#david m halperin

[vital-information]

“Official, public, out-and-out proud gay identity has no tolerance for shame, solitude, secretiveness, and no patience for those who choose to wallow either in an abject state of emotional isolation or in the compensatory, manic joys of a solitary queer fantasy life.

Nowadays, proud gay men do not ground their identity in their loneliness, lovelessness, hopelessness, isolation, and sentimentality. Quite the opposite. We fashion a gay self (to the extent that we do) by proudly affirming a common, collective gay identity, claiming this gay identity openly, visibly, unashamedly, and communally, constructing on that basis a shared culture and society--full of opportunities for emotional and erotic expression--and thereby attaining to a healthy gay sexuality, defined by our eroticization of other gay men as gay, and ultimately crowned by the successful achievement of a relationship. And, by the way, we don’t want to be reminded that ‘twas not ever thus.

...“No gay man could possibly regret the trade” of pre-Stonewall gay abjection for post-Stonewall gay pride, [scholar D.A. Miller] acknowledges. No gay man “could do anything but be grateful for it--if, that is, it actually were a trade” (26; italics added). The problem, it turns out, is that instead of winding up in triumphant possession of a gay pride and freedom that we can wholeheartedly call our own, we have constructed a gay identity that actively represses both the pathos and the pleasure of those residual queer affects that we prefer to think we have liberated ourselves from and that we claim have simply vanished from our consciousness. Instead of transcending the secret shame and solitary pleasures of our sentimentality, as we would like to think, we have assiduously closeted them.”

David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay

[trans-corvo]

been reading about sexuality and sexual arousal, it's absolutely fascinating stuff, definitely rewiring my brain.

Saw someone argue that thinking about things in term of heterosexual, homosexual, etc., is reductive, that at best gay and straight are labels we use to categorize ourselves rather than things that actually exist ('we are gay because we experience same-sex attraction', not 'we experience same-sex attraction because we are gay').

Also said that categorizing ourselves by which sex we are attracted to is reductive because we aren't attracted to that sex, we are always only attracted to some people of that sex, and that factors like age, race, gender identity, gender performance, body-type, and physical features are just as important (nevermind personality, relationship dynamics, clothing, personal habits, personal grooming, occupation, location, power dynamic, cultural and historical backgrounds, etc.,)

Same book argued that there's no meaningful distinction between fetishes and the 'ordinary' mechanisms by which people experience sexual arousal. That anything that elicits sexual arousal is a fetish and that some are just more accepted than others.

That procreation is not the purpose (or rather, sole purpose) of sex, and that we should move away from thinking of it as such. The book didn't say what other purposes it may have, but I can only assume social bonding must be up there. Accepting social bonding as just as valid a reason to have sex as procreation would mean we no longer have to view same-sex attraction as deviant, as something that has to be explained.

Another book argued that by creating the labels of 'homosexual,' we essentially created the gay community, that sexuality is an invention of the 19th c., as is sexuality as an identity (gay sex used to be something you did, now gay is something you are.) At the same time, it's a mistake to think that historically, sexual acts couldn't be seen as being informed by someone's identity or morphology.

Both books pretty much outright state that sexuality, race, and gender are historically linked, and that you cannot consider one without considering the others. Which is to say, they're all flawed attempts to categorize and explain human differences.

Anyway, you should read them.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt2204r8x

[lizbethborden]

I had to read some extracts of Judith Butler books for a class at uni and it was the most nonsensical bullshit I've seen in my entire life, made worse by the fact that the teacher was in absolute awe of it and talking about her like she wrote the bible. Do you have recs of women (either in Tumblr posts or articles or their own books) reviewing her works and analysing it from like, a perspective that makes sense ? I tried searching her name on tumblr.com but almost every single post has "anti-radfem" in the tags which is a bad sign lol. Because if I don't read something smart very soon I think my brain's gonna shrivel up and die (just a heads up you're not the only blog I sent this to, I'm reaching out to the smartest tumblr blogs I know and desperately looking for recs lol)

I know what you mean anon LOL. I think the big one here would be "The Professor of Parody" by Martha Nussbaum. For criticisms of postmodernism and queer theory in general you could also read:

"Let them eat text" by Karla Mantilla

"The Descent from Radical Feminism to Postmodernism" by Ti-Grace Atkinson

"The Normalization of Queer Theory" by David M. Halperin

[fanhackers]

How To Be Gay, by David M. Halperin

While there are obvious fan studies classics, there are other books that don’t always fall into the “fan studies” canon that I have found incredibly useful for my own thinking.  I cited one of them, Carol Dyhouse’s  Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire (2017), a few posts ago; another is David Halperin’s How To Be Gay (2012)

How To Be Gay came out of a course Halperin taught at the University of Michigan, whose full title was “How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation.”  The initiation in question was not sexual, but cultural:  Halperin believes that there are not only gay texts, a gay canon of sorts, but also gay ways of reading that are taught and learned and that help constitute something we might call a gay subjectivity (that you don’t have to be gay actually to have):  e.g. Hollywood movies, opera, Broadway musicals, camp, diva worship, drag, muscle culture, style, fashion, interior design. Halperin asked both why this set of things–why musicals? why this diva or that–and what do they tell us about gay experience? Halperin was trying to trace “gay men’s characteristic relation to mainstream culture,” which often involves collaborative and camp appropriation: a queering.

I find this book very useful, both because fandom also has its own shared languages and rites of initiation (consider the idea of watching something with fannish goggles or slash goggles or a fanfic lens, as was recently discussed in a previous post; think about all the languages and tropes and artistic structures we all learn from each other) but also because Halperin talks about modes of identification that aren’t representational or based obviously in identity politics. So, for example, he says that the gay male students in his class were more likely to express themselves vis a vis a shared text like  The Golden Girls than vis a vis the traditions of what Halperin calls “good gay writing.” There is, Halperin argues, a queer pleasure in the Broadway musical that’s different than the pleasures of gay identity or even gay sex; similarly, queer female fans might find pleasures in identifying with, say, Sherlock, Crowley, or Blackbeard that are very different from the pleasures offered by a woman- or lesbian-centered text. 

Here’s an excerpt that gives a good sense of the book, I think: fans might identify with this or recognize it as descriptive of their own fannish feels.  (FWIW, the italics are all his!)

[H]omosexuality is not just a sexual orientation but a cultural orientation, a dedicated commitment to certain social or aesthetic values, an entire way of being.  That distinctively gay way of being, moreover, appears to be rooted in a particular queer way of feeling. And that queer way of feeling—that queer subjectivity—expresses itself through a peculiar, dissident way of relating to cultural objects (movies, songs, clothes, books, works of art) and cultural forms in general (art and architecture, opera and musical theater, pop and disco, style and fashion, emotion and language). As a cultural practice, male homosexuality involves a characteristic way of receiving, reinterpreting, and reusing mainstream culture, of decoding and recoding the heterosexual or heteronormative meanings already encoded in that culture, so that they come to function as vehicles of gay or queer meaning. It consists, as the critic John Clum says, in “a shared alternative reading of mainstream culture.” As a result, certain figures who are already prominent in the mass media become gay icons: they get taken up by gay men with a peculiar intensity that differs from their wider reception in the straight world. (That practice is so marked, and so widely acknowledged, that the National Portrait Gallery in London could organize an entire exhibition around the theme of Gay Icons in 2009.) And certain cultural forms, such as Broadway musicals or Hollywood melodramas, are similarly invested with a particular power and significance, attracting a disproportionate number of gay male fans. What this implies is that it is not enough for a man to be homosexual in order to be gay. Same-sex desire alone does not equal gayness. In order to be gay, a man has to learn to relate to the world around him in a distinctive way.  (p. 12 - 13)

–Francesca Coppa, Fanhackers volunteer

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Julian Adorney

Published: Jun 1, 2024

When I first heard about queer theory, I assumed that it had to do with gay rights. I was familiar with the LGBTQ acronym, and I assumed that a field called “Queer Theory” would have as its central focus helping to advance lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans rights. But while queer theory does focus a lot on advancing negative and positive rights for trans people (for those not familiar with the philosophical distinction, negative rights don’t infringe on others’ rights, and would include in this case the right for adults to get gender-transition surgery; positive rights do infringe on the rights of others, and would include in this case the “right” of trans-identified males to enter women’s bathrooms), its central focus is very different.

The central focus of queer theory is on rejecting the received wisdom of our ancestors. That is: our society has certain things that we consider “normal,” such as monogamy, having a job, or the notion that there are two (and only two) separate and distinct sexes. The central aim of queer theory is to subvert, problematize, and ultimately undo these norms. Here’s how women’s and gender studies professor David Halperin defined queer theory in his book Saint Foucault:

As the very word implies, ‘queer’ does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence.

What does this attack on social norms look like in practice? It can take almost any form; society has a lot of norms, and a field that defines itself in opposition to these norms will have a target-rich environment.

But let’s walk through a few examples.

First, queer theorists reject what they call “homonormativity.” This is the idea that gay people are just like straight people, and want to fit into the mainstream of society rather than simply living at the margins. It’s the idea that gay people, like straight people, mostly want to put on a suit and tie, go to work, get married, and have children. For queer theorists, this is problematic. Here’s how professor Tyler M. Argüello put it in a paper for the Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services:

Extending modern capitalism and consumption, homonormativity has emerged in queer theory, entrenching a transparent White, neoliberal subject, one who replicates heteronormativity (Duggan, 2004). In this variation, homonormativity anesthetizes queer communities into passively accepting alternative forms of inequality in return for domestic privacy and the freedom to consume (Manalansan, 2005).

This rejection of homonormativity can even lead queer theorists to oppose (or at least problematize) the gay and lesbian community’s long fight for marriage equality. Argüello, again: “A preeminent example of this is the fight for “marriage equality,” which privileges a specific form of intimacy and relationship-making (i.e., legal marriage) while silencing and eclipsing other aggrandizing notions of intimacy, domesticity, sexuality, and sociality, among other discourses.”

That is: it’s problematic that gay people fought for the right to get married because this prioritizes (or “privileges”) monogamous relationships over other expressions of sexuality and intimacy (such as hook-ups or open relationships).

Queer theorists also take aim at traditional gender norms. In their paper “Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood,” co-authors Harper Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess (no, really) complain that society and schooling can reify traditional gender norms.

Although individuals’ experiences are profoundly complex, schooling often categorizes people in ways that train each of our ways of being into compliance with an inflexible ‘script’ (Keenan, 2017b). That script, which is enforced through formal institutions as well as through social interaction, operates on multiple levels. The script of gender teaches the public not only what gender is in some essential sense – setting up a binary between womanhood and manhood – but that some gendered ways of being are acceptable and others are not. In the USA, for example, many people learn that the most valued boy will be white, engage in rough-and-tumble play with other boys that will toughen him up and straighten him out, allowing him to mature into a man who wears a suit and tie, makes a lot of money, enters into a sexually monogamous marriage with a woman, buys a home, and has enough but not too many children. In other words, a script that may begin with gender shapes how individuals are taught to understand their expected roles in society in ways that extend far beyond gender alone.

For queer theorists, even the existence of this script is problematic—adhering to it even more so. Boys shouldn’t be encouraged towards rough-and-tumble play, and men shouldn’t be encouraged towards monogamy, high-paying jobs, or buying a house. According to queer theory, men who find a wife and a high-paying job aren’t following their passions or a well-worn societal template that mostly works. Instead, they are merely playing roles that were not written for them, adhering to rules not of their making but imposed by societal pressures.

Queer theory sees these scripts, especially around gender, and delights in breaking them. Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess’ paper is about drag queen story hours, which involve drag queens teaching children. A key aim of these story hours, they argue, is to allow and even encourage children to break conventional rules. Because the teacher in this setting is a drag queen, he “breaks the limiting stereotype of a teacher: she is loud, extravagant, and playful.” As a result, he “encourages children to think for themselves and even to break the rules.” They note that drag, which is a powerful manifestation of queer theory, “ultimately has no rules – its defining quality is often to break as many rules as possible!” Of course, this goal makes sense because the authors don’t believe that rules (even the rules of a classroom) matter. They talk about the “arbitrariness of rules” and how drag queen story hours can make this arbitrariness apparent.

Because queer theory focuses so much on sex and gender, norms and social rules of decency are frequently in its crosshairs. In their book Queer Theory, Gender Theory, Riki Wilchins describes a surreal interaction with one of their trans-identifying friends.

I am reminded of the first time my friend Tony pulled down his jeans to show off his new $33,000 penis. As I looked on with fascination, he began razzing me with various invitations, all of which had the words “my dick” and “suck” in them. I quickly found myself immersed in the usual complex reaction I have to the idea of giving head, until it dawned on me that—given the donor site for his graft—I would be sucking off his forearm.

As far as I can tell, there’s no point to this story. It doesn’t advance any of the conscious arguments that Wilchins makes in their book. The only point seems to be that it’s subversive. Wilchins gets to talk about performing oral sex on a simulated penis in a quasi-academic book, which certainly breaks some social norms.

It gets worse. Wilchins, to their credit, wrote their sexually subversive passage in a book primarily read by adults. However, some other queer theorists target a more foundational and essential norm: the idea that we shouldn’t sexualize children. Michel Foucault might be called the grandfather of queer theory. While not himself a queer theorist, he (along with Jacques Derrida) founded the school of postmodernism which has heavily influenced queer theory. Celebrated by queer theorists from Wilchins to Judith Butler, Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, dismissed the criminalization of pedophilia as a solution in search of a problem. Here’s the relevant passage:

One day in 1867, a farm hand from the village of Lapcourt, who was somewhat simple-minded…was turned in to the authorities. At the border of a field, he had obtained a few caresses from a little girl, just as he had done before and seen done by the village urchins round about him; for, at the edge of the wood, or in the ditch by the road leading to Saint-Nicolas, they would play the familiar game called ‘curdled milk.’ So he was pointed out by the girl’s parents to the mayor of the village, reported by the mayor to the gendarmes, led by the gendarmes to the judge, who indicted him and turned him over first to a doctor, then to two other experts who not only wrote their report but also had it published. What is the significant thing about this story? The pettiness of it all; the fact that this everyday occurrence in the life of village sexuality, these inconsequential bucolic pleasures, could become, from a certain time, the object not only of a collective intolerance but of a judicial action, a medical intervention, a careful clinical examination, and an entire theoretical elaboration. 

Got that? The man in Foucault’s story paid a small girl to give him sexual favors. Foucault dismisses this act of sexual abuse as one of life’s “inconsequential bucolic pleasures.” He’s struck most by the “pettiness” of putting this man in jail, a man who until then had been “an integral part of village life.” For Foucault, it seems that laws criminalizing sexual abuse of children represent just one more socially constricting norm that we should interrogate, problematize, and ultimately do away with.

Why have queer theorists built an entire field centered around identifying and rejecting societal norms?

First, because they think that all knowledge is socially constructed. This idea goes back to Derrida, another grandfather of queer theory. Derrida rejected the idea that we can ever find or know capital-T truth. Instead, all of our knowledge is arbitrary; and we only think that it’s all true because we’ve been conditioned to think this way. Here’s how Wilchins summarizes Derrida’s argument: “Derrida’s constructedness is like what you get when you use a cookie cutter on a freshly-rolled sheet of dough. There is no truth to the cookies, and no particular shape was any more inherent in the dough than any other.” Our “discourse���—the intellectual paradigm of our society, the ideas in which we swim—is the cookie cutter, and it determines how we see the world.

Given this premise, we could have a discourse that emphasizes and focuses on the separateness of men and women. Or we could have a discourse that emphasizes their sameness. Or a discourse that has six sexes, or none. We could have a discourse that sees penises and vaginas as different. Or, as Wilchins argues, we could have a perfectly valid discourse that sees a vagina as just an inward-facing penis (no, really); as “providing, not primal difference, but strong evidence of [male and female] bodies’ underlying and inherent similarity.”

Of course, this can take us into territory that normal people find pretty offensive. For instance, Wilchins argues that there’s no such thing as a real woman. Drag performers frequently seek to imitate women, but for Wilchins, they aren’t imitating anything real. What they’re imitating is itself an imitation. Biological females, in their view, are simply “doing” their best impression of womanhood in an attempt to fit in, and their performance is no more or less authentic than the performance of men wearing dresses and makeup who are also trying to “do” womanhood (in Wilchins’ sort-of defense, they’re not singling out womanhood as fake; to them, manhood is equally fake). Here’s how Wilchins puts it: “Woman is to drag—not as Real is to Copy—but as Copy is to Copy. Gender turns out to be a copy for which there is no original. All gender is drag. All gender is queer.”

Not only is all knowledge socially constructed in the worldview, but it’s constructed for a particular reason: to keep the dominant people in society in power. Knowledge is a weapon used to build some people up and keep others down. Or as Wilchins quotes Foucault: “Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.”

This brings us full circle to why queer theorists reject social norms. For the queer theorist, norms are built from knowledge that is arbitrary and socially constructed, and in turn are constructed only in order to help the ruling class to maintain its power. In this worldview, the dominant intellectual paradigm of any given period doesn’t tell us any more or fewer true things than would a different paradigm. Indeed, the current paradigm is particularly bad because it’s a tool for perpetuating racism, sexism, homophobia, and (worst of all, and somehow intermingled with all of them) capitalism.

The second reason that queer theorists reject so many social norms is that there’s a certain presentism to queer theorists’ worldviews. The idea is that what’s come before hasn’t worked, and so we need a radical break from tradition. In a discussion on HIV, Argüello argues that “Queer theory can be a productive, additive analytic to comprehend risk and radicalize this longstanding war [against HIV].” Why? Because existing tools haven’t worked: “Frustratingly, incidence (of HIV) persists to be stable annually in the United States.” Our progress has stalled, and so we need to try new and different tools.

Of course, our society has made (and continues to make) remarkable progress in many areas. This means that sometimes presentism has to rely on claims that aren’t true. In the case of HIV, for instance, the CDC notes that we have made tremendous progress in reducing incidence of this deadly disease. New HIV infections per year fell from over 130,000 in 1985 to just 34,800 in 2019. 34,800 is of course still far too high, but it’s tough to look at a decline of 73.2 percent in just over 3 decades and conclude that our tools aren’t working.

So queer theory sees all knowledge as socially constructed in order to entrench the dominant group’s power, and sets itself in opposition to what it sees as the rigid and oppressive norms that this socially-constructed knowledge creates. Fine. In queer theorists’ defense, sometimes knowledge production does look like what they describe. For example, the 19th-century science of phrenology, where white intellectuals sought to maintain dominance by promoting a false science claiming genetic inferiority in non-whites, supports this view. The pathologization of homosexuality is another example where knowledge production looks both arbitrary and malicious. Pathologizing people for wanting to have sex with other consenting adults isn’t something we should ever have done.

However, many social norms are generally good. Keenan and Lil Miss Hot Mess bemoan the idea that men should get married and put on a suit and tie and go to work. But, for most men, this lifestyle works. Monogamous relationships endure better than polyamorous ones. Humans’ willingness to go to work is one reason that our society is so wealthy and that we’re able to provide materially better lives for our children than we ourselves were given (economic data show that Generation Z is on track to be the wealthiest generation in human history).

More broadly, capitalism gets a bad rap from queer theorists, but it’s also lifted billions of people out of poverty.

[ Source: World Bank ]

Norms against pedophilia are unequivocally good. So are norms against cheating on our spouses, abandoning our kids, and (I would argue) biological males hanging out in female locker rooms.

In their campaign against social norms, queer theorists might accidentally do a lot of harm. For instance, Argüello bemoans the fact that “barebacking [having sex without condoms] is met with social and public health policing.” He argues that barebacking isn’t “reckless,” and that, “Instead of indictment, a queer epistemology would be interested to regard this phenomenon as one of strategic behavior and dialectical.” But normalizing barebacking might do a lot to increase the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections, for the simple reason that using condoms actually does work to reduce transmission.

It seems to me that knowledge can fit into one of two categories. First, it can be born out of, and reify, our existing biases. Phrenology and the pathologization of homosexuality are examples of this kind of “knowledge.” Alternatively, it can represent the received wisdom of our ancestors: what millions of humans have learned through trial and error before us, and passed down to us so that we don’t have to make their same mistakes.

Sometimes, knowledge can fit into both categories. For example, monogamous marriage grew out of a Judeo-Christian norm, which might be called a bias. But data also suggests that this norm works. Research is hard to come by, but one study suggests that open marriage has a 92 percent failure rate. The rate of failure for monogamous marriage is much lower.

Queer theorists assume that all knowledge fits into the first category. This makes them good at seeing the flaws in society and the areas where our collective biases are running away with us. However, it makes them bad at seeing the areas where our accumulated inter-generational knowledge actually makes life better for almost everyone most of the time. 

If queer theorists consider social norms to be oppressive and want to tear them down, what do they want to put in their place? No one knows—not even the queer theorists. In a book that otherwise spends a lot of time praising both deconstruction and postmodernism, Wilkins acknowledges that:

Deconstruction and postmodernism are not so much a set of truth claims as a set of philosophic tools and ideas for dismantling existing truth claims. That it, is [sic] intended to take knowledge systems apart rather than to suggest what might take their place […] It’s more than a little like Scarlet O’Hara, promising breathlessly that ‘tomorrow…is another day,’ without knowing that tomorrow will be better, or even explaining why it should be. In this sense, postmodernism seems to trade on the assurance that newness itself is filled with enough promise.

In his book Cruising Utopia, queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz put it even more bluntly.

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house.

To put it another way: queer theory is nihilistic. It’s better at throwing bombs than creating blueprints. It wants to tear society down, but has no idea what to build in its place. It promises that once we tear down the oppressive norms, our politics can have a different shape; but theorists openly acknowledge that they don’t know what that shape is.

The received wisdom of our ancestors is part baby and part bathwater. Queer theorists are very good at identifying the bathwater, though they’re far from the only ones. But they assume that it’s all bathwater; they’re completely blind to the existence of the baby. Queer theorists deserve a seat at the table, because no society is perfect and they might be able to see bathwater that other people can’t.

Those of us who see the baby need to have the courage to speak up to ensure that, in the pursuit of progress, we don’t inadvertently transform our world into something far worse than it is now.

--

About the Author

Julian Adorney is the founder of Heal the West, a Substack movement dedicated to preserving our liberal social contract. He’s also a writer for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR). Find him on X: @Julian_Liberty.

==

Unlike gay identity, which, though deliberately proclaimed in an act of affirmation, is nonetheless rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. As the very word implies, “queer” does not name some natural kind or refer to some determinate object; it acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. “Queer,” then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative—a positionality that is not restricted to lesbians and gay men but is in fact available to anyone who is or who feels marginalized because of her or his sexual practices. ― David Halperin, "Saint Foucault"

That is, you cannot be "queer," you can only do "queerness." Those who claim to be 'queer" - usually heterosexuals - have no idea what they're talking about, that it's performative.

Whatever is the norm, do the opposite, or just something else. It's just being contrary. It's rebellion without a point or cause.

"Lisa, what are you rebelling against?" "Whaddya got?"

Because when whatever is currently "queer" becomes the norm, that then needs to be "queered." Just look at "non-binary" and how much of a stereotype and trope that is now.

It's pathologizing everything that's normal, and normalizing everything that's pathological.

Gay people fought to blend in with society, for their lives and relationships to raise no more eyebrows than any heterosexual relationship. Queer Theory's goal is the exact polar opposite of this.

[catominor]

Found some books and articles that might help with your research. These come from the bibliographies of Craig Williams' book "Roman Homosexuality," and Kelly Olson's article "Masculinity, Appearance, and Sexuality: Dandies in Roman Antiquity." Good luck!

Olson, Kelly. Masculinity and Dress in Roman Antiquity. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies, 2017.

Alexandra T. Groom, Roman Clothing and Fashion (Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2002), 31-73; Julia Heskel, "Cicero as Evidence for Attitudes to Dress in the Late Republic," in The World of Roman Costume, ed. Judith L. Sebesta and Larissa Bonfante.

Mary Harlow, "Clothes Maketh the Man: Power Dressing and Elite Masculinity in the Later Roman World," in Gender in the Early Medieval World: East and West., 300—900, ed. Leslie Brubakerand Julia M. H. Smith

Brisson, Luc. 2002. Sexual Ambivalence: Androgyny and Hermaphroditism in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Berkeley.

Foxhall, Lin, and John Salmon, eds. 1998a. When Men Were Men: Masculinity, Identity, and Power in Classical Antiquity. New York. Thinking Men: Masculinity and Its Self-representation in the Classical Tradition. New York.

Gilmore, David D. 1990. Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity.

Gleason, Maud W. 1990. “The Semiotics of Gender: Physiognomy and Self-fashioning in the Second Century C.E.” In Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990: 398–415.

Gleason, Maud W. 1995. Making Men: Sophists and Self-presentation in Ancient Rome. Princeton.

Graver, Margaret. 1998. “The Manhandling of Maecenas: Senecan Abstractions of Masculinity.” American Journal of Philology 119: 607–32.

Gunderson, Erik. 2000. Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World. Ann Arbor.

Kleijwegt, Marc. 1991. Ancient Youth: The Ambiguity of Youth and the Absence of Adolescence in Greco-Roman Society. Amsterdam.

Porter, James I., ed. 1999. Constructions of the Classical Body. Ann Arbor.

Walters, Jonathan. 1997. “Invading the Roman Body: Manliness and Impenetrability in Roman Thought.” In Hallett and Skinner 1997: 29–46.

Williams, Craig A. Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity. Oxford.

Wyke, Maria, ed. 1999. Parchments of Gender: Deciphering the Body of Antiquity. Oxford.

YAYY thank you so much!! this is really useful!! my idea is mostly to do with ideas about attractiveness in terms of physical features as opposed to presentation, but as far as i know there's no writing on it yet so all of these are useful as sort of... nearby topics. it'll be really interesting to dig into the masculinity aspect of it as well as like... age/youth too

[counttwinkula]

“Consistent with the ancient division between queens and trade is the split between ironic camp complicity and earnest butch posturing, between sisterhood and sex, between conviviality and eroticism. Those divisions, which structure all traditional gay male culture, are grounded in the opposition between the beauty and the camp and enforced by the law that prevents them from being the same person.”

Gerald P. Donelan / David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay

[deeplovelydark]

...

The Normalization of Queer Theory, David M. Halperin

[beingharsh]

david m. halperin

[counttwinkula]

“Much contemporary gay male culture represents a sustained effort to recombine the beauty and the camp. Substantial skill and ingenuity are required to do so in the case of men, and the droll task of rising to that challenge affords gay male culture a multitude of incitements and opportunities to display its dynamism and inventiveness, as well as to manifest its perpetual capacity to startle and surprise.”

—David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay, p. 210

idc if this is for men or women its highly cringe and unsexy. if you think this is sexy please love yourself ❤️ there's better out there

[vital-information]

“Conventional romantic love already has a defiant, antinomian character, as Michael Warner has pointed out. The social function of romantic love is to be anti-social, to represent a private, spontaneous, anarchic rebellion against the order of society. Love is the one socially conventional emotion that is conventionally defined as being opposed to social conventions. Falling in love is thus the most conformist method of being an individual Conversely, falling in love is the most original and spontaneous way to conform, perhaps the only way of conforming to social demands that will never make you look like a conformist. It is the one way that you can behave like everyone else and still claim, at the same time, that you did it your way.

Gay romantic love may feel even more like something socially rebellious rather than like something socially scripted, and gay people may therefore tend to ascribe to their love affairs a dangerous and excessive degree of emotional truth, or personal authenticity. Which risks imparting to those relationships an intensity and an inelasticity that can be suffocating, while you are in them, and that later makes them very difficult to escape. Similarly, the social opprobrium attached to such relationships may make gay people feel particular pressure to champion their naturalness, which is to say their involuntariness. And that may make gay love relations seem even more inescapable.

Gay male culture has therefore had to devise a number of remedies against the romantic ills to which it is vulnerable. That, after all, is what camp is for. Camp is designed to puncture the romantic appeal of beauty, to mock the seriousness with which you might be tempted to endow your own emotions, especially your feelings of love and desire, and to deconstruct the kind of authenticity with which you might be tempted to invest them. Camp, as we have seen, is a practice internal to a dialectic in gay male culture that revolves around a series of oppositions between romance and disillusion, seriousness and unseriousness, authenticity and inauthenticity--between the unironic intensity of gay men’s desire for masculine beauty and the ironic deflation of that intensity.

Camp belongs to one side of that polarity. It is the antidote to romanticism. It breaks into the self-contained world of passionate desire and interrupts its unironic single-mindedness--its systematic exclusion of competing values, its obliviousness to its larger social context, its obsessive focus on the desired object, and its refusal of alternate perspectives. Camp is a reminder of the artificiality of emotion, of authenticity as a performance. At the same time, camp is not the whole story. For it represents a challenge to the power of a feeling for which it knows itself to be no match. It does not seek or hope to conquer love, or to end our breathless, religious veneration of beauty. It merely strives to render their effects less toxic--by making the value and prestige of romantic love less axiomatic.”

--David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay

[splatterscrawl]

extract from How to be Gay by David M. Halperin

[lexluth0r]

Representation in media can greatly impact perceptions of marginalized groups. Both Halberstan and Hall discuss the power dynamics at play between limiting and stereotypical portrayals, as well as ways to dismantle and challenge these ideas.

According to Halberstam, positive images of marginalized peoples in film and television can often be harmful because they portray a limited and narrow view of these communities. In their work “Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film”, they argue that in the case of Butches of races other than white “The image of the black or Latina butch may all too easily resonate with racial stereotyping in which white forms of femininity occupy a cultural norm and nonwhite femininities are measured as excessive or inadequate in relation to that norm,” (180) (1). Halberstam concludes that intersectionality between sexual orientation and race on screen often attempt to portray stereotypes while not engaging in conversation on how that may be received. Positive images portray certain stereotypes which can be harmful, especially to minority communities, as they illustrate this entire community as a monolith. Looking specifically into sapphism and sexuality, white women are often portrayed at the forefront of sapphic love. Due to harmful depictions of the degradation of black women throughout history, this display of sexuality is not explored and celebrated the same way that white women are. Although the integration of black and latina butches is a progressive stride in film and television, their portrayls are often limiting and one dimensional, riddled with racial tropes in contrast to white depictions of butches.

Stuart Hall in his essay titled “What is ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?”, he explores how popular culture serves as a multi-faceted platform riddled with political messaging in reference to identity. Cultural strategies play a crucial role in challenging systems of power in the form of stereotyping by creating counter representations. Marginalized groups can assert agency through their challenge of dominant conversations that depict harmful portrayals. Hall says that the path to agency over representation is to accept that popular culture is “an arena that is profoundly mythic,” (477) (2). Similar to the concept of gender performance, the popular culture arena is filled with arbitrary roles to fill of made up concepts of people. By recognizing this fact, marginalized communities can unite to create media that is representative of their community as a whole. Cultural production can serve as a tool for building solidarity and fostering cohesive action.

All in all, conceited efforts towards dispelling the “myths” of stereotypical characteristics is a progressive way to strive for equal and diverse representation of all individuals.

Bibliography

Halberstam, Jack. "Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film." In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 237-249. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, pg. 180.

Hall, Stuart. "What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?" In Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace, edited by Gina Dent, 21-33. Seattle: Bay Press, 1992, pg. 477.

Reading Notes 9: Halberstam to Hall

Jack Halberstam’s “Looking Butch: A Rough Guide to Butches on Film” and Stuart Hall’s “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” link our inquiries into gender and sexuality with race and representation.

What examples of “positive images” of marginalized peoples are in film and television, and how can these “positive images” be damaging to and for marginalized communities?

In what ways is (popular/visual) culture (performance) a complicated and political site where various identities are negotiated, and how can cultural strategies make a difference and shift dispositions of power?

@theuncannyprofessoro

[somerabbitholes]

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato's Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur's Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai's iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of "White Town" in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of "Muddling Through" - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

'Massa Day Done:' Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism's effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe's influence on India's culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien's Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

[certainwoman]

“Gay male gym culture, as well as the concerted production and display of beautiful bodies, has contributed significantly to public demonstrations of gay pride. After more than a century of scientific efforts to correlate deviant sexual desire with abnormal or deficient body types, not to mention the age-old association of same-sex desire with masculine lack and female monstrosity, it is eminently understandable that the culture of gay pride should have generated an attachment to able-bodiedness and morphological normativity. It is similarly unsurprising that gay pride should have entailed the performance, indeed the hyperperformance, of masculinity by gay men. In this context, nothing is more shameful than having the wrong kind of body. Lesbian culture may have developed a more generous appreciation of a range of body types, but embarrassment and abjection at inhabiting the wrong kind of body continues defensively to shape lesbian representation in at least some instances, as any viewer of the television series The L-Word can testify.”

David M. Halperin and Valerie Traub,  Beyond Gay Pride

[counttwinkula]

In many of those social contexts, especially in sexual institutions such as the bars and the baths, you were bound to meet all sorts of people you would never have encountered in your own social circles, along with numbers of people you would never have chosen to meet on your own, including a whole bunch you wouldn't have wanted to be caught dead with, if it had been up to you. But it wasn't up to you. You had to take the crowds that congregated in gay venues as you found them. You couldn't select the folks you were going to associate with according to your own criteria for the kind of men you approved of or thought you wanted as buddies. You had to deal with a wide range of people of different social backgrounds, physical types, appearances, gender styles, social classes, sexual tastes and practices, and sometimes (in the case of White folks) different races. Which meant that you were exposed to many different ideas about what it meant to be gay and to many different styles of gay life. You might not have wanted to be exposed to them, but you didn't have much choice. […] the new gay public culture virtually guaranteed that people who moved to a gay enclave would encounter a lot of old-timers who were more experienced at being gay and more sophisticated about it than they were. Moreover, those veterans of urban gay life often held shockingly militant, uncompromising, anti-homophobic, anti-heterosexist, anti-mainstream political views. People who had already been living in gay ghettos for years had had time and opportunity to be 'liberated'; to be deprogrammed, to get rid of their stupid, heterosexual prejudices, to achieve a politicized consciousness as well as a pride in their gay identity. By encountering those people, with their greater daring and sophistication and confidence, the new arrivals from the provinces often found their assumptions, values, and pictures of the right way to live, of how to be gay, seriously challenged. Their old attitudes were liable to be shaken up. The sheer mix of people in the new gay social worlds favored a radicalization of gay male life. It lent weight and authority to the more evolved, sophisticated, experienced, and radical members of the local community. And so it tended to align the coming-out process with a gradual detachment from traditional, heterosexual, conservative, mainstream notions about the proper way to live. […] many of the new recruits to the gay ghettos found themselves gradually argued out of their old-fashioned, rustic, parochial, unenlightened views—their ‘hang-ups’ and their ‘unliberated’ attitudes—including their adherence to rigid gender styles, inappropriate romantic fantasies, restrictive sexual morality, political conservatism, prudery, and other small-town values. Psychic decolonization was the order of the day: gay men needed to identify, and to jettison, the alien, unsuitable notions that the ambient culture of heterosexuality had implanted in their minds. […] The replacement of gay bars by online social-networking sites means that you can now select the gay people you want to associate with before you meet them or come to know them. You can pick your contacts from among the kinds of people you already approve of, according to your unreflective, unreconstructed criteria. You don’t have to expose yourself to folks who might have more experience of gay life than you do or who might challenge your unexamined ideas about politics. you can hang on to your unliberated, heterosexist, macho prejudices, your denial, your fear, and you can find other people who share them with you. You can continue to subscribe to your ideal model of a good homosexual: someone virtuous, virile, self-respecting, dignified, ‘non-scene,’ non-promiscuous, with a conventional outlook and a solid attachment to traditional values—a proper citizen and an upstanding member of (straight) society.

David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay, “Queer Forever,” 435-440