Queer Masculinity

With the rise of gay liberationist movement in the post-Stonewall era, overtly ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ perspectives began to be put forward in the nexus of ‘new gender studies’. If ‘queer studies’ as an umbrella term has already raised an entire set of questions and issues about identity, sexuality, race, desire, and gender, ‘black queer studies’ attempts to zoom in the fraught relations among and between these often overlapping narratives of black and queer identities. Work on ‘men and masculinities’ are unable to evolve into a discourse in its own right, unlike work on women and femininity, which evolved into the discourse of feminism. Where feminism emerged out of political engagement with women and femininity as an ideological stance, as much as a set of conceptual and philosophical discourses, work on ‘men and masculinity’ resists being located under the singular rubric category, say, ‘masculinism’, because of the ideological and political baggage that the term carries historically. This paper argues the queer project marks an effort to speak from and to the differences, nuances and ‘invisibility’ that are eclipsed by the underplay of the gender binary oppositions. This proposal is critically curious to probe into the matter that what happens when black masculinity soaks up the attention of queer and become ‘queered’ black male. Black gay identity overlaps with ‘despecified’ queer. Treating ‘Queer’ as an anti-assimilationist and anti-separatist with the overlapping of the narrative discourse of race, this paper seeks to engage with ‘othered’ masculinities, presumably ‘queered’, that not only in terms of the attributes that characterize them but also in terms of the historical, structural and discursive conditions, interrelation and ‘intersectional’ dynamics that foster their formation, formulation and reproduction. Keywords: Gender, Black Masculinities, Heteronormativity, Invisibility, Queer, Sexuality. With the upsurge of seemingly maverick gay liberationist movement or men’s liberation in the post-Stonewall era that employed a version of liberalism in its concern with individual and psychic aspects of gendered habits, attitudes, etiquettes and mannerisms, overtly the gender terminologies such as ‘gay’, ‘lesbian’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’, and ‘queer’ came into elitist consideration in the nexus of critical masculinity studies. …show more content…
Not surprisingly, the relationship that ostensibly surfaces between men’s liberation movement and critical masculinity studies is somewhat equivocal as the former relied more on the psychological and support-oriented approach than a political one, the latter (Beasley 179). Raewyn Connell, one of the leading masculinity studies theorists, offers different configurations of masculinity including ‘hegemonic masculinity’, ‘complicit masculinity’, ‘subordinate masculinity’ and ‘marginalized masculinity’ (Connell 76). But before moving on to the critical assessment of those configurations of masculinity, Connell added four kinds of strategies to characterize the type of person who appears to be ‘masculine’. This tactical attempt contributes well to the construction of masculinity politics and helps further for the understanding of the gender relations among men involved. They include essentialist, positivist, normative and semiotic definitions of masculinity which are to be evaluated shortly. To begin with, essentialist definitions of masculinity came under critical scrutiny. Since it has been familiar to all and sundry that ‘masculinity’ exists only in contrast to the existence and subordination of ‘femininity’ or ‘other’, so to say, and thereby, the closed phallocentric binary frame results with the compulsory condition of its arbitrary relationality. …show more content…
The crux in this strategy rests on the essence of the core masculine which, later, proved to be only a social construct, as said beforehand. Therefore, the persistent oversimplification in making sense of masculinity as a whole leads itself to a vacuum. Secondly, positivist definitions of masculinity perched on the ethnographic scaling of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ in the academy of humanities and social sciences. But this ethnographical survey, though meticulous in its approach, falls short for its attempt to introduce the names of the gender categories. Precisely, the descriptions that are given to characterize ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ having recourse to the terminologies of the same names bring themselves into the epistemological sophistry. This falsified notion occurs only when one resorts to the terms of artificial binary opposition to make its own sense. The much-discussed terms ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ now appear redundant to express the contradictions such as ‘masculine female’ or ‘feminine male’ because the binary of ‘male’ and ‘female’, though questionable, is in sync with the sex differences. Thirdly, normative definitions of masculinity often lean toward essentialist agendas but it produces ‘paradox’ due to its deep-seated anxiety which disables