Introduction: Christopher Kendall and Wayne Martino

Abstract

Employing the subversive power of the unnatural to unseat the Platonic world view, the queer, unlike the rather polite categories of gay and lesbian, revels in the discourse of the loathsome, the outcast, the idiomatically-proscribed position of same-sex desire. Unlike petitions for civil rights, queer revels constitute a kind of activism that attacks the dominant notion of the natural. The queer is the taboo-breaker, the monstrous, the uncanny. Like the phantom of the Opera, the queer dwells underground, below the operatic overtones of the dominant; frightening to look at, desiring, as it plays its own organ, producing its own music. (Case, 1993:3)*At the heart of sexual oppression and hierarchical power relations in queer men’s lives lurks the “operatic overtones of the dominant” in the form of the gendered outcast. This often materializes, within the context of social and hierarchical relations among gay men, around a norm of bodily formation that produces “a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation” (Butler, 1993:16) that constitutes the not fully masculine. What often gets constituted within the limits of regulatory schemas for inscribing the normative means by which gay male subjects are formed in queer communities is a despised and repudiated Other. In fact, the feminized “fag” gets appropriated equally from within the gay male community with such a force that it raises ques-tions about just how taboo-breaking “queer” actually is for many gay men who subscribe to straight-acting and aestheticized masculinities (Simpson, 2003b, 2004) as well as forms of sexual oppression that get read as sexual liberation. In this chapter we raise some important issues about masculinities and sexual oppression in queer men’s lives that are taken up further by contributors in this collection of essays. Our main argument is that the gendered outcast emerges from within the queer community to signify the full force of enforced normalization and idealization of masculinity in gay men’s lives. Moreover, we argue that to constitute gay male pornography as a site for transformative possibilities for queer men (Dowsett, 1996; Warner, 1999) is to ignore equally its complicity in sexual oppression as well its anxietyproducing and normalizing potential. This is manifested in its reiterative capacity as a technology for installing norms around which the desirable and idealized gay male body gets articulated and represented. This is often instantiated within the context of the legitimation of certain eroticized power relations that are dictated from within the apparatus of heterosexuality. In other words, rather than “enabling disruption” or the “occasion for a radical rearticulation of the symbolic horizon in which bodies come to matter,” what gets reinscribed are familiar sexist and racialized power relationships in which the active/passive gender binary is inscribed.