Gender
Studies: Male
Session Coordinator: Steve Davis
Dept. of English,
Indiana
University
Ballantine Hall
1020 East Kirkwood Avenue
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103
stevdavi@indiana.edu
“The Daily Male”: Vesta Tilley and
the Performance of Masculinity
on the Victorian Music-Hall Stage”
Throughout the late-nineteenth century and into the early
twentieth century Vesta Tilley performed on the
music-hall stage as Algy: the Piccadilly Johnny,
Burlington Bertie, the Seaside Sultan, and other men. Her cross-dressing
performances entertained and inspired audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. In this presentation, I will discuss how
Tilley’s performances of masculinity on the music hall stage and her
performances of femininity off the stage participate in what Judith Halberstam terms “female
masculinity” and the overall construction of Victorian masculinity.
Specifically I will discuss how Tilley’s performances enact a particular
version of masculinity that resonates with existing Victorian notions of
lower-middle-class masculinity—small stature or effeminacy for example—and how
her performances also serve as a challenge to those notions of class based
masculinity. Tilley’s slight stature and her ability to not only mimic but
master Victorian notions of masculinity that are centered on the body gives the
many clerks, shop assistants, and other lower-middle-class men in the audience
an idol of their very own to emulate. Such men can conclude that masculinity
does not mean one must be muscular. Further, Tilley’s performances, as
represented in the pages of Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, set a new standard for male
beauty and desirability. Her male characters engage in a range of behaviors
that represent a challenge to Victorian mores, i.e., excessive drinking, lack
of discipline, love of dress, disdain of marriage, and disregard for social
hierarchies, etc. Locating the rebellion of the lower middle class in the
jaunty knowingness of a crossed-dressed woman transforms what Halberstam calls “the rebellion” of the young middle-class
man into something potentially more dangerous to the Victorian heteronormative order and disruptive to notions of
masculinity, including what makes a man a man and thus desirable.
Scott Banville
Georgia Institute of Technology
scott.banville@lcc.gatech.edu
“From Swan Queen to the Swan: Crossover Beauty in Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake”
If the admittedly specialized world
of ballet has contributed any iconic figure to popular conceptions of beauty,
that figure surely is the swan queen Odette from Swan Lake. Graceful, ethereal, delicate, and loving unto
death, Odette also fits neatly into one model of the feminine ideal. What, then, does one make of the fact that
choreographer Matthew Bourne created a smash crossover hit by re-envisioning Swan Lake with a male and (in
conventional terms) extremely masculine Swan of impressive musculature and
unabashed body hair?
Some might claim that Bourne’s Swan Lake
succeeded because it made an overt appeal to the sexual preferences of gay
males in ballet audiences. But if
homophobia is one reason for many people’s dislike of ballet – and it surely is
– then Bourne’s homoerotic version presumably could only make a niche art work
even more “niche.”
In fact, the reverse proved
true. Bourne’s Swan Lake
was one of the rare ballet productions to become a popular theatrical hit. Adam Cooper, who originated the role of the
Swan, not only ignited his career in the process, but attracted enough female
as well as male admiration to prompt actress Emma Thompson’s comment that she
would like to lick his leather breeches.
What accounts for the fact that
both male and female ideals of beauty can be accommodated within the swan’s
wings? This paper proposes that the
accepting and forgiving love associated with the swan in both the traditional
and the revised Swan Lake creates a
figure in whom both men and women, people of all varieties of sexual
orientation, can find beauty.
Laura Fasick
Minnesota State University
Moorhead
lfasick@hotmail.com,
fasick@mnstate.edu
"The Enchantment of Whiteness: Male Beauty and Racial
Melancholia"
In his 1996 film The Delta, filmmaker Ira Sachs
rewrites the story of Huck Finn by modernizing his characters, and exploring
the intersections between race and sexuality in contemporary culture. When
half-black, half-Vietnamese Minh, who does not fit conventional standards of
masculine beauty, chances upon delicately-featured Lincoln in a porn arcade, he falls in love at
first sight. But, as Sachs demonstrates, what Minh falls in love with is not
just Lincoln himself, but the social implications of the young man's
"whiteness," including Lincoln's
privileged economic position, and his fetishized
place within the homoerotic imagination. This presentation explores the ways in
which the film cunningly dissects the fetishization
of young, white male beauty, and the ways in which men of color respond to this
cultural pressure by engaging in internalized racisms and by recirculating colonialist notions of white superiority. As
Lincoln and Minh begin an ultimately doomed relationship, their interactions
illustrate how homoerotic desire within a black-white paradigm follows a model
of racial melancholia. In this formation, the ego is formed and fortified by a
spectral drama, in which the subject sustains itself through the ghostly
emptiness of a lost Other. This paradigm elucidates
how racialization works within the queer
community--the creation of a dominant, standard white ideal of male beauty
depends upon an exclusion-yet retention of racialized Others. The film ultimately draws fascinating
parallels between the privileged status of whiteness in gay culture, and the
construction and dissemination of internalized racism in minority subjects.
Samuel Park
Columbia College, Chicago
“‘Bitch, I’m not one of you, and you’ve made that perfectly
clear’: Gay Asian Male (GAM) Identities/Bodies in the Gay White
Supremacist Imagination”
My paper interrogates the discursive construction of Gay Asian Male (GAM)
identities and bodies on the popular website Gay.com. This discursive
construction is interesting for several related reasons. First, GAM
bodies and identities are produced/maintained hypertextually;
as such, these bodies and identities are textualized
through digitally mediated representations and readings, thus calling attention
to the politics of
representation and to the complexities of “reading” these non-material bodies.
Second, the range of possible Asian identities is collapsed into a pan-Asian
Asian identity, a common colonizing practice that renders invisible the differences
across Asian groups and that recalls the racist assertion that “All Asians
look (and are) alike.” Third, and perhaps most importantly, the implications
of this discursive construction of GAM
identities and bodies challenge the commonly articulated communitarian rhetoric
of “gay community,” which is neither inclusive nor universal and which is
predicated on an a priori gay white male identity. My reading of the
Gay.com website focuses on the structural elements that delimit and sometimes
exemplify the discourses under scrutiny, the banner advertisements that peripherally
contribute to the discourses on the website, and the participant-produced
discourses in the personal profiles and chatroom spaces.
Reid T. Sagara
University of Washington
rsagara@u.washington.edu