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 …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 …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