straight men trying to make Serious war dramas and accidentally making incredibly tender homoerotic cinema is the funniest thing
In his essay, âMasculinity as Spectacle,â Steve Neale seeks to extend Laura Mulveyâs work on the male gaze and to challenge her assertion that the male or male-identified spectator can never look upon the male body as an erotic object. To challenge Mulveyâs assertion, Neale identifies the mechanisms mainstream Hollywood cinema uses to represent the male body as erotic. One way of doing this, Neale argues, is by making the male body the target of violence. In the war film, a soldier can hold his buddy â as long as his buddy is dying on the battlefield. In the western, Butch Cassidy can wash the Sundance Kidâs naked flesh â as long as it is wounded. In the boxing film, a trainer can rub the well-developed torso and sinewy back of his protege â as long as it is bruised. In the crime film, a mob lieutenant can embrace his boss like a lover â as long as he is riddled with bullets. Violence makes the homoeroticism of many âmaleâ genres invisible; it is a structural mechanism of plausible deniability.
âBiological essentialist gender determinismâ is the view shared between many TERFs and mainstream cisnormativists:Â âGendered social roles are determined by a biological essence which is shared between members of the same gender.â This essence tends to be related to assumed reproductive capability at birth, such as genitals or chromosomes.
âPsychological/spiritual essentialist gender determinismâ are the related ideas that many TERFs and truscum share: âGendered social roles are determined by a spiritual or psychological essence which is shared between members of the same gender.â On one hand TERFs might talk about âmale socializationâ while truscum tend to talk about gender dysphoria as their gender essence which proves the rightness of their role.
âSocial performative gender constructivismâ is a set of ideas that oppose forms of gender determinism by stating that instead âGendered social roles are a set of performances which construct systems of genderâ. Many strict social performative gender constructivists, like Natalie Wynn of Contrapoints, might even say that their transition in presentation is a transition between genders and not simply a change in the way society views them.
âSocial performative gender nihilismâ is a response to some of the shortcomings of gender constructivism (for instance, that it grants legitimacy to harmful social pressures around gender performance) and which recognizes the gender determinist project as one that seeks to use gender role to colonize reproductive power. Gender nihilists instead seek to use gender performance to make gender and thus reproductive power illegible and opaque so as to undermine this system of control. Gender nihilists recognize the socially constructed reality of gender but that this reality is a battleground rather than a unchangeable backdrop to every gender performance.
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