“Unruly Alliances,” Female Phallicism, and Other Forms of New Masculinities

We are living in a time crisis—one of selective care and empathy. Many of our hearts are broken. As I enter into this discussion, I want to leave space for those who are being directly targeted and attacked. Harms compound by the day. And toxic, or what I call normative, masculinity—as the air we breathe—actively curates this selective care and empathy.However, the stories, films, poems, and performances in my book, Masculinity in Transition, show that there is also creative power in the masculine, and potential for what queer/transgender Tamil-Sri Lankan artist D’Lo calls “beautiful masculinity.”1 Exuberant, utopic possibilities exist for masculinities that reject sexual domination, nationalism, and this more insidious trait of impenetrability. They offer a critical perspective outside of the assigned male body, for as Jane Ward notes, only the marketing around masculinity has shifted since #metoo, from the art of seducing women to the art of personal transformation. This shift, she laments, is nothing more than a rebranding of white-supremacist, heteropatriarchy.2 Or, to quote “Corporate Man” in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, “We’re actually doing patriarchy very well . . . we’re just better at hiding it.”3In Masculinity in Transition, I view normative masculinity—across embodiment, gender identification, and sexuality—as motivated primarily by the desire for profit and for the psychological wages of dominance. To draw the historical contours of the argument, I turn to Jacques Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship, in which he observes a suturing of racist, misogynistic, and classist masculine norms that occurred between the otherwise vastly different Greco-Roman, Christian, and Enlightenment periods, through to the Revolutions. Fraternity becomes the default, as it elevates and justifies the truth effects of male–male friendship. The power derived from these friendships, and from the processes of fraternization, rationalizes rule by the few—or selective care and empathy. I combine deconstruction with critiques of racial capitalism, including the work of Grace Hong, Aníbal Quijano, Nikhil Pal Singh, Robin D. G. Kelley, Linda Martín Alcoff, Eric Foner, and Cedric J. Robinson. In Chapters 1 and 2, which I review here, the root systems of psychoanalysis also provide alibis for normative masculine dominance.To nurture radical care and empathy, I coined the term “unruly alliance,” which transcends the limitations of identitarian thinking—outside of heteronormative domestic and familial arrangements, but without drawing on theories of queer kinship. I am in agreement with Kadji Amin that queer kinship can create new idealizations, and mirror “the values of egalitarianism, individual autonomy, and elective affinities,” the very things that authorize and legitimize white, masculine fraternity.4“Care” might seem too basic for addressing the complexity of the current crises, but care contains within it a passionate refusal of the ruses of autonomy and independence. Care brings with it the promise of new futures, but it appears radical only because dehumanization and neglect have become so normalized. Unruly alliance offers a complex view of subjectivity and a vision for a politics of solidarity that can scale up to address ecological and economic issues. Unruly alliance helps to zero in on moments when conditions are ripe for what Angela Davis famously calls “unpredictable or unlikely coalitions grounded in political projects.”5 Because unruly alliance can be brought to bear on nearly any other context, it can become a widely applied concept for discussing human relationality.In Chapter 1, “‘She’s a Pistol’: Female Phallicism,” queer femmes and trans women use the phallic to reject the fusion of the assigned male body and the penis/phallus. As masculinity studies scholar Todd W. Reeser puts it, “manhood” and “penis” are synonymous, as sex and gender are often collapsed together.6 Through the phallic, assigned male bodies reinforce their originary and precultural status. Film and television personalities—from Sylvester Stallone to Vin Diesel—present themselves as phallic bodies, always in total control, weaponizing able-bodied masculinity metaphorically.As psychoanalytic queer scholars and deconstructionists have argued for generations, normative masculinity requires the symbolic phallus, which the penis cannot approximate. The obsession with erectile dysfunction and how to cure it is one example of this failure to live up to this imagined phallus. It is not surprising, then, that chaos, dread, and fear occur when the penis—or its proxy, the dildo—shows up where it supposedly really does not belong: on the body of a trans or queer femme. One of the most significant ways that normative masculinity can be challenged is through what I am calling female phallicism, which reimagines the phallic as a domain of buoyant and pleasurable assertion.The heteronormative, colonial, and racialized epistemology of the body requires that “male” and “female” sexual morphologies, and their attendant parts, remain completely distinct. This separation is grounded in the idea that those assigned female at birth represent the threat of castration, and therefore “are” the phallus (the Lacanian “privileged signifier” that allows access to power), while those assigned male “have” the phallus. However, in “The Lesbian Phallus,” Judith Butler destabilizes the fusion of penis and phallus, claimed by both Freud and Lacan. Butler identifies how they fix the phallus and penis together through a series of denials, disavowals, and negations. Consequently, the idealized phallus is subject to contradictions, and Butler’s lesbian phallus calls out this “denial of its substitutability, dependency, diminutive size, limited control, [and] partiality.”7 The chapter has performed crucial work by opening a space for queer phallic possibilities. However, for Butler, the new possessor of phallic masculinity is an assumed butch lesbian subject, which marginalizes other possibilities. In my reading, femme subjectivity threatens even more profoundly the fiction that one cannot both “be” and “have” the phallus at the same time. New mobile masculinities emerge from female phallicism, highlighting the willfulness of this ruse of distinct sexual morphologies. When the phallus begins to move with greater fluidity across a range of embodiments, gender identifications, and sexualities, it becomes a source of generative play—and political possibility.Nao Bustamante is a Los Angeles–based performance artist whose “filmformance” Silver & Gold (2008) provides a powerful example of onstage phallic anarchy. Through a combination of projected film, live performance, and costuming, she invents in her own words a “magical and joyfully twisted exploration of race, glamour, sexuality, and the silver screen.”8 She playfully critiques Hollywood’s obsessive reproduction of the exotic, endowing herself in the process with femme bravado, the symbol of which is not a pink pussy hat but a bedazzled dildo.When Bustamante first appears onstage, she is cloaked in black and hidden from the audience, standing near a black, boxlike podium. On the film projected behind her, she tends a bed of lilacs with a pair of sharp forbidding hedge trimmers to the soundtrack of European classical music. This potentially lethal garden tool in the hands of a femme-presenting Latin@ symbolizes how women “are” the phallus and represent the threat of its removal. Wearing a white (virginal) dress, she then reclines in this bed of lilacs, referencing normative gender expectations. However, she walks away from this scene in a dream state across an empty field, while the camera registers her body disappearing. When the camera comes close again, gender categories begin to collide. She performs ballet in the woods, then suddenly dons a beekeeper’s costume. By exclaiming histrionically, “Ay, Dios mío!” she also suggests that racial categories are simultaneously threatened. Bustamante then discovers a mannequin head hanging from a tree, wearing a yellow mustached hat, which signals that we are entering a space beyond binary categories, where the prosthetic and the real will become indistinguishable. The mannequin head, attached to a stick body wearing a sequined dress, becomes her waltz partner, but the tempo accelerates, conjuring the dance of the red shoes and the hysterical “too muchness” of the Latin@ body. Bustamante then discovers that she has become the figure, while the actual figure is reduced to sticks and a head of lilacs. In a critical turning point, she announces to the figure that this is her “realm.” She laughs manically as though possessed, announcing to the birds overhead and to a duck decoy in her arms that “this is my real life.”9To her shock and horror, she looks down and discovers an erect “penis” protruding from beneath the sequined dress. At first, she tries to deny its existence, but she realizes she is overpowered when a swarm of disconnected, angry penises attacks her relentlessly, causing her to collapse to the ground and lose consciousness. However, she wakes up and finds that the penis/phallus is now pink, bejeweled, and femme, inspiring not revulsion and fear, but desire and identification. She strokes the tiny glitter face and croons, “You’re a part of me. I could never get rid of you.” She tells the anthropomorphized dildo, “You are so beautiful,” and the dildo responds, “Why yes, I am quite handsome, aren’t I?”10 The dildo’s masculine voice of authority might have sprung spontaneously from this series of actions, or perhaps it has been part of her all along.Bustamante’s performance overflows with what queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez calls a utopian and embodied “stream of gestures” through which people strive for social and political connection.11 In conversation with Rodríguez, Bustamante counters Leo Bersani’s antisocial impetus with the “queer articulation of utopia that is always on the horizon and decidedly committed to futurity.”12 Bustamante causes a gestural jamming of gendered cues and signals that escape the entire logic of sex/gender, race, and nation and propose a space beyond. As Rodríguez argues, Latin@ performances of gender and sexuality already “arouse discomfort” and signal a “surplus” that is inappropriate for everyday contexts: “Our bodies dispatch sweeping flourishes or hold back wilted rests. We swish too much and speak too loudly. The scents we exude disturb the numbing monotony of straight middle-class whiteness. . . . Our racialized excess is already read as queer, outside norms of what is useful or productive.”13 Bustamante’s female phallicism becomes part of a queer Latin American diaspora articulating a “complex intersectionality” through which the phallic connects to economics, religion, legal systems, race, class, nation, and politics.14 This is shown in the fact that when she tries to run away from the mostly white penises, their attacks only intensify, which symbolizes the reach of their counterfeit power.Expanding on Butler’s field of substitutability, I envision multiple horizontal relations, which would include dildos, phallic body parts, and more penetrative sex beyond the dehumanizing world of lesbian or trans porn for straight men. Female phallicism can lead to new forms of relationality—a breakdown of the centralization of white, male bonding as the only form of politics and bodies that matter.In Chapter 2, “‘When I Was a Boy’: Boi/Boyhood and the Unworking of Masculinity,” I continue thinking about the penis/phallus fusion through the utopian concept of “imagined boyhood.” I show trans and non-binary poets refuse the ways the “gifts” of boyhood—adventure, messiness, and healthy forms of assertion—became the exclusive property of white boys—apparent in the oft-repeated phrase “boys will be boys.” Trans and queer masculinity can become instead a source of phallic exuberance and mentorship, psychic and material locations of pleasure, joy, and belonging.This fantasy of white boyhood is once again grounded in psychoanalysis. In Freud’s 1909 essay “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy,” five-year-old Hans dreams of a horse with a gargantuan penis, which causes him to experience what Freud describes as phobic dread.15 According to Freud, to overcome his phobia, Hans must, in classic Oedipal fashion, separate from his mother and identify with his father. In this essay and elsewhere, Freud insists that all of masculinity’s joys and problems originate in the penis, regardless of family and cultural environment. Therefore, as psychoanalyst Ken Corbett observes, “the penis precedes the boy.”16 Obviously, boyhood becomes a domain of the phallic inaccessible to assigned female bodies.In their critical unworking of masculinity, trans poets reclaim boi/boyhood through accessing the private, twilight edges of imagination. Imagined boyhood is a space of fantasy and creativity existing within the limitations and possibilities of a particular historical moment. For example, Samuel Ace wrote the poems “Lost Boyhood,” which is a nod to the “Lost Boys” in Peter Pan, who have fallen out of their strollers as babies, and if they are not claimed within a week, they are sent to Neverland, where Peter Pan becomes their captain.17Like many trans folks who came out later in life, Ace reclaims childhood stories like these to locate a boyhood that never actually occurred. For example, in a scene with his father, Ace’s narrator imagines a different gendered interaction than the one that actually took place. “‘Hello little girl,’ the father says. Hello little boy is what I hear.”18 He feels like a drummer inside, which compels him to drum his glass at the dinner table with his silverware, an action that makes his father grab his hand violently. The boy accidentally knocks over a glass of milk, which fills his skirt, symbolizing the feminine as something forced upon him, literally poured over him in a way that he cannot control. The boy retreats to his room and fashions a set of drumsticks, or phallic extensions of himself, out of clothes hangers. Staring at the bedspread, he notices the pattern of a fence: “I play in that fence. I bounce over it and there’s a stream. I walk in the stream and the trees tower over me. They stand naked for a long time before they reach their full and leafy tops. I throw rocks in the water. One sound is like a bell. The next like my drum. There are frogs too. Green and portly frogs like the hearts of bears.”19 Once over this imagined fence, he discovers a boy’s paradise, complete with a Huck Finn–like set of items ideal for running away from home: a red bandanna on a stick, a metal plate, a knife, a flint, and a fishing line and hook. “I need very little,” he declares. “I walk with the fish. The stream runs through my head and out my feet.”20 In this fantasy, he becomes one with nature, which refutes the idea that being trans destroys the so-called natural laws of gender assigned at birth. Trans poet and theorist Cameron Awkward-Rich views these fantasies as “a reparative retreat into the vast territories of the interior. Boyhood names a child’s wish and need for the loosening of gender’s, of modernity’s, of subjectivity’s constraints.” In this way, Ace’s work leads us toward “trans as a particular practice of imagination.”21 Ace’s work allows entry into the unfinished project of gender, encapsulating the spirit of the trans and genderqueer poets who invent imagined boyhoods. Contrary to the urgings of the right-wing political authoritarians in the United States, masculinity is never fixed but rather mobile and unstable, revealing the ruse of its status as universal signifier.As I am writing this, the world is witnessing accelerating brutality, perpetrated by both authoritarian regimes and so-called democratic societies. In such a world, in which direct and covert annihilation is rationalized, what remains is a state of psychic and material starvation. As sociologist of masculinity R. W. Connell writes, if unchallenged, the centralization across the world of “competitive and dominance-oriented masculinity” will make the trends of military technology, environmental catastrophe, and increasing economic inequality extremely threatening to all.22 To be masculine in the normative sense indeed means in many contexts to uphold sexual domination, nationalism, and impenetrability. However, as many before me have noted, masculine normativity often disrupts itself, as no subject position or group formation can maintain this kind of drive to be on top in all situations without rupture and contradiction, especially as precarity becomes more and more the norm. and play an in both these and and ways To create those and familial systems that and are by masculine normativity need to be through unruly and its utopian possibilities. The is and it is perhaps to refuse its within the current conditions and the and of racial its insidious on and these power not occur in our but and in way can the space of the as one of I that all of this requires a way to the by with and we become for thinking and the and of in Derrida’s “the the and the the can only occur when more possibilities beyond the normative are not only but