating him onto our curio shelves or else he might send our meticulous ménagerie crashing down.  Through him, classic aesthetic categories which have infiltrated so much of our collective experiences across the years find themselves pulverized, even sublimated – it might even be correct to invoke sublation, if indeed the digital series is broken. This is the heart of his crime: that, after him, women and men alike lose their bearings aesthetically and somatically, trapped in a flurry of addled butterflies whose eyespots cannot take us in, yet expire trying: literally dying to see from the depths of a legendary psychasthenia making the body an experiment in amateur cartography. The map he presents us is criss-crossed by words we recognize, yet contains bodies of land and water we cannot identify as earthly — and still we must follow it, all other atlases having been incinerated at a clandestine book-burning where a secret society committed to the agonies of beauty roasts Vanitas by the side of ’Smores and the street plans of cities so far-flung they might as well have been extraterrestrial.

These men, metropolitan in the extreme, underscore the mappy ‘legend’ of the legendary, as once again their confabulations and fables produce a glimpse of the fabulous close, but out of reach; centered, they experience no mirror stage disruptions, and do not technically even mimic their gay older brothers, but those of us who regard them certainly undergo the loss of spatial awareness and subsumption by dark space that sociologist Roger Caillois famously described in his seminal work on mimicry as a sort of sickly dis-identification belonging to the lost creature unable to separate itself from an environment that absorbs it completely via a camouflage anticipating psychosis.[7] Through the laws of usufruct, we siphon off a portion of the metrosexual’s pleasure for ourselves, following the delirious Deleuzian coprs sans organes’ lead and applying it to our surface counterproductively as joyful appurtenance while that famous Law central to Lacan and his heirs monitors our EKG carefully and with great interest. Yes, it is shopping for stem cells.

If Roger Caillois Designed Menswear
(Dsquared, Spring/Summer 2014
Dsuared2.com)

Filaments

Print

Boileau, Nicolas. Œuvres Completes. Paris: French and European Publications, 1966.

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. In Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry and Other Pre-revolutionary Writings. London: Penguin, 1998.

Caillois, Roger. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Trans. Claudine

Frank and Camille Naish. Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

_______. The Writing of Stones. Trans. Barbara Bray. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985.

Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, in The Concept of Irony/Notes on Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. Trans. Howard V. and

Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Easton Ellis, Bret. American Psycho. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991.

Flügel, J.C. The Psychology of Clothes. London: Hogarth Press, 1950.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

____. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge,

1972-1973, Book XX. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von. L’Esthétique que de la Laideur, Suivi de Diderot à  Pétersbourg. Trans. Georges-Paul Villa. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967.

_______. Venus in Furs. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. NewYork: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1996.

Tata, Michael Angelo. “The Homoerotic Truth of the Sublime: A Philography.”  rhizomes. 2012 (Issue #24).

Wallace, Michele. “Michael Jackson, Black Modernisms and ‘The Ecstasy of Communication,’” in Invisibility Blues: from Pop to Theory. London: Verso, 1990.

Pixel

Tool Academy 1. 495 Productions: VH1, January—March 2009.

Tool Academy II. 495 Productions: VH1, August 2009—present.

End Notes

[1] The word “upbuilding” (opbyggelig) is intimately Kierkegaard’s; in using it, I refer primarily to the Ultimatum from Either/Or II (“The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong”), as well as to the tension between Socratic irony and edification in The Concept of Irony. For the metros, the trick is to secularize the opbyggelig, and yet in doing so still retain the isolation from the blanknesses of Socratic irony that the concept demands in order for the “building” to proceed upward in the erection of that strange piece of architecture that is the metrosexual, who puts the “building” in “upbuilding” and literalizes the metaphor of erection. One final riff: as did the Chelsea Boy before him, the metro spins the upbuilding, turning it into a sort of out-building, as muscle fibers grow outward from the body, one style supplants another without sublation, and, overall, a sort of horizontality that is of a piece with postmodern rhizomation prevails.

[2] I presented this take on Burkean aesthetics some time ago in a paper called “S/ubliMe” at a Valentine’s conference at Fordham University in New York City; it has since appeared in the journal rhizomes with a new preface. My idea was that since in Burke’s system the beautiful is overtly the feminine, and describes the relation between a gazing/hearing/attending male and an objectified female presence, then the sublime, which presumably involves the same male spectator as he achieves contact with something decidedly un-feminine, describes a situation either homosocial or homosexual, depending on one’s reading of the violence of sublimity. For this project, I took Nicolas Boileau’s idea of the sublime as rape/ravishment at its word.

[3] In Burke’s Enquiry, the angular first enters the picture in II, VII, Vastness: “A perpendicular has more force in forming the sublime, than an inclined plane; and the effects of a rugged and broken surface seem stronger than where it is smooth and polished” (114). Within the context of my discussion, “angularity” is a strange term; its opposite appears to be the “melted-into” (as in “to have those parts not angular, but melted as it were into each other” (III, XVIII, Recapitulation, 151)). For Flügel, as quoted above, “angularity” is one of the features shared by men which precludes them from being beautiful. For Burke, beauty, which is feminine, knows nothing of the angular. For example: “…[T]o be graceful, it is requisite that there be no appearance of difficulty; there is required a small inflexion of the body; and a composure of the parts, in such a manner, as not to incumber each other, nor to be divided by sharp and sudden angles. In this case, this roundness, this delicacy of attitude and motion, it is that all the magic of grace consists, and what is called its je ne sais quoi…” (III, XXII, Grace, 153). Interestingly enough, it is in this same section, dedicated to grace, that Burke mentions his only substantive reference to human male beauty: statues of Antinous. Outside of Antinous, the only other ‘attractive’ males are ornithological: the peacock, the drake (III, Section XVII, Beauty in Color, 151).

[4] I do not yet raise the problem of an aesthetic of ugliness of the sort described by Sacher-Masoch in Venus in Furs and, more acutely, his Aesthetics of Ugliness, but it is here, just out of earshot, waiting to speak, interjecting insights into the mechanics of male sexuality and its commitment to the fetish.

[5] Ringgold’s daughter Michele Wallace describes this quilt and Jackson’s badness in her Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (see the chapter “Michael Jackson, Black Modernisms and ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’” ).

[6] The unwieldiness of the sublime comes at us early on in the text, as Burke identifies its corresponding affect as delight, defined as negative pleasure, or the sensation that obtains when a pain is removed (I, IV, Of Delight and Pleasure, as Opposed to Each Other, 83-84). In Burke’s algebra—or is it a calculus?— pleasure is positive when it relates to something present, and negative when it relates to something absent. The sublime is not sublime if it presses too closely, since then we would actually be in danger, and not be able to have the requisite distance to appreciate it as aesthetic experience (it would appear as brute somatism, sympathetically triggering a flight or flight). While this essay is not the place to delve deeply into Burke’s controversial Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), I would point out in passing that, for Burke, the French Revolution could not be read as sublime, since it pressed too closely (for example, it disrupted a balance of power, and set itself up as an example to be emulated), causing Burke to be unable to enjoy it—and certainly not, according to a principle of delight. In essence, the French Revolution obviated the beautiful, while it de-distanced the sublime, eradicating the protective space separating spectator from annihilating object, and hence had to be rejected on both counts.

[7] Lacan’s theory of the gaze owes much to Caillois’ idea of mimicry as legendary psychasthenia, or that condition according to which an individual loses itself in its environment through acts of absorption. For example, reading Caillois’ essay against the chapters comprising the section “Of the Gaze as objet petit a” in Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (67-119) opens Lacan and psychoanalysis to the strange possibilities associated with Caillois’ entomological (and mineral) surrealism, as the essays in Edge of Surrealism demonstrate (Lacan seems to ignore the mineral). See also his The Writing of Stones. I would ideally suggest looking at his “The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis” (1934) with one eye and Lacan’s theory of female sexuation (for example, “A Love Letter,“ Encore, 78-89) with the other. Basically, the space separating the two mathemes defining the female seems to call forth a shocking violence that is an effect of pataphysical entrapment – something we see at extreme places in the Animal Kingdom as a rare moment of biological truth.

…

About the Author

Michael Angelo Tata is the Executive Editor of the Sydney-based electronic journal of literature, art and new media nebu[lab] and a member of the editorial collectives of the journals Kritikos and rhizomes. His Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality arrived to critical acclaim from Intertheory Press in 2010. His lyric essays on poetics, psychoanalysis and philosophy appear most recently in the collections The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein and Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950 as well as the British journal Parallax (Routledge). His poetry and graffiti are featured in the British journal Rattle and in the American journal Xanadu. He also writes reviews of contemporary Aesthetics titles for Temple University’s and Mount Holyoke College’s Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

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by Michael Angelo Tata 

.

For Dixon Miller: Bless His Heart    

For the history of metrosexuality — and yes, it is strange yet important to provide some kind of forward-oriented chronology for even a metaphysical entity like the Metro, despite the fact that, being metaphysical, there will necessarily be resistance to containment, overflow of boundaries and an almost total refusal of vitrinization — the fantastic but very real story of the death of Gianni Versace functioned as a morality tale casting an unflattering light on an unruly and overgrown homosexual narcissism. This glamorously ludicrous stance seemed to beg for its own eradication as it articulated its visual, behavioral and ethical excesses so vividly in the language of a mass producibility that magically retained reference to the exclusive despite the tacit, blasé populism underwriting its existence. As with Freud, a primary, post-autoerotic attachment to the self seemed to lead straight to the necropolis when that love was tested in that realtime which transcends the solipsism of minutes spent gazing into a mirror whose tain holds the secret to that fixation. This creature’s disappearance freed up the domain of self-beautification for a metrosexual culture which would never know these particular consolidated energies and indulgences of the flesh, because, not being homosexual, their drive or pulsation was always directed toward an alternate biological organization of physiological surfaces different from theirs: this tale is one version of what happened to make way for a straight takeover of the scene of a sartorial display into which the corporeal factored in equally, body and garment conversing with one another loudly, and in public, the two engaged in an endless dialogue, each blocking the other’s claims to primacy through friendly semiotic horseplay. In this version or fashion genealogy, the metrosexual was an aftereffect of the Chelsea Boy’s deterioration, a degradation marked by a fatal unidimensionality which no molt or pair of alligator loafers or iced double mocha sipped by the shores of a restless South Atlantic lost in the pondering of its own turquoise splendor could have saved: the ecstasy of communication, Baudrillard’s vision of what happens when semantic channels collapse into the singularity of one neon tube abuzz with residues of lost dimensionalities, took this uniquely Mediterranean historical superficiality as a victim, Grimm’s Fairy Tale meets Movie of the Week.

Versace Mania: Rococo à Go-Go.
Screaming Mimi’s Unveils Vintage Versace Collection

Being one myself — what a crime, to admit it, even all these years later — and totally devoted to the cause, I penned a gossip column by the title Chelsea Boy for New York City newspaper LGNY in 1997, finally posing for a strange and tasteless advertisement in which I took responsibility for Gianni’s shooting before Cunanan had emerged as a suspect: the perfect swan song. In general, I took the concept and pushed it up against it structural limits, making it performative, a mobile site where surface and depth came into controversy without it being clear who won or could win the skirmish, sublation alluded to, yet never completed as a process, Deleuze’s CSO (Corps Sans Organes) popping by the mall for a ride on the merry-go-round, round and round and round, all those Holden Caulfield circles masquerading as motion (yes: Post-structuralists kept feeding the machine quarters). And because it all came so naturally to me, I continued to espouse the aesthetic long after it ceased being acceptable to do so, driven by my own sumptuary demons — right up until the present moment (and every act of écriture has its unique present, as Barthes’ punctum grounds itself in the spaciotempral banalities of a studium it is loathe to admit it needs). Walking the streets of Miami in a circus of citrus colors and animal prints, I still cannot help but flinch at the memory of what it felt like to live through the aftermath of Cunanan’s bullet striking the fleshy target of an icon reminded he was after all only a man. This bullet was so clearly my Chicxulub, affording me the vista of witnessing an entire way of life follow the precepts of Charles Darwin, only becoming extinct before it was ever endangered and there was time for postage stamps or Warhols to be generated as equal parts warning and testament.

Not Every Frog Becomes a Prince
CCTP-725: Remix and Dialogic Culture

Furthermore, and most likely a reaction to all that unseemly opulence, by the beginning of the 21^st century, the rich patterns and see-through fabrics of Gianni Versace had long given way to the cool and sterile cotton of American Apparel and the self-consciously faux excesses of Juicy Couture, which recast Goth as Emo and brought the sartorial geographies of Los Angeles and Orange County, California, to the fore, places where to be open is to be unemployed, yet where male display does not immediately sync one up with homosexuality, creating a novel space for masculine performance — the place where denial displaces homosexuality endlessly and the Metro becomes a way of articulating “the downlow” for a suburban audience.[1] In addition, post-911 American culture has continued to exhibit all around diminished tolerance for the foreign, the exotic or the excrescent, making the faux-Euro Chelsea Boy a ridiculous creature even within homosexual culture itself, which has almost entirely dropped the Chelsea Boy façade in favor of a more proletarian look ruled on a good day by the fragmentary Armanis: Emporio to keep it classy, the more American Armani Exchange to go full-on Jersey Shore, GTL on a loop of white suds and orange guns. In this community, the fabulous becomes downgraded to historical fable, the tale an older relative shares at a holiday party between bites of stuffing while the rapt youth composing a captive audience marvel at the fact that the present— this present, theirs, the only one it is possible to know, really — has any anterior, or exterior, or ant/exterior. For there have been other presents: imagine.

Loss of Opulence
2 Oceans Vibe News:
From Tame to Sexually Explicit: American Apparel Has Different Rules for Male and Female Models

Walking the finest line between twink and bear, and of course invoking the famous gay taxonomy at the same time that it subverted it, the Chelsea Boy had finally lost his hold, either falling into the unstylish curvaceousness of the otter/cub/bear spectrum, or collapsing into the chic but flat trappings of flaming twinkdom. In the wake of the Chelsea Boy’s demise, the gay hierarchy returned to its normal equivalences between stylish and waify/oblivious and juicy, and the metrosexual absolutely swooped, taking over his aesthetic mission in a swoon, retaining his visual and performative dimensions while leaving behind the drug-fueled hedonism of “the circuit” and the exotic sexual practices of the dungeon. Tired of losing his women to the perennial gay BFF, one who is motorboated frequently and in general monopolizes the surrogacy of love objects, an ideal ever a at remove from consummation, and hence motorized by it à la Will and Grace, the Metro learned to emulate the appearance of her darling sidekick, able to give her the one thing his gay counterpart could never bring to the table: an orgasm. Responding to yet ironically constructed by films like Amy Heckerling’s playfully excoriating Clueless and foreshadowed by novels like Bret Easton Ellis’ visionary American Psycho, the metrosexual, an ideal and idealized invert, if we are to manipulate the Freudian lexicon, which I always advise, dispenses with the sick frivolity of high camp in favor of a redefined virility that is not campy at all — and hence campy beyond its wildest dreams, as the essence of camp is nothing more than cluelessness.[2]

The Juicy Emo: Flat’s All That
LIVEJOURNAL: Tattoos 5

Various famous Metros continue to surface within contemporary televisuality, the metrosexual’s primary medium: Heat and 12 Pack from VH1’s I Love New York and I Love Money 1 and 2, the character Conrad Gates on BBC soap opera Footballers’ Wives, bodybuilding icon and consort of party maven Suzanne Bartsche, David Barton, and the most famous metrosexual of all, soccer star and fashion icon David Beckham, who asks nothing of us but that we bend our will to his vestimentary and physical domination. What they have to say to which ever “us” this us is can only be revealed by the unfolding of a sumptuary history — a history for which body is vestment, underwear becomes outerwear (thanks, Marky Mark!) and the duty to refashion oneself as eye candy bears the weight of Kantian obligation, so heavy and inevitable, a categorical imperative concealing a secret core of adiaphora mobilizing a current at once repressive and expressive.[3]

Funky Bunch Crotch Grab
That’s Fugged Up (Blog)

What this paradoxical obligation brings, though, is equally objective reality and subjective mirage: or, to put it another way, the reality of the metrosexual is the site of mirage, the illusion of the straight gay man, one who adopts the trappings associated with men of a certain homosexual niche without taking away anything of an Ars Erotica, in essence stripping away the dangers of the gay lifestyle to which the clothing corresponds and presenting it in a tamed form, much as for Romantic aesthetics, the picturesque emerged as the category which framed the sublime and made it palatable through decontextualization, When he appeared in the late 90s, the Metro did so brilliantly and with the air of scandal, publicly cropping up first on the eponymous stage of talk show luminary Ricki Lake where, along with the various other subcultures, types and trends that were his kin, he entered into public consciousness along with the Hoochie, the Baby Mama, and the Club Kid, new terms studding the Ricktionary of postmodern life and giving it metaphysical substance.[4]

This Is Not a Knot
University of Victoria, Lecture Notes

Even when he appeared stable in his metrosexuality, and the alliance between the metropolis and the heterosexual was secure, he was always the locus of disbelief and speculation, the knot where sexuality and aesthetics ran into one another to create a mess of ripples sending a shiver through society, which trembled slightly as the non-confusion of the metrosexual became the consternation of those who could not help but attribute a projected form of non-innocent ambiguity to him. For while people could believe in the existence of a Hoochie Mama, welfare queen or fat transvestite with dubious Karaoke skills in advance of the #RATCHET, which was yet to emerge, although it existed primordially (and un-hashtagged) under the banner of Kristevan abjection, it found itself thrown into a befuddlement fueled by jealousy at the notion that one for whom sex could be procreative and based upon a union of biological opposites yet who was beautiful and hence an aesthetic mutant had actualized his possibilities and burst forth on the scene.

Advent of the #RATCHET
Pussila with Jay Heels
Courtesy of Jay Heels’ Facebook Page

And so, on and off Ricki’s set, there were debates about gay men sexing up Metros, about the rituals giving the metrosexual his distinctive beauty, and about the ever elusive boundary separating the effeminate gay man from the straight flamer.[5] In the final wash, no one ever believes the metrosexual, now or anytime, except the metrosexual himself, making him the type of failed ideal whose very failure can derive only from his success: in short, he does his job too well, better than distant relatives the disco stud, glamrocker or 80s genderbender and thus causes us to doubt the veracity of what he has to say about his poses and attitudes, this while he remains calm, composed and at home with the resplendent shimmer of his surfaces. A victim of his own perfection, he persists as queen protesting too much, as idealized homosexual, as gay man whose inversions have been twisted in the right direction, miraculously maintaining his narcissism intact despite the fact that a topography has fundamentally changed. Perhaps this fact is why we do not lend credence to anything he says or does, and why he will be the focus of an endless sexual interrogation taking place in the magazines, blogs, vlogs and YouTube videos that pack the screens of global consumerism with manly yet unmanning e-jects generating heat and melodrama: if we believe him, if we accept his beliefs and take his self-image as it is presented to us, then what are we do with our own self-love? Have we loved ourselves enough?

Hoochie Haters:
The Best Ricki Lake Topics
LIFELOUNGE

To believe him, we must disbelieve ourselves, and here lies the difference between the inquisition of the dandy, disco stud or genderbender and that faced by the Metro: secretly, no matter what our sexual preference, we want to be him or to have him, he who disrupts our own narcissism, he who gives legendary psychasthenia, that famed condition purported by sociologist Roger Caillois to give the creature practicing animal mimicry its sense of anomie and disassociation, he who taunts me to no end, this other idealized, stylized me[6] And so we must disprove him, or expire trying, all while we acquiesce to his dominion of the food chain, an alpha-male’s alpha male.

For these men, the inversion without which Narcissus would merely be yet another creature lost in the game of reflection reverses itself such that the narcissist e-verts, or dis-inverts, however we describe the motion opposite to that inversion foundational to the narcissistic experience (words for motion leave us dizzy, fizzy, like a shaken can of Diet Cola). It may even be said that the Metro creates a libidinal knot that he first turns upon himself before riding this circuit back outside himself, leaving the residue of an inversion at the same time that he is able to transcend it by passing beyond it via the logic of a sublation interrupting the digital series: perhaps he helps the CSO might evolve (or is an evolved CSO). Taking Freud literally, the Metro in its hematophagy lives “on” narcissism, coming to rest on the pulse of self-love and gorging himself rapaciously on its contents. Feeding on narcissism, he takes it as his substratum, putting its nutritional value to work in the erection of a new center where autoerotism blossoms into a full-fledged adoration and adulation of a self who is able to take itself as erotic object without the intrusions of the abject marring that love: it’s almost a secondary narcissism, as the first M in the M-2-M (Man-to-Man) formula takes the second as external presence and a pure love takes root, one built to inhabit the multifarious screens lighting up the global village.

Stick Insect Realness
Image from my Miami Beach Hallway
Author’s Private Collection

Having reversed its polarity and hence flowing in a new direction, the libido of the metrosexual supports a love affair between self and self at the same time that it manages to cathect the world, which, in the grandest act of megalomania, is lovable because it can presumably take the Metro as its ideal object without much convincing or fears of rejection and abjection. That love’s simplest articulation would be: I love the world because the world finds me loveable. Here, the “lovence” of narcissism performs the paradoxical feat of permitting the self-loving Metro to become the world which loves him, gratifying his narcissism through the warm embrace of an envy emptied of all invidiousness.[7] A metropolis unto itself, the metrosexual is a port city where bodybuilding, tanning, depilation, coiffure and couture come together in a rogue wave whose summed amplitudes cause it to soar above the social ocean, swamping everything with glamorous quantum excesses. Smooth, he is no Studio 54 reveler, all surfaces trimmed, plucked and manscaped, so that they may be consumed without the intrusiveness of follicles trapped between teeth. Bending genderbending, he becomes the ultimate transsexual: the M-to-M, an epitome of manhood sharing in the tradition of conquest endemic to that philanderer the 18^th century known lovingly as the rake — only this wanton rakes up everything he can with little critique and few objections, even from his gay brethren, who ogle him mercilessly, yet can never quite figure out what it would take to become him.

Body by Barts
Suzanne Bartsch, David Barton and Amanda Lepore
Guest of a Guest: New York Parties

To reform him would be to deform him, and who would want him to disappear from the urban peepshow? Without him around, what would we look at? Through him, the fabulous, itself an epicenter of fables and confabulation, reveals itself to be a philosophical problem in the truest sense: he wants it all, and will get it, but not without the remainder of doubt he inspires in those who simply do not believe in perfectibility, since they would necessarily lose faith in themselves, they, who have achieved so much less. That he does not doubt himself in his accession to a type of beauty even more aerodynamic and puffy than the Greek ideal to whom he does not even obliquely refer because for the most part he has not had time for books keeps him in play, and guarantees that we will play along: this engine is fueled by egotism alone, its race car speeding around and around a NASCAR track surrounded by mullets and t-shirts that bear the logos of domestic beers. His beauty knows no pederasty, nor does it truck with those exchanges of knowledge marking philosophy as amorous. Yet he does teach us something, as it is always possible to learn from ignorance (and what is narcissism but the most supreme form of ignorance?): through him, we learn that the fabulous life cannot quite belong to his homosexual brother, that, in the end, straight men are better gay men than gay men, just as transvestites are more ideal women that any biological woman could ever be, the only exception being rare moments of Bio Queendom (for example Marilyn Monroe, Cookie Mueller, or, more recently, World Famous *BOB*) [8]

I Got a Knife in my Purse
Fanpop

The ideal can never belong to the real: has psychoanalysis taught us nothing? What use would there ever be for an Imaginary or a Social-symbolic if it were that easy to live thoughtfully? As ever, display is the purview and provenance of men, a joust between and among men, for the benefit of men, whose manly code of behavior mandates an identification with the surface perhaps hardwired into his circuitry via an animal and instinctual attachment to a physical display merging sex, appearance, and, ultimately, the death it vociferously summons, taunts and works so hard to dispel with a combination of body language, visual presentation and that type of poignant verbalization involving only the eyes. In this schema, women emerge only as false screens for display while the real action happens in a luxe elsewhere to whose parties she is never invited – not that she would notice, the mauvaise foi of female display totally absorbing her efforts at social dominion. The peahen laughs: metrosexuality is no mystery to her, but what are cities of birds?

Did I Stutter?
Style & Then Some (Blog)

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Threads

Print

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard.

……….New York: Hill and Wang, 2010.

Baudrilard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012.

Caillois, Roger. The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader. Trans. Claudine

……….Frank and Camille Naish. Raleigh-Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. 

Castiglione, Baldesar. The Book of the Courtier. Trans George Bull. New York: Penguin

……….Classics, 1976.

Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso,

____. The Work of Mourning. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault. Chicago: The University

……….of Chicago Press, 2001.

____. The Gift of Death. Trans. Davis Wills. Chicago: The University of

……….Chicago Press, 1996.

Easton Ellis, Bret. American Psycho. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1991.

Freud, Sigmund. On Narcissism: An Introduction. Ed. Joseph Sandler. New Haven:

……….Yale University Press, 1991.

Indiana, Gary. Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story. New York: Harper

……….Perennial, 1999.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Book XI. Trans.

Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

____. Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge,

……….1972-1973, Book XX. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company,

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. George Abbeele.

………..Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

Orth, Maureen. Vulgar Favors: Andrew Cunanan, Gianni Versace, and the Largest

……….Failed Manhunt in U.S. History. New York: Dell, 1999.

Ronell, Avital. Stupidity. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Mental Illenss. Trans. Ida Macalpine and Richard

………A. Hunter; Intro. Rosemary Dinnage. New York: The New York Review of Books,

………2000.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Anchor Books, 1986.

Web

Lawanda Jackson’s Queendom. www.lawandajackson.com. Last consulted October 1,

Jonny McGovern. www.gaypimp.com. Last consulted October 1, 2009

Ricki Lake Episode Guide. www.TV.com   Last consulted October 1, 2009.

Boob Tube

House of Versace: Lifetime, 2013. 

I Love Money. Chris Abrego and Mark Cronin. VH1: July—October 2008.

I Love Money 2. Chris Abrego and Mark Cronin. VH1: February—May 2009. 

Tool Academy 1. 495 Productions: VH1, January—March 2009.

Tool Academy II. 495 Productions: VH1, August 2009—present.

Dish

Tata, Michael Angelo. “l Shot Gianni Versace,” in LGNY. New York City: July 1997.

End Notes

[1] RIP, Juicy Men’s! As of 2009, the fashion line has discontinued its menswear line. First called “Juicy Men,” then “Dirty English,” Juicy menswear finally went under in 2009, its signature swags so many wind chimes blowing in a desert monsoon. What does its death mean for the metro, who was so instrumental to its popularity, and to whom its designs implicitly referred in each articulation/event? I wonder: does the death of Juicy mark an important change within metrosexuality itself, or at minimum within what it is willing and able to consume and metabolize in the construction of its surfaces?

[2] For the Susan Sontag of “Notes on Camp,” there is no such thing as self-conscious camp. In order for camp to be possible, there must be a chasm between production and consumption: what makes an artifact campy is that it tries very hard to achieve an end we deem ridiculous or excessive (as in the fabrications of Art Nouveau and Jügendstil), or that its project is a desperate one, and, outsiders, we appreciate its failings and shortfalls with a glee shot through with thanatos or todestrieb. What is important is that production decouples form consumption—in other words, that in making the attribution “camp,” we must view and consume the camp item differently from the way its producers conceived and produced it, our intentionalities bifurcating. The rift between production and consumption fabricates the space of camp.

[3] Here, I think of Lyotard’s early work on uniquenesses among various species of apathy, Derrida discusses these in his farewell to Lyotard in The Work of Mourning, itself alive with the knowledge that it is death alone which makes indifference impossible. Speaking about and to his deceased friend, colleague, Zeitgeist soulmate, Derrida explains: his master’s thesis, “Indifference as an Ethical notion,” examined “various conceptions of indifference, from Epicurian ataraxia, to Stoic apatheia and adiaphora, to Zen “not thinking” and Taoist nothingness” (211). To this incredible list about indifferent differences, I would add only that, from the perspective of FashionTtheory, we must include the Renaissance notion of sprezzatura touted by Castiglione, and from the perspective of psychoanalysis, we must include Judge Schreber’s tormenting “thinking-nothing thought, “or Nichtsdenkungsgedanke, as these are also different indifferences at stake in the thinking of fashion, be it Metrosexuality, the Chelsea Boy phenom or otherwise..

[4] Regarding Ricki Lake’s fundamental engagement of the metrosexual, even self-proclaimed “Gay Pimp” Jonny McGovern was brought onto her stage for the express purpose of “rating metrosexuals”; see his memoirs on his site, http://gaypimp.com/index.php/content/blogcategory/16/28/. Regarding Ricki’s show, see the following episodes: “You’re My Man…Stop Hangin’ with Gay Men” (Season 5, Episode 5102, January 12, 1998), “Stop Saying My Man Is Gay” (Season 6, Episode 6025, September 25, 1998), “Stop Letting Your Man Pretend He’s Gay for the Pay” (Season 6, Episode 6032, October 2, 1998), “Stop Pretending to be Gay” (Season 9, Episode 9170, April 17, 2002), among others. Lawanda Jackson also judged a Metrosexual Trivia Show, but unfortunately the link has been removed from YouTube. Unfortunately, I am relying upon cultural memory, and am unsure of the episode number for this rare treat. See www.lawandajackson.com for more on this performer (her triplet breasts should serve as indication of her stance toward biology and sociology).

[5] If for Ricki there was the metrosexual, then for Oprah, the man living on the down low took center stage: each star had her man of choice, and thus her favorite sexual problematics (for Ricki, the beautiful and chic straight man with an urban flair; for Oprah, the largely black man living the dual lives of public straight man and private homosexual). Do these tastes reflect anxieties about Rob Sussman and Stedman Graham, each host’s respective beau (at least at the time these episodes were filmed)? Sexual types like these filter through mass media, which creates them just as much as it reflects them. They are the superstars of urban sociology and postmodern televisuality, creating the world that contains them as much as that world calls them forth, calling for their call.

[6] Calllois is vital in that it is his version of mimicry as surreal lostness which informs and inspires Jacques Lacan’s notion of an Imaginary founded upon the mirror’s hijinks, meaning that the Mirror Stage is but a human reflection of an entomological sickness, the Imaginary carried on the backs of stick insects so busy convincing themselves that they’re made of wood that they never notice.

[7] In his Politics of Friendship, Derrida coins the term “lovence” to describe the relation of love and loving which unites lover and beloved in their radically dissymmetrical relationship—dissymmetrical within a temps and contretemps which order that one pair of the couple survive the other and hence love him beyond the grave, as well as epistemologically, within the order of knowledges and stupidities which differentiate lover from beloved. The lover knows, but the beloved is devoid of knowledge: hence it is better to be the lover than the beloved, as the Aristotelian logic goes, just as it is better to have fewer than more friends (and, I would argue, lovers) within this philosophy (hence the problem of number plaguing the conjoined histories of friendship and polity).

[8] The trope of stupidity surfaces as homage to Avital Ronell, whose Stupidity truly gives ignorance its due, highlighting the complicated relationship that obtains between presence and lack of knowledge. I define narcissism as Primary Stupidity, just as for Deleue and Guattari, the CSO is counterproductive, stopping up its senses to frustrate empiricism’s efforts to inscribe upon its tabula rasa. Only with the Metro’s narcissism, the CSO has gone glam, triumphantly entering the agora as victor.

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About the Author

Michael Angelo Tata is the Executive Editor of the Sydney-based electronic journal of literature, art and new media nebu[lab] and a member of the editorial collectives of the journals Kritikos and rhizomes. His Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality arrived to critical acclaim from Intertheory Press in 2010. His lyric essays on poetics, psychoanalysis and philosophy appear most recently in the collections The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein and Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950 as well as the British journal Parallax (Routledge). His poetry and graffiti are featured in the British journal Rattle and in the American journal Xanadu. He also writes reviews of contemporary Aesthetics titles for Temple University’s and Mount Holyoke College’s Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

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by Michael Angelo Tata 

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for 12 Pack

12 Pack Takes Over (photo via vh1.com)

Introduction: Narcissus Blinked (#sorrynotsorry)       

Selfie Wars take no prisoners: and so it is with vibrant male display in mind in the grand age of reality stardom that I offer the following series of reflections on what the metrosexual has done to interrupt a certain domination of the surface by homosexual culture in general, broken up into four installments, a tetraptych to be displayed at an impossible memorial ceremony where mourning and melancholia cross wires like so much spaghetti thrown against the wall just to see if it will stick, proof that the apartment was always a rental. In the first, printed here, immediately after this preface, and in direct physical contact with it, as if that matters (it might, actually), I trace out the rough contours of a fashion history that has left men in the dust in order clarify why exactly the metrosexual should arrive as such a surprise on the scene of display, where he seems to abjure both heterosexual and homosexual orthodoxies, making the future of each unclear, muddled and completely vulnerable to apocalypse. In the second, I gaze upon more recent history—and yet years that seem to have slipped so far and so quickly into oblivion, now that time has accelerated even beyond the spaciotemporal compression initially postulated by David Harvey in his analysis of postmodern culture and that Husserlian Internal Time Consciousness, a phenomenological mainstay, has become just another bone in the Pomo Reliquary—to examine what Gianni Versace has contributed to male efflorescence and in particular how he has clothed the whore so that his eventual disappearance will be more meaningful within the context of these struggles over aesthetic ownership (for in the end, not everyone owns male display—others are owned by it, or find themselves disowned completely, dissed and alone).

Next, in the third panel, if I may be permitted to stick with the poltytych metaphor from classical devotional painting, which seems entirely apt, I examine seminal aesthetician Edmund Burke’s ideas about the external features of the beautiful and the sublime so that the stakes of metrosexual reversal as the sublime becomes beautiful in a species of metaphysical makeover are spelled out clearly: the shift is not benign, and might even be described as tactical, assuming aesthetics is a war, which it might very well be, if entomology and ornithology have taught us anything and if the human experience is not such a radical break with nature as we might initially have fancied back at the start of Enlightenment thinking (it’s no accident that the typical Sadean justification of sexual violence is always that nature is cruel). Lastly, the final section of my lyric evocation introduces future mourning into the discussion, as it attunes itself to the affinity of fashion for the corpse and looks at the strange friendship the two entities share on both runway and street: for if every fashion stance is a commentary or gloss on death, then the metrosexual, too, must die, and be glossed, perhaps still remaining glossy, a creature most at home on the pages of a magazine or the charmed quadrilateral of the billboard, much like the Armani one famously perched along the elevated High Line Park in New York City, a metrosexual anchor. Assigning a value to that/these death(s) is imperative, for not every disappearance counts, much as we might wish it did: for to end and to stop denote different modes of cessation, as Arthur Danto has taught us in his writings about the famous End of Art: not every stop is an end, although every end stops (the trick is for the disaster to be world-historical).

Giorgio on the High Line (photo via flickr.com)

In the end, I am treating metrosexuals just as so much theory has illustriously treated drag queens and kings: that is, as semiotic mysteries, strange places where biology gives way to the supernatural and we come to doubt the inexorability of our own givens. Can narcissism be doubted, though? Is the cogito lost in its own pattern of reflections a grounding narrative of the human experience, a primary occurrence of narcissism and one that will haunt philosophy as the horror story of its roots in a solipsism that is counterproductive at the core, to use the lingo of Deleuze and Guattari with respect to their famous Corps Sans Organes? Here, reflection means image as much as thought: a phantom presence emanating from the mirror’s tain along with thought coming to know itself through the medium of thought, a paradox that seems to place every idea and concept into jeopardy, including those related to the ego and its objectifications, specular externalizations of desire’s cloudy programmatic taking concrete form in an agora that is equally stage and page (paper, but supremely Web). Furthermore, the fact that I write these words from Miami Beach, Florida, must mean something: I will leave it up to my readers to determine my own situation among these debates based on the simple fact of geography and the promises a map can make—for where else would a piece such as this be written, except among beautiful, self-obsessed fashion creatures blissfully unaware of their own mortalities, in particular as they await the arrival of their international mentor, David Beckham, who famously plans to relocate to SOFL with his family? The metrosexuals might end heterosexuality as we have known it, but they also put the brakes on homosexuality, and I have every intention to concede graciously: they are really just New and Improved gay men, much as the ideal woman is a trannie, even if her uterus is only a dream wrapped in a hallucination. What these facts reveal about sexuality in general and its enchainment to a logic of visibility and expression is sketched out here, but can only be realized back out in the world, where identities are battled out every day and style is only occasionally a supermarket but is more often than not an abbatoir.

Michael Angelo Tata

Miami Beach 2014

I. Renouncing Renunciation: The M-to-M Revolution

Renunciation: Before and After (photo via coilhouse.net)

The fin-de-millénaire phenomenon of metrosexuality is by far the most important mutation within heterosexual masculinity since the emergence of the middle class in the 18^th century doomed straight men to a life of achromatic business attire fit for a funeral—the funeral of a certain concept of masculine display central to ethnology and psychoanalysis, as well the burial of a kind of puffery which according to evolutionary biology is located within primitive male brain structures associated with reptilian awareness.[1]

The Origins of Male Puffery? Meet Anolis carolinensis—Miami Native
(photo via usfca.edu)

Before what the fashion world heralded as “The Great Masculine Renunciation” banished the visual luridness of the pre-revolutionary aristocrat from masculinity proper, men were free to don regalia which would later become identified with femininity: powdered wigs, bold colors, and tight fabrics, not to mention more exotic gear, like the codpiece, the Artois shoe buckle, or the cape, items long since banished to the effulgences of pop music (the reprisal of the codpiece in the 80s by Cameo’s lead singer Larry Earnest Blackmon) or the chronicles of obesity (think: Dom DeLuise out on the town). Psychoanalyst John Carl Flügel in his influential Psychology of Clothes was the first to identify this closure as a post-Revolutionary aesthetic, a very real response to the emerging bureaucracy which would be the true legacy of the Être Supreme and French Republican Calendar, as the emergent middle class created the workaday world in the image of sobriety, consistency and reproducibility—ideas he attempted to challenge through his co-founding of the Men’s Dress Reform Party in 1929, an organization whose mission was to counter the “ascetic reaction-formation” which has suppressed male narcissism, and to rehabilitate male fashion and corporeality in general. In his words:

At about that time there occurred one of the most remarkable events in the whole history of dress, one under the influence of which we are still living, one, moreover, which has attracted far less attention than it deserves: men gave up their right to all the brighter, gayer, more elaborate, and more varied forms of ornamentation, leaving these entirely to the use of women, and thereby making their own tailoring the most austere and ascetic of the arts. Sartorially, this event has surely the right to be considered as ‘The Great Masculine Renunciation.’ Man abandoned his claim to be considered beautiful. He henceforth aimed at being only useful (111).

Thus in Flügel’s estimation, the French Revolution revolutionized not only society, but also gender, redefining maleness for a bourgeois world which now had to earn its way not through the inheritance of titles or a genetic connection to a Sun King, but instead through everyday labor that was largely administrative and demanded a suppression of the flagrant and the florid, the industrial world requiring the managerial prowess of nondescript worker bees to keep its motion perpetual.

Cameo Does Shakespeare (photo via cracked.com)

By the time industrialism began to wane in the mid-twentieth century, the greatness of the Great Masculine Renunciation had taken two centuries of casualties, fashion victims in the sense that, deserting them, fashion had victimized them, leaving them without vibrancy, without variety and with a truncated identity. Having developed everything it could develop and having industrialized everything that could be industrialized, the largely informational society which resulted had even less use for an embellished masculinity, as so many workers became ‘managers’ and pencil-pushers. As described by Daniel Bell in his influential The Coming of Post-industrial Society, this social structure reorganized bits and bytes, its employees floating paper and tapping at keys within the homogenized beige cubes of space which came to constitute the physicality of the business world, a place where the male physique would not need to be muscle-bound or physically massive since nothing weighty needed to be done. For both industrial and post-industrial societies, the men orchestrating and managing it had to tone down the excesses endemic to an aristocratic manhood revolutionized out of existence in the interest of capital, which demanded a certain neutrality and interchangeability, adhering to a principle that, truly, any man could be any man, just as every commodity could be exchanged for every commodity. For these social moments, the proletarian, long alienated from vivid display and accustomed to not affording variegation—for example, as with the history of an expensive synthetic dye like fuchsin and its use for pricy garments in the 19^th century, differentiation is not always available to just anyone—was not receptive to the ecstatic display rejected by the burgeoning middle class, leaving this impulse nowhere to go but in the direction of estivation.[2] Industrialism had no use for it, and neither did post-industrialism—at least not yet. For these men and their respective renunciations, all of them “great” and “masculine,” costume was truly radical in and of the ornamentation it rejected and the uniformity it fostered, as well as the globalism and universalism it both presupposed and crafted in its adherence to a male subjectivity identified with permanence, classicism and stability. A Magrittan dream of bowler hats and crisp lapels, these men were visually nondescript, the general equivalence central to capital demanding a corresponding equivalence within masculinity, which after the guillotine was charged with creating men divorced from ostentation as well as from the singularity of brash individualism.

It’s Raining Men: Post-revolutionary Downpour (image via wikipedia.org)

Straight (and not-so-straight) men since the French Revolution have certainly had their share of feminine moments, as the history of the macaroni in the 18^th century and the dandy in the 19^th century have demonstrated and as any portrait of Beau Brummell radiates, despite his claims to a less ornamental masculinity. In addition, there have been little coups along the way, many not without their gains. The decadent British Victorian culture of Charles Algernon Swinburne, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley espoused its own critique of the limitations of male renunciation, particularly with regard to Wilde’s promulgation of “Aesthetic Dress,” while a century later and a continent away, the polyester culture of the 1970s American disco generation, as permanently etched on cultural consciousness by John Travolta and his Saturday Night Fever ensemble, gave men the leeway to get in touch with their softer sides (for Travolta, through the ironically fierce and highly masculinized competitiveness of disco culture). While moments such as these, diverse and chronologically distant as they are, have been refreshing and inspiring, it is primarily the metro who has brought to fruition Flügel’s dream by reconciling male body and fashion, putting forth a brutal aesthetic of male beauty involving body as much as clothing, albeit by modeling himself on the homosexual male, developing an attitude toward display which is part innovation, yet mostly coöptation (in fact, its innovativeness is that it coopts). Unlike the Victorian dandy or disco stud, the metro, this creature on our microscope slide, is not tinged with homosexual phantasm in quite the same way, his sexual preference for the opposite sex not coming into question as viciously or as vehemently, although pointed interrogatives do arise: for him, the excessiveness of display is a masculine and straight challenge through and through, his enlightenment permitting him to cull from gay men with whom he is at best merely confraternal the choicest aspects of their visages and torsos for his own repurposing, thereby granting Flügel his wish of a re-charged male body clothed in the fluxions of temporality.[3] Whether he is “sub”-cultural in the strictest Hebdigian sense remains to be determined, as it is not clear if he survives as mutation within homosexuality, and is hence parasitic upon it, or if he pinches off from the gay subculture he emulates to do his own thing in another stratum: what exactly will sociology do with this creature who, if we take his name seriously, derives his sexuality and sexual identity from the metropolis, who himself becomes a metropolis of postures and poses? Does it matter which cage we use to contain him, how we draw the boundaries of this ideal city?

Taking a cue from the homosexual paradigm of what in America was called the Chelsea Boy and which achieved popularity in the mid- to late nineties and best described by Michelangelo Signorile in journalistic exposés like his Life Outside, the metrosexual learned the lesson of identifying with his surfaces well, being a more than apt pupil at the mystery of becoming two-dimensional.

South Beach Body Stress (photo via .lilies-diary.com)

Here, the “ecstasy of communication,” as Baudrillard has formulated the concept critical to postmodern theory, demands not so much the cramming of semantics into one flat channel that can’t possibly contain it, yet miraculously does, but rather the collapse of subjectivity into the dimension of the surface, which, whether we take it as matte or glossy, causes psyche to burst at the seems and reel with pleasure at the pains of its enclosure (hyperrealism, as opposed to surrealism). Ultimately, the look and lifestyle of the Chelsea Boy reached a crisis point through the fragmented and failed glamour of Andrew Cunanan, whose untimely murder of Gianni Versace in 1997 bespoke Cunanan’s own inability to become the Versace ideal for reasons equally socio-economic, ethnic and tychic: hence in Gary Indiana’s Three Month Fever he kills out of a fear of his immigrant roots and a loathing of his inability to be white and spoiled, while in Maureen Orth’s even more excoriating Vulgar Favors he is an obscene party monster milking the oldie circuit for a cachéthat will elude him ontologically and existentially.[4]

The Closing of Casa Casuarina: Neo-Permian Collapse (photo via miamiherald.typepad.com)

Post-Versace, the metros were free to take the Chelsea Boy look and aesthetic (one may argue even ethics) as their own. Cunanan killed not only Versace, but the culture accreting around him, leaving display ripe for the picking, as the pre-metro straight man learned to embrace worldiness and its many sumptuary signs, symbols and indications for the first time since an 80s flamboyance which recuperated fashion but left body largely untouched, had flowered. Within this context, the complaint of the diabolical yet aesthetically alive protagonist regarding the body of U2’s Bono during a concert appearance in Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho is hilariously apt:

But when I sit down something strange on the stage catches my eye. Bono has moved across the stage, following me to my seat, and he’s staring into my eyes, kneeling at the edge of the stage, wearing black jeans (maybe Gitano), sandals, a leather vest with no shirt beneath it. His body is white, covered with sweat, and it’s not worked out enough, there’s no muscle tone and what definition there might be is covered beneath a paltry amount of chest hair (Easton Ellis, 146).

Furthermore, like the disco aesthetic I have previously mentioned, the visual extremes of 80s masculinity that did not fall under the rubric ‘heterosexual camp’ (for example, the teased hair and aquamarine zebra Spandex associated with metal culture) did to some degree infuse hetero-masculinity with sexual dubiousness, a lush ambiguity which did not make it into the 90s but which, while it prevailed, produced the likes of Etienne Daho and France and Simon Le Bon in the UK as glorious artifacts of another time. Absorbing a worldview and cleaning it up enough to make it respectable, the metro, visually but not sexually gay, took on the Chelsea Boy’s project of self-beautification, turning himself into a trophy boy par excellence—and being straight, he could take the trophy relatively unchallenged, loving cup to his subversive love of a gay men he might nor might not identify as adelphos, but whom he might mine for ideas, attitudes and altitudes. Learning to live at the Pec Deck, tweak his eyebrows, wax his chest, and take on the smoothness that Edmund Burke connected with femininity proper and the pursuit of beauty it inspired, becoming expert at baking at the tanning salon and squeezing into designer jeans three sizes too small, the metrosexual took on the impetus of superficiality which had dominated the American homosexual aesthetic for so much of the nineties, making attention to appearance and narcissism his life’s work as he reintegrated body and fashion. What was appalling was how well he succeeded at philantia and its compulsory rituals of torsion, flexion, coloration, locomotion and gustation, even gestation, as one metro produced another in a dazzling string of “bros” and “bras” entering into autoerotic bromances where like and like acted synergistically.

King of the Metros + His Toy Boy  (photo via dailymail.co.uk)

Endnotes:

[1] In the standard Lacanian account, display is a manly affair, an effect of masquerade obscuring men’s lack of the phallus with a compensatory show. His “What Is a Picture?” is particularly clear on this point. In his words: “In the case of display, usually on the part of the male animal, or in the case of grimacing swelling by which the animal enters the play of combat in the form of intimidation, the being gives of himself, or receives from the other, something that is like a mask, a double, an envelope, a thrown-off skin, thrown in order to cover the frame of a shield. It is through this separated form of himself that the being comes into play in his effects of life and death, and it might be said that it is with the help of this doubling of the other, or of oneself, that is realized the conjunction from which proceeds the renewal of beings in reproduction” (The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 107). As regards the R-complex, see Dorion Sagan’s “An Evolutionary Striptease” in his and Lynn Margulis’ Dazzle Gradually. According to Sagan, the R-complex dictates a certain puffery, causing male reptiles to take up the most space possible when confronting a rival. This structure remains in the human brain as a cerebral vestige, yet may still exert an influence on male display in humans, just as it has been shown to affect primate display behaviors. For example, experiments with the Anolis lizard have revealed the connection of the R-complex to the intense visuality of puffery. Specifically, when one hemisphere of the lizard’s stratial forebrain is damaged, and the lizard uses the eye connected to that hemisphere to regard a threatening rival, no display results. The case is quite different for the other eye, which connects with a healthy hemisphere: now, “[t]he reptile reacts with species-typical challenge or territorial displays: he pushes up with his feet, swells out his throat fan, and changes his position so that his imposing long side, his profile, is exposed to his rival. In a word, he makes himself big. The normal Anolis lizard with intact R-complex is like a man who puffs out his chest or stands over an adversary to get a psychological advantage. He is cold, predictable. You might even call him macho” (133).

[2] I examine the history of the dye fuchsin and its role in the inaccessibilities of visual variegation in my “Post-Proustian Glamour” (rhizomes.5). My point in mentioning the dye making possible for the first time a consumable fuchsia is that variety can be costly, something not everyone can afford, and as such a sign of wealth or aristocratic advantage (as purples were, for example, in Medieval Europe). As for proletarian display and its history, the tattoo commands further examination, especially as its inking ties to concepts of the body and the types of display it might be subjected to within a particular social class. It may even be argued that working class men took on the project of display during the years of the Great Masculine Renunciation, depending on how we interpret the tattoo and its showcasing of skin and muscle.

[3] I mention the concept of confraternity with an eye to Derrida’s use of the theme in his Politics of Friendship. For Derrida, the problem is that, if democracy relies upon a concept of fraternity, as the French Revolution has assured us it does, then those excluded from fraternity, such as the sister, find themselves excised from the order it instantiates, which is essentially a formalized brotherhood. How can we retain the concept of fraternity, yet make it less fraternal (some may argue more, perhaps most, fraternal)? Within masculinity itself, the problem becomes how we are to incorporate the homosexual male into the bonds of fraternity making democracy possible. This same problem haunts the transsexual more acutely: how can we create a fraternity of the transsexual, one uniting straight man with transgendered man? The most radical radical democracy, one beyond even Laclau and Butler, seems to demand this revision in the nature of the fraternal.

[4] Again, I think of Derrida—in this instance, of his adherence to the Aristotelian distinction between the automatic (mere chance) and the tychic (luck) drawn in his Physics. In his analysis of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Counterfeit Money” in Given Time, Derrida allies fortune/tyché with nature, as it is the “fact of birth” (an Arendtian term I import from The Origins of Totalitarianism) which in the poem determines social station and the need for almsgiving and alms-receiving—in short, anything and everything involving social position. Outside the poem, Derrida’s point would be that, natural, fortune is essentially a given, yet another aspect of our thrownness with which we must contend. On a related note, see Jacques Lacan’s analysis of eu- and dys-tychia, or good and bad fortune, in his “Tuché and Automaton” (Four Fundamental Concepts).

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About the Author

Michael Angelo Tata is the Executive Editor of the Sydney-based electronic journal of literature, art and new media nebu[lab] and a member of the editorial collectives of the journals Kritikos and rhizomes. His Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality arrived to critical acclaim from Intertheory Press in 2010. His lyric essays on poetics, psychoanalysis and philosophy appear most recently in the collections The Salt Companion to Charles Bernstein and Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950 as well as the British journal Parallax (Routledge). His poetry and graffiti are featured in the British journal Rattle and in the American journal Xanadu. He also writes reviews of contemporary Aesthetics titles for Temple University’s and Mount Holyoke College’s Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.

by Joe Weinberg

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It has long been thought that there are two and only two genders: male and female. While some (such as Butler in Gender Trouble) have argued that there is actually only one gender (Male being the norm, and female, as not-male, being the only gender) and used as a basis for justifying patriarchal mistreatment,[1]  it seems more accurate to say that there are more than ‘just’ two genders. That heteronormative binary is not only inaccurate, but actively hurtful to large groups of people, those who fall ‘between’ or ‘outside’ that binary.

Once we accept that there is more to the world of gender than male and female, certain questions arise. Do we look at gender as a spectrum? How many genders are there? And where does sex come into the picture? The simple answers are “No,” “I don’t know,” and “Everywhere.” For more nuanced and complex answers, we have to take a step back and define a few terms.

First, heteronormative binary. The heteronormative binary is a very fancy way of saying “two genders.” Basically, it’s referring to the idea that there are only two genders (male and female) and that being one means NOT being the other. Similarly, it refers to the idea that sexuality is pure, either homo or hetero. I don’t like binaries; there is more to being a woman than NOT being a man, and vice versa. I also think it is possible to have aspects of both without being ‘in transition’ from one to the other. And, it’s possible to be neither one, and be perfectly satisfied with that. Similarly, even if we throw in bisexuality to the homo/hetero split, I STILL think there’s more. That’s a matter of simple logic.

Speaking of logic, there are two other principles I need to get out of the way: The Law of the Excluded Middle (LotEM) and the Sorites paradox. The LotEM basically just says that there are other more than two options, and that sometimes the decision that seems to be between two things is actually between more than two things. For some nicely inflammatory examples, abortion isn’t a matter of Pro Choice or Pro Life; someone can be opposed to abortion in all cases EXCEPT incest or rape, or can be in favor of the right to choose while choosing for themselves not to have an abortion. There’s more than just black and white. The LotEM basically reminds us that there are shades of gray.

Sorites is a bit more complex. That’s the question of when something becomes a pile. Sorites himself used millet seeds, but I prefer the image going bald. If I lose one hair, I’m not bald. If I lose all my hair, I’m bald. But one hair isn’t going to make a difference one way or the other, right? But at the same time, if I take my hair away one at a time, sooner or later I cross into the bald category. That means that there is a point where one hair DOES make a difference. So a single hair both does and doesn’t matter. That’s why it’s a paradox.

Okay. Back to the spectrum of gender. If we see gender as a spectrum with male on one side and female on the other, we run into a Sorites paradox. Look:

Somewhere along that line, a person goes from being female to being male. At some point, a single quality changes the gender. While there is a fluid space in between, a space where someone could be ‘partly male’ or ‘mostly female,’ even then their gender identity is directly linked to that same binary. Riki Wilchins writes that “when you look closer, every spectrum turns out to be anchored by the same familiar two poles – male/female, man/woman, gay/straight. The rest of us are just strung out between them, like damp clothes drying on the line. The spectrum of gender turns out to be a spectrum of heterosexual norms, only slightly less oppressive but not less binary than its predecessors” (30-31). A spectrum really just is a binary. It’s just a binary that looks at the places between. But not as places in themselves so much as portions of one or the other side of the binary. So we have that paradox.

What’s the solution? How can we have transgenderism if we really have only two genders? Well, now we go back to the LotEM. It’s a really simple answer, when you think about it. The way to not have a binary is, simply, to have more than two options. But those other options can’t be a mixture of the first two; it can’t be a spectrum. It needs to be something else. Gender is more than a spectrum. It’s bigger than that. There is androgyny, there are genders that are more than male or female, more than male and female. They can’t be on a spectrum, and having a spectrum between three points is not only hard to draw, it’s hard to conceptualize. Also, no matter how many points we put on whatever shape we decide to make for gender (a gender triangle? Maybe a rhombus?), there may very well be others that are excluded. Some might suggest a ‘galaxy’ of genders, where any gender has the same value as any other. But I think that goes back to the LotEM. Gender isn’t either a shape or a galaxy. It’s not that solid. Not that cemented.

Gender is a performance. Lots of people (Butler, Paasonen, Kogan, West and Zimmerman, etc.) have pointed that one out. Gender is fluid, and it doesn’t necessarily have a singular point where anyone finally settles down.

So how do we throw sex into the mix? The best option would probably be to remind everyone that it doesn’t matter what prefix they put on ‘-sexual’; but seeing as that is unlikely to happen, and is a bit of a lazy way out of the problem, let’s turn back to logic. Gender is fluid and performed. But at any given time, it’s in a single place.[2] So determining sexuality is just a matter of determining preferred sexual partners. In the world of the heteronormative binary, there are three possible sexualities: hetero-, homo-, and bi-. That’s just a matter of logic. But logic changes a lot when we start adding in genders.

Most of us understand logic as being a binary system (bivalent, as the philosophers say): something is either True or it is False. So a truth table with two variables (p and q) has only four possible lines:

The LotEM tells us that there’s more than two options, so we have to go beyond bivalence. And what is beyond bivalence? Well, you could have something be neither true nor false; it could be both true AND false. Or it could partially true or partially false. Moving into regular language, it’s not hard to see. But it IS hard to represent in a truth table.

Take something as simple as negation (~p or ‘not p’). In bivalent logic, there are only two lines. If p is true, ~p is false. If p is false, ~p is true. Simple. But when we have four possibilities, there are many more possibilities. We have to decide if ~p means “p is false” or “p is not true” or “p is completely false” or “p is not entirely true” or “p is neither true nor false” or “p isn’t completely true or completely false” etc.

Coming back to sexuality, then, we see a similar explosion. If we add a third gender (let’s call it xemale, and define it as having aspects of BOTH male and female), then sexuality expands quite a bit:

1. MM/FF: homosexuality
2. MF/FM: Heterosexuality
3. MX: ?
4. FX: ?
5. XX: ?

That’s without even considering people spanning multiple categories. And if we add a Neuter gender (neither male nor female), it gets even bigger:

1. MM/FF: homosexuality
2. MF/FM: heterosexuality
3. MX
4. FX
5. XX
6. MN
7. FN
8. XN
9. NN

With four different genders, we have nine different couplings. And that’s not counting threesomes, foursomes, or other fun weekend activities. A fifth gender puts us up to fifteen. Six puts us to twenty-one. Seven to twenty-eight. Not quite exponential, but the increase in possibilities gets bigger every time we add a gender; by the time we have ten genders, we have almost sixty different pairing possibilities.

Does this destroy heterosexuality? No. But it certainly puts it in perspective, doesn’t it? How important a place does heterosexuality have when there are five, or ten, or fifty-six other possibilities? Getting back to the idea of gender being fluid, how can we classify ourselves as heterosexual, knowing that our partners may or may not continue to be the gender they currently identify as at any given moment?

Defining gender in any specific way, and defining sexuality in a specific way, seems doomed to failure. Or, at best, confusion. Once we accept that there are more than two genders, heterosexuality either becomes less significant or goes away altogether. Both options are good.

Though there’s probably a third option, too, if the LotEM has anything to say about it.

…

Works Cited:    

Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal. Vol 40. No 4 (Dec 1998).

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge. First published 1990. reprinted 2008.

Ely, Robin and Irene Padavic. “A Feminist Analysis of Organizational Research on Sex Differences.” Academy of Management Review. Vol 32, No 4: 2007.

Kogan, Terry S. “Transsexuals and Critical Gender Theory: The Possibility of a Restroom Labeled ‘Other’.” Hastings Law Journal. Volume 48 (1996-1997).

Paasonen, Susanna. “Chapter 6: Binary Code, Binary Gender.. And Things Beyond.” from Figures of Fantasy: Internet, Women, & Cyberdiscourse. Peter Lang, New York: 2005.

West, Candace and Don H. Zimmerman. “Doing Gender.” Gender and Society. Vol. 1, No. 2: June 1987.

Wilchins, Riki. “It’s your gender, stupid!” GenderQueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary. Nestle, Joan, Clare Howell, Riki Wilchins, Eds. Alyson Books, Los Angeles: 2002.

The sixth in our on-going series of articles on “The Screen”

by Chase Dimock

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The Misfit Narrative and Queer Youth

The narrative of the misfit character struggling to find his place in the world is a well-used trope for popular entertainment because it is nearly universally identifiable and it lends itself to a light, yet redeeming moral at the end of the story. Everyone, in some capacity, thinks of himself or herself as a misfit to some degree and everyone is accustomed to, yet never contesting of, the simplistic message of tolerance and treating everyone equally.

Yet, the story of Rudolph as a misfit takes on a different dimension for the 50 years worth of queer American children who grew up watching the holiday classic every year on television. While these stories about kindly treating those different from us and not being afraid to be different were commonplace in the American classroom with their examples of not being ashamed to wear glasses, have freckles, stuttering, etc., the narrative of tolerating difference resonates differently for queer youth. Unlike the child with glasses who knows he is the same as other children beneath the glasses, queer youth often feel an intrinsic difference—that they inhabit a different kind of body or gender—almost another species of being. The queer youth is looking for more than a little hope that they will be tolerated and accepted; they are also looking for a subject model to emulate, a guide on how to live as a misfit.

For most of the past 50 years, lgbt youth have had to look for subject models in the abstract. Until the past decade, there were few, if any, lgbt identified characters in the media that their family consumed. Unlike today where lgbt youth have a character on Glee or Modern Family to point to in order to navigate their subject position, children of previous generations (including myself) had to look elsewhere for characters and subject models who mirrored their queerness in non-explicitly gendered or sexual forms. Coming into one’s gay identity meant identifying across a variety of different kinds of queerness and cobbling together a sense of how to think and live in a marginalized subject position by observing and learning from other forms of outsider status, like racial minorities, the disabled, immigrants, the poor—pretty much any oppressed class of people who would have some representation in the media.

In a certain way, maturing into my gay subjectivity by identifying through the similar outsider subject positions of others was beneficial because I saw my gayness as united with other disadvantaged segments of the population. It allowed me to see that some of the challenges facing the lgbt world come not simply from sexual or gender difference, but also from how society defines and polices otherness. In contrast, growing up today with gay visibility in mainstream media cuts out some of the grappling and self-invention that the queer youth historically went through in understanding their sexual or gender identity. Now they are given preformed, and usually limited, definitions of what constitutes an lgbt person. There is a greater sense of tolerance and acceptance, but oddly enough, lgbt identity becomes the freckles and glasses of the 21^st century. Queerness is written out of lgbt identity as one’s constitutional difference is made one dimensional, aesthetic—like how the oft repeated message of not judging a man by the color of his skin leads children to believe that racism is absurd because it is about an arbitrary difference of physical appearance instead of its true basis in a long history of cultural, political, and economic oppression.

This is the legacy that the “be nice to those who are different” and “be proud to be different” morals have left modern lgbt youth now that movements like the It Gets Better Project have updated this message for the 21^st century. These are fine messages to begin with: on the very basic level, we should indeed be nice to those who are different and be proud of our differences. Yet, just like how the It Gets Better Project (in spite of itself) became a vehicle for press-seeking celebrities and corporations to dilute its specifically lgbt oriented message with vague assertions of “hang in there kids”, so too does this tolerance fable often miss the supposed point of its own message. It’s okay to be different, but more often than not, the happy ending of the story is that the misfit learns that their difference is their key to fitting in. Rudolph’s red nose is accepted once it is discovered that society has a use for it and he can fit in at the front of Santa’s sleigh. When the misfit’s happy ending is finally finding a place to fit in within the same social system that had once rejected him, ultimately the moral of the story is to tolerate only minor, superficial differences. The moral of the story declares it is okay to be a misfit by showing how a misfit has a place in society—which renders him no longer a misfit. It is the story of social assimilation—difference is tolerable as long as it fits into the social hierarchy and structure and does not threaten it.

This is the same problem that lgbt youth face today as society has become more accepting of gay identity and more exposure has been granted to gay characters in the media. There is increasing support for coming out as gay, but because modern lgbt activism has stressed its “normality” as the key to gaining rights, one comes out to a specific idea of what gay sexuality constitutes, including a preconceived identity politics and culture. One may come out as different from the societal norm of heterosexuality, but that child is reinscribed into the system of cultural norms by being expected to adhere to the norms of lgbt identity.  Now that there are uses for the gay man in society (largely stereotypes of the interior decorator, hair dresser, stage producer, though there is no shame in these vocations) he is encouraged to come out because there are non-threatening, economically viable uses for him in mainstream society. His misfit status isn’t accepted or defended, because ultimately society has a found a “fit” for him, that serves the dominant culture.

While the story of Rudolph participates in this discourse of sympathizing with the misfit not by defending the right to be different, but by trying to trivialize his difference, the story is also remarkable in how it identifies the political, cultural, and social roots of how we determine “otherness” in our society while vaguely hinting at a possible alternate social arrangement. Through Rudolph’s story, we can see how the queer subject is constituted through 1. Sexism and the Patriarchal Family System (Donner’s (the father’s) fear that his son’s nose will prevent him from maturing into a proper, heterosexual patriarch) 2. Industry, Capitalism, and the Means of Production (How Santa’s system of production values certain traits amenable to his production of toys) and 3. Through Class and Racial Identity (The Reindeer and Elves as permanent underclasses of laborers with essentialized identities that lock them into their drudgery) Finally, when Rudolph and Hermey band together as misfits, become “independent together”, and visit the Island of Misfit Toys, the film suggests an alternative kinship structure where difference within the social system is not defined against an internal norm, but as a virtue. Yet, the Island of Misfit Toys is a paradise lost, a queer utopia that could have been. They present the possibility of a society based not on prefabricated social roles, but on mutual support of each other’s individuality.

1. Sexism and the Patriarchal Family System

A child is never born as a blank slate. Not only does he begin life with unique genetic traits that will influence his course of life (including the proclivity toward what we call homosexual desire and gender feelings) he is also born into a subject position preconceived by his parents, and by association, the social position of his parents. As the son of one of Santa’s reindeer, Rudolph’s identity is already predetermined by his sex and social position. This is the legacy of patriarchy: his manhood, future vocation, place within the reindeer community, and concomitant beliefs and values are all formulated for him before he has the ability to understand any of it because he was conceived in his father’s image to become a patriarch himself.

Rudolph’s nose frightens his father because it jeopardizes his and his son’s position in the social hierarchy of the North Pole. Homosexuality or queerness is denigrated in the classic patriarchal system because it assumes that with the homosexual’s refusal to sexually reproduce, (though this is not always the case now) that the homosexual will then refuse to reproduce the social relations of patriarchy. Rudolph, the queer child, understands early in his life what the expectations are for his life, and while he cannot quite understand what they mean in the broader picture of society, he can already sense he is failing to meet them because of some sense of difference. Queerness is always constructed as a failure to maintain an unquestioned norm, and that this queerness is some how unnatural.  Yet, if we are a culture that presumes a certain individual self-fashioning, that we have the ability to choose parts of who we are, then to the contrary, nothing could be more “artificial” and “abnormal” than to have such social expectations from outside foisted onto a child and to judge him by them before he can understand them as an individual.

The film shows us how the patriarchal system that mandates heterosexuality is far from normal or natural, but rather, how it is a product of learning to become a man and performing manhood in a fashion legible to the social definition held by peers and elders. We see this clearly in the reindeer games scene, where Rudolph, with his nose concealed behind a black prosthesis, begins his lessons in learning how to fly, and impress the does in the process, through the tutelage of a gym teacher charged with “making bucks out of [them]”. Masculinity is revealed to be not a completely natural attribute, but instead something that one learns to signify according to cultural codes. The process of becoming a man is thus contingent upon performing manhood convincingly in front of women as other males watch and become envious of one’s successful performance of masculinity before women.

Although it is presumed that the point of exhibiting masculinity is the end goal of attaining a woman, the woman is revealed to be only the signifier of one’s masculinity in the eyes of other males. Rudolph demonstrates his superior talent in flying, bolstered by his confidence after Clarice tells him she finds him cute, but when his prosthesis falls off and his nose is revealed, the other young deer, the coach, and Santa himself recoil in horror and then mock him as unfit to be a future member of the sleigh team. Despite the ridicule, Clarice comes to comfort Rudolph and restate her interest in him. However, her approval alone does not console Rudolph and he decides to run away. If the true objective of heterosexuality was to simply develop a coupling with a woman, then Clarice’s approval would be sufficient, but what the scene of ridicule and shame reveals is that normative heterosexuality is not about the mere coupling of man and woman, but about being able to signify one’s normality and agency to the rest of the world through the woman. Rudolph is queer even though he has won the affections of a woman because in this classic patriarchal structure, the woman is a mere signifier of normality, an object that does not have the power to recognize and validate the man in of herself. Rather, the man is validated through other men who evaluate him through his possession of a woman as an element of his manhood.

2. Industry, Capitalism, and the Means of Production

There is a telling exchange between Rudolph and his father that hints at the origins of his father’s judgments of conformity when he first tries on the prosthetic black nose. Rudolph complains that the prosthesis is uncomfortable and Donner retorts, “There are more important things than comfort, self respect! Santa can’t object to you now!” Although Donner reacts to Rudolph’s nose in personal horror and disgust, the true origin of that sentiment is product of the norms set down by a higher authority. As the factory owner, controller of the means of production, and resident 1%er of the North Pole, Santa has the power to shape the culture and ideology of the inhabitants of the land who are dependent on his near monopoly on local industry in order to make a living.  It is never clear why Santa at first disapproves of Rudolph’s nose, but of course, once he realizes during the storm that his nose can guide his sleigh and save his industry, he convinces everyone that something he once treated as a deformity is now a virtue.

When Rudolph is given the lead position in front of the sleigh at the end of the film, Donner states that he knew Rudolph’s nose would be a good thing all along, thus changing his personal set of values based on the opinions of the man who controls the means of production, for whom virtues and values revolve around what is good for his industry. Thus, in a Marxist way, the story illustrates the power that those who control the means of production have in manufacturing public ideology, with the power to change cultural norms based on what is expedient for production. What was once denigrated as queer and shunned can be ingratiated back into society as a virtue based on its profitability.

3. Policing Class (and possibly racial) Identity

Are the reindeer human? Are the elves human? They seem to possess conscious, self-aware minds, the symbolic capacity of language, and the ability to social organize in a civilization, but they both seem as well to occupy a permanent underclass status at the North Pole. The entirety of the Reindeer community revolves around pulling Santa’s sleigh. They are animals living in caves, yet they possess the capacity to reason and communicate like a human. We see the same situation with the elves. They clearly possess human qualities, yet all elves are expected to work mindless assembly line jobs with the exception of Hermey who pursues a desire to perform intellectually satisfying labor as a dentist. Even Rudolph with his cruel treatment as a misfit upholds the status quo that he become the member of Santa’s team that all reindeer are predestined by the culture to become. Only Hermey questions the idea of the unexamined norm that a certain racial (if we can think of elves as a race) or species identity biologically predisposes the individual to the subservient and oppressed status of their people.

Rudolph’s non-conformity is purely biological. Hermey’s non-conformity is a product of intellect, but he is treated as if there is something constitutionally wrong with him when he declares he does not like making toys and would rather become a dentist. The essentialism instilled in the proletarian class of elves by the dominant culture makes them feel as though their place at the bottom of the chain of production is somehow written into their genes. Instead of raging against the system of production that ensures their subservient status, they berate and bully Hermey for aspiring to perform non-mechanized labor and pursue scientific knowledge as a dentist Hermey is a misfit simply because he possesses class-consciousness and defies the essentialist construction of the elves as a permanent class identity.

The bullying that both Hermey and Rudolph endure illustrates how often the bully is himself in a position of oppression and limited power. Bullying then comes from an individual or group that represses thoughts of their limited agency by taking it out on a weaker individual. The bully hates the misfit because the misfit is a living, breathing symbol of his own limited power on the grand scale of society.

In both Donner’s treatment of Rudolph and the fellow elves’ treatment of Hermey, the film illuminates the role that industry and capitalism play in creating cultural norms and values, constructing essentialisms of identity, and leaving those in the oppressed position to police each other. Queerness as a degraded quality is set by those who realize (perhaps unconsciously) that a figure that does not fit into the norms of production has the capacity to question its logic. By marginalizing and subjugating the queer, those who produce culture eliminate voices of dissent through the policing power of the very group that shares that misfit’s struggle. Only when the misfit has become too powerful or too inconvenient to ignore do capitalism and what Adorno called the Culture Industry, offer a place of enfranchisement, safely locked within the system of production.

The Island of Misfit Toys as a Lost Queer Utopia

When Hermey and Rudolph unwittingly meet one another as they both run away from the oppressive conditions of life in the North Pole, their bond based on mutual outsider status suggests the possibility of an alternative model of social relations not based on essentialized gender, class, or racial identity and status. Hermey and Rudolph agree to be “independent together,” based on the fact that Hermey does not mind Rudolph’s nose and that Rudolph does not mind that Hermey is a dentist, although he has no concept of what a dentist is. The idea of difference in their relationship is not monstrous or threatening—Rudolph is not phased by Hermey outing himself as an identity that Rudolph does not comprehend because he recognizes the more important way in which they are similar.

The idea of being independent together is obviously phrased as a contradiction—yet in synthesizing two supposedly opposite states of being, the contradiction is not on Hermey and Rudolph for desiring such a model of a relationship, but it is instead the reflection of society’s binary thinking that presumes one cannot be independent, different, queer, and be engaged in a community or relationship at the same time. We saw previously that in the North Pole, living in society meant subservience to specific roles based on one’s gender, class, or racial identity both in the community and in one’s own household. Independence and individuality is arrested for the sake of fulfilling one’s social roles. Queerness is then the state of individuality that calls attention to the desires suppressed by the constraints of one’s social role, and its oppression is the product of its threat to damage the structure of the social system by going against them.

Yet, the independent together, dentist and red-nosed reindeer relationship suggests that queerness and difference need not be anathema to a sense of community and mutually beneficial personal relationships. Rather, it illustrates that part of the basic unhappiness of the individual in civilization is his attempt to find meaningful relationships within traditional systems of kinship, labor, and culture that require him to repress certain parts of his self and contort his identity to fit the paradigm of the role through which he can gain recognition. With Rudolph and Hermey, there is no predetermined relationship schema, no essentialized roles, just mutual recognition of the other’s right to individuality and the desire to create a relationship that supports each others’ desire. Their pairing implies the possibility of an alternate form of kinship and community and the right of the individual to seek and define their own form of community and define relationships outside of tradition.

This is where I come to the Island of Misfit Toys. At first, when Rudolph and Hermey arrive, they have a sense that perhaps they have finally found a place where they can truly belong. If an entire community equally shares the concept of being a misfit, then perhaps everyone can live together equally. Without a norm with which to fit into, the idea of being a misfit could be erased entirely from the culture. Yet, nobody on the Island of Misfit Toys is happy with their misfit status. They possess community, a common identity and desire, a support network, yet this functional culture makes none of them happy.

What child could love a pistol that shoots jelly?

As it is explained to Rudolph, Hermey, and the audience, this base unhappiness is due to the fact that “a toy is never happy until it is loved by a child.” Once again, we come back to the psychological problem of recognition—specifically that individuals seek happiness, fulfillment, and love by being recognized by certain authorities that they grant the power to recognize them on those terms. Just as Clarice’s affection is not enough to keep Rudolph at home because he seeks the recognition of other men, so too is the community among other misfit toys not enough to make them happy because they seek the recognition of a child. Toys are literally fabricated for the specific amusement of a child, engineered to be useful based on whether or not the child finds the toy engaging. The same can be said for the psyche of the individual who does not question the cultural ideologies that have inculcated in him as a child, the need to find recognition in certain forms of authority.

The child instinctively seeks the recognition of a parent, and as they emerge into society, that desire to find recognition from a paternal or maternal figure is projected onto social institutions such as the government, industry, the church, etc. Patriarchy is not just the rule of one’s father, but the way in which institutions operate paternalistically. The inhabitants of the Island of Misfit Toys never question the source of their need for recognition, much like how many queer individuals continue to seek recognition and approval from institutions that want little to do with them. The misfit toys miss the opportunity to find mutual recognition in each other and to appreciate how their community can rectify the kinds of ideology that resulted in their degraded status as misfits. In this allegory, there is a message for the modern lgbt community—that if it questions the basis of the oppressive norms of a society that calls them outcasts instead of desiring to fit in at the cost of assimilation, it can build the forms of recognition and “independence together” to create forms of relationships that avoid the oppression of traditional social roles.

Yet, the moral of Rudolph stops short of this possibility. Non-conformity is ultimately presented as the root of unhappiness, and the moral of the story is ultimately that normal people should work to be accepting of the abnormal so long as they don’t disrupt the status quo of gender, class, and race too much. Rudolph, Hermey, and even the abominable Snowman eventually find a place in the society of the North Pole once the powers that be realize that their abnormalities can be put to productive use for Santa’s industry.

Even misfits have a place in society. I can agree with this sentiment, but not as the film intends. Misfits do have a place in society, and that is to critique its abuses, to agitate for the reformation of oppressive social and political institutions, and to think creatively about alternatives. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer points at the possibilities of using the figure of the misfit to examine to roots of the abuses people face in modern society, and it is for this reason that it can be used to teach about the production of otherness and the experience of queer identity.

About the Author

Chase Dimock teaches in the English Department at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau. He holds a PhD in Comparative and World Literature from the University of Illinois. He specializes in 20^th century American, French, and German literature with an emphasis in Queer Theory, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. The courses he has taught include classes on western literature spanning the ancients to the existentialists as well as courses on gender studies, queer literature, post 1945 European politics, and representations of the Holocaust.  His research is devoted to exploring interwar queer sexualities in the works of lost and forgotten American expatriate authors and how the established French canon of gay authors and French gay culture influenced the construction of an American queer subject. Chase Dimock is also a regular contributor to the arts and politics magazine As It Ought To Be and he writes reviews of Queer Studies publications for the Lambda Literary Review

Also by Chase Dimock:

What’s Queer About Psychoanalysis?

Saint Turing: A Few Reflections on Gay Iconography and Martyrdom on the Occasion of Alan Turing’s 100th Birthday

Robert McAlmon’s Psychoanalyzed Girl and the Popularization of Psychoanalysis in America

by Barbarism

…

In this spirited send-up of Pride & Prejudice, BARBARISM queers the classic! (which itself queered the classics–as Jane Austen queered femininity, the Barbs queer what has been queered before! With new and old results). By inserting the Thatcherian past into the Austenian past, Prejudatass connects new to old and upends the old, creating continuity as discontinuity, a constant inconsistency attesting that “there is no solid, objective reality… each of us experiences our reality subjectively”; it is rather for us to advocate what “encourages overlapping and sometimes contradictory realities… as opposed to essentialism’s quest for the One Truth” (Queen, 1997, p. 21).

Psychoanalytically, Prejudatass is a bacchanalia of defenses! This Darcy reincarnation relies on intellectualization and Otherizing to displace and combat his feelings of insecurity by scapegoating immigrants and dandies, thus divesting himself of responsibility and instead assigning blame to socially inferior parties. Psychologically self-soothing, this lack of honesty–as exhibited in his defense against enjoying performing femininity on The Old Stage–represents an egodystonic relationship with exhibitionism. He is finally able to integrate the multiple components of himself as he acknowledges his enjoyment, though with a discomfort that belies the complexity of emotions broiling underneath.

Further, this video is itself a defense against discomfort which “by finding a means of withdrawing the energy from the release of unpleasure that is already in preparation” is able to transform it “by discharge, into pleasure” (Freud, 1960, p. 290).

…

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Works Cited

Freud, S. (1960). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company.

Queen, C., & Schimel, L. (1997). PoMoSexuals: Challenging assumptions about gender  and sexuality. San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press.

…

About the Author

BARBARISM is a multimedia project developed by Rebecca Katherine Hirsch and Sarah Secunda that agitates on messianic behalf of gender-implosion, identity-expansion and balls-out psycho-social analysis! Our videos and screeds aim to put forth a no-holds-barred bundle of art as activism. See the Barbs LIVE at Philadelphia’s Fleisher Art Memorial as part of the Wind Challenge Exhibition Series Dec 6-Jan 31.

|BLACK BOX| the milk: /sweet 5

Teaser

by Kevin McLellan

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Preface

Brazilian filmmaker Diego Costa traces back (and forth) the sources of his femininity through provocative/perverse encounters with his Mother, Her sister, and Her drag doppelgängers in “Matricídio“. The film will be screened one night only, this Tuesday, August 27 at 9:30 p.m. at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City, as part of the NewFilmmakers series. Tickets are $6. “Matricídio” is at once an experimental cinematic love letter and letter of rupture, the Mother is here muse and monster, incorporated and exorcised from the son’s body. Watch the trailer above.

(Brazil, 2013, Dir. Diego Costa, 93 min., In Portuguese and French, with English subtitles)

Tuesday, August 27, at 9:30pm
Anthology Film Archives
32 Second Ave, New York, NY 10003
$6

for more info:
Facebook.com/Matricidio
Twitter.com/MatricidioFilm
http://www.NewFilmmakers.com