1 Feminizing the Male Persona

1 Feminizing the Male Persona: Effeminacy as Rebellion and Subversion Author: Donovan Cleckley Faculty Mentor: Dr. Cathlena Martin School: University of Montevallo 2 Recognized and understood as concepts, “man” and “woman,” do not exist independently of the gendered discourse which defines “manhood” and “womanhood.” This statement does not mean that the categories of man and woman are not real; rather, it means that they are constructions, woven into the very fabric of everyday life. Involving the linguistic designation of man and woman, gendered discourse, as it is institutionalized and policed, thus controls what is acceptable and unacceptable in terms of given performances and presentations of gender. Trouble arises over the variance of gender, being new ways of doing gender, in an accepted binary system which emphasizes the dichotomy of the masculine and the feminine. Built on polarity, and problematic as such, this hegemonic model of gender, functioning as a lens through which to see bodies, comprehends definite blue or definite red without considering that qualities designated as either masculine or feminine, associated with either man or woman, respectively, are all qualities capable of human beings. In considering the existing chasm between maleness and femaleness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman writes that, although the confinement of women to their “feminine functions,” as defined by androcentric culture, deprives them of their full humanity, men, even while ahead of women in patriarchal society, suffer because “maleness […] warps and disfigures their [men’s] humanness.”1 Instead of pure blue and pure red, it seems as if, moving away from masculinity and femininity and toward humanness, shades of purple, differing in shared hues of blueness and redness, exist. Gender, as Kathy Rudy writes, is a "matter of performance," involving how one engages in acts, particular kinds of doing gender, which code the body as either man or woman; gender is not based on “ontological or even biological certainty.”2 For gender to be neither based in ontology nor biology, gender is something that one does, reliant upon the social environment in which one continuously performs acts which society associates with manhood or womanhood. One’s clothing and one’s voice, as examples, affect the perception of gender based on the doing and not necessarily the being. If one does gender, then, in truth, one cannot truly ever be a gender. On the one hand, gender is widely considered to function as a noun, which would make it immutable and unchangeable, rigid and not fluid, but, on the other hand, as Judith Butler writes in Gender Trouble, gender “ought not to be conceived of as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort.”3 Instead of functioning as a noun, firmly rooted in being in existence, gender functions more like a verb, based on how one constantly engages in experience while existing. Acting incessantly and repetitiously, one creates the always changeable persona of the gendered self. Just as the actor performs in a particular role, the individual in society, if that person follows the standard division of masculine and feminine, also performs in an imposed gender role, sometimes willingly and sometimes unwillingly. Bodies themselves can be symbolic of differing gender performances, indicating whether these acts undertaken by the individual accept or reject the conventions of masculinity or femininity. Symbols, according to Julia Wood, function as “abstract, arbitrary, and often ambiguous ways of representing phenomena,” which, in relation to gender, means that the uncertainty of 3 symbols allows for variations in perceived meaning based on who sees and affixes a particular meaning to each symbol.4 As examples, one can consider the meaning of wearing a shirt and jeans versus the meaning of wearing a dress. Furthermore, in terms of abstractness, arbitrariness, and ambiguousness, the widely accepted meanings for varying symbols in a given culture must be taken into account when considering how and why many people within the same society respond to a presented symbol in a strangely familiar fashion. With clothing being an example of differences in symbolic meaning, most Americans in 2018 respond quite differently to a male wearing a dress than they do to a female wearing a pair of pants. Although clothes exist as mere fabric, created and sold to provide simple covering and warmth for human bodies, the simple cloth, when infused with the force of gender, holds socially understood meaning when crafted into pants (which were once considered a strictly masculine style to be worn by men and not women) or fashioned into an elegant, pink dress. In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes: “All art is at once surface and symbol.”5 Similar to how Wilde defines art, gender involves performing actions and creating a persona, although not a fixed and rigid one, through which one establishes a gender of one’s own, externalizing the internal self through one’s expression of gender in appearance, voice, and mannerisms. Wilde mentions the peril which lies in going beneath the surface and reading the symbol, correlating to the reality of gender as a process of doing masculinity, doing femininity, or perhaps even doing neither. Involving the actors and the audience, gender is both a constant performance and a continuous spectacle. One thus does gender to partake in the process of becoming man or woman, typically appearing as either masculine or feminine. But experience in the social world—which is to say the way of doing gender in relation to the dominant cultural discourse—provides the basis for the reality of gendered bodies. Effeminacy relates to he who is perceivably feminine, particularly the male whose gendered self differs from the idealized masculine male body. Defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, “effeminate” means, in regard to and of a person, “that has become like a woman” since it comes from the Latin words ex (out) and fēmina (woman) which create the word effēminātus, referencing to becoming like a woman (the Latin suffix -tus is added to the end to make the word an adjective).6 To be effeminate, then, is to be perceivably womanish, thus the word applies specifically to males who, in some capacity, deviate from the expectations of maleness. Words associated with being effeminate, in terms of the male persona, include qualities of being weak, soft, and tender, not clearly projecting—as well as perhaps totally rejecting—a patriarchal male persona. Opposing these qualities would be those deemed “masculine”: strong, hard, and tough. Man is active and woman is passive, or so the idea goes; as such, the male exhibits domination and the female exhibits submission to male authority. In relation to the negative associations with the word “effeminate,” one question could be posed: If men and women exist equally in society, then why is it considered shameful for a man to become like a woman? 4 “La femme,” in French, coming from the Latin word fēmina, means, “the woman,” and it seems important that the word effeminacy, notably the feminized male, is viewed in connection to assumed weakness, softness, and tenderness, all deemed unfavorable characteristics for a man to exhibit, all associated with what it is to be a woman. Womanliness, exhibited by the male, supposedly indicates inferiority, for he is, so it seems, a lesser kind of man who, in his rebellion against the carefully manufactured and meticulously packaged image of man, deviates from widely accepted understandings of manhood. Yet, womanliness, although viewed as shameful in man, is viewed as a virtue in woman. To remain men in their ongoing and seemingly tireless masculine performances, men must distance themselves as far as possible from qualities considered “feminine,” ones that would possibly make a man seem less like a man and more like a woman. Rejecting the feminine and the womanly, man desires to maintain whatever seems to be pristine maleness. Any perceivably feminine qualities, even in terms of his emotional capacity, not just in terms of his appearance, could break the constructed—yet oftentimes quite brittle—male persona that he strongly desires to uphold in order to remain perceived as a man by virtue of how he does his gender. “Feminine emotion,” as Susan Brownmiller writes, typically emphasizes “sentimentality, empathy, and admissions of vulnerability—three characteristics that most men try to avoid.”7 As such, masculine emotion, which utterly repudiates effeminacy and that which could be considered womanly, exhibits dispassionateness, apathy, and masks of invulnerability. In adherence to popular ideas about manliness, men—to do gender as men—smile less, appear less emotional, detach themselves from others, and fear appearing soft and tender. Given that the separation of emotions into masculine and feminine spheres constructs individuals who are less than whole in their humanity, depriving them of partaking in their entire humanness, denying them the fullness of their emotional experiences, it is important to consider what exactly manliness means. Perhaps manliness could be defined best in reference to womanliness, which is considered its polar opposite. Contrary to what one might think, womanliness, the state of being like a woman, has been more determined by men than by women. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton writes, “the womanly,” created by men and imposed upon women, associated with female submission to male dominance, has transformed women throughout history into “the mere echoes of men.”8 Because womanliness, as defined by men, justifies the subordination of women, emphasizing male dominance and female submission, it is reasonable that men view the effeminate male, which is to say the womanly male, as a threat to the patriarchal order that dictates the subjection of women. A man who can seem like a woman, look like a woman, sound like a woman, and act like a woman proves that the lines of gender do not draw upon either one’s state of being or some biological destiny.

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