#ken corbett

[breakingtheboycode]

Men and boys are often easily provoked into defending the honor of their masculinity via violent means. Yesterday’s duels bleed into today’s drive-by shootings.

Needless to say, the ravages of such sadistic mastery have an ignominious history. But a part of this history that has not been so well documented is the hate and violence employed by men to defend the honor of their masculinity from the perceived threat of homosexuality. One of the reasons this history has gone undocumented is the belief that such hate is constitutive of masculinity. It is one of the ways in which boys will be boys.

Ken Corbett, ‘Homosexual Boyhood: Notes on Girlyboys,’ Gender and Psychoanalysis

[breakingtheboycode]

Achieving a passable approximation of normative masculinity requires cultivating a surprising amount of compliance in relation to the norm; passivity and docility turn out to be positively masculine attributes, whereas the work of letting one’s queer gender express its phenomenological life requires a bravery and an amount of resistance more often attributed to normative masculinity. Inviting the sissy boys to be their fierce selves, as Corbett is inclined to do, takes a lot of bravery on each side of the therapeutic relation.

Corbett suggests that the difference between feminine boys that succumb to the crushing forces of normalization and boys who are able to survive with a sense of self intact seems to be those boys who survive are held within a “transformative nexus,” a holding environment in which the bonds of relation allow for mutability and change, where that change happens as a result of relation and recognition and not just traumatic breach.

“Key here is helping parents to allow and reflect upon their child’s needs for gender practice, gender construction, the performative play of gender theatre, and the concomitant normative counterreactions cross-gender play evokes. Parents who can keep one foot in the play and one eye toward normative counterreaction allow their child to bring into this nexus his experience of reactive shame and/or hate. He then has an opportunity to reflect on normative force, its anxious regulatory push, and gather strength in order to push back.”

Gayle Salamon, ‘Humiliation and Transgender Regulation: Commentary on Paper by Ken Corbett,’ Psychoanalytic Dialogues

[breakingtheboycode]

Men and boys are made anxious when characterized as feminine, the shaming implication being that they have lost hold over their proper gender. The misogynist heart of homophobia beats with such anxiety and shame.

Ken Corbett, ‘Homosexual Boyhood: Notes on Girlyboys,’ Gender and Psychoanalysis

[breakingtheboycode]

The therapeutic work I described is to some degree a redress of the traditional presumption that masculinity is a site of emotional disavowal. Feminine boys present a challenge to that ideal, and certainly it is not without meaning that most often such boys come to the attention of mental health authorities because it is felt that they are too sensitive, they cry too easily, they are too flamboyant; in short, they are too expressive in a variety of ways. They upset what Davidson referred to as the ‘affective geography of gender.’ The colorful, sentimental, and hysterical themes that sometimes inform the play of feminine boys threaten the rugged, tight-lipped, stoic terrain of masculinity. Embarrassing excess looms. When emotion leaks, when tears fall, they are often seen as ill tempered, mocked as shrill, and diagnosed as feminine.

Ken Corbett, “Boyhood Femininity, Gender Identity Disorder, Masculine Presuppositions, and the Anxiety of Regulation,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues

[breakingtheboycode]

The departure of the feminine boy is routinely taken for trauma, but trauma for whom, him or the normative order?

Ken Corbett, “Boyhood Femininity, Gender Identity Disorder, Masculine Presuppositions, and the Anxiety of Regulation,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues

[breakingtheboycode]

All genders are plagued by anxiety. All genders lack coherence. All genders are colored by defensive operations and fictive performance. But the regulatory regime moves with particular vigilance and diagnostic overdrive in the face of masculine femininity. Throughout the discourse on feminine boys, masculinity is not queried; masculinity is, and is therefore diagnostic. Justice and expert judgment do not proceed through an account of masculinity’s social and historical construction. Variance is read as disturbance or illness; rarely is variance recognized for the ways in which it speaks to the range of that which is normal, and never is it read for its potential, or relished for its ideality.

Ken Corbett, “Boyhood Femininity, Gender Identity Disorder, Masculine Presuppositions, and the Anxiety of Regulation,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues

[breakingtheboycode]

Masculinity advances largely by appeal to the necessary reproduction of discreet and complementary genders: masculinity and femininity. The claim of this binary precedes any boy: Boys will be boys by not being girls. As Stoller put it, ‘The first order of business in being a man is don’t be a woman.’

The claims of the binary are so powerfully culturally compelled that they are thought of as natural and essential. Gender is routinely conflated with anatomy, and gender is routinely conflated with that which produces our desires and personality traits. Male traits are linked with the desire for female traits, in keeping with the model of heterosexual complementarity, and so it goes.

[...]

Homophobia and misogyny run school halls.

Ken Corbett, “Boyhood Femininity, Gender Identity Disorder, Masculine Presuppositions, and the Anxiety of Regulation,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues

[breakingtheboycode]

Gender identity—the internal conviction regarding one’s gender classification—is no longer positioned as a fixed identity or essence at the core of a person. This turn toward the chaotic complexity of gender speaks to the productive possibilities of gender variance, to the place within masculinity for feminine masculinity, and the place within boyhood for feminine boys.

Ken Corbett, “Boyhood Femininity, Gender Identity Disorder, Masculine Presuppositions, and the Anxiety of Regulation,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues