Th
Notice that the Western interviewer talks of the third gender identity as non-heterosexual orientation, clearly meaning that heterosexuality equals the male gender or manhood.
The Hindu interviewee also sees, on his part, 'gay' to be the 'third gender' or 'tritiya prakriti' who are defined in medieval and modern India as effeminate/ passive males (and not men who like men).
Jan 23, 2009
Jan 19, 2009
Sexual activity is a key path to masculine status,
This version was published on April 1, 2008Men and Masculinities, Vol. 10, No. 3, 339-359 (2008)DOI: 10.1177/1097184X06287761
Men, Sex, and Homosociality
How Bonds between Men Shape Their Sexual Relations with WomenMichael Flood
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University
Male-male social bonds have a powerful influence on the sexual relations of some young heterosexual men. Qualitative analysis among young men aged eighteen to twenty-six in Canberra, Australia, documents the homosocial organization of men's heterosexual relations. Homosociality organizes men's sociosexual relations in at least four ways. For some of these young men, male-male friendships take priority over male-female relations, and platonicfriendships with women are dangerously feminizing. Sexual activity is a key path to masculine status, and other men are the audience, always imagined and sometimes real, for one's sexual activities. Heterosexual sex itself can be the medium through which male bonding is enacted. Last, men's sexual storytelling is shaped by homosocial masculine cultures. While these patterns were evident particularly among young men in the highly homosocial culture of a military academy, their presence also among other groups suggests the wider influence of homosociality on men'ssexual and social relations.
Men, Sex, and Homosociality
How Bonds between Men Shape Their Sexual Relations with WomenMichael Flood
Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, La Trobe University
Male-male social bonds have a powerful influence on the sexual relations of some young heterosexual men. Qualitative analysis among young men aged eighteen to twenty-six in Canberra, Australia, documents the homosocial organization of men's heterosexual relations. Homosociality organizes men's sociosexual relations in at least four ways. For some of these young men, male-male friendships take priority over male-female relations, and platonicfriendships with women are dangerously feminizing. Sexual activity is a key path to masculine status, and other men are the audience, always imagined and sometimes real, for one's sexual activities. Heterosexual sex itself can be the medium through which male bonding is enacted. Last, men's sexual storytelling is shaped by homosocial masculine cultures. While these patterns were evident particularly among young men in the highly homosocial culture of a military academy, their presence also among other groups suggests the wider influence of homosociality on men'ssexual and social relations.
Jan 18, 2009
What it Means to be Straight
By Crispin Sartwell
Like a lot of the straight guys I know, I am a homophobe.
I had that realization last week when a guy named Jake gave a presentation to a meeting I was in. I disliked him on sight, though he seemed perfectly nice. And I had the realization that I thought he was defectively gendered. He didn't walk right; he didn't sit right; he didn't talk right.
I am not a fan of Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms. I don't reject homosexuality on Biblical or in fact any other grounds. But I have a visceral reaction of hostility to men I perceive as gay.
Homosexuality seems like a performance to me, whereas heterosexual masculinity seems natural.
Now sometimes I suppose it's fair to say that homosexuality really *is* a performance. There's no doubt that Greenwich Village drag queens are at play in the fields of gender; that they're very purposefully trying to compromise the categories of male and female. And perhaps Jake, who seemed very androgynous (though in fact I don't know his sexual orientation) was consciously messing around with gender too.
But the funny thing is, heterosexual masculinity is also a performance. My ways of walking and talking and dressing and sitting were things I actually remember choosing and learning in my adolescence. At the time when my own sexual identity was fluid, I consciously chose and performed heterosexuality.
RuPaul is a performer of gender. But you know what? So is, let us say, Bruce Springsteen. The "plain" clothes (jeans and a white shirt) the studiously unkempt hair, the stage swagger: these are public performances of heterosexuality, no more "true" or "natural" than RuPaul's. In fact, the staging of heterosexual masculinity is extremely elaborate and takes a long time to learn. It is extremely elaborate performance that is supposed to be effortlessly natural.
One is simply supposed to be heterosexual and masculine, effortlessly, by nature. But the repertoire of gestures and inflections that mark one as masculine are things that must be learned. Male effeminacy is threatening because it indicates that masculinity is optional, that it is a public performance.
The attack on homosexuality has often taken the form of saying that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is unnatural. Heterosexuality is what mammals do in order to reproduce; homosexuality is just a distortion or a pathological state of the reproductive impulse. But in fact sexuality has many functions in mammalian life, including various kinds of partnership and bonding.
As a philosopher, I have long argued that there is absolutely no defensible distinction between the natural and the artificial. Everything human beings do is perfectly natural: we can no more violate the laws of nature than can a squirrel. Our minds are natural objects. And, by the way, everything we do is also artificial, in the sense that it is something human beings do.
Springsteen's outfits are no less artificial than RuPaul's: Springsteen also communicates an identity by his manner of dress. I say this as seriously as possible: natural and artificial are the same.
And that's how I try to reason myself out of homophobia. That's how I stopped hating Jake. But it's a constant task, a constant discipline, because homophobia is built into the structure of heterosexual masculinity.
___
Crispin Sartwell is chair of humanities at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Like a lot of the straight guys I know, I am a homophobe.
I had that realization last week when a guy named Jake gave a presentation to a meeting I was in. I disliked him on sight, though he seemed perfectly nice. And I had the realization that I thought he was defectively gendered. He didn't walk right; he didn't sit right; he didn't talk right.
I am not a fan of Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms. I don't reject homosexuality on Biblical or in fact any other grounds. But I have a visceral reaction of hostility to men I perceive as gay.
Homosexuality seems like a performance to me, whereas heterosexual masculinity seems natural.
Now sometimes I suppose it's fair to say that homosexuality really *is* a performance. There's no doubt that Greenwich Village drag queens are at play in the fields of gender; that they're very purposefully trying to compromise the categories of male and female. And perhaps Jake, who seemed very androgynous (though in fact I don't know his sexual orientation) was consciously messing around with gender too.
But the funny thing is, heterosexual masculinity is also a performance. My ways of walking and talking and dressing and sitting were things I actually remember choosing and learning in my adolescence. At the time when my own sexual identity was fluid, I consciously chose and performed heterosexuality.
RuPaul is a performer of gender. But you know what? So is, let us say, Bruce Springsteen. The "plain" clothes (jeans and a white shirt) the studiously unkempt hair, the stage swagger: these are public performances of heterosexuality, no more "true" or "natural" than RuPaul's. In fact, the staging of heterosexual masculinity is extremely elaborate and takes a long time to learn. It is extremely elaborate performance that is supposed to be effortlessly natural.
One is simply supposed to be heterosexual and masculine, effortlessly, by nature. But the repertoire of gestures and inflections that mark one as masculine are things that must be learned. Male effeminacy is threatening because it indicates that masculinity is optional, that it is a public performance.
The attack on homosexuality has often taken the form of saying that heterosexuality is natural and homosexuality is unnatural. Heterosexuality is what mammals do in order to reproduce; homosexuality is just a distortion or a pathological state of the reproductive impulse. But in fact sexuality has many functions in mammalian life, including various kinds of partnership and bonding.
As a philosopher, I have long argued that there is absolutely no defensible distinction between the natural and the artificial. Everything human beings do is perfectly natural: we can no more violate the laws of nature than can a squirrel. Our minds are natural objects. And, by the way, everything we do is also artificial, in the sense that it is something human beings do.
Springsteen's outfits are no less artificial than RuPaul's: Springsteen also communicates an identity by his manner of dress. I say this as seriously as possible: natural and artificial are the same.
And that's how I try to reason myself out of homophobia. That's how I stopped hating Jake. But it's a constant task, a constant discipline, because homophobia is built into the structure of heterosexual masculinity.
___
Crispin Sartwell is chair of humanities at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Jan 16, 2009
The third gender in twentieth-century America
Journal of Social History, Winter, 1996 by Randolph Trumbach
George Chauncey's brilliant and often persuasive study of male homosexual relations in early twentieth-century New York was published two years ago on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riot that inaugurated the recent gay liberation movement. The world that he describes was the product of a major shift in western sexual behavior that had begun two hundred years before, around 1700. And his book is in dialogue with the scholars who over the past twenty-five years have tried to analyze that shift. The nature of the problem to be discussed can be indicated by asking whether homosexuality and heterosexuality are biological categories that divide the world into a majority and a minority that can be found in all times and places. To such a question most western people today would reply yes. And while they would probably wonder why a minority should be homosexual, they would simply accept without question that most people are heterosexual. Since the 1970s, however, the work of some historians and sociologists has radically challenged these presumptions. Mary McIntosh in a classic article in 1968 began the discussion by proposing that homosexuality in modern society was a deviant role into which some men were socialized beginning around 1700. Nine years later in 1977 Jeffrey Weeks and myself, under McIntosh's influence but independently of each other, rephrased McIntosh's proposal. Weeks maintained that the modern homosexual role emerged in the late nineteenth century when the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented.(1)..... click here to read more.
George Chauncey's brilliant and often persuasive study of male homosexual relations in early twentieth-century New York was published two years ago on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riot that inaugurated the recent gay liberation movement. The world that he describes was the product of a major shift in western sexual behavior that had begun two hundred years before, around 1700. And his book is in dialogue with the scholars who over the past twenty-five years have tried to analyze that shift. The nature of the problem to be discussed can be indicated by asking whether homosexuality and heterosexuality are biological categories that divide the world into a majority and a minority that can be found in all times and places. To such a question most western people today would reply yes. And while they would probably wonder why a minority should be homosexual, they would simply accept without question that most people are heterosexual. Since the 1970s, however, the work of some historians and sociologists has radically challenged these presumptions. Mary McIntosh in a classic article in 1968 began the discussion by proposing that homosexuality in modern society was a deviant role into which some men were socialized beginning around 1700. Nine years later in 1977 Jeffrey Weeks and myself, under McIntosh's influence but independently of each other, rephrased McIntosh's proposal. Weeks maintained that the modern homosexual role emerged in the late nineteenth century when the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality were invented.(1)..... click here to read more.
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