More (Than) Masculinity

Men need to do more than simply do better. In Masculinity in Transition, K. Allison Hammer locates that more in forms of movement—movement with others, for others, and, significantly, moving in masculinity otherwise. Hammer's men and masculinities are also more plural than a dominant discourse of manhood would willingly entertain. For Hammer, putting masculinity in motion promises to proliferate its alternatives by way of unfixing a seemingly static, impossibly singular, and exceedingly violent normative masculinity. All the while, Hammer rarely loses sight of how such deep-seated violence still finds its way into the best of intentions. The title's “transition” does outsize work here. In much of the text, transition makes space for the deployment of trans theory and the viability of transmasculine life, but it also allows for the necessity of thinking masculinity in process, in draft, and, following C. Riley Snorton (2017: 197), in the complicated tension of the “future imperfect, which is to say . . . the present by way of a future (aspiration).”What's more, Hammer finds that these movements often cause generative forms of commotion, or what they call unruly alliances. Centrally, unruly alliance names a feminist remedy to culturally embedded notions of fraternity and fraternization, which Hammer suggests are a structural imperative of normative American masculinity. They offer unruly alliance as a corrective and a politics of solidarity—“bonds that occur outside of heteronormative domestic and familial arrangements, but without [necessarily] drawing on theories of queer kinship” (3). Hammer writes that unruly alliances “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” (54). Their book details many such alliances—variably unlikely, unusual, and often uncomfortable relationships that resonate with a long history of difficult but necessary coalitional politics made across lines of gender, race, nation, class, and ability. Across the text, these alliances are often a collaboration occurring within a “lowercase masculinity”: be they trans poets (re)turning to “boi/boyhood and mentorships . . . to resist phallic domination” (57); Marlon Riggs's dream meetings with Harriet Tubman; trans labor organizing on the factory floor in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues; or the “sick sex” of intimacy throughout the AIDS crisis. More broadly, Hammer invokes unruly alliance to name an uncomfortable form of intersectionality that aims to overcome (or merely tolerate) prevailing expectations of race, ability, gender, sexuality, and class—expectations that too often serve only as obstacles, precluding the possibility of working for more together, albeit uneasily.Throughout, Hammer insists on alternative forms of masculinity that—while avowedly rejecting violence, mastery, and aspirations for wholeness—need not eschew the vigor, confidence, or resolve that too often remains the sole purview of normative masculinity. Attesting to instances of phallic exuberance, Hammer documents performances of assertion outside of and contesting the contours of patriarchal privilege—“not constituted but constituting” (36). Pointing to theatrical excesses of the phallic imaginary in performance artist Nao Bustamante's “filmformance,” Silver and Gold, Hammer sees a female phallicism that “shifts how the potentialities of the phallic are imagined, toward the goal of subverting normative masculinity” (54). Vis-á-vis a female phallicism, Hammer considers how one might dislodge (if not completely discard) the phallus, finding instances where it can be revealed as a floating signifier (or, quite literally, a floating dick) that can be wielded otherwise.Hammer's neighboring concept, butch exceptionalism, is far more fraught if no less unapologetically assertive. In a later chapter, Hammer discusses the ways in which Gertrude Stein and Willa Cather exhibit an aspirational masculinity colored by the prevailing notion of American exceptionalism at that time. By Hammer's account, they inadvertently expressed “a form of transnormativity based in white, American monumentality,” underlining how their forms of phallic assertion often traded within a larger “psychic space of white masculine nostalgia . . . [connoting] hubris, colonial and postcolonial greed, and the coveting of a virile virtue” (134, 138). But in working across such terms as female phallicism and butch exceptionalism, and the complicated valences of their creative and historical deployment, Hammer critically tarries in the uneasy suspensions of a masculinity in transition. How has masculinity been tried on, toyed with, and tested in ways that stumble toward imperfect futures unanchored from mastery and violence?Hammer makes quite clear: “Phallocentrism makes it difficult, if not impossible, for those on the margins to harness the political and material potentialities—and pleasures—of the phallic” (31). And yet, Hammer calls for a phallic power “universalized as a potentiality for all embodiments, gender identifications, and sexualities, but without its characteristic aggression and violence” (31). They insist on a reclamation of phallic authority, for both male and female categories, as “a nondialectical negation, preventing the creation of a field of abject phallic subjects” (36). But does “harnessing” phallic potentiality (or its metaphoric equivalent: the equitable distribution of patriarchy's reins) necessarily warrant priority over the decision to fully divest from the phallic as a source of political and material potentiality and pleasure? Hammer's objects attest otherwise. Political practices of de-signification as disarmament, rather than universalization as reassignment, are the actual sources of power for political assertion and contestation. This is seen most notably in Bustamante's use of comedy to highlight a phallic absurdity that “has always been counterfeit” (42–43) but also in Netflix's Godless, where “what is left of masculine authority is either completely inept or immature” (120). Divestment from such counterfeit and compulsory structures of signification need not reduce to what Hammer terms a transphallomisogyny—“a form of misogyny based on the presence of the penis (real or imagined)” (35). As Hammer notes, “the penis and phallus never fully separated” within our current cultural imaginary, but wholesale redefinition of the latter need not substitute for sundering them altogether (35).What's certain for Hammer is that masculinity can be—is and has been—much more than its dominant positions and aspirations wish to betray. Masculinity can be penetrable, sick, and divided; embodied, wielded, and shared; with or without genital requisites or a gendered coherence. Masculinity is and has been very much on the move but could be still so very much more.