Homosocial Relationships Research Articles

Breaking Down Bromance: An Analysis of NigaHiga’s Bromance Music Video and Word of the Day: Bromance Episode

In a society where expectations often influence people more than they are aware of, we find a humorous take on society’s expectations of men and how they express affection toward one another. NigaHiga’s Word of the Day: Bromance video and Bromance music video poke fun at the idea of bromance and, along the way, provide us with an opportunity to look deeper into this male-to-male relationship. Bromance is a combination of the word brother and romance. It is a term created to capture the essence of a male bond so strong and intimate, it assaults the border between brotherhood and romantic, homosexual relationships. The term coined for relationships between those of the same gender such as this is Homosocial. This paper then looks at bromance as a homosocial relationship and discusses men’s struggle to perform according to hegemonic masculinity and express affection at the same time—as exhibited by Nigahiga’s videos, now an Internet sensation.

"No Band of Brothers Could Be More Loving": Enslaved Male Homosociality, Friendship, and Resistance in the Antebellum American South

This article examines the homosocial world of enslaved men in the antebellum American South. It underscores that the lives of enslaved men were intertwined with one another, and that male interdependence was a fact of enslaved life. It examines how pursuits such as drinking, gambling, and wrestling brought enslaved men together in an all-male subculture through which they constructed their own independent notions of masculinity, friendship, solidarity, and resistance. The article claims that homosocial company was integral to the gendered identity and self-esteem of enslaved men. Through their homosocial relationships men forged strong ties of friendship. These relationships offered enslaved men a significant emotional landscape through which to resist the dehumanizing features of enslaved life. Furthermore, the article reveals how some friendships nurtured a culture of resistance among enslaved men.

Male Homosociality, the Femme Fatale, and Gender Relations in Andrea Camilleri’s Il campo del vasaio

Andrea Camilleri’s Montalbano series raises serious issues of gender that require analysis and elucidation. The concept of male homosociality (as developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) is particularly useful for defining the relationship between Montalbano and his deputy Mimì Augello. A close examination of Il campo del vasaio will reveal how the balance of this particular homosocial relationship is upset by the presence of a woman — the femme fatale Dolores — before the status quo is restored through suppression of the female Other. From the homosocial angulation of Il campo del vasaio, it becomes clear that the male workforce of the commissariato is privileged over other relations. Consequently women are marginalized, or useful only as adjuncts to the male narrative, or threats to be neutralized.

Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema , and: Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II (review)

Reviewed by: Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema, and: Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II Robyn A. Epstein (bio) and Mel Michelle Lewis (bio) Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema by Robert J. Corber. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 240 pp., $66.00 hardcover, $24.00 paper. Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II by Yvonne Tasker. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 328 pp., $70.00 hardcover, $25.00 paper. Robert Corber’s Cold War Femme: Lesbianism, National Identity, and Hollywood Cinema and Yvonne Tasker’s Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television since World War II consider the cinematic characters of the femme lesbian and the military woman, respectively, both of whom are contradictory and influential representations of women. These interdisciplinary studies scrutinize how onscreen portrayals of women’s gender and sexuality model dynamic historical, social, and cultural norms. The gender expression of the cold war femme is seemingly incongruous with lesbian sexual identity, thus creating an always-already taboo subject through which to render the value of normativity, the dangers of female desire, and the penalties of nonconformity. Similarly, the military woman’s subjectivity is contentious, pivoting between romanticized feminine altruism and tropes of masculine heroism; she is at once glamorous and mannish, angelic and disruptive, inaccessible and sexy. Her power evokes anxiety and challenges normative constructions of femininity. Corber’s Cold War Femme observes and analyzes the role of a purposeful femme lesbian subjectivity in the Hollywood-imagined world of women’s homosocial relationships during the period of the cold war (1940s to mid-’60s). In addition to illuminating this subjectivity, Corber brands a genealogy of the sociocultural invention and positioning of femme lesbians in cold war cinema. Through a reading of McCarthy-era anti-communist discourse and the crafted threat of homosexuals as hidden, seditious Americans, Corber establishes that fictitious femme lesbians displaced fictitious butch lesbians as the greater social threat to the U.S. nation-state. Hollywood reproduced and cultivated this gender category, steering it into acutely provocative characters. With primarily heterosexual aesthetic presentations and attractions to feminine women, these cold war and Hollywood-created femme lesbians roused alarm and curiosity as they challenged normative sexual-identity arrangements. The cold war femme demonstrated a “lack of congruity between gender identity, sexual practice, and object choice” (30). Corber asserts that directors and screenwriters summoned the cold war femme by depicting women’s sexual desire and social autonomy as mysterious and menacing, while carefully avoiding violating the Motion Picture Production Code (Hays Code) by excluding any explicit indication of lesbianism. His strongest examples include films like All About Eve (1950) and The Children’s [End Page 136] Hour (1961), in which the stories are shown to swivel and are directed through female relationships that are latently yet more reasonably interpreted as lesbian. Revealing these partially hidden scripts, Cold War Femme contributes to feminist and queer film theory, as well as to cold war cinema studies; Corber explains that even while the subjectivity of the cold war femme is created to underscore the communist threat to “American” capitalist, heterosexual, and patriarchal culture, the cross-film identity creates a successful archetypical legacy of this kind of femme. Still, the sophistication of Corber’s lens is somewhat undermined by the surprising absence of raced and classed analyses. The nationalism driving the production of cold war–era ideology was highly informed by racial and socioeconomic politics, which are ignored in the text; whiteness has been central to the construction of the “real American,” especially during the time of the cold war femme’s cinematic run. This omission confuses the historicity of the subject of the text, although the contribution to theorizing the cold war femme is still of important value. The book is divided into two parts: “Part I: Screening the Femme,” which attends directly to an explicit cold war femme construction; and “Part II: Female Stardom,” which contends with messy gender-crossings between actresses’ personas and their characters in film. In both sections, Corber presents interesting close readings of films, through which the reader is able to watch the interplay...

Smollett’s World of Masculine Desire in The Adventures of Roderick Random

This essay argues that Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random—often characterized as a “robust adventure story”—puts male-male relations at the center of the world it describes. Tracing homosocial relations in the novel, it reveals that male relations are given an intensity that they rarely have in other fiction of the period. Smollett’s fear of giving in to male desire means that he only gives in to it more intensely than ever. That is what makes Roderick Random’s world of masculine desire so truly robust.

The Blithedale Bromance: A Queer Reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne

Though the word “homosexual” did not yet exist in 1852 when The Blithedale Romance was published, its author portrayed both characters and relationships in it which clearly indicate distinctive aspects of queerness. In this romance, Hawthorne sets up a sort of “love square” in which the four main characters, Coverdale, Hollingsworth, Zenobia, and Priscilla, operate. Though the romance seems to discuss the heterosexual relationships between these men and women, there is strong evidence that erotic homosocial relationships are also at the core of the story. By reexamining some overlooked aspects of the work, we learn that the true heart of this tale of love and loss is found in the relationship between Coverdale and Hollingsworth. This tragic pair were doomed from the start because of nineteenth-century social repercussions of homosexuality, their opposing archetypes, the ways in which they act out and also repress their homosocial desire, and their relationships with Zenobia and Priscilla, particularly how they interpose these women as functional vessels of their love.

The Homosocial Construction of Alternative Masculinities: Men in Indie Rock Bands

This study explores the construction of masculinities and homosocial relationships within alternative subcultures. Through in-depth interviews, I researched men in “indie” rock bands that were redefining homosocial relationships in order to construct alternative masculinities within the indie rock subculture. The study's findings demonstrate that while the men upheld certain hegemonic gender norms inside and outside the scene, within the subculture they report constructing alternative masculinities through homosocial interactions and gender strategies involving their bodies and performances. This study provides an example of how gender is fluid within specific social locations and contexts. Furthermore, it emphasizes the idea that multiple masculinities are constructed within society and that homosocial relations can be places for challenging hegemonic masculinity rather than reinforcing them.

"Let's Hug It Out, Bitch!" The Negotiation of Hegemony and Homosociality Through Speech in HBO's Entourage

Situating Raewyn Connellfs theories of gender hegemony in Angela McRobbiefs vista of gpost]feminist society,h this paper interprets HBO comedy]drama television series Entourage (2004]c) as a significant object of study in understandings and negotiations of contemporary masculinity. It advances a new perspective on Connellfs notion of hegemonic masculinity as a constantly negotiated state requiring labour and an awareness of social ideas of masculinity. Homosocial relationships in Entourage illustrate Demetrioufs notion of a ghybrid bloc of masculinity.h Reflecting most prominently the politics and labour of producing hegemonic masculinity, Entourage character Ari Gold is an illuminating and compelling figure in this perspective.

“Other People's Clothes”: Homosociality, Consumer Culture, and Affective Reading in Edith Wharton's <em>Summer</em>

For a novel typically viewed as the narrative of heroine Charity Royall's illicit affair, pregnancy, and subsequent marriage, Edith Wharton's Summer presents a wide range of homosocial encounters--between Charity and her North Dormer peers (some of whom appear in the novel and some of whom are only named), between Charity and women glimpsed in mirrors and on streets, and between Charity and women viewed as others to the norms of late-nineteenth-century heteromaternal femininity--spinsters, prostitutes, female professionals, and differently abled women (Kent 16). (1) Feminist scholarship on the novel has rotated around the question of Charity's illicit affair with visiting architect Lucius Harney, her pregnancy, and her subsequent marriage to her guardian, Lawyer Royall, seen on the one hand as quasi-incestuous and sick (Amnions 133) and, on the other hand, as an act of generosity that restores Charity's virtue. (2) More recently, critics have turned their attention to Wharton's engagement with the racial thinking of the period, as witnessed through the novel's representations of the ostensibly dysgenic Mountain community, its depiction of the possibilities of women's reproductive choice, and Charity's ultimate decision to keep Harney's child, which Jennie A. Kassanoff reads as Wharton's effort to perpetuate Harney's patrician blood through the vessel of Charity's working-class body (145-49). (3) Despite the richness of these readings, however, both traditional feminist and contemporary racialized readings have tended to sidestep Charity's relations with women, as well as the burgeoning rural middle class of which she is a part, viewing her quest for place in primarily heterosocial and non-class-specific terms. On first glance, Charity's identity seems almost completely determined by her relations with men: Separated from her birth mother as a child and brought down from the Mountain by Lawyer Royall to the bleak New England town of North Dormer, she becomes pregnant with Harney's child during their summer affair but knows that marriage to him is impossible. After a brief return to the Mountain, where she learns that her mother is dead, she accepts a marriage proposal from Royall and returns to North Dormer to embark on an apparently bleak future. This essay recasts Charity's narrative of limited mobility in light of her conflicts with women, showing how her efforts to appropriate a middle-class identity through consumer culture implicate her in a series of antagonistic homosocial relationships. Charity's interactions with these female others are dominated by emotions of envy, irritation, and frustration, feelings that recent scholarship on affect in nineteenth-century literature has identified as characteristic of middle-class identify formation. As Stephanie Foote has argued, class and gender are affective positions, deeply structural while also deeply personal (66). (4) Because Summer typically communicates women's anxieties over class and status through bodily reactions rather than open verbal expression, critics have yet to pay sufficient attention to the novel's depiction of tensions among women of different class positions. (5) Reading for affect demonstrates how the struggles of class identity formation--especially for Charity, a lower-middle-class subject surrounded by characters at almost every level on the class spectrum--register in bodily and emotional terms, forming a part of the novel's depiction of everyday life of which characters, and even their creator, may be unconscious. (6) Examining both inter- and intraclass homosocial tensions illuminates the effects of the unequal distribution of cultural and economic capital on working-class and middle-class subjects, who are typically held responsible for the hostile feelings they generate. (7) Summer witnesses Charity's envious negotiation for place on a ladder of feminine status through her consumer practices; similarly, it demonstrates the implication of other women--particularly marginalized women of the working and lower-middle classes--in the new economies of desire that early-twentieth-century consumer culture made palpable. …

The Body Politic and Its Parts in El médico de su honra

This article examines how the representation of threats to and damage inflicted upon the physical body in Calderón de la Barca's El médico de su honra correlate with the text's problematic depiction and incisive critique of Spain's political body. It explores the modes in which homosocial relations determine the infliction of violence on those excluded from the bonds between noblemen. The play demonstrates how male and female physical bodies—seen in different stages of injury—have clear ties with the health of the body-state. There is a critique of the self-interested and politically driven means by which the aristocratic male characters, namely, Pedro, Enrique, and Gutierre, negotiate their own relationships and form the basis of the political body. These characters attempt to further establish and solidify their status and protect their interests, despite the cost to themselves and other subjects, that is, the body politic's "parts," and as a result, to the well-being of the kingdom as a whole. Through the various damaged bodies, El médico reveals a connection between its characters' physical health and the pervasive sickness of the nation controlled by some problematic parts. And it suggests that the relations between and among noblemen are at the heart of the sociopolitical ills.

Three Lean Cats in a Hall of Mirrors: James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver on Race and Masculinity

During the 1950s and 1960s, James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, and Eldridge Cleaver initiated a literary discussion on race and masculinity that explored the undercurrents of conflict and power traversing the Beat, Civil Rights, and Black Power movements of the post-World War II era. This conversation was prescient, if sometimes also awkward and troubling, in its exploration of the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in U.S. society. Baldwin's Another Country and The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy, Mailer's The White Negro, and Cleaver's Soul on Ice attempt to renegotiate homosocial relations between black men and white men during the post-World War II era in the hopes of moving closer to some form of racial reconciliation.

Humoristiske bøsserier og latterens perversiteter - tilblivelse af heteroseksuel maskulinitet i skolelivet på automekanikeruddannelsen

Frisky Faggoting and the Perversity of Laughter - the Production of Heterosexual Masculinity in the School life at a Car mechanic programme.Humour is conceptualized as a subjectification in the formation of masculinity and the processes of inclusion and exclusion. The article produces knowledge about the creation of hierarchy among boys in a homosocial educational context. Inspired by British educational and youth studies and Danish poststructuralist informed empirical gender studies a theoretical perspective is established on intersections between masculinity and locally composed categories in school life. The point of empirical departure is homosocial relations among boys and between boys and teachers where a dynamic hierarchy of masculinities are produced. The article shows a dominant masculinity revolving around humour and laughter, use of sexual language, ‘disgusting' practices and desires directed at imaginary female bodies. Humour enables a play with homoerotic relations and non-heterosexual desires, but at the same time a heterosexual masculinity is valued, which eliminates and subordinates the perversions of laughter and the frisky faggoting among the boys at the Car mechanic programme.

“Prey to some cureless disquiet”: Polidori’s Queer Vampyre at the Margins of Romanticism

Dr. John Polidori’s appropriative rewriting of Lord Byron’s unfinished “Fragment” as The Vampyre has long been of interest to the field of Gothic studies for its representation of the first coherent vampire in English Literature. In recent years, the inscription of sexual rhetoric in both texts has attracted further critical attention. Featuring men who traverse the explosively tense line between compulsory homosocial relations and the culturally prohibited horrors of homoerotic desire, these texts can certainly be read in the light of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s identification of the homophobic “paranoid gothic.” However, considered together, The Vampyre and the “Fragment” reveal more than anxieties about male bonding. In this essay, I explore the nexus of concerns raised by The Vampyre, its relation to the “Fragment,” and the perceived relationship between Polidori and Byron with the aim of working towards a repositioning of these marginal Gothic works as indeed both disquieting and deeply queer. The “Fragment” represents Byron’s contribution to the now mythical “ghost story competition” at Villa Diodati in 1816 which also inspired the writing of Frankenstein. The man Mary Shelley dubbed “Poor Polidori” stands on the margins of this famous gathering, but he and his story remain a haunting presence in more than one respect. Focussing upon the way in which modern sexual discourse has helped make the author into an object of sexual interest, I propose that the production of Polidori as a strange, sexually suspect figure strikingly illustrates how the Gothic rhetoric of the sexual “unspeakable” can reverberate out from the text and into our thinking about the author.

Homosocial Relations, Masculine Embodiment, and Imperialism in Stevenson's The Ebb-Tide

Homosocial Relations, Masculine Embodiment, and Imperialism in Stevenson's The Ebb-Tide Guy Davidson University of Wollongong, Australia ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON'S novella The Ebb-Tide (1894) presents perhaps the most intensively elaborated and intensely anxious treatment of masculine identity and relations between men in an oeuvre enduringly preoccupied with these interimplicated issues. In its representations of fractured masculine subjectivities and a homosociality fraught with compounded aggressive and libidinal impulses, Stevenson's work may be located within a wide range of fictions that dramatize the late nineteenth-century "crisis" within masculinity.1 More specifically, in The Ebb-Tide, which is set in the colonized Pacific, an account of the instabilities of conventional masculinity overlaps with an account of the instabilities of the imperialist project. In this essay, I suggest The Ebb-Tide's representation of masculine crisis might be understood as a manifestation of what Christopher Lane has named "colonial jouissance." In his wide-ranging study of British colonialist literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Lane points to the frequent invocation of forces, located both outside and within the imperialist masculine subject, which simultaneously drive and threaten to dissipate the "labor and power" essential to the imperialist project: "an unremitting dread of external defiance and internal unmaking propelled Britain's drive for global mastery," Lane contends .2 The experience of cultural and environmental alterity made dangerously evident the fragility of a masculine subjectivity more readily naturalized at home, so that the colonial subject "was obliged... to compete with a correponding impulse to self-dispossession whenever he bid for a country's possession."3 In The Ebb-Tide, I suggest, the Pacific setting enables extreme modes of "internal unmaking." The threat of self-dissolution that always shadowed the "aggressive self-mastery" 123 ELT 47 : 2 2004 of Victorian bourgeois masculinity is realized in the perverse energies of homoeroticism, hysteria, and masochism, and potently conveyed through persistent imagery of somatic trauma and dysfunction—of male bodies being overwhelmed by involuntary impulses.4 Along with this representation of failed self-discipline, a certain "external defiance" carried in the novella's representation of racial and classed differences between the male characters contributes to a critical perspective on imperialism and the forms of masculinity it elicited. However, while the novel both explicitly and inadvertently undermines certain orthodoxies and hierarchies integral to the imperialist project, it also often relies to a significant degree on these same structures in order to tell its story, suggesting a complex range of investments and disinvestments in imperialist ideology on Stevenson's part. ♦ ♦ ♦ The Ebb-Tide is a bleak tale featuring disease, social degradation, psychic turmoil, and religious fanaticism, which Stevenson invariably referred to in his correspondence using adjectives such as "grim," "grimy" and "gloomy," and which he compared to the work of Zola.5 And certainly its thoroughgoing pessimism, and its characters' morally shabby treatment of one another, suggest an affinity with metropolitan naturalism—an importation, as critics have suggested, of the perspectives of naturalism into the adventure novel. But in its emphatic concern with the futility of "human" existence, the novella also discloses an affinity with the existentialism which was subsequently to form an important thematic strand within literary modernism. As such, The Ebb-Tide, the last of Stevenson's works to be published during his lifetime , marks the culmination of a gradual shift in Stevenson's career away from exuberant literary romance—exemplifed by works such as Treasure Island (1883) and The Black Arrow (1888)—to a disaffected, distinctively modern mode of writing, a shift which has been generally seen as prompted by his experience of the depredations of colonialism in the Pacific, where Stevenson was based for the last six years of his life.6 For instance, Patrick Brantlinger writes that Stevenson's major Pacific fictions—the tale "The Beach of Falesá" (1893), as well as The Ebb-Tide—are "accounts of the contemporary results of empire quite at odds with Stevenson's romances of historical adventure," "as skeptical about the influence of white civilization on the primitive societies as anything Conrad wrote," and that they "read like botched romances in which adventure turns sour or squalid, undermined by moral frailty." 124 DAVIDSON : STEVENSON...

An Unbecoming Lady of the Camellias: Luiza's Desire for Recognition in O Primo Bazilio

This article both explores the intertextual link between Eça de Queiroz's O PrimoBazilio and Alexandre Dumas's La Dame aux Camélias, and discusses the homosocialrelationship between the female protagonists of the former novel, venturing tosuggest that Luiza yearns for a recognition that can only be granted through herconsumption by the novel's other characters. Through close readings of Eça's text,the article argues that every person with whom Luiza interacts seeks to render herthe mirror image of themselves, something which serves as a paradigm for thecomplex link between recognition and consumption.Este artigo explora a ligação intertextual entre O Primo Bazílio, de Eça de Queirós e ADama das Camélias, de Alexandre Dumas e discute a relação homosocial existenteentre as protagonistas femininas de O Primo Bazilio, aventurando-se a sugerir queLuiza anseia por um reconhecimento à la Barthes que, na verdade, só obtém ao serdevorada pelas outras personagens do romance. Através de leituras detalhadas dotexto queirosiano, este artigo defende que todas as personagens com quem Luiza serelaciona procuram torná-la a imagem-reflexo deles próprios, algo que serve deparadigma para a complexa ligação entre reconhecimento barthesiano e anulação.Este artículo explora el enlace intertextual entre O Primo Bazilio de Eça de Queiroz yLa Dame aux Camélias de Alexandre Dumas. En él también se discute la relaciónhomosocial entre las protagonistas de la novela de Eça, proponiendo así, que Luizadesea profundamente el reconocimiento que sólo puede garantizársele mediante suliteral conversión en el Otro. A través de una cuidadosa lectura del texto de Eça, esteartículo afirma que toda persona que interactúa con Luiza termina transformándolaen su propio reflejo, lo que sirve como paradigma para articular la complejarelación entre los conceptos de reconocimiento y consumo.

Whom do you fight?

Whom do you fight?

Back Door Sex: Renaissance Gynosodomy, Aretino, and the Exotic

Few fans of the defunct rock group The Doors are liable to link the song "Back Door Man" with an early modern euphemism for anal sex. Yet the modern rock song—its subject illicit, non-monogamous, "straight" sex—occupies a continuum traceable to seventeenth-century England, when shifting ideologies gave rise to a secular and therefore increasingly sexual form of popular entertainment in the commercial theaters. 1 That the back door idiom—though still connotive of transgression—has lost its original anatomical referent should not surprise us, given the rampant homophobia of postwar America and its habit of associating anal eroticism with gay sex. Recent scholarship, however, has questioned the utility of the hetero/homo classification system in comprehending the more fluid erotic economies of early modern English culture, particularly as manifested by the transvestite stage, that matrix of sexual indeterminacy. 2 Moreover, the back door idiom in Renaissance drama does not inevitably invoke male-male sex; very frequently, in fact, it refers to male-female sex. And while Queer theory has shed much light on the various eroticisms of the stage, these gynosodomitical moments remain as yet undertheorized—a footnote in the history of male homoerotic and homosocial relations. 3

CASTLE, COFFIN, STOMACH: DRACULA AND THE BANALITY OF THE OCCULT

Fools, Fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?— Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)Art is completion; not merely a history of endeavour.— Stoker, Personal Reminiscences (1906)“HE CAN, WHEN ONCE HE FIND HIS WAY,” says Van Helsing of Dracula, “come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound” (211; ch. 18). Recent criticism has claimed similar powers for Stoker’s text, and its relationship to late-Victorian social formations. A wide territory has been staked out. Moving beyond earlier universalizing Freudian readings, Carol Senf sees the anxiety the novel expresses about gender roles as indicative of Stoker’s difficulty in accepting the rise of the New Woman. Talia Schaffer and Christopher Craft read the homosocial relations in the novel in the light of sexological discourses of inversion and the emergence of the homosexual as a “type of life” (Foucault 43); Stephen Arata, noting Stoker’s frequent use of racial metaphors, has seen the text as expressive of a “reverse colonization” in which “the spectacle of the primitive and the atavistic” (“Occidental Tourist” 624) is brought back to a town house near Piccadilly Circus, the hub of the empire.

Courtship, Marriage Vows, and Political Metaphor in Vanbrugh’s The Relapse and The Provoked Wife

Courtship, Marriage Vows,and Political Metaphor in Vanbrugh's TheRelapse and TheProvokedWife JEMCS 1.2 (Fall/Winter 2001) Carlos J. G6mez playwrights' viewsonmarriage provide, as Robert D. Hume has noted, "an importantkey to the shifting ideological stances"oftheperiod ("Marital Discord" 248).Although tragedy is potentially a moreliteralvehicleforpoliticaldebate on the public sphere,comic themesare metaphorsfor,and consequencesof,social and politicalchanges.Actually, many charactersdefine theirdomestic, private situationswithimages ofpoliticalauthority, sovereignty included. For instance, in Etherege's She WouldifShe Could(1668),Arianaand Gatty, two unmarried girls, agreeto"become absolutetyrants,* shouldtheir gallants behave"likelawlesssubjects"(I.ii.177-81).Iftheir gender inversion ofthemale/sovereign analogyis a fantasy derived from thelanguagesofpremarital courtship and precieusegallantry,1 in thesame playSir Oliver'slikening his wifeto an usurperof his "empire"(II.ii.176-79) reveals his assimilation of both patriarchal and patriarchalist discourses - thesubordination of womentomenand monarchic powerbeinganalogoustofamilial authorityrespectively(see, forexample, McKeon). Gender relations areoften defined through political metaphor. TheLadies Dictionary (1694) states that "a BeautifulWoman fixesher unshakenEmpirein the heartsofherAdmirers" (59), but,as MaryAstellwarnsherfemalereaderin 1700, a man "maycall himself herSlave a fewdays,butitis onlyinordertomakeher his all therestofhis Life." Actually, those"whomaketheIdols, are thegreater Deities"(44-45). Mypurposeis to examinethegenderedpowerrelationsof theprivatesphere(courtship and marriage) inVanbrugh'stwo majorplays,and theuse ofpoliticalanalogiesto definethem. Vanbrugh's realistic portrayal ofpost-Revolutionary timesreveals 94 TheJournal forEarlyModern Cultural Studies his concernforwomen'slot. TheRelapse (Nov.1696) and The Provoked Wife (April1697)belongtoa decade inwhichprivate/ public-sphere tropesare particularly frequent and underscore the crisis ofpatriarchalist notionsofthe polity,a crisisthat coexistswiththeratification ofpatriarchy inthemaritalsphere and thereformulation ofwomen'sprimarily moralassignment; thatis, the appearance ofa socializingmatriarchy.2 Conduct bookslikeRichard Allestree's influential TheLadiesCalling (1673) could ask women to "draw offmen's eyes" fromsin and simultaneously insistthatGodhas "determined subjection tobe women'slot."3 In myopinion, Vanbrugh's playsunderline this duplicity. Thefollowing sequenceofeventsdefines women'sfate in his plots.Once a womanenterstheprivate worldofhernew home, subjection replaces the fantasies nourished during courtship. Still,although hersexualpower overherformer suitor disappearsaftera while,thelibertines outtherein thepublic, social realmstilloffer herimagesofpowerthatarea reversal of her domesticsituation.Ifthewifedoes not enterthis sexual market, thenhervirtue willbe granted persuasivepowersmuch moretranscendentthan her former sexual appeal: both the privateand thepublicspheresmaybenefit from herinfluence, sincebothbad husbandsandlibertines maybe reformed. Cibber hadendorsed thispoint, butVanbrugh's is thatsuchmatriarchal powersare eventuallysterile,since post-Revolutionary rakes perpetuate oldstandardsoflibertinism. The reversal of power roles inherentlyassociated with marriageis impliedin many early Restorationcomedies. A playwright thatdenouncesitveryexplicitly is ThomasDurfey, whose Madam Fickle,in the play ofthat name (1676), sees through theartificial discourseofhersuitors.Bellamore, who uses "a whining method," evenrevealsthegamehe is at: "What womanbutyoudurstprovoke a loverthus?Nay,one thatis to marry you,and consequently to have powerto tyrannize over you"(II.ii.71;95-97).Vanbrugh provides hisownexampleinThe Relapse. Whentheinexperienced Hoyden, whois familiar only withparentalauthority, is asked to giveher "consent,"she wonderswhyshe is notexpectedtoobeyhersuitor,and Young Fashionhas toexplaintoherprecisely whatAstell warnscourted womenabout: "That'swhenwe are married;tillthen,I am to obey you."4The temporariness ofmale subjectionguarantees patriarchal order, sinceindulgence leads tousurpation.Such is Manly'sopinioninCibber'sTheProvoked Husband(1728),based on Vanbrugh'sunfinished A Journey toLondon:LordTownly "shouldhavetakenup thehusband"(1.327-30), buthe has kept Gomez 95 on acting the loverand treatinghis wifeas an idolized mistress. Ifmost Restorationheroines feartheirworshippinggallants may turn into brutes, women characters of the 1690s in particular need not be warned against the fictionality offemale power. As Durfey'sBerenice puts it afterabusing her suitor, "[t]hetimeof Wooing is a Woman's own,/ But when she's Married once, her time is gone" (IILi, 28). In George Granville's The She-Gallants (Dec. 1695?), Constantia, conscious of "what Dissemblers are Men" (I, 3), disguises herself as her own brother because by venturing into her gallant's company in male attire, by establishing homosocial relations,5 she will have "many opportunitiestopryintohis mostsecretaffections" (1,3). Another cross-dresserwho believes in theopportunitiesprovidedbymale partnership is the untamed Charlotte in She Venturesand He Wins(1695), by"Ariadne." A loverwill"flatter and deceive"without showing "his paw till he has got his preyfast in his clutches." The couple's first meetingas man and woman is on theirweddingday , her only"day ofpower"because she supposes the "devout" lover will soon claim the "lawfulauthority"of his new status: "beingthe last that I must reign,you must expect me to be very tyrannical"(Li, 109; III.v, 133). Many other female characters, whetherseriouslyornot,assume such temporary powerrelations based on absolute authority;forinstance...

Tenderness: A Mediator of Identity and Gender Construction in Politics

Tenderness: A Mediator of Identity and Gender Construction in Politics Ileana Rodríguez (bio) The main purpose of my paper is to explain how romantic love between men and women is used to signal tensions and negotiation between heterosexual couples. Performance theories refer to compulsive heterosexuality encoded in nineteenth-century bourgeois epistemologies of man as tenderness. I intend to use the concepts of love and tenderness to show how and why radical guerrilla discourses of the twentieth century have defined love for the fatherland as a homosocial relationship among guerrilla men. 1 Considering how this is related to performance will bring us back to the identity construction of gender in politics; at the moment, identities are defined as multipositional in order to destabilize categories and to dissolve the metaphysics of substance. In this, I will also discuss tenderness as travesty. Any discussion about tenderness could begin with an analysis of the conditions of discourse production, introducing notions of context and contextuality within the productive activities of what Gayatri Spivak calls “worldlings” (262) and Sylvia Wynter, “languaging” (“1942” 7). We all know, after Foucault, that discursive production has been transferred from the warehouse of epistemology to that of politics, and that discourses are not solely linguistic practices—they exist in the world [End Page 240] as one of the many pragmatics of the polis, in the form of policies, politics, and power. Discussions about nineteenth-century bourgeois romantic love and tenderness as culture are very different from more contemporary discussions about love as politics, revolution, and misogyny. Writing about love and tenderness during revolutionary periods and inside the perimeters of the revolutionary states is a state matter; and gender troubles. Although women’s rights have always been constituted as nation’s rights and feminism has always been a double jeopardy—hermeneutically and politically, a theoretical condition at the service of the state (or proscribed)—in revolutionary states maleness itself, the eponymous figure of male leadership, is made to preside over the fullness of the space. Pictures of leaders hang on the walls of homes and sometimes at the centers of living rooms. Their images are constituted as authorities ruling over public and private as lovers, fathers, leaders, and even movie stars. The figure of Che Guevara, for instance, has occupied that place; he has become a lay saint, an auratic man presiding over private and public spheres, in homes, buses, and buildings. 2 In Women, Guerrillas, and Love, I disengage spheres and collapse categories to show how heterosexual love is used as a pretext or metaphor for homosocial love. By making a distinction between the erotic and the patriotic, the heterosexual from homosexual affect, and by merging borders and margins such as ethnicities, gender, and sexualities with symbols that represent the collectivity, I will show how socialism united homosocial affect and political narratives of representation with bureaucracies. It is within this working hypothesis that I read the testimonials of guerrilla fighters, such as Omar Cabezas and Che Guevara, and compare them to women’s narratives, where women did not represent loved ones but dead ones—women as corpses. I argue that the rigidity of the body that might constitute the tumescence of the sexual organs during the kind of compulsory heterosexual intercourse, which symbolizes the masculine act of creating the radical nation-state, in women just represents the death and stiffness of that project. To collapse the representations of women with those of the collectivity—which is often referred to as “the people,” “the masses,” “the social classes,” “the political base,” or “the troops”—is to speak about the small voices of history, about the non-, about the counter-(practices), [End Page 241] and about the hetero-(geneous). My aim is to demonstrate that a position against women is antidemocratic. How can a political party promise to create an egalitarian society when its social policies are exclusionary? These are very simple questions, yet they remain unresolved. Tenderness as Travesty In her studies of Caribbean culture, more specifically, in her work on C. L. R. James and the events of 1492 as a discovery, Sylvia Wynter works with two epistemological spheres. One is an open, multiconceptual, nondogmatic cultural framework, where subjects are...