The commencement of a "man" in a "man's" world: Chapters 1-3 of "Self-Made Man"

Norah Vincent’s journalistic piece Self-Made Man raises plenty of questions surrounding gender. Despite her overwhelming appeal to emotions and her tendency to over-generalize, Vincent recognizes many of the ways gender is socially constructed that supports the idea of gender as a performance. Additionally, her experience as a “man” shows the oppressive nature of patriarchy, and its affects on women and men.

Chapter 1 “Getting Started” describes Norah’s transformation into Ned, the man she will perform for a year. Her interest in drag started through a friend and manifested itself in a night out in the East Village of New York as a man. In that single outing Norah remembers having an epiphany of sorts about the way men interact on a daily basis: The men she came across looked away immediately instead of holding a gaze. This was contrary to Norah’s experience as a female living in that same neighborhood. As a woman, Norah had to constantly try to ignore the male eyes that followed her down the street. While she was in drag, Norah recalls feeling “the respect they [the neighborhood men] showed me by not looking at me, by purposely not staring” (3). She confirms her experiential hypothesis through male friends and was astounded that what she had experienced was the norm. She had “learned such an important secret about the way males and females communicate with each other, and about the unspoken codes of male experience” in such a short period, what about if she passed as a man for much longer period of time (4). Couldn’t she “potentially observe much more about the social differences between the sexes”? From there Norah takes transforming to a man very seriously. She wanted to offer an analytical and introspective narrative on the “sociological implications of passing as the opposite sex” that was not found in mainstream media portrayals of gender bending. With the help of a few professionals- (makeup artist, personal weight-lifting trainer/dietician, and a voice coach) and new accessories-(glasses, clothes, etc.), Norah began her journey as a man, in a man’s world.

The end of chapter 1 commences a trend in Norah’s journalism; an appeal to emotions that at times perhaps skews other aspects (including the analytical and introspective) of the story. She disclaims that while she deceived and lied to many people in the writing of this piece she “can claim with relative surety that in the end [she] paid a higher emotional price for my circumstantial deceptions that an of my subjects did”

Ned joins a bowling league for his first attempt to enter the “male” world in Chapter 2: “Friendship.” Although his biggest challenge in this chapter was his lack of bowling skills, Ned learns many things about his male bowling companions- Jim, Bob, and Allen. These three men are stereotypical American bowlers- white, middle-aged, and working-class men, escaping their wives and families once a week at the local bowling ally. However, Norah’s initial judgment of the men proves wrong as they struggle with things that aren’t “typically male.” Jim’s wife, for example, is dying of cancer and while it is not appropriate to show too much emotion, Ned notices the subtle things that show Jim’s love for his wife. Additionally, Norah’s description of Alex’s (Bob’s son) presence at the bowling ally begins to unravel the complexities of the socialization of boys into men (rite of passage-esque).

What struck me the most about this chapter was the fleeting recognition of class in these men’s lives. Although Norah does mention these things her approach to her bowling friends lacks an analysis that understands the emphasis that class (and race) play in the shaping of these men’s masculinities. Further, I was completely surprise (and in some ways unconvinced) with the responses of Jim, Allen, and Bob of finding out that Ned was in fact a woman. Do you think Vincent could be altering some of the happenings, or have I (and in some ways society) misinterpreted and stereotyped these type of men?

Ned is introduced to the infamous “titty bar” in Chapter 3 “Sex.” This was the most revealing and interesting of chapters for me. Ned begins to understand the culture of these clubs and comes to extremely insightful conclusions. Vincent paints the pictures of the “titty bar” as a separate culture. It is a place where men go to express their sexuality in “appropriate” ways. These ways include wanting and liking to look at naked women that meet an unnatural standard of “beauty” one that largely resembles something fake – like a doll. Although the portrayal of these women and the men’s response to it is surely misogynistic, Vincent thinks part of it may be contrary to misogyny; “…the idea that you [heterosexual men] could only treat as an object something that resembled a real woman as little as possible, because only then could you bear to mistreat it and yourself enough to satisfy your instincts” (79). Toward the end of the chapter Vincent further concludes “In those places male sexuality felt like something you weren’t supposed to feel but did, like something heavy you were carrying around and had nowhere to unload except in the lap of some damaged stranger” (90). She continues to outline a larger theme in the book which I really agree with and like- that men are just as much victims in these types of situations as women- but in very different ways. Men’s “victim-hood” has differing levels of oppressive results and is hard to directly compare to women’s but nonetheless, no one comes out clean.

So far I have enjoyed reading Vincent’s journey as a Ned. Her experiences thus far, show that performing maleness has its unwarranted side-effects and in a patriarchical society where they are largely the oppressors being a man is not as liberating as we may initially think. How would you respond to the questions below?

Questions:

1. To what extent is Ned performing gender? Does Norah’s performance of Ned refute or support Butler’s ideas in Gender Trouble? (For example, in order to truly perform gender in the dichotomous system, do you have to truthfully identify with the gender you are performing?)
2. Are there limitations to how much one can learn in just drag about the opposite biological sex?
3. To what extent is Vincent ignoring class, race, and sexual orientation in her analysis of male culture?

Butler part II

In the second chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler takes up a commonplace of feminist theory, the patriarchy. She notes that many feminists have tried to produce and analyze the pre-patriarchal state of culture as a model upon which they can base a new, non-oppressive society. She cautions, however, this feminist recourse to pre-patriarchy to not “promote a politically problemative reification of women’s experience in the course of debunking the self-reifying claims of masculinist power” (p. 48). In other words, she doesn’t want new “stories of origins” to be created while we try to debunk the old. Essentially, Butler is describing the way in which feminist discourse has and needs to continue to, “locate moments or structures within history or culture that establish gender hierarchy” in order to, “repudiate those reactionary theories which would naturalize or universalize the subordination of women” (49). It is using this type of analysis Butler hopes we can understand the formation of gender and its origins.

I. Structuralism’s Critical Exchange

Structuralism is one of the French schools of thought Butler uses in her gender analysis. Butler describes Levi-Strauss’s, a famous structuralist, view of the “critical exchange”. The critical exchange is the exchange of females from different clans for marriage (otherwise known as exogamy). A structualist analysis of this exchange is what reveals the “incest taboo.” It starts with the ideas that women were exchanged, in reality, to bond the men together (homosocial). That bonding is what precedes the “incest taboo” or, in other words, the incest taboo necessitates a kinship structure governed by the exchange of women. Butler also claims that incest is a “pervasive cultural fantasy” that is perpetuated because it is taboo.

Butler ends this section with an interesting quote, “language is the residue and alternative accomplishment of dissatisfied desire, the variegated cultural reduction of a sublimination that never really satisfies” (58)- I think then what she is saying is that the “taboos” that have come about through a variety of historical contexts have also created a limited language to talk about alternative sex practices….Feel free to help me out with this.

II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade

Butler addresses Lacan and Riviere’s theories on masquerade. She begins with an analysis of Lacan’s language (Symbolic) of to have (the phallus) and to be (the phallus). Men have the phallus and thus women strive “to be” the phallus. “To be” the phallus embodies and affirms the phallus. Lacan concludes that, this “‘appearing as being’ the Phallus that women are compelled to do is inevitably masquerade” (63). This claim brings up the idea that there is a “being” or “ontological specification of femininity prior to the masquerade…that might promise an eventual disruption and displacement of the phallogocentric signifying economy” (64).

Riviere’s psychoanalytic description of “womanliness as a masquerade” supposedly hides masculine identification and therefore also conceals a desire for female homosexuality. A mask is used to defend their feelings and protect individuals from societal disapproval (gay men mask in masculine heterosexuality and “masculine” women in femininity).

Is “masking” or “masquerading,” then, performing gender? If yes, then what is truly being masked?

III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender

Freud’s psychoanalytic explanation of mourning and melancholia states that “loss” prompts the ego to incorporate attributes of the lost loved one itself. In other words “the ego is said to incorporate the other into the very structure of the ego” sustaining this “lost” one with “magical acts of imitation” (78). Furthering this theory, gender too can be internalized with the “imitation” of internalized taboos. “This process of internalizing lost loves becomes pertinent to gender formation…” (79).

Butler questions assumptions that are present in Freud’s arguments that seem to negate the view that gender is performed. She states that many of his theories and claims “disguise its own genealogy. In others words “dispositions” are traces of a history of enforced sexual prohibitions which is untold and prohibitions seek to render untellable” (87).

IV. Gender Complexity and the limits of identification and V. Reformulating prohibition as power

Butler, at the end states that, “an even more precise understanding is needed of how the juridical law of psychoanalysis, repression, produces and proliferates the genders it seeks to control” (97). She points again to the productivity of the incest taboo, a law which generates and also regulates approved heterosexuality and homosexuality as subversive and “before” or prior to the “law.”

Feminst Porn (and dialogue) in a third-wave context, please?

Knowing that I hadn’t explored feminist porn to its full potential, I was skeptical and hesitant to learn more about it. I expected to be either turned-off or offended by the porn that claimed to be “feminist,” but my exploration into the area changed my mind. I enjoyed aspects of some of the clips and directors we viewed on Friday. My favorite was the Comstock film, I never thought porn could really capture the potential for emotional connection, but the Xana and Dax (along with a short preview of Comstock’s film Ashley and Kisha) proved me wrong.

The blogs assigned mainly centered on some of the debates surrounding the porn industry. Because of the amount of arguments made, and the complexity of many of them, I am going to avoid trying to summarize the readings and focus more on responding to how many of the arguments fit into third-wave feminism and our class.

Reading the blogs on the web was, at times, extremely irritating. The complexities of the porn industry are exhausting, especially when many of the feminist porn makers seem to have the same goals. Similarly, was the frustrating idea that many of our allies for sexual freedom and feminist ideals are often split on “little” things (with recognizable larger implications), like, for example, whether or not it is “feminist” to have a man come in a woman’s face….I know the intricacy’s of porn-making, especially in trying to produce a porn that is feminist and non-misogynistic, but to what extent can arguments, not unlike the ones we saw in CAKE versus Levy, distract us from the real goals of third-wave feminism?

First and second-wave feminism have been largely criticized for being racists, classists, and ethnocentric. I do not in any way refute these claims. Instead, I find it interesting to think about the porn-debate in the context of these waves. How much has the feminist- porn industry been criticized for being theses things? Not much discussion about class and race came up in the blogs. Comstock was the only one to speak to race and gender directly, and I am confused about my reaction to his response.

Ashley and Kisha, Comstock’s newest film, features two lesbian identified, black women. He seems to struggle sales of the movie at first, and wants to initially blame the lack of sales on some larger societal racial trend. Then he steps back for moment, and reflects:

I think there ways to depict sex that can transcend race, gender, or sexuality, and Jessica, Linda, JAG [people who’ve said generous things about A&K] and the others are helping to sustain me in my belief that by focusing on the subjective aspects of the sexual experience, I can reach across boundaries of race, or gender, or sexual taste.

The part I disagree with is the lack of acknowledgement of class. In my opinion, a dialogue surrounding who has access to feminist porn, who is making it, who is starring in it, etc. is lacking in Comstock’s analysis, and also in the current feminist-porn movement. Similarly, I don’t know how I feel about these comments, as well:

Of course our differences still matter… but those aren’t the only things that matter, and they’re not always the thing that matters the most. You don’t have to be African-American to be inspired by the story of the Tuskegee Airmen; you don’t have to be Jewish to feel the horror of The Holocaust; you don’t have to be young, black, or a lesbian to know when you’re watching Kisha ride Ashley’s face, you’re seeing something that’s as right as rain.

Do you think what unites as sexual beings is more important than our other differences?

Is there something in sex/sexuality that is inherent in human beings and can be understood on that level? Or does Comstock oversimplify the roles that “race, gender, or sexual taste” play in shaping us as sexual beings?

It is hard for me to respond to a concrete thing we have learned in our porn section. I would like to shape our knowledge of these new things, however, in a context that takes into account race, class, and gender.