An Ethic of Fragilization

Abstract

This book has analysed performances and representations of ostensible ‘masculinities in crisis’ which inevitably incorporate trouble as norm by operating within a distinctly phallic, sacrificial model of identity. That is to say, subjective violence both reveals and reproduces systemic violence. Male trouble emerges as a network of performative practices that contain the queer disruption that crisis might otherwise signify. While the reading offered here is queer, the plays, performances, and films are less easy to situate insofar as they are so deeply immured in a victimized logic. Rather than rethink restrictive terms of identity and relationality, the works are committed to the reconstitution of a phallic masculinity via a performative politics of suffering. Focusing on a spectrum of ostensibly gay and straight masculinities, what remains most troubling in these constructions is an underlying fear of women and what we might think of as ‘the feminine’.4 Repeatedly, what we are confronted with is the feminization of trauma and the traumatization of the feminine.