Can I suggest that politics is also highly gendered. Just like things fall in the category of masculine and feminine, political ideology also has its types. Considering my own bias for the feminine, I would argue that there are forces, which support the democratic process, and hence can be rated as feminine. Those that favor authoritarian-military rule fall in the category of masculine. In Pakistan’s case there is yet another category of political heterosexuals. These are individuals or forces that might pretend to be feminine but are actually the other, or they tend to swing both ways. Therefore, politics has increasingly become the game played by political hijras (eunuchs) or heterosexuals.
To give an example a few weeks ago Farahnaz Isphani’s company organized a show at the Pakistan National Council of Arts, Islamabad where the chief guest were the PM, Yusuf Raza Gillani and the now ‘extended’ army chief Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani. For those, who are not familiar with the lady, she is a PPPP parliamentarian and wife of Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington, Hussain Haqqani. She was formerly a booker for CNN before getting a job with VoA which she had to leave because of the company’s internal politics and her poor management. Anyway, the news is that this event happened exactly after her husband shook hands with the army chief.
This country and its politics seems to be a great example of political heterosexuality – everyone ready to bugger the other and offering their own service to the more powerful. Farahnaz’s case is not new. The government’s foreign minister falls in the same category. He seems pretty keen to become ‘His Master’s Voice’. Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s recent letter to the UN in which he objected to the fingers raised by the international organization on the military and its intelligence agencies during investigation of Benazir Bhutto’s murder is one of the many examples. Why should it surprise anyone at all? Its nothing new that the great sajjada nasheen has done. I remember a dinner party at the US ambassador Wendy Chamberlain’s house in Islamabad. She had invited a few people for dinner including JI’s Liaquat Baluch, the NRB fame Lt. General (retd) Tanveer Naqvi, Shah Mehmood Qureshi and a few others. I can’t forget how pir sahib was singing praises of the devolution of democracy plan carved out by the general and making all efforts to make the general happy. “Oh it is a great program and we are making tremendous progress in strengthening of democracy” was the pir’s refrain. He was then commanding the local government in Multan. It didn’t matter that his party chief BB, who was then alive, did not agree with the devolution formula. In any case, the pir from Multan has this toothpaste or a traitor smile.
The other examples being Zia-ul-Haq and the present head of the state. You don’t know what are they hiding inside. But who cares? Shah Mehmood Qureshi wanted to save his little fiefdom in Multan. This puts him in the category of political eunuchs which means that they are not what we think they look like.
The pir sahib’s political heterosexuality is, unfortunately, a manufacturing defect. He was born with it. He seems to have taken after his father Makhdoom Sajjad Qureshi. While Sajjad Qureshi was the governor of Punjab General Zia, who was both the President and army chief then, happened to visit Lahore data darbar. As the dictator got out of the mausoleum Makhdoom Sajjad Qureshi, who was also then the sajjada nasheen of a great shrine in Multan, put Zia’s shoes in front of him with his own hands. This is called saving ones backside or knowing which side the bread is buttered, and then really applying lots of it on the toast . But its this over-obsession with saving the backside which turns a lot of politicians towards political heterosexuality. While they pretend to be for the democratic forces, there heart lies elsewhere.
Moreover, this is not limited to the PPPP. Look at PML-N where the younger brother has been in bed with the military for a long time assisted by other political heterosexual like one particular chaudhry who actually looks like one in reality as well. Not to forget the PML-Q which is defined by its political heterosexuality. Deep-center, look at the great pir sahib of Pagara sharif who has played second fiddle to the GHQ. Interestingly, the pir sahib was quite powerful during Zia’s regime and is held responsible for thwarting the procurement of newer Type-23 British frigates and supported the case for the old Type-21s. The pir sahib is related with pir Yusuf Raza Gillani, Makhdoom Ahmed Mehmood (PML-Q), Tasneem Nawaz Gardezi and other political stalwarts. Marriage was a great tool to connect European courts during the days of monarchical and feudal Europe. Dig a bit deeper and you will find familiar names – people involved in getting the Bhutto government of the 1970s in trouble by leaking secrets of dalai camp to the press, or the legal community working closely with the military. Some would like to say “is hamam mein sab nangey hein” (all in this bath are naked). This is not about nudity but about political sexual preference.Nothing odd in this behavior except that the elites tend to service their interests first. Shah Mehmood Qureshi or other pirs like him represent a certain vested interest. Given Pakistan’s patronage based political system, an individual politician’s capability is gauged on his power to extract resources (all kinds) from the state. This formula does not produce democrats but hijras. 64 years after independence the patronage based political system has turned the tide in a way that civil-military relations must be carefully re-evaluated. There is now an abundance of political hijras and military hijras (these are military personnel pretending to be pro-democracy while they just use the concept to further their own political objectives. Most just want to remain in circulation through the media and the conference circuit and not die away like frogs).(continued)
Source: Dr. Ayesha Siddiqa blog
Showing posts with label Heterosexuality is Queer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heterosexuality is Queer. Show all posts
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Heterosexuality is Queer and so is heterosexual brand of manhood
Michael Chabon - Modern Manhood, An Amateur's Guide
NPR looks at Chabon's Modern Manhood, An Amateur's Guide.
Modern Manhood, An Amateur's Guide
by Heller McAlpin
In a controversial New York Times "Modern Love" column, Michael Chabon's wife, Ayelet Waldman, confessed that she'd have a harder time losing her husband than one of their children. After reading Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs, you'll understand why.
He emerges from these 39 beautifully written personal essays as a prince among men. Not only does he produce dazzling novels that have given genre fiction literary cachet — including The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2001) — he also cooks, cleans, markets and gets his children to their appointments — and counts himself fortunate to be in a position to do so.
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son
By Michael Chabon
Hardcover, 320 pages
Harper
List price: $25.99
Read An Excerpt
There have been no shortage of books on motherhood, but daddy diaries are a growing phenomenon. Chabon raises the bar with his often poignant meditations on manhood, fatherhood and aspects of his own childhood. Most of these loosely connected essays, which add up to an episodic autobiography of sorts, first appeared in Details magazine. In addition to the gorgeous prose for which he is celebrated, several lovely qualities shine through.
For starters, Chabon clearly adores and respects his mother. After his parents divorced when he was 12, his mother got her law degree and a federal job in D.C. Chabon took over dinner preparations. Instead of feeling put-upon, he expresses gratitude at having grown up "during a time of dissolving boundaries," when it was all right for a boy to want to emulate his mother.
Michael Chabon Reads 'The Hand On My Shoulder'
[15 min 46 sec]
Add to Playlist
As for his wife, in an essay titled "Looking for Trouble," Chabon offers a tribute to "quick, mercurial, intemperate" Waldman. In marrying her, he says he "answered the call of adventure," and he's thankful he did. In another nod to Waldman, he notes the disparity between expectations for fathers and mothers: "The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low."
More than marriage or writing, these essays focus on the wonders of childhood and parenting. Chabon loves the intimacy of domesticity — though he is circumspect with private details. He writes movingly that in his four children he has found "a band of companions" with whom to share various enthusiasms, something he pointedly missed when his pediatrician father moved away after his parents' divorce.
Enlarge Vince Bucci/Getty Images
Michael Chabon told the Weekly Reader that he knew he wanted to be a writer when his first short story, a class assignment, about Sherlock Holmes got an A. "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's what I want to do. I can do this.' And I never had any second thoughts or doubts."
Chabon takes his kids to junky movies and erects elaborate Lego constructions with them, but he is concerned that today's kids, deprived of the open-ended play, unsupervised landscapes and vast stretches of free time that characterized his own childhood, have too little room for imagination. He worries that he is bringing up "free-range children" who, like chickens raised to near-maturity in a controlled environment, don't actually "range" much even when the doors of freedom are thrown open.
Although Chabon's subjects range from sex at 15 with a divorced friend of his mother's to pocketbooks for men, the thread that ties Manhood for Amateurs together isn't a purse string, but the idea that fandom — being an amateur "driven by passion and obsession" to "explore the imaginary world" — is what connects him not only to his children, but to his writing.
Excerpt: 'Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son'
by Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon Reads "The Hand On My Shoulder"
[15 min 46 sec]
Add to Playlist
Transcript
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
By Michael Chabon
Paperback, 320 pages
Harper
List price: $25.99
The Hand on My Shoulder
I didn't play golf, and he had never smoked marijuana. I was a nail chewer, inclined to brood, and dubious of the motives of other people. He was big and placid, uniformly kind to strangers and friends, and never went anywhere without whistling a little song. I minored in philosophy. He fell asleep watching television. He fell asleep in movie theaters, too, and occasionally, I suspected, while driving. He had been in the navy during World War II, which taught him, he said, to sleep whenever he could. I, still troubled no doubt by perplexing questions of ontology and epistemology raised during my brief flirtation with logical positivism ten years earlier, was an insomniac. I was also a Jew, of a sort; he was, when required, an Episcopalian.
He was not a big man, but his voice boomed, and his hands were meaty, and in repose there was something august about his heavy midwestern features: pale blue eyes that, in the absence of hopefulness, might have looked severe; prominent, straight nose and heavy jowls that, in the absence of mirth, might have seemed imperious and disapproving. Mirth and hopefulness, however, were never absent from his face. Some people, one imagines, may be naturally dauntless and buoyant of heart, but with him, good spirits always seemed, far more admirably, to be the product of a strict program of self-improvement in his youth — he believed, like most truly modest men, in the absolute virtue of self-improvement — which had wrought deep, essential changes in a nature inclined by birth to the darker view and gloominess that cropped up elsewhere in the family tree. He didn't seem to be happy out of some secret knowledge of the essential goodness of the world, or from having fought his way through grief and adversity to a hard-won sense of his place in it; they were simple qualities, his good humor and his optimism, unexamined, automatic, stubborn. I never failed to take comfort in his presence.
The meaning of divorce will elude us as long as we are blind to the meaning of marriage, as I think at the start we must all be. Marriage seems — at least it seemed to an absurdly young man in the summer of 1987, standing on the sun-drenched patio of an elegant house on Lake Washington — to be an activity, like chess or tennis or a rumba contest, that we embark upon in tandem while everyone who loves us stands around and hopes for the best. We have no inkling of the fervor of their hope, nor of the ways in which our marriage, that collective endeavor, will be constructed from and burdened with their love.
When I look back — always an unreliable procedure, I know — it seems to have been a case of love at first sight. I met him, his wife, and their yellow beach house all on the same day. It was a square-pillared bungalow, clapboard and shake, the color of yellow gingham, with a steep pitched roof and a porch that looked out over a frigid but tranquil bay of brackish water. His wife, like him in the last years of a vigorous middle age, had been coming to this stretch of beach since early in her girlhood, and for both her and her daughter, whom I was shortly to marry, it was more heavily and richly layered with memories, associations, artifacts, and stories than any place any member of my own family had lived since we had left Europe seventy years before. Everything about this family was like that. My future mother-in-law lived in the house in Seattle where she had been born. My father-in-law had grown up down the road in Portland. They had met at the University of Washington. Everyone they knew, they had known for longer than I'd been alive. All the restaurants they favored had been in business for years, they were charter members of their country club, and in some cases they did business with the sons of tradesmen they had dealt with in the early days of their marriage. A journey through the drawers, closets, and cabinets of their house in town yielded a virtual commercial and social history of Seattle, in the form of old matchboxes, rulers, pens, memo pads, napkins, shot glasses, candy tins, golf tees, coat hangers; years and years' worth of lagniappes, giveaways, souvenirs, and mementos bearing the names, in typefaces of four decades, of plumbing supply companies, fuel oil dealers, newlyweds, dry cleaners, men and women celebrating birthdays and anniversaries.
God, it was a seductive thing to a deracinated, assimilated, uncertain, wandering young Jew whose own parents had not been married for years and no longer lived anywhere near the house in Maryland where, for want of a truer candidate, he had more or less grown up. They were in many ways classic WASPs, to be sure, golfing, khaki-wearing, gin-drinking WASPs. The appeal of such people and their kind of world to a young man such as I was has been well-documented in film and literature; perhaps enough to seem by now a bit outdated. But it wasn't, finally, a matter of class or style, though they had both. I fell in love with their rootedness, with the visible and palpable continuity of their history as a family in Seattle, with their ability to bring a box of photographs taken thirty summers earlier and show me the room I was sitting in before it was painted white, the madrone trees that screened the porch before two fell over, the woman I was going to marry digging for geoduck clams on the beach where she had just lain sunbathing.
Of course, they were more than a kind of attractive gift wrap for their photographs, houses, and the historical contents of their drawers. They were ordinary, problematical people, my in-laws, forty years into a complicated marriage, and over the course of my own brief marriage to their daughter, I came to love and appreciate them both as individuals, on their merits and, as my marriage began so quickly to sour, for the endurance of their partnership. They had that blind, towering doggedness of the World War II generation. I suppose it's possible that with two daughters, they'd always wanted a son, my father-in-law especially; I do know for certain that I have never been one to refuse the opportunity to add another father to my collection.
He offered himself completely, without reservation, though in his own particular, not to say limited, way (it is this inherent limited quality of fathers and their love that motivates collectors like me to try to amass a complete set). He took me down to Nordstrom, the original store in downtown Seattle, and introduced me to the man who sold him his suits. I bought myself a few good square-cut, sober-colored numbers in a style that would not have drawn a second glance on Yesler Way in 1954. He introduced me to the woman from whom he bought jewelry for his wife, to the man who took care of his car, to all of the golf buddies and cronies whose sons he had been admiring from afar for the last thirty years. He was a bit barrel chested anyway, but whenever we went anywhere together and, as was all but inevitable, ran into someone he knew, his breast, introducing me, seemed to grow an inch broader, the hand on my shoulder would administer a little fighttrainer massage, and I would feel him — as first the wedding and, later, the putative grandchildren drew nearer — placing, for that moment, all his hopes in me. He took me to football games, basketball games, baseball games. He let me drive his Cadillac; naturally, he never drove anything else. Most of all, however — most important to both of us — he let me hang out in his den.
As the child of divorced parents, myself divorced, and a writer trained by five hundred years of European and American literary history always to search out the worm in the bud, I have, of necessity, become a close observer of other people's marriages. I have noticed that in nearly all the longest-lived ones, if there is space enough in the house, each partner will have a room to flee to. If, however, there is only one room to spare, it will always be the husband's. My in-laws had plenty of room, but while she had her office just off the bedroom (where I would sometimes see her sitting at a Chinese desk, writing a letter or searching for an article clipped from Town & Country about flavoring ice creams with edible flowers), my mother-in-law's appeared to serve a largely ceremonial function.
My father-in-law, on the other hand, sometimes seemed to live down in the basement. His office, like him, was mostly about golf. The carpet was Bermuda-grass green, the walls were hung with maps of St. Andrews and framed New Yorker covers of duffers, and the various hats, ashtrays, hassocks, cigarette lighters, plaques, novelty telephones, and trophies around the room were shaped like golf balls, tees, mashies, mulligans, and I don't know what. In the midst of all this sat an enormous black Robber Baron desk with matching black Captain Nemo chair; an old, vaguely Japanese-looking coffee table on its last tour of duty in the house; a cyclopean television; and a reclining armchair and sofa, both covered in wool patterned with the tartan of some unknown but no doubt staunch, whiskey-drinking, golf-wild highland clan.
It is for just such circumstances, in which two men with little in common may find themselves thrown together with no other recourse than to make friends, that sports were invented. When my wife and I visited I went downstairs, flopped on the sofa, and watched a game with my father-in-law. He made himself a C.C. and soda, and sometimes, to complete the picture, I let him mix one for me. Like many men of my generation, I found solace when unhappy in placing quotation marks around myself and everything I did. There was I, an "unhappy husband," drinking a "cocktail" and "watching the game." This was the only room in the house where I was permitted to smoke — I have long since quit — and I made the most of it (a man's den often serves the same desublimating function in the household as Mardi Gras or Las Vegas in the world; a different law obtains there). We spent hours together, cheering on Art Monk and Carlton Fisk and other men whose names, when by chance they arise now, can summon up that entire era of whiskey and football and the smell of new Coupe de Ville, when the biggest mistake I ever made came home to roost, and I briefly had one of the best fathers I've ever found.
My ex-wife and I — I won't go into the details — had good times and bad times, fought and were silent, tried and gave up and tried some more before finally throwing in the towel, focused, with the special self-absorption of the miserable, on our minute drama and its reverberations in our own chests. All the while, the people who loved us were not sitting there whispering behind their hands like spectators at a chess match. They were putting our photographs in frames on their walls. They were uniting our names over and over on the outsides of envelopes that bore anniversary wishes and recipes clipped from newspapers. They were putting our birthdays in their address books, knitting us socks, studying the fluctuating fortunes of our own favorite hitters every morning in the box scores. They were working us into the fabric of their lives. When at last we broke all those promises that we thought we had made only to each other, in an act of faithlessness whose mutuality appeared somehow to make it all right, we tore that fabric, not irrecoverably but deeply. We had no idea how quickly two families can work to weave themselves together. When I saw him sometime later at his mother's funeral in Portland, my father-in-law told me that the day my divorce from his daughter came through was the saddest one in his life. Maybe that was when I started to understand what had happened.
What was I now to him? How can it have felt to have been divorced by someone he treated like a son? These are not considerations that comfort me or make me especially proud. I try to remind myself that in the long course of his life, I occupied only a tiny span of years toward the end, when everything gleams with an unconvincing luster, moving too quickly to be real. And I try to forget that for a short while I formed a layer, however thin, in the deep stratigraphy of his family, so that some later explorer, rummaging through the drawers of his big old desk, might brush aside a scorecard from the 1967 PGA Pacific Northwest Open signed by Arnold Palmer, or an old pencil-style typewriter eraser with a stiff brush on one end, stamped queen city ribbon co., and turn up a faded photograph of me, in my sober blue suit, flower in my lapel, looking as if I knew what I was doing.
From Manhood For Amateurs by Michael Chabon. Copyright 2009 by Michael Chabon. Published by Harper. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Posted by WH at 8:05 AM
Labels: culture, fiction, masculinity
NPR looks at Chabon's Modern Manhood, An Amateur's Guide.
Modern Manhood, An Amateur's Guide
by Heller McAlpin
In a controversial New York Times "Modern Love" column, Michael Chabon's wife, Ayelet Waldman, confessed that she'd have a harder time losing her husband than one of their children. After reading Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs, you'll understand why.
He emerges from these 39 beautifully written personal essays as a prince among men. Not only does he produce dazzling novels that have given genre fiction literary cachet — including The Yiddish Policemen's Union (2007) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2001) — he also cooks, cleans, markets and gets his children to their appointments — and counts himself fortunate to be in a position to do so.
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son
By Michael Chabon
Hardcover, 320 pages
Harper
List price: $25.99
Read An Excerpt
There have been no shortage of books on motherhood, but daddy diaries are a growing phenomenon. Chabon raises the bar with his often poignant meditations on manhood, fatherhood and aspects of his own childhood. Most of these loosely connected essays, which add up to an episodic autobiography of sorts, first appeared in Details magazine. In addition to the gorgeous prose for which he is celebrated, several lovely qualities shine through.
For starters, Chabon clearly adores and respects his mother. After his parents divorced when he was 12, his mother got her law degree and a federal job in D.C. Chabon took over dinner preparations. Instead of feeling put-upon, he expresses gratitude at having grown up "during a time of dissolving boundaries," when it was all right for a boy to want to emulate his mother.
Michael Chabon Reads 'The Hand On My Shoulder'
[15 min 46 sec]
Add to Playlist
As for his wife, in an essay titled "Looking for Trouble," Chabon offers a tribute to "quick, mercurial, intemperate" Waldman. In marrying her, he says he "answered the call of adventure," and he's thankful he did. In another nod to Waldman, he notes the disparity between expectations for fathers and mothers: "The handy thing about being a father is that the historic standard is so pitifully low."
More than marriage or writing, these essays focus on the wonders of childhood and parenting. Chabon loves the intimacy of domesticity — though he is circumspect with private details. He writes movingly that in his four children he has found "a band of companions" with whom to share various enthusiasms, something he pointedly missed when his pediatrician father moved away after his parents' divorce.
Enlarge Vince Bucci/Getty Images
Michael Chabon told the Weekly Reader that he knew he wanted to be a writer when his first short story, a class assignment, about Sherlock Holmes got an A. "I thought to myself, 'That's it. That's what I want to do. I can do this.' And I never had any second thoughts or doubts."
Chabon takes his kids to junky movies and erects elaborate Lego constructions with them, but he is concerned that today's kids, deprived of the open-ended play, unsupervised landscapes and vast stretches of free time that characterized his own childhood, have too little room for imagination. He worries that he is bringing up "free-range children" who, like chickens raised to near-maturity in a controlled environment, don't actually "range" much even when the doors of freedom are thrown open.
Although Chabon's subjects range from sex at 15 with a divorced friend of his mother's to pocketbooks for men, the thread that ties Manhood for Amateurs together isn't a purse string, but the idea that fandom — being an amateur "driven by passion and obsession" to "explore the imaginary world" — is what connects him not only to his children, but to his writing.
Excerpt: 'Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son'
by Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon Reads "The Hand On My Shoulder"
[15 min 46 sec]
Add to Playlist
Transcript
Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son
By Michael Chabon
Paperback, 320 pages
Harper
List price: $25.99
The Hand on My Shoulder
I didn't play golf, and he had never smoked marijuana. I was a nail chewer, inclined to brood, and dubious of the motives of other people. He was big and placid, uniformly kind to strangers and friends, and never went anywhere without whistling a little song. I minored in philosophy. He fell asleep watching television. He fell asleep in movie theaters, too, and occasionally, I suspected, while driving. He had been in the navy during World War II, which taught him, he said, to sleep whenever he could. I, still troubled no doubt by perplexing questions of ontology and epistemology raised during my brief flirtation with logical positivism ten years earlier, was an insomniac. I was also a Jew, of a sort; he was, when required, an Episcopalian.
He was not a big man, but his voice boomed, and his hands were meaty, and in repose there was something august about his heavy midwestern features: pale blue eyes that, in the absence of hopefulness, might have looked severe; prominent, straight nose and heavy jowls that, in the absence of mirth, might have seemed imperious and disapproving. Mirth and hopefulness, however, were never absent from his face. Some people, one imagines, may be naturally dauntless and buoyant of heart, but with him, good spirits always seemed, far more admirably, to be the product of a strict program of self-improvement in his youth — he believed, like most truly modest men, in the absolute virtue of self-improvement — which had wrought deep, essential changes in a nature inclined by birth to the darker view and gloominess that cropped up elsewhere in the family tree. He didn't seem to be happy out of some secret knowledge of the essential goodness of the world, or from having fought his way through grief and adversity to a hard-won sense of his place in it; they were simple qualities, his good humor and his optimism, unexamined, automatic, stubborn. I never failed to take comfort in his presence.
The meaning of divorce will elude us as long as we are blind to the meaning of marriage, as I think at the start we must all be. Marriage seems — at least it seemed to an absurdly young man in the summer of 1987, standing on the sun-drenched patio of an elegant house on Lake Washington — to be an activity, like chess or tennis or a rumba contest, that we embark upon in tandem while everyone who loves us stands around and hopes for the best. We have no inkling of the fervor of their hope, nor of the ways in which our marriage, that collective endeavor, will be constructed from and burdened with their love.
When I look back — always an unreliable procedure, I know — it seems to have been a case of love at first sight. I met him, his wife, and their yellow beach house all on the same day. It was a square-pillared bungalow, clapboard and shake, the color of yellow gingham, with a steep pitched roof and a porch that looked out over a frigid but tranquil bay of brackish water. His wife, like him in the last years of a vigorous middle age, had been coming to this stretch of beach since early in her girlhood, and for both her and her daughter, whom I was shortly to marry, it was more heavily and richly layered with memories, associations, artifacts, and stories than any place any member of my own family had lived since we had left Europe seventy years before. Everything about this family was like that. My future mother-in-law lived in the house in Seattle where she had been born. My father-in-law had grown up down the road in Portland. They had met at the University of Washington. Everyone they knew, they had known for longer than I'd been alive. All the restaurants they favored had been in business for years, they were charter members of their country club, and in some cases they did business with the sons of tradesmen they had dealt with in the early days of their marriage. A journey through the drawers, closets, and cabinets of their house in town yielded a virtual commercial and social history of Seattle, in the form of old matchboxes, rulers, pens, memo pads, napkins, shot glasses, candy tins, golf tees, coat hangers; years and years' worth of lagniappes, giveaways, souvenirs, and mementos bearing the names, in typefaces of four decades, of plumbing supply companies, fuel oil dealers, newlyweds, dry cleaners, men and women celebrating birthdays and anniversaries.
God, it was a seductive thing to a deracinated, assimilated, uncertain, wandering young Jew whose own parents had not been married for years and no longer lived anywhere near the house in Maryland where, for want of a truer candidate, he had more or less grown up. They were in many ways classic WASPs, to be sure, golfing, khaki-wearing, gin-drinking WASPs. The appeal of such people and their kind of world to a young man such as I was has been well-documented in film and literature; perhaps enough to seem by now a bit outdated. But it wasn't, finally, a matter of class or style, though they had both. I fell in love with their rootedness, with the visible and palpable continuity of their history as a family in Seattle, with their ability to bring a box of photographs taken thirty summers earlier and show me the room I was sitting in before it was painted white, the madrone trees that screened the porch before two fell over, the woman I was going to marry digging for geoduck clams on the beach where she had just lain sunbathing.
Of course, they were more than a kind of attractive gift wrap for their photographs, houses, and the historical contents of their drawers. They were ordinary, problematical people, my in-laws, forty years into a complicated marriage, and over the course of my own brief marriage to their daughter, I came to love and appreciate them both as individuals, on their merits and, as my marriage began so quickly to sour, for the endurance of their partnership. They had that blind, towering doggedness of the World War II generation. I suppose it's possible that with two daughters, they'd always wanted a son, my father-in-law especially; I do know for certain that I have never been one to refuse the opportunity to add another father to my collection.
He offered himself completely, without reservation, though in his own particular, not to say limited, way (it is this inherent limited quality of fathers and their love that motivates collectors like me to try to amass a complete set). He took me down to Nordstrom, the original store in downtown Seattle, and introduced me to the man who sold him his suits. I bought myself a few good square-cut, sober-colored numbers in a style that would not have drawn a second glance on Yesler Way in 1954. He introduced me to the woman from whom he bought jewelry for his wife, to the man who took care of his car, to all of the golf buddies and cronies whose sons he had been admiring from afar for the last thirty years. He was a bit barrel chested anyway, but whenever we went anywhere together and, as was all but inevitable, ran into someone he knew, his breast, introducing me, seemed to grow an inch broader, the hand on my shoulder would administer a little fighttrainer massage, and I would feel him — as first the wedding and, later, the putative grandchildren drew nearer — placing, for that moment, all his hopes in me. He took me to football games, basketball games, baseball games. He let me drive his Cadillac; naturally, he never drove anything else. Most of all, however — most important to both of us — he let me hang out in his den.
As the child of divorced parents, myself divorced, and a writer trained by five hundred years of European and American literary history always to search out the worm in the bud, I have, of necessity, become a close observer of other people's marriages. I have noticed that in nearly all the longest-lived ones, if there is space enough in the house, each partner will have a room to flee to. If, however, there is only one room to spare, it will always be the husband's. My in-laws had plenty of room, but while she had her office just off the bedroom (where I would sometimes see her sitting at a Chinese desk, writing a letter or searching for an article clipped from Town & Country about flavoring ice creams with edible flowers), my mother-in-law's appeared to serve a largely ceremonial function.
My father-in-law, on the other hand, sometimes seemed to live down in the basement. His office, like him, was mostly about golf. The carpet was Bermuda-grass green, the walls were hung with maps of St. Andrews and framed New Yorker covers of duffers, and the various hats, ashtrays, hassocks, cigarette lighters, plaques, novelty telephones, and trophies around the room were shaped like golf balls, tees, mashies, mulligans, and I don't know what. In the midst of all this sat an enormous black Robber Baron desk with matching black Captain Nemo chair; an old, vaguely Japanese-looking coffee table on its last tour of duty in the house; a cyclopean television; and a reclining armchair and sofa, both covered in wool patterned with the tartan of some unknown but no doubt staunch, whiskey-drinking, golf-wild highland clan.
It is for just such circumstances, in which two men with little in common may find themselves thrown together with no other recourse than to make friends, that sports were invented. When my wife and I visited I went downstairs, flopped on the sofa, and watched a game with my father-in-law. He made himself a C.C. and soda, and sometimes, to complete the picture, I let him mix one for me. Like many men of my generation, I found solace when unhappy in placing quotation marks around myself and everything I did. There was I, an "unhappy husband," drinking a "cocktail" and "watching the game." This was the only room in the house where I was permitted to smoke — I have long since quit — and I made the most of it (a man's den often serves the same desublimating function in the household as Mardi Gras or Las Vegas in the world; a different law obtains there). We spent hours together, cheering on Art Monk and Carlton Fisk and other men whose names, when by chance they arise now, can summon up that entire era of whiskey and football and the smell of new Coupe de Ville, when the biggest mistake I ever made came home to roost, and I briefly had one of the best fathers I've ever found.
My ex-wife and I — I won't go into the details — had good times and bad times, fought and were silent, tried and gave up and tried some more before finally throwing in the towel, focused, with the special self-absorption of the miserable, on our minute drama and its reverberations in our own chests. All the while, the people who loved us were not sitting there whispering behind their hands like spectators at a chess match. They were putting our photographs in frames on their walls. They were uniting our names over and over on the outsides of envelopes that bore anniversary wishes and recipes clipped from newspapers. They were putting our birthdays in their address books, knitting us socks, studying the fluctuating fortunes of our own favorite hitters every morning in the box scores. They were working us into the fabric of their lives. When at last we broke all those promises that we thought we had made only to each other, in an act of faithlessness whose mutuality appeared somehow to make it all right, we tore that fabric, not irrecoverably but deeply. We had no idea how quickly two families can work to weave themselves together. When I saw him sometime later at his mother's funeral in Portland, my father-in-law told me that the day my divorce from his daughter came through was the saddest one in his life. Maybe that was when I started to understand what had happened.
What was I now to him? How can it have felt to have been divorced by someone he treated like a son? These are not considerations that comfort me or make me especially proud. I try to remind myself that in the long course of his life, I occupied only a tiny span of years toward the end, when everything gleams with an unconvincing luster, moving too quickly to be real. And I try to forget that for a short while I formed a layer, however thin, in the deep stratigraphy of his family, so that some later explorer, rummaging through the drawers of his big old desk, might brush aside a scorecard from the 1967 PGA Pacific Northwest Open signed by Arnold Palmer, or an old pencil-style typewriter eraser with a stiff brush on one end, stamped queen city ribbon co., and turn up a faded photograph of me, in my sober blue suit, flower in my lapel, looking as if I knew what I was doing.
From Manhood For Amateurs by Michael Chabon. Copyright 2009 by Michael Chabon. Published by Harper. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Posted by WH at 8:05 AM
Labels: culture, fiction, masculinity
Friday, May 29, 2009
"Feminine" heterosexual men: subverting heteropatriarchal sexual scripts?
Publication: The Journal of Men's Studies Publication Date: 22-MAR-06 Author: Hill, Darryl B.COPYRIGHT 2006 Men's Studies Press More than a decade ago, Hunter (1993) proposed a way in which a heterosexual man might avoid heterosexual privilege. Writing from the perspective of a self-proclaimed "sissy"--a male (regardless of sexual orientation) who is in some way not masculine" (p. 153)--Hunter rejoiced in his "refusal to be a man" and in his "location outside of masculinity" (p. 152). As much as he seemed happy with his status, Hunter also related some of the problems of being heterosexual with a nontraditional sexual script. Feminine men may be more emotionally sensitive than their women partners, but this may pose a problem for women who may not be comfortable with emotional men. Their partners may also feel burdened by the obligation to initiate more sexual encounters and may not be too enthused. It seems that sissies might face some unique challenges in heterosexual relationships. | |||
TAG: queer heterosexuals: Gender Queer Hets
Posted by on November 8, 2005
I’ve had an idea haunting me for a long time now; Tristan Taormino planted the seed with her discussion of ‘queer heterosexuals’ (the passage quoted in Chapter 6 of MHB) and so has my existence, so to speak. Because it was only once I met Betty that I went back in time some and revisited my younger self - the childhood tomboy I was, the punk rocker who’d opted out of gender, the young adult who was “sirred” regularly, the crewcutted co-ed who got asked out more often by lesbians than by the boys I sought.
But at some point I learned to be more traditionally femme, mostly in order to date boys.
And then of course you might remember I got upset with Judith Halberstam by dismissing the masculinity of heterosexual women.
Today at the Hetrick-Martin Institute, where Betty and I were in a panel about trans relationships, I talked to a femme who has dated a few transmen pre-transition. She, like I, felt liberated by being with someone who was not traditionally gendered, not male or female; she, like me, found it enabled her to be who she was. In her case, she was a natural femme who had tried desperately to “look like a lesbian,” and at some point I joked with her that we should have switched either gender identities or sexual orientations.
And while it seems like I’m just going to point out again that gender identity and sexual orientation don’t go together, what I’m really after is where the genderqueer heterosexuals are.
Because I asked our contact at HMI whether or not - if such a person existed - if a heterosexual, out teenaged crossdresser would be welcome there. And then Betty and I wondered out loud why we know he’d never come out in time to go to a GLBT high school. I want to know why he’s invisible, or why het crossdressers, and late-transitioning, lesbian-identified transwomen, all seem to “come out” so much later (much later than the GLBT kids we saw hanging around today).
I decided the problem is heterosexuality. Not being heterosexual - that’s what it is. But when a crossdresser writes to me,
Sexually, I have never been attracted to ‘a man presenting as a man’ and think I would run a mile if I had discovered a penis in any one else’s knickers but my own. Similarly (or is that conversely) FTMs are (to me, and please, I would not say this to them) sexually attractive. In fact I find muscular, athletic females, and those frequently described as ‘butch dikes’ more often than not attractive too. Now the awkward bit… so are some transwomen – at least from the very limited views available on their own sites. I have no idea how I would react if I met them. . .
I wonder whether or not gender queer sexuality is just kept under wraps.
I wonder if there were guys who were attracted to me because I was kind of dyke-y and I just didn’t recognize that because - well maybe they were waiting for me to ask them out. Or maybe I was so intent that masculine boys were my only option that I didn’t see them as potential romantic partners (and maybe they didn’t see me, either). What I’m thinking these days is that heterosexuality stifles genderqueerness, while homosexual cultures - for whatever reasons - give people more room to express gender variance.
And I wonder what it would take to queer gender even in heterosexual reality. It might mean we’d have to rewrite some of the love songs. Change expectations.
When I play The Sims, for instance, I often let the women do the wooing, and it tickles me no end to see the male being wooed put his hand to his forehead, swoon slightly, and giggle in response while my female seducer, down on one knee, serenades his pretty self. But like that commercial for the guy in his wife’s slip, there is no template for that, is there? It’s like us genderqueer hets simply don’t exist.
But we do, don’t we?
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