Femme Fatalities: Revisiting “Effeminophobia”
I wrote an essay entitled Effeminophobia and the Gay Community at a time when my own allegiances to sexuality and gender were being tested. In it, I discuss “gay masculinities” and how, after reading C.J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re a Fag, I began to realize that how people read me in gendered terms was growing in resemblance to contemporary notions of the “effeminate man” (which is really another way of marking a man as incomplete or a failure).
And while I stand by the need to create a space for the discursive analysis of gay masculinities, I also want to be careful about not reiterating the social and political disenfranchisement of women. The conundrum is in the very wording of the previous sentence: effeminate men and gay masculinities. “Effeminate” qualifies “man,” and, effectively, one gender is relegated to serving as an adjective to the other.
The term “effeminate” — which entered popular usage around 1600 (a GREAT year for women and people of color everywhere) — means “having or showing qualities that are considered more suited to women than to men.” Sit with that for a bit. “More suited to women than to men.” You feel that? You’re beginning to realize the political ick of first compiling a detailed set of stereotypes surrounding “femininity,” and then deploying it to assess the degree to which a man has “feminine qualities untypical of a man/not manly in appearance or manner.” I suspected you felt such. And who’s compiling and who’s deploying? Men.
Men tend to get upset by what they perceive as deficits of masculinity in other men, which is exactly why Pascoe’s book, written in 2007, is still as relevant as ever. “Fag” is something we hear within the confines of our private communities as a term of endearment, or one signaling the political resistance in (re)appropriating terms once used as demeaning slurs. But in mainstream media and culture, “fag,” especially when used my men, represents a means of social control, a way to embarrass men who “aren’t quite man enough” into becoming what “they should have been in the first place.”
Under all this language, at heart, is an issue of power, a power that inheres in any faithfulness to gender, as conceived under rubrics of “appearance or manner.” Affectations are not things I would normally consider useful predictors of the quality of one’s character. What are you measuring in a man when his blue eye shadow makes you feel uncomfortable? What are you really saying when you tell a man that he’s “too feminine”?
For one, that you’re a ridiculous human being. But the people I’m addressing here aren’t just those dimwits who think that micromanaging someone’s gender presentation (to perhaps resemble what one perceives as the “appropriate” gendered codes to emulate in any given situation) is at all a reasonable thing to do. I am also nodding to those who, while their hearts are in the right place, are a little premature in aligning themselves and their political ideologies with such useless approximations of human worth: “femme,” “masc,” “fit.” Political resistance is always important when it comes to staking a shared claim to freedom. However, I think we should really take a moment and consider what we are prioritizing when we not only pander to exhausting and tired tropes in the name of freedom, but also establish politically salient identifications that are influenced/encouraged by heterosexist conceptions of what it means to be a “man” or a “woman.” Human traits and characteristics should be treated as the unremarkable cultural pastiches that they are (since originality is dead), not as identities.
