Race and the Subject of Masculinities

by Harilaos Stecopoulos (Editor), Michael Uebel (Editor)

Overview

Although in recent years scholars have explored the cultural construction of masculinity, they have largely ignored the ways in which masculinity intersects with other categories of identity, particularly those of race and ethnicity. The essays in Race and the Subject of Masculinities address this concern and focus on the social construction of masculinity—black, white, ethnic, gay, and straight—in terms of the often complex and dynamic relationships among these inseparable categories.
Discussing a wide range of subjects including the inherent homoeroticism of martial-arts cinema, the relationship between working-class ideologies and Elvis impersonators, the emergence of a gay, black masculine aesthetic in the works of James Van der Zee and Robert Mapplethorpe, and the comedy of Richard Pryor, Race and the Subject of Masculinities provides a variety of opportunities for thinking about how race, sexuality, and "manhood" are reinforced and reconstituted in today’s society. Editors Harry Stecopoulos and Michael Uebel have gathered together essays that make clear how the formation of masculine identity is never as obvious as it might seem to be. Examining personas as varied as Eddie Murphy, Bruce Lee, Tarzan, Malcolm X, and Andre Gidé, these essays draw on feminist critique and queer theory to demonstrate how cross-identification through performance and spectatorship among men of different races and cultural backgrounds has served to redefine masculinity in contemporary culture. By taking seriously the role of race in the making of men, Race and the Subject of Masculinities offers an important challenge to the new studies of masculinity.

Contributors. Herman Beavers, Jonathan Dollimore, Richard Dyer, Robin D. G. Kelly, Christopher Looby, Leerom Medovoi, Eric Lott, Deborah E. McDowell, José E. Muñoz, Harry Stecopoulos, Yvonne Tasker, Michael Uebel, Gayle Wald, Robyn Wiegman

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822397748
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	11/24/1997
Series:	New Americanists
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Lexile:	1560L (what's this?)
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Harry Stecopolous is Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa. Michael Uebel is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky.

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Race and the Subject of Masculinities

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By Harry Stecopoulos, Michael Uebel

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9774-8

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CHAPTER 1

READING MEN, READING RACE

DESIRE AND DIFFERENCE

Homosexuality, Race, Masculinity

JONATHAN DOLLIMORE

Theories of sexual difference notoriously disregard the erotics of other kinds of difference. As Mandy Merck observes, in such theories "no non-genital differences (of race, class, age, and so on) can signify such total Otherness, no genitally similar object can be legitimately eroticised" (5-6). But, of course, these other kinds of differences have always been erotically invested, not least in lesbian and gay cultures, where they are inflected by the crucial further difference of homosexuality as a difference/deviation from the norm. What sexual difference theorists see here is only desire-without-difference, that is, a desire for the same sex rooted in an alleged fear of the other sex. Beholden to an anatomically derived, heterosexual dualism, they tend to regard homosexuality as a disavowal of that very difference that is assumed to be fundamental to social, psychic, and sexual organization. In reply, it has been suggested that those adherents of sexual difference who repudiate or pathologize homosexual desire in this way may themselves be expressing a fear or disavowal of the same, or the proximate (Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence, ch. 17).

So should we seek to displace sexual difference by cultural difference? This could not exactly be a direct substitution: to attempt that would involve something like a category mistake. The suggestion to be explored is rather that, to think difference in terms of culture rather than hetero/sexuality, might be both more illuminating and more liberating. Attractive as that proposition has seemed in recent years, the form in which it has been pursued is fraught with difficulties. Most obviously, an ahistorical and mainly theoretical emphasis on cultural difference can perpetuate the imperialism it seeks to expose. As Ania Loomba puts it, in relation to colonialist studies, "the neglect of histories surrounding native insubordination either devalues or romanticises the latter, or worse, tends to read colonised subjects through linguistic or psychoanalytic theories which, for some of us at least, remain suspiciously and problematically shot through with ethnocentric assumptions whose transfer to all subalterns is unacceptable" (171).

Utopian Differences

No consideration of cultural and/or racial difference should ever neglect the sheer negativity, evil, and inferiority with which "the other" of such differences has been associated throughout history. In the wake of that history there is all the more to appreciate about the way progressive movements in our time have turned things around, positively embracing difference and otherness: "the emphasis on discontinuity, the celebration of difference and heterogeneity, and the assertion of plurality as opposed to reductive unities—these ideas have animated almost an entire generation of literary and cultural critics" (Mohanty 56-58). Just one instance, especially relevant to what follows, is Roland Barthes's celebration of difference—so much difference, in fact, as eventually to subvert repression itself, producing a concept of desire wherein there would be, for instance, not homosexuality but homosexualities "whose plural will baffle any constituted, centred discourse" (Roland Barthes 69). Far from being an endorsement of discrimination, this excess of difference would disarticulate the very terms of discrimination.

The instance of homosexuality is not incidental here, since "perverse" desire figures crucially in Barthes's influential theories of difference and textuality. Like Wilde, Gide, and others, Barthes draws upon perverse desire to animate and inform his aesthetic and linguistic theories; further, it is in terms of language and art that such perversity would in part operate. In his inaugural lecture he imagines a utopian plurality of languages on which we would draw "according to the truth of desire ": "This freedom is a luxury which every society should afford its citizens: as many languages as there are desires—a utopian proposition in that no society is yet ready to admit the plurality of desire. That a language, whatever it be, not repress another; that the subject may know without remorse, without repression, the bliss of having at his disposal two kinds of language; that he may speak this or that, according to his perversions, not according to the Law" (Selected Writings 467).

From within such a utopian perspective sexuality comes to be understood relationally—not as the internal relations of sexual difference, but the relations between the sexual and the nonsexual, as these both have been imagined and as they may now be radically envisioned. This would be related to a progressive sexual politics wherein the aim is not necessarily to liberate sexuality (the sexual drive), but to eroticize the social while at the same time releasing it from the grip of sexuality as conventionally conceived. Such theories have been plausibly criticized for their romantic and utopian strains, also for the way they echo and sometimes invoke a post-Freudian version of the polymorphous perverse. But often such criticisms laboriously misrepresent the utopian strain, not least by taking it too literally. Also, cultural context makes the crucial difference: the appropriation of the romantic, the utopian, and the polymorphous for what has hitherto been marginal to, and demonized and repressed by, the center, and perhaps internalized on the center's terms by the marginal, has quite different effects from, say, a more general (postmodern?) theory that "anything goes anywhere." For one thing, Barthes's perverse perspective on difference foregrounds a different history, one wherein there is no simple privileging of the marginal: the paradoxically perverse interrelationship between center and margins whereby the marginal returns to the center in a way that disarticulates the center-margin binary itself, is signified in this instance by his inaugurating his professorship with a lecture on the significance of perversity vis-à-vis language.

Since Barthes wrote that lecture in 1977, the affirmation of difference has become almost a new orthodoxy, and Mohanty's warning that this celebration may involve a sentimental charity concealing a more fundamental indifference is timely. So, too, is Homi Bhabha's skepticism about the way cultural theory uses the "Other" to deconstruct "the epistemological 'edge' of the West"; the problem being that "the 'Other' is cited, quoted, framed, illuminated, encased in the shot-reverse-shot strategy of a serial enlightenment," while at the same time losing "its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its 'desire', to split its 'sign' of identity, to establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse." Even as otherness is being affirmed it is also being foreclosed ("The Commitment to Theory" 16).

Interestingly, homosexuality has hardly ever been rehabilitated as a positive difference within and by those heterosexual discourses that hitherto constructed it as negative other. Progressives would willingly remove some of the stigma from homosexuality, and have often acknowledged the homosexual component within the heterosexually identified. But this is typically the at once honest and evasive acknowledgment of a troubling presence/absence. Put bluntly, to be identified positively outside of its own cultures, homosexuality usually has to be dissolved into androgyny. Or, alternatively, homosexuality might be called upon to loosen the rigid gender identities within heterosexuality: men are permitted a "feminine" component, and, less often, women a "masculine" one. But such acknowledgments of the "other" gender usually make for a fuller, more rounded, heterosexual identity. Helene Cixous is an exception in this respect, and it is interesting that she becomes so by almost reversing the psychoanalytically inspired account of homosexuality as involving a fear of difference/desire of the same. Even though homosexuality as such remains muted, subsumed into an "other bisexuality," it is here nevertheless explicitly and exceptionally identified as a creative otherness: "This does not mean that in order to create you must be homosexual. But there is no invention possible, whether it be philosophical or poetic, without the presence in the inventing subject of an abundance of the other, of the diverse ... there is no invention of other I's, no poetry, no fiction without a certain homosexuality (interplay therefore of bisexuality) making in me a crystallized work of my ultra subjectivities" (Cixous, "Sorties" 97).

Desiring the Different

The rarity of such positive conceptions of homosexuality within, or in relation to, otherness, is all the more significant given that homosexuals have been among those who have literally (rather than metaphorically or theoretically) embraced the cultural and racial difference of the "other." This history, addressed in what follows, is indispensable for current debates about difference.

Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien are right to emphasize that the complexity that arises at the junction of race and sexuality is something that "some people simply don't want to talk about" (99). Of the convergence of homosexuality and race, fewer still are prepared to speak, and those who have spoken have often done so in racist and/or homophobic terms—and that, as Mercer and Julien show, includes people in both the black and gay communities.

A constructive, if brief, discussion of the problematic convergence of race and homosexuality occurs in Dennis Altman's now twenty-year-old pioneering study, Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. Altman discerns links between the oppression of blacks and homosexuals, and of the way that both are vulnerable to an internalization of their oppression. He considers that in America especially there has always been a strong cross-racial homosexual attraction, which is less restrained by social barriers than its heterosexual counterpart: "the very furtiveness and outlaw status of the gayworld has led to its greater integration across colour lines." Yet he refuses to sentimentalize the connection, recognizing that white homosexuals are not necessarily less racist than white heterosexuals, and that the cross-racial attraction in question may, for both parties, be a consequence, rather than a repudiation, of their oppression. He suggests that blacks have been "at one and the same time both more accepting of and more hostile towards homosexuality," and that the hostility has often been extreme—as in the case of Eldridge Cleaver's notorious attack on James Baldwin (see Altman, esp. 192-207; Bergman). Despite this difficult history, crucial alliances have occurred. The gay movement learned greatly from black analysis and black political experience, and it was possible in 1970 for Huey Newton, joint founder of the Black Panther Party, to welcome alliance with the women's and gay movements. In this he made the Black Panthers the first significant radical group to recognize gay liberation as a valid political movement, and did so in terms that provoked hostility from some in his own party: "maybe I'm injecting some of my prejudices by saying that 'even a homosexual can be revolutionary'. Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary" (Newton, qtd. in Altman 204; see also Genet in Leyland, Gay Sunshine Interviews).

The relevance of this obscure and marginal history where race and homosexuality ambivalently converge is once again being recognized. Jonathan Rutherford finds something strangely relevant for British cultural politics in the 1990s in the cross-racial identifications of Lawrence of Arabia some seventy years before: "His identification with the Arabs and their culture displaced the centered position of his identity as a white man. The story is a compelling image of a postmodern world that is challenging so many of our own certainties and our cultural, sexual and political identities" (9). Rutherford cites Lawrence's own remark in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom to the effect that this identification "quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me." Significantly, Rutherford does not mention Lawrence's homosexuality, although this is, as Kaja Silverman shows, a crucial determinant in all this. Silverman explores the way Lawrence's homosexuality promotes an erotic identification that is itself crucial for his psychic participation in Arab nationalism; of how, in effect, he discovered himself within the Other. More generally, the case of T. E. Lawrence becomes an exemplary reminder that we are obliged "to approach history always through the refractions of desire and identification, and to read race and class insistently in relation to sexuality" ("White Skin, Brown Masks" 4, 10, 12).

This is especially so with writers such as Barthes and Genet, and Wilde and Gide before them, who, far from subordinating their outlawed sexuality to their radical politics or radical aesthetics, actively informed them with it. Of course, there were and are risks in doing that. From the vantage point of so-called postliberation, we know only too well the political blindnesses of sexual desire, and of how disastrous it can be to make sexuality the prime mover of a political vision. That holds true in principle for any sexuality. But, significantly, this is rarely, if ever, what those writers advocated. Arguably theblinder kinds of sexual radicalism, wherein sexuality is made the prime political mover, have tended to be mainly heterosexual, and in the case of Wilhelm Reich, overtly homophobic (see Weeks 160-70). What we learn from Wilde, Gide, Barthes, and others is that a conventionally understood politics, which ignores sexual desire, will quite possibly be as disastrous as one that makes that desire the prime mover—even, or especially so—in the age of so-called postliberation. But also, it is not exactly that they bring sexuality to politics (it was always already there); rather deviant desire brings with it a different kind of political knowledge, and hence inflects both desire and politics differently.

Desire and Strangeness

In 1920 Gide recalls walking the streets of Biskra with Dr. Bourget of Lausanne. The latter does not like what he sees: "'Young men ought to be brought here to give them a horror of debauchery' exclaimed the worthy man, bursting with disgust." Gide's response nicely, if unawares, repudiates the sexual-difference view of homosexuality as solipsistic refusal of the other: "how little he knew of the human heart!—of mine at any rate.... Some people fall in love with what is like them; others with what is different. I am among the latter. Strangeness solicits me as much as familiarity repels" (If it Die 253). Seventy years on Michael Carson, writing of his own homosexual desire for the racially other, expresses a similar sentiment, though now with the addition of a revealing, probably necessary, and certainly crucial distinction: "I have always been sexually attracted to foreigners. Foreignness for me provided a difference that moved me in a way that sexual difference never did" (44).

But perhaps this celebration of the exotic cultural/racial other is merely the counterpart of the racist's demonizing of the other? Very possibly, and a remark of Michael Carson's explaining what it was that took him abroad in search of the other shows how the celebration may share the stereotypes of the demonized: "what I lacked was a foreign accent, almond eyes, straight or springy black hair, a black skin, a muscular physique, a mind full of difficult alphabets, a sense of rhythm, a pitiful history of slavery and oppression, and a massive member—though not necessarily in that order" (44).

But Carson is also suggesting how the fantasized desire for the "other" actually begins at home; how fantasy is ineradicably social and, as such, susceptible to stereotypes of all kinds, including racial and racist ones; how fantasy of and for the other exemplifies the mobilities of desire and identification. And a certain lack at the heart of both: what Carson actually finds in twenty years abroad is some oppressive sexual mores epitomized in a loveless fuck over the bonnet of a Chevy Impala. And his article is about the corollary of discovering that the other begins at home, namely disenchantment: "almost twenty years later I am not convinced that sexual love between men exists in places like Saudi Arabia" (45). Gide's experience, elsewhere and seventy years earlier, was very different, but, as we shall see, he too experiences the desire of the other as finally about disenchantment. Perhaps then, and in a way that recalls Freud, Carson and Gide are also writing about the strange impossibility of desire? Whether their accounts confirm, coincide with, or can substitute for the psychoanalytic account of desire as lack, is hard to say. But Gide's account especially does suggest how the vision of desire as loss is strangely inseparable from both the blindness of desire and its capacity to know more than it wants.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Race and the Subject of Masculinities by Harry Stecopoulos, Michael Uebel. Copyright © 1997 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Men in Color: Introducing Race and the Subject of Masculinities / Michael Uebel 1

I. Reading Men, Reading Race

Desire and Difference: Homosexuality, Race, Masculinity / Jonathan Dollimore 17

Fiedler and Sons / Robyn Wiegman 45

II. White Like Who?

"As Thoroughly Black as the Most Faithful Philanthropist Could Desire": Erotics of Race in Higginson's Army Life in a Black Regiment / Christopher Looby 71

Mezz Mezzrow and the Voluntary Negro Blues / Gayle Wald 116

Reading the Blackboard: Youth, Masculinity, and Racial Cross-Identification / Leerom Medovoi 138

The World According to Normal Bean: Edgar Rice Burroughs's Popular Culture / Harry Stecopoulos 170

III. Visualizing Race and the Subject of Masculinities

The Riddle of the Zoot: Malcolm Little and Black Cultural Politics during World War II / Robin D. G. Kelley 231

"The Cool Pose": Intersectionality, Masculinity, and Quiescence in the Comedy and Films of Richard Pryor and Eddie Murphy / Herman Beavers 253

The White Man's Muscles / Richard Dyer 286

Fists of Fury: Discourses of Race and Masculinity in the Martial Arts Cinema / Yvonne Tasker 315

Photographies of Mourning: Melancholia and Ambivalence in Van Der Zee, Mapplethorpe, and Looking for Langston / José Muñoz 337

IV. Coming After

Pecs and Reps: Muscling in on Race and the Subject of Masculinities / Deborah E. McDowell 361

Works Cited 387

Index 415

Contributors 419

Editorial Reviews

"These essays are well researched, beautifully contextualized in relation to previous work in pertinent fields, and engagingly written. Race and the Subject of Masculinities will be extremely useful to scholars and critics working in gender studies."--Phillip Brian Harper, New York University

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