I was raised in milieu where joto was synonymous with effeminacy, and masculinity with heterosexuality. Only when I entered teenage-hood, when I became increasingly aware that I was what adults referred to as curioso, did I notice that joto-ness could take many forms. And that just like heterosexual men, jotos could construct their masculinity in opposition to femininity and the specter of a fagness—failed masculinity embodied in an effeminate man. (See Dude You’re a Fag) But jotos’ relationship to masculinity is complicated by their object of desire, which is often masculine men.
In our hypersexualized culture, jotos are intimately familiar with one pernicious rule of thumb: jotos desire masculine men, not fags. This generalization pervades queer spaces as "gay culture morphs into ‘straight-acting dudes hangin’ out," and the categories "Masc only, no femmes or fatties. Straight acting, straight appearing" signal the sorts of intimacies that gay men crave. (See Introduction to Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?) Thus, it’s unsurprising that one of Pornhub’s “most viewed gay categories” is “straight guys,” and that popular gay searches include “straight first time,” “straight,” and “straight friend.” What is surprising, however, is that some popular gay searches include descriptors that are linked to the working class, including “redneck” and “cowboy.”
Moreover, data for gay searches in the United Kingdom track America’s. In the UK, popular gay searches include “straight first time,” “straight,” and “straight friend,” plus “british chav.” The latter word, "chav," connotes a person “of a low social status.” And some find the word to be “a nasty, coded attack on the working class.” One has to wonder why these erotic trends/desires persists despite recent cultural progress on gender and sexuality issues.
So while “redneck” and “cowboy” may be erotically fashionable in joto circles today, in the past other class-based, hyper-masculine imagery filled queer landscapes. In 1970s San Francisco, for example, the “clone” was front-and-center. In Gay Macho, Martin Levine, describes the gay clone as an “articulation of gay masculinity... that used sexual activity as a major vehicle of gender confirmation” and that relied on the performance of intelligible sexual scripts that openly and visibly embraced “masculine definitions of masculinity” through working class attire. (p2, 12, & 29) That helps explain, in part, why the dynamic membership of the Village People included a cowboy, a construction worker, an officer/sailor, a GI soldier, a leather-daddy/biker, and a Native American. Racial undercurrents aside, one wonders why the group didn’t include a doctor, lawyer, or businessman—I guess the imagery those professions evoke wasn’t masculine enough! Still, in parodying the hyper-masculine working-class imagery that was commonplace at gay clubs, the Village People managed to expose the fragile nature of masculinity. It seems the more aggressively or blatantly one performs masculinity, the queerer one's performance becomes. That's why the group is often regarded as campy.
South of the border, in México, jotos also have an erotic fondness for masculinities linked to working-class imagery, especially the chacal. In Cinemachismo, De La Mora describes chacales as men who have sex with men, and who are “specially linked to the working class.” (p189) Another writer characterized the chacal as a “macho, rude, tanned, beefy, man from a barrio.” In other words, a chacal is an emerging iteration of a queer masculinity that is strictly linked to class. After all, a well-off person wouldn’t live in a barrio, though he could go there for sexual escape. It remains to be seen whether the chacal will become a fixture of México’s “gay animal kingdom” that jotos use to navigate sexual landscapes. For now, the chacal resides in a sexual limbo, where he “is the image of the macho and the joto a feminine fantasy... [and] his resistance to expressing desire toward his male sexual partners reinstalls [him] in a doubtful heterosexuality.” (Modernity and the Nation in Mexican Representations of Masculinity, p136-37)
Personally, it troubles me that even when I attempt to subvert gender norms or queer spaces, I remain attracted to iterations of working class masculinities that seem inextricably linked to heterosexuality—ever hear of lumbersexuality! It seems that so long as jotos construct their masculinity, erotic practices, or desires in relation to a triad that fastens working class imagery, masculinity, and heterosexuality together, the emotional pain that some of them endured when they realized they were “different” will continue tormenting future generations of jotos. That is why jotos must be critical of the ways in which culture sutures insidious heteronormative desires in their psyches. And that jotos learn “to desire from within the heterosexual norms and gendered structures” that replicate the status quo shouldn't excuse our inaction. (Homos, p7) After all, historically, the status quo hasn’t been kind to jotos.
Showing posts with label LGBT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LGBT. Show all posts
Monday, April 23, 2018
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
"Queering" the white working class
This week we took time to read and discuss pieces about white working-class women. The rumination on gender in relation to class made me pause and consider another facet of the white working-class: its LGBT members.
Thus far this semester, discussion of how the LGBT community and the white working-class community intersect has been limited. For the most part, in class and in the media, LGBT issues are treated as unimportant (or, at best, peripheral) to the white working-class. They are seen as distractions from key economic concerns, or as wedge issues that alienate homophobic/transphobic (or, to be more charitable, religious conservative) white working-class individuals from a Democratic Party that has, at least traditionally, better represented its economic interests. Pundit Mark Lilla has called Hillary Clinton's explicit LGBT outreach a "strategic mistake." Professor Joan Williams referred to "sexualities" as an elite interest. Lilla and Williams, like many other commentators, seem to agree that to focus on LGBT issues such as gay marriage and transgender bathroom access is to engage in "identity politics" - a tenuous strategy that led to Democratic electoral defeat among white working-class voters in 2016.
I concede that perceived "niche" LGBT issues are unlikely to garner overwhelming support from working-class whites. However, as a member of the LGBT community, I am not about to ask my queer peers to take a backseat in the political dialogue. Perhaps one way working-class whites and the LGBT community can find common ground is through renewed focus on their shared economic concerns. In particular, I think it worthwhile to highlight that a large number of LGBT people are working-class (and white!) and struggling for economic survival.
Popular culture paints gays and lesbians - and even certain transgender people like Caitlyn Jenner- as well-off, financially secure, and politically powerful. Some academics and journalists have referred to this stereotype as the "myth of gay affluence;" and even well-educated Supreme Court Justices aren't immune to the stereotype. In Romer v. Evans, an important Supreme Court gay rights case, Justice Antonin Scalia commented that “[t]hose who engage in homosexual conduct tend to reside in disproportionate numbers in certain communities" (read: urban elite enclaves) and that gays and lesbians have "high disposable income." He went on to say that gays and lesbians "possess political power much greater than their numbers" and that they use this power to advocate for "not merely a grudging social toleration, but full social acceptance, of homosexuality."
The misconception that LGBT people are riding high on the hog obscures a less fabulous reality. As a 2016 piece in The Advocate succinctly states: "poverty is an LGBT issue." Due to a number of factors - including employment/housing discrimination, school harassment, lack of family support, and insufficient/inconsistent legal protection for LGBT individuals and families - LGBT men and women have lower average incomes and suffer from disproportionately high poverty rates when compared to their straight counterparts. For LGBT men and women who are employed, the jobs are often "working class." For example, gay men are more likely than straight men to be pushed into working class jobs like teaching, secretarial work, and nursing. Additionally, there is a long history of working-class lesbians and transmen engaging in traditionally "masculine" blue-collar professions like industrial/factory labor and construction work (For a seminal semi-autobiographical LGBT novel on the intersection of blue collar work and lesbians/transmen, I strongly recommend reading Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. Feinberg defined hirself as "an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist," and her work reflects all of these identities. The entire book is available free online and it's excellent!).
Thus far this semester, discussion of how the LGBT community and the white working-class community intersect has been limited. For the most part, in class and in the media, LGBT issues are treated as unimportant (or, at best, peripheral) to the white working-class. They are seen as distractions from key economic concerns, or as wedge issues that alienate homophobic/transphobic (or, to be more charitable, religious conservative) white working-class individuals from a Democratic Party that has, at least traditionally, better represented its economic interests. Pundit Mark Lilla has called Hillary Clinton's explicit LGBT outreach a "strategic mistake." Professor Joan Williams referred to "sexualities" as an elite interest. Lilla and Williams, like many other commentators, seem to agree that to focus on LGBT issues such as gay marriage and transgender bathroom access is to engage in "identity politics" - a tenuous strategy that led to Democratic electoral defeat among white working-class voters in 2016.
I concede that perceived "niche" LGBT issues are unlikely to garner overwhelming support from working-class whites. However, as a member of the LGBT community, I am not about to ask my queer peers to take a backseat in the political dialogue. Perhaps one way working-class whites and the LGBT community can find common ground is through renewed focus on their shared economic concerns. In particular, I think it worthwhile to highlight that a large number of LGBT people are working-class (and white!) and struggling for economic survival.
Popular culture paints gays and lesbians - and even certain transgender people like Caitlyn Jenner- as well-off, financially secure, and politically powerful. Some academics and journalists have referred to this stereotype as the "myth of gay affluence;" and even well-educated Supreme Court Justices aren't immune to the stereotype. In Romer v. Evans, an important Supreme Court gay rights case, Justice Antonin Scalia commented that “[t]hose who engage in homosexual conduct tend to reside in disproportionate numbers in certain communities" (read: urban elite enclaves) and that gays and lesbians have "high disposable income." He went on to say that gays and lesbians "possess political power much greater than their numbers" and that they use this power to advocate for "not merely a grudging social toleration, but full social acceptance, of homosexuality."
The misconception that LGBT people are riding high on the hog obscures a less fabulous reality. As a 2016 piece in The Advocate succinctly states: "poverty is an LGBT issue." Due to a number of factors - including employment/housing discrimination, school harassment, lack of family support, and insufficient/inconsistent legal protection for LGBT individuals and families - LGBT men and women have lower average incomes and suffer from disproportionately high poverty rates when compared to their straight counterparts. For LGBT men and women who are employed, the jobs are often "working class." For example, gay men are more likely than straight men to be pushed into working class jobs like teaching, secretarial work, and nursing. Additionally, there is a long history of working-class lesbians and transmen engaging in traditionally "masculine" blue-collar professions like industrial/factory labor and construction work (For a seminal semi-autobiographical LGBT novel on the intersection of blue collar work and lesbians/transmen, I strongly recommend reading Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. Feinberg defined hirself as "an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist," and her work reflects all of these identities. The entire book is available free online and it's excellent!).
The white working-class might be forgiven for not realizing that LGBT folks can be working-class and have working-class economic concerns. Many young and/or "elite" LGBT people might not even realize it themselves. LGBT interest groups and figureheads do not frequently focus on class and economic issues in their high-profile fundraising campaigns and press releases. Some have even argued that in recent years, the LGBT community has "turned its head and looked the other way" in regards to the working-class and labor rights. However, this perceived gap between the interests of the white working-class and the LGBT community hasn't always existed. Historically (since at least the 1930's) the LGBT and working-class communities have been strong allies. One of the first gay rights organizations in the U.S., the Mattachine Society, was founded by a longshoreman and union member. Gay icon Harvey Milk allied with Teamsters to successfully organize a national boycott of Coors, a partnership that aided Milk's election as San Francisco Supervisor. Labor unions and the LGBT community worked together to defeat the Briggs Initiative (meant to bar gay teachers from public schools) in California. Finally, many union contracts with anti-discrimination provisions have historically protected gay, lesbian, and trans workers where federal and state laws have not.
If Step #1 of reconciling the white working class and the LGBT community is demonstrating their history of collaboration and common cause, then Step #2 is finding a practical and actionable way to bridge the cultural gap that has grown between the two groups in recent years. Luckily, this is already being done by LGBT organizers and politicians in working-class communities around the country, not just in urban elite ones!
If Step #1 of reconciling the white working class and the LGBT community is demonstrating their history of collaboration and common cause, then Step #2 is finding a practical and actionable way to bridge the cultural gap that has grown between the two groups in recent years. Luckily, this is already being done by LGBT organizers and politicians in working-class communities around the country, not just in urban elite ones!
Danica Roem is one such example. In 2017, Roem became the first openly transgender person elected to serve as a state legislator. She was elected to represent Virginia's 13th House of Delegates District, which consists largely of Manassas Park, a "working-class commuter city" where many of the city's 16,000 residents are service workers who "juggle long work hours and lengthy commutes." She defeated a 13-term Republican incumbent, self-proclaimed "homophobe in chief" Bob Marshall. While Roem didn't shy away from her transgender identity, she focused her campaign primarily on local issues like traffic, jobs, and schools. She was also endorsed by working-class darling Joe Biden. By comparison, her opponent Marshall was accused of focusing more on divisive identity politics and conservative "values" than local issues that truly affected working voters in the district.
Roem illustrates that when LGBT politicians highlight commonalities, rather than differences, inroads can be made. Her campaign also suggests that LGBT individuals can appeal to working-class communities without sacrificing or hiding their sexual orientation or gender identity. Finally, her campaign shows that identity politics aren't just a Democrat failing, but can backfire for Republicans courting the white working-class as well.
Roem illustrates that when LGBT politicians highlight commonalities, rather than differences, inroads can be made. Her campaign also suggests that LGBT individuals can appeal to working-class communities without sacrificing or hiding their sexual orientation or gender identity. Finally, her campaign shows that identity politics aren't just a Democrat failing, but can backfire for Republicans courting the white working-class as well.
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