#between men

[queen-of-hawkins-why-ler]

Thinking about the way that patriarchal and heteronormative norms make mlm and wlw ships different from each other, especially regarding physical touch. For mlm, the slightest touch is taboo and can be mistaken for something romantic, so it’s a matter of, “how much can I touch him and get away with?” i.e. shared glances, lots of patting, touching of shoulders etc. all with the crippling fear that it’ll be “too much” or “look suspect.”

But wlw ships are the exact opposite bc while nearly any amount of man/man contact is interpreted as romantic, almost no amount of woman/woman contact is, not even cuddling, sleeping in the same bed, kissing, or sometimes even sex. So it’s not a matter of, “how much am I allowed to touch her?” it’s more like, “no amount of touching her could ever be enough,” and the girls can all but confirm their feelings for each other and make the relationship official, but it’s STILL ambiguous. Like, “yeah, my best gal pal cuddles with me and kisses me on the lips, but that doesn’t mean she has romantic feelings for me.” It’s why seeing two men touch each other makes us go insane, but nearly all wlw touching, no matter how intimate, can be interpreted as “friendly” so it feels like never enough.

[screaminglads]

Army toes serviced

[reliquiaeperustae]

The Gothic seems to offer a privileged view of individual and family psychology. Certain features of the Oedipal family are insistently foregrounded there: absolutes of license and prohibition, for instance; a preoccupation with possibilities of incest; a fascinated proscription of sexual activity; an atmosphere dominated by the threat of violence between generations. Even the reader who does not accept the Oedipal family as a transhistorical given can learn a lot from the Gothic about the terms and conditions under which it came to be enforced as a norm for bourgeois society.

sedgwick, between men: english literature and male homosocial desire

[mytortoisegotstuckinatupperware]

[mxryshcllcy]

But a subtler, answering strategy was also called for, complementary to this one, to consolidate control over the bonds of men who were not part of the distinctly homosexual subculture. Not only must homosexual men be unable to ascertain whether they are to be the objects of "random" homophobic violence, but no man must be able to ascertain that he is not (that his bonds are not) homosexual. In this way, a relatively small exertion of physical or legal compulsion potentially rules great reaches of behavior and filiation.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Toward the Gothic: Terrorism and Homosexual Panic,” in Between Men

[reliquiaeperustae]

As we see how unrelentingly Lizzie is diminished by her increasingly distinct gender assignment, it becomes clearer why "childishness," rather than femininity, should at that moment have been the ideological way the ruling class categorized its own male homosexuality. As Jean Baker Miller points out in Toward a New Psychology of Women, an attribution of gender difference marks a structure of permanent inequality, while the relation between adult and child is the prototype of the temporary inequality that in principle - or in ideology - exists only in order to be overcome: children are supposed to grow up into parents, but wives are not supposed to grow up into husbands.

sedgwick, between men: english literature and male homosocial desire

[reliquiaeperustae]

One impulse in Edwin Drood, then, is toward a de-individualizing, relatively universal Gothic critique of the organization of male desire - a critique that would sweep away the factitious distinctions between exotic and domestic sites and bonds and pleasures...the organization and the manipulability of male bonds after the secularization of homophobia depend exactly on a visible arbitrariness in assigning "good' or "bad" names to the array of homosocial bonds. In a narrow, psychologizing view, Edwin Drood could well be called a novel about the homosexual panic of a deviant man. The jagged edge of a racial faultline across the novel's plot and setting facilitates that coarse halving of the view.

sedgwick, between men: english literature and male homosocial desire