Inter-queer Phenomenology
By Richard Birch
Emergence of Sociological Theories SOCI 2017
February 28, 2005
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch
The layers of experience are extremely important to understand for the method of phenomenology to effectively give light to the essence of inter-queer standpoint. My own personal Dasein provides a roadmap for looking at the duality of oppression of the gay male. Within the sexual orientation pyramid of oppression is another secondary pyramid based on a hierarchy of body image. Queer male culture is a highly stratified society in which individual classification and status are designated to members based on body type and their respective levels of masculinity. The phenomenon of which my analysis is based on is of my entire coming out period. By examining layers of my act of coming out and their relations to the social constructive fundamentals of heteronormativity, my phenomenological account of this period of my existence can be the discursive measure on which to uncover both primary and secondary hierarchies of oppression; one which was most prevalent at the beginning of the narrative, and the second which is codified in the present. To understand the phenomenon of body image within the secondary pyramid of oppression is to understand the externalized formation of a social world culturally produced on the notion of acceptable and non-acceptable male body imagery.
Primary Hierarchy Queer Standpoint
By primary hierarchy I mean the differentiation of heteronormative power potentials existent within the apparatus of ruling and productive master narratives. For much of my life I experienced oppression of Dasein capacity. For fear and worry of being discovered as queer, gay, fag and homo I managed to maintain an impression of heteronormativity in my social acts. Thus I attempted to portray symbolically the ideal heterosexual male. I was born into an affluent capitalist family. I went to predominantly white, straight, upper class, privileged, and reasonably affluent schools. I took up positions of management within the family business as was expected of my class. I dated women. I married. I procreated. I lived the heteronormal capitalist Dasein that was expected of me. However I engaged in oppressive discourse for I too through my closeted acts fulfilled the requirements of heteronormative patriarchal symbolic order.
For a time my positionality was of the upper sector of a hierarchy of sexual orientation. Phenomenologically I sensed this oppression from the outside in, for my knowledge of heteronormative ideology told me I was of the ‘dominant’ sector. As Dorothy Smith writes, “Hierarchy, power, and domination sustain the circularity of schema and data. Factual accounts do not aim at contexts of reading uncontrolled by the purposes and policies structuring their relevance.” (Smith, 1990) As I experienced Dasein through the standpoint of a closeted gay male, I experienced oppression but merely at a superficial level. Being closeted prevented me from truly taking notice and placing myself in the subjective of this primary hierarchy. Being closeted was akin to “ideological organization [which] creates a disjuncture between the world as it is known within the relations of ruling and the lived and experienced actualities its textual realities represent as ‘what actually happened/what is.’” (Smith, 1990) My goal to fit the master narrative and align my performed heterosexuality with the relations of ruling kept me from the bottom of the pyramid.
From the time I ‘came out’ as gay male, these textual realities became ever more apparent to my experiences. The severity of my oppression was deep. The necessity for exploring this phenomenon of sexual alienation became urgent. By making the everyday life problematic it clarifies this pyramid. I became conscious of my real positionality as oppressed. My consciousness of being gay became intentional where once it was intentionally suppressed. Phenomenologically my experiences as oppressed gay male uncover layers of structures parallel to this pyramid. By being of the subjective, my oppressed sexuality is ordered according to the knowledge uncovered through phenomenological analysis. As written by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, “I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them and that impose themselves upon the latter.” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966)
Sexual orientation is socially constructed. From the beginnings of industrialized society the subject of sex orientation became synonymous with silence. The aberration of the sexual mosaic in society can be adjusted to “coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.” (Foucault, 1978) Through my coming out activity the discourse of my sexual knowledge was a discourse of resistance for others around me. I experienced resistance from family, from friends, and from the heteronormative environment in which I existed for such a long time. I became aware that my sexual truths of coming out and of being gay were not equal to the “representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or of a misunderstanding caused by taboos” (Foucault, 1978). My representation in the family became distorted and problematic for my parents who did not feel comfortable with my new identity. Some friends disappeared as my master status in the narrative became uncharacteristic to the productive paradigm they adopted. I no longer represented the status quo in coming out and my status in the hierarchy diminished. For a time my intentions were questioned as was my mental health by some family members. If I was now of the oppressed, and seemingly ‘by choice’ as stated by family members, then what became clear to me was that I was pathologised in my spheres of existence. More precisely what my parents charged for a time was that my mental health was no longer in order. The underlying layer within their resistance was that I embodied the antithesis of not merely non-heterosexuality, but I differentiated my existence from the institutionalized capitalist order that was so influential in my life and in theirs.
Power is what gives structure the ruling relations of sex. Textual realities on sexual discourse are staged on the premise that “sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden.” (Foucault, 1978) Heterosexual activity is licit, and thus, clearly, homosexual activity is illicit according to mainstream ideology. Power prescribes a directive for sex that operates as a tool for intelligibility. My coming out as gay, my public denouncing of the textual realities of heteronormativity and my being of the antithesis of productive order, produced a socially constructed intelligibility of my own personal Dasein for those in my circles. Phenomenologically when I look within my subjective experience of coming out to my inner circles, the structure of oppression affected not just my own part in the narrative but everyone else’s.
Secondary Hierarchy Queer Standpoint: Ideological Coding of Inter-queer Stratification
When I read articles in queer publications and journals, when I watch television shows that are designed and programmed for the queer audience, when I shop in clothing stores in certain parts of the city that are marketed to the gay-male consumer, and when I walk through the ‘gaybourhood’ district of Toronto with my friends, I experience external symbols of queer culture. I am also experiencing the essence of the community I am engaging in and thus I am participating in discursive activities. Everywhere in this microsocial structure are what Dorothy Smith calls “mediated texts” or “T-discourses” (Smith, 1999). T-discourses are “skeins of social relations, mediated and organized textually, connecting and coordinating the activities of actual individuals whose local; historical sites of reading/hearing/viewing may be geographically and temporally dispersed and institutionally various.” (Smith, 1999) When engaged in this symbolic discourse as it were, I take in, I absorb, and I experience the essence of the milieu. However it becomes clear that from my phenomenological standpoint queer cultural textual realities surround no other than I in my own discourse of oppression. For as I become internal within the experience of the community I also am of the subjective of cultural mediated textual relations of ruling. Everywhere are symbols of the ever-present master narrative of productive order. Among these symbols are beautiful images of digitally constructed ideals of masculinity on billboards and street-publication covers. The commercial aesthetic comprises ‘hot-bodies’ posed in gender-explicit shirtless forms of mechanical cyborg-like perfection on billboards promoting same-sex couples travel and cruise packages to the Caribbean. Installed over street corners are large black and white signs with a handsome, white, fit, male model in his late 30’s selling Botox injections with the slogan “Now It’s Time To Level the Playing Field”. Gay telephone cruise-line and personal advertisement website posters are stapled to light posts by the hundreds with images of young, smooth, hairless, thin, boyish features embodying a strategic form of quasi-femininity in the young gay-male ideal of masculinity.
All of these symbols of textual reality help in creating what Smith terms an “ideological code” (Smith, 1999). This code, though not simply formulaic in nature, provides a template for the social construction of the relations of ruling within queer culture. To be even more exact, the codification of what I call inter-queer body-image ideology as a textual reality of oppression is something that has become increasingly evident to me as a student of the social sciences since my first ‘coming out’. I have many times wondered, why does a society like the gay-male community, which has suffered, greatly, for centuries at the expense of capitalist productive symbolic order, include stratas of its own within its social composition? Why would a system of oppression exist within a culture that seemingly throws a public and very political image of appropriative desire? Phenomenologically the essence of this question turns towards the standpoint of the alienated in my personal experience. For as one who experienced alienation of identity within heteronormative society for much of his life, my Dasein of alienation is not a new form of phenomenon to make an account of. My personal senses are attuned to the nuances of alienation. Alienation from social hierarchy based on sexual orientation, alienation from those who are thin and who embody male physical desire, as well as alienation from being of the valued consumer in a capitalist productive order.
I have suggested earlier in this essay of a secondary pyramid of oppression based on a hierarchy of gay-male body image. Ideological codification threads this secondary hierarchy into the primary hierarchy of sexual orientation by a mimicking process of gender differentials and pyramids of oppression found in heteronormative sexism. As social order is a construction of social reality, so is the social phenomenon of gender performativity, a concept that lends itself to the structures in place within gay-male stratification. My experience of queer-male body image stratification is of temporal non-mobility it seems. It is if the very constructive qualities of body-image stratification are aligned with the premise of gender performativity. Judith Butler writes, “Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” (Butler, 1996)
Through my coming-out process it became very clear that I was to assume a class identification of: masculine, feminine, twink, bear, or chub. Similar to heteronormative textual reality, the patriarchal master narrative of everyday life requires one to be identifiable as male or female, masculine or feminine, top or bottom. Before you can even give your head a shake from the time you first declare yourself as ‘gay’, the social pressures within inter-queer society are immense. To declare yourself of one classification is the automatic disclosure of your ‘gendered’ performance within gay culture. To be ‘bear’ represents male. ‘Chub’ represents female. Masculine is as thus, masculine, and ‘twink’ is as furthermore, feminine. It could be comparatively argued that all queers are transgendered in nature. It seems one could easily assume any gender as a constructed identity.
But as for my existence, this is not the case. For my classified identity has been socially constructed for me. It became quite clear from the descriptions I received from friends in the gay male community that I embody lower gay-male stratas. My physique, weight, mannerisms and interests identify me as such within a codified ideology of oppression. I am an overweight gay male. I am a middle-aged gay male. These two characteristics have served to promote without any influence of direction of my own, that I am not of the upper stratas of gay male body classification. Coming out to the gay male community in postmodernism has not been an easy process. Because of my physical appearance, I provide no function in an inter-queer system of stratification other than to be subordinated based on a value system of physical beauty. More importantly, my being the overweight gay male represents no historical possibility of ‘fitting in’.
As Judith Butler elaborates, “the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities.” (Butler, 1996) In other words, the essence of my physical composition, as obese, as non-‘twinkie’, and as of a stratified unit of commercial and social oppression, corresponds in its codified nature to performative characteristics of gender constitution within the theatrical context of patriarchal and capitalist productive order. Consider body image as an act, or as Butler also terms, a “corporeal style” (Butler, 1996). When I remove my preconceived notions of what I romanticize and idealize gay culture to be about, and when I attempt to open up my senses to my Dasein of everyday life as a gay male, it is clear my physical corporeality is performative in textual relations of ruling. My existence as obese gay male is performative as subordinated when I roam the bookstore, shopping district, clothing stores or social nightclubs. My account of such experiences or of one of my strata are erased and of non-disclosure. There is very little to account for in the bear. There is nothing of commercial or social value or importance for the chub. The sales clerk in the clothing store on Church Street pays little or no attention to me, as I do not fit the ideal gay male consumer. My personal interests in gay culture, deeply rooted in consumerist ideology, are void. Even though I am of the account of which I create in my interactions with those who I would call members of my community, my alter-physicality permits no account to be formulated and realized within the culture.
Comparatively this alienation phenomenon can be aligned with Dorothy Smith’s suggestion of master narrative discourses of patriarchy. “Hence the established social forms of consciousness alienate women from their own experience.” (Smith, 1990) Whereas Smith’s phenomenological method shows that her account of experiences as a woman is erased by master narrative textual realities in patriarchal society, the overweight gay male account of oppression is also as thus erased in a male-beauty coded ideology paralleling patriarchal hierarchal structures. A patriarchal code of sexism replicates and imprints itself in gay culture. A “narrative structure fitting the schema of tyranny is replicated.” (Smith, 1999) My experiences as the subordinated gay male are predetermined and predefined by this replicative codification of ideology. For example along this same comparison, an account of femininity to be recognized in social order it must fit master narrative paradigms of patriarchal domination. Thus accounts of female beauty that are mediated textually are of consumerist value. On fashion magazines such as Vogue or Vanity Fair the homogenized ideal of femininity and feminine worth are exemplified by the phallic woman, the über-sexualized woman, and more importantly and aggregately, the commercially constructed female embodiment of consumer and industrial dependency. In gay culture, the gay male of obese distinction is also non-existent. Queer magazine covers such as Fab, Out, Xtra and The Advocate supply no notion of the existence of the over-weight gay male ideal. Month after month, photographs and cover materials provide the same masculine, butch, hard-bodied and Adonisient archetypical images that help to permeate the secondary pyramid of oppression.
Developing a phenomenological sociology for the inter-queer subordinated gay male requires further motion into the textual mediation of capital. Smith defines wealth sociologically in the following way: “Capital as a social form is not just wealth, it is wealth perpetuated through time as a capacity to generate wealth.” (Smith, 1999) Gay culture in its recent upsurge of mediated and textual appropriation is very much a result of the growing corporate recognition of it’s capital potential. The new gay market as it were comprises a multi-billion dollar market share for the tourism, financial, educational, food, and drug industries collectively. A “hyper-reality” (Smith, 1999), which is a simulation of capitalist productive textual relations of ruling, is codified on such a paradigm. The ‘hyper-reality’ of gay male consumerism as thus seemingly and increasingly appropriated by rational consumer-productive ideological practices in Western society has found its place in mainstream culture as functional to conventional consumer marketeering.
In my phenomenological experience this ‘hyper-reality’ though functional in this perspective, thwarts any means of acquiring similar master status within the narrative of gay male consumer appropriation. When I look for it, I find no mainstream magazines for the overweight gay chub. When I ask for it, I am hard pressed to find promotional material designed to offer information on where to obtain health and fitness products for the overweight gay male. Yet there are a growing number of advertisements for my fit and market-palatable counterpart. My classification of gay male embodiment holds no capital generative properties within the master narrative. The essence of my Dasein is not included within the capitalist productive schema of gay interest appropriation through market potential.
My experiences of oppression in both primary and secondary hierarchies are connected and separate it seems. As a closeted gay male living the façade of the heteronormal capitalist my Dasein was of both the oppressor and the oppressed. I served the master narrative from which institutionalized oppression attempts to hold down the interests of queer society. My true Dasein as gay was oppressed and my reaction to this oppression was fear and heterosexual performativity. My early-closeted heterosexual performance shows the social construction of my sexual orientation within this primary hierarchy. A phenomenological account of my experience within a secondary hierarchy as overweight gay male shows my sexual orientation is now socially constructed on the parameters of inter-queer stratification. I have been designated a master status of bear and chub for my physicality will not permit any other classification in gay male society. My stratum within this inter-queer hierarchy is of the subordinated for it does not fit the ideological code of beauty and consumerist perfection as originating in patriarchal capitalist productive order. As such, the oppression of gay male sexuality is experienced in many layers, all-threading back to a singular ideology of capitalist productive symbolic order.
References:
Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise In The Sociology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Butler, J. (1996). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. In S. Case (Ed.), Performing Feminisms (pp. 270-282). Baltimore, MA: John’s Hopkins University Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The History Of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Random House, Inc.
Smith, D. (1990). Women’s Experience As A Radical Critique of Sociology. The conceptual Practices Of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. (pp. 11-28). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Smith, D. (1999). Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Emergence of Sociological Theories SOCI 2017
February 28, 2005
This work Copyright (C) 2005 Richard Birch
The layers of experience are extremely important to understand for the method of phenomenology to effectively give light to the essence of inter-queer standpoint. My own personal Dasein provides a roadmap for looking at the duality of oppression of the gay male. Within the sexual orientation pyramid of oppression is another secondary pyramid based on a hierarchy of body image. Queer male culture is a highly stratified society in which individual classification and status are designated to members based on body type and their respective levels of masculinity. The phenomenon of which my analysis is based on is of my entire coming out period. By examining layers of my act of coming out and their relations to the social constructive fundamentals of heteronormativity, my phenomenological account of this period of my existence can be the discursive measure on which to uncover both primary and secondary hierarchies of oppression; one which was most prevalent at the beginning of the narrative, and the second which is codified in the present. To understand the phenomenon of body image within the secondary pyramid of oppression is to understand the externalized formation of a social world culturally produced on the notion of acceptable and non-acceptable male body imagery.
Primary Hierarchy Queer Standpoint
By primary hierarchy I mean the differentiation of heteronormative power potentials existent within the apparatus of ruling and productive master narratives. For much of my life I experienced oppression of Dasein capacity. For fear and worry of being discovered as queer, gay, fag and homo I managed to maintain an impression of heteronormativity in my social acts. Thus I attempted to portray symbolically the ideal heterosexual male. I was born into an affluent capitalist family. I went to predominantly white, straight, upper class, privileged, and reasonably affluent schools. I took up positions of management within the family business as was expected of my class. I dated women. I married. I procreated. I lived the heteronormal capitalist Dasein that was expected of me. However I engaged in oppressive discourse for I too through my closeted acts fulfilled the requirements of heteronormative patriarchal symbolic order.
For a time my positionality was of the upper sector of a hierarchy of sexual orientation. Phenomenologically I sensed this oppression from the outside in, for my knowledge of heteronormative ideology told me I was of the ‘dominant’ sector. As Dorothy Smith writes, “Hierarchy, power, and domination sustain the circularity of schema and data. Factual accounts do not aim at contexts of reading uncontrolled by the purposes and policies structuring their relevance.” (Smith, 1990) As I experienced Dasein through the standpoint of a closeted gay male, I experienced oppression but merely at a superficial level. Being closeted prevented me from truly taking notice and placing myself in the subjective of this primary hierarchy. Being closeted was akin to “ideological organization [which] creates a disjuncture between the world as it is known within the relations of ruling and the lived and experienced actualities its textual realities represent as ‘what actually happened/what is.’” (Smith, 1990) My goal to fit the master narrative and align my performed heterosexuality with the relations of ruling kept me from the bottom of the pyramid.
From the time I ‘came out’ as gay male, these textual realities became ever more apparent to my experiences. The severity of my oppression was deep. The necessity for exploring this phenomenon of sexual alienation became urgent. By making the everyday life problematic it clarifies this pyramid. I became conscious of my real positionality as oppressed. My consciousness of being gay became intentional where once it was intentionally suppressed. Phenomenologically my experiences as oppressed gay male uncover layers of structures parallel to this pyramid. By being of the subjective, my oppressed sexuality is ordered according to the knowledge uncovered through phenomenological analysis. As written by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, “I apprehend the reality of everyday life as an ordered reality. Its phenomena are prearranged in patterns that seem to be independent of my apprehension of them and that impose themselves upon the latter.” (Berger & Luckmann, 1966)
Sexual orientation is socially constructed. From the beginnings of industrialized society the subject of sex orientation became synonymous with silence. The aberration of the sexual mosaic in society can be adjusted to “coincide with the development of capitalism: it becomes an integral part of the bourgeois order.” (Foucault, 1978) Through my coming out activity the discourse of my sexual knowledge was a discourse of resistance for others around me. I experienced resistance from family, from friends, and from the heteronormative environment in which I existed for such a long time. I became aware that my sexual truths of coming out and of being gay were not equal to the “representation that is more or less distorted by ideology, or of a misunderstanding caused by taboos” (Foucault, 1978). My representation in the family became distorted and problematic for my parents who did not feel comfortable with my new identity. Some friends disappeared as my master status in the narrative became uncharacteristic to the productive paradigm they adopted. I no longer represented the status quo in coming out and my status in the hierarchy diminished. For a time my intentions were questioned as was my mental health by some family members. If I was now of the oppressed, and seemingly ‘by choice’ as stated by family members, then what became clear to me was that I was pathologised in my spheres of existence. More precisely what my parents charged for a time was that my mental health was no longer in order. The underlying layer within their resistance was that I embodied the antithesis of not merely non-heterosexuality, but I differentiated my existence from the institutionalized capitalist order that was so influential in my life and in theirs.
Power is what gives structure the ruling relations of sex. Textual realities on sexual discourse are staged on the premise that “sex is placed by power in a binary system: licit and illicit, permitted and forbidden.” (Foucault, 1978) Heterosexual activity is licit, and thus, clearly, homosexual activity is illicit according to mainstream ideology. Power prescribes a directive for sex that operates as a tool for intelligibility. My coming out as gay, my public denouncing of the textual realities of heteronormativity and my being of the antithesis of productive order, produced a socially constructed intelligibility of my own personal Dasein for those in my circles. Phenomenologically when I look within my subjective experience of coming out to my inner circles, the structure of oppression affected not just my own part in the narrative but everyone else’s.
Secondary Hierarchy Queer Standpoint: Ideological Coding of Inter-queer Stratification
When I read articles in queer publications and journals, when I watch television shows that are designed and programmed for the queer audience, when I shop in clothing stores in certain parts of the city that are marketed to the gay-male consumer, and when I walk through the ‘gaybourhood’ district of Toronto with my friends, I experience external symbols of queer culture. I am also experiencing the essence of the community I am engaging in and thus I am participating in discursive activities. Everywhere in this microsocial structure are what Dorothy Smith calls “mediated texts” or “T-discourses” (Smith, 1999). T-discourses are “skeins of social relations, mediated and organized textually, connecting and coordinating the activities of actual individuals whose local; historical sites of reading/hearing/viewing may be geographically and temporally dispersed and institutionally various.” (Smith, 1999) When engaged in this symbolic discourse as it were, I take in, I absorb, and I experience the essence of the milieu. However it becomes clear that from my phenomenological standpoint queer cultural textual realities surround no other than I in my own discourse of oppression. For as I become internal within the experience of the community I also am of the subjective of cultural mediated textual relations of ruling. Everywhere are symbols of the ever-present master narrative of productive order. Among these symbols are beautiful images of digitally constructed ideals of masculinity on billboards and street-publication covers. The commercial aesthetic comprises ‘hot-bodies’ posed in gender-explicit shirtless forms of mechanical cyborg-like perfection on billboards promoting same-sex couples travel and cruise packages to the Caribbean. Installed over street corners are large black and white signs with a handsome, white, fit, male model in his late 30’s selling Botox injections with the slogan “Now It’s Time To Level the Playing Field”. Gay telephone cruise-line and personal advertisement website posters are stapled to light posts by the hundreds with images of young, smooth, hairless, thin, boyish features embodying a strategic form of quasi-femininity in the young gay-male ideal of masculinity.
All of these symbols of textual reality help in creating what Smith terms an “ideological code” (Smith, 1999). This code, though not simply formulaic in nature, provides a template for the social construction of the relations of ruling within queer culture. To be even more exact, the codification of what I call inter-queer body-image ideology as a textual reality of oppression is something that has become increasingly evident to me as a student of the social sciences since my first ‘coming out’. I have many times wondered, why does a society like the gay-male community, which has suffered, greatly, for centuries at the expense of capitalist productive symbolic order, include stratas of its own within its social composition? Why would a system of oppression exist within a culture that seemingly throws a public and very political image of appropriative desire? Phenomenologically the essence of this question turns towards the standpoint of the alienated in my personal experience. For as one who experienced alienation of identity within heteronormative society for much of his life, my Dasein of alienation is not a new form of phenomenon to make an account of. My personal senses are attuned to the nuances of alienation. Alienation from social hierarchy based on sexual orientation, alienation from those who are thin and who embody male physical desire, as well as alienation from being of the valued consumer in a capitalist productive order.
I have suggested earlier in this essay of a secondary pyramid of oppression based on a hierarchy of gay-male body image. Ideological codification threads this secondary hierarchy into the primary hierarchy of sexual orientation by a mimicking process of gender differentials and pyramids of oppression found in heteronormative sexism. As social order is a construction of social reality, so is the social phenomenon of gender performativity, a concept that lends itself to the structures in place within gay-male stratification. My experience of queer-male body image stratification is of temporal non-mobility it seems. It is if the very constructive qualities of body-image stratification are aligned with the premise of gender performativity. Judith Butler writes, “Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.” (Butler, 1996)
Through my coming-out process it became very clear that I was to assume a class identification of: masculine, feminine, twink, bear, or chub. Similar to heteronormative textual reality, the patriarchal master narrative of everyday life requires one to be identifiable as male or female, masculine or feminine, top or bottom. Before you can even give your head a shake from the time you first declare yourself as ‘gay’, the social pressures within inter-queer society are immense. To declare yourself of one classification is the automatic disclosure of your ‘gendered’ performance within gay culture. To be ‘bear’ represents male. ‘Chub’ represents female. Masculine is as thus, masculine, and ‘twink’ is as furthermore, feminine. It could be comparatively argued that all queers are transgendered in nature. It seems one could easily assume any gender as a constructed identity.
But as for my existence, this is not the case. For my classified identity has been socially constructed for me. It became quite clear from the descriptions I received from friends in the gay male community that I embody lower gay-male stratas. My physique, weight, mannerisms and interests identify me as such within a codified ideology of oppression. I am an overweight gay male. I am a middle-aged gay male. These two characteristics have served to promote without any influence of direction of my own, that I am not of the upper stratas of gay male body classification. Coming out to the gay male community in postmodernism has not been an easy process. Because of my physical appearance, I provide no function in an inter-queer system of stratification other than to be subordinated based on a value system of physical beauty. More importantly, my being the overweight gay male represents no historical possibility of ‘fitting in’.
As Judith Butler elaborates, “the body is understood to be an active process of embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities.” (Butler, 1996) In other words, the essence of my physical composition, as obese, as non-‘twinkie’, and as of a stratified unit of commercial and social oppression, corresponds in its codified nature to performative characteristics of gender constitution within the theatrical context of patriarchal and capitalist productive order. Consider body image as an act, or as Butler also terms, a “corporeal style” (Butler, 1996). When I remove my preconceived notions of what I romanticize and idealize gay culture to be about, and when I attempt to open up my senses to my Dasein of everyday life as a gay male, it is clear my physical corporeality is performative in textual relations of ruling. My existence as obese gay male is performative as subordinated when I roam the bookstore, shopping district, clothing stores or social nightclubs. My account of such experiences or of one of my strata are erased and of non-disclosure. There is very little to account for in the bear. There is nothing of commercial or social value or importance for the chub. The sales clerk in the clothing store on Church Street pays little or no attention to me, as I do not fit the ideal gay male consumer. My personal interests in gay culture, deeply rooted in consumerist ideology, are void. Even though I am of the account of which I create in my interactions with those who I would call members of my community, my alter-physicality permits no account to be formulated and realized within the culture.
Comparatively this alienation phenomenon can be aligned with Dorothy Smith’s suggestion of master narrative discourses of patriarchy. “Hence the established social forms of consciousness alienate women from their own experience.” (Smith, 1990) Whereas Smith’s phenomenological method shows that her account of experiences as a woman is erased by master narrative textual realities in patriarchal society, the overweight gay male account of oppression is also as thus erased in a male-beauty coded ideology paralleling patriarchal hierarchal structures. A patriarchal code of sexism replicates and imprints itself in gay culture. A “narrative structure fitting the schema of tyranny is replicated.” (Smith, 1999) My experiences as the subordinated gay male are predetermined and predefined by this replicative codification of ideology. For example along this same comparison, an account of femininity to be recognized in social order it must fit master narrative paradigms of patriarchal domination. Thus accounts of female beauty that are mediated textually are of consumerist value. On fashion magazines such as Vogue or Vanity Fair the homogenized ideal of femininity and feminine worth are exemplified by the phallic woman, the über-sexualized woman, and more importantly and aggregately, the commercially constructed female embodiment of consumer and industrial dependency. In gay culture, the gay male of obese distinction is also non-existent. Queer magazine covers such as Fab, Out, Xtra and The Advocate supply no notion of the existence of the over-weight gay male ideal. Month after month, photographs and cover materials provide the same masculine, butch, hard-bodied and Adonisient archetypical images that help to permeate the secondary pyramid of oppression.
Developing a phenomenological sociology for the inter-queer subordinated gay male requires further motion into the textual mediation of capital. Smith defines wealth sociologically in the following way: “Capital as a social form is not just wealth, it is wealth perpetuated through time as a capacity to generate wealth.” (Smith, 1999) Gay culture in its recent upsurge of mediated and textual appropriation is very much a result of the growing corporate recognition of it’s capital potential. The new gay market as it were comprises a multi-billion dollar market share for the tourism, financial, educational, food, and drug industries collectively. A “hyper-reality” (Smith, 1999), which is a simulation of capitalist productive textual relations of ruling, is codified on such a paradigm. The ‘hyper-reality’ of gay male consumerism as thus seemingly and increasingly appropriated by rational consumer-productive ideological practices in Western society has found its place in mainstream culture as functional to conventional consumer marketeering.
In my phenomenological experience this ‘hyper-reality’ though functional in this perspective, thwarts any means of acquiring similar master status within the narrative of gay male consumer appropriation. When I look for it, I find no mainstream magazines for the overweight gay chub. When I ask for it, I am hard pressed to find promotional material designed to offer information on where to obtain health and fitness products for the overweight gay male. Yet there are a growing number of advertisements for my fit and market-palatable counterpart. My classification of gay male embodiment holds no capital generative properties within the master narrative. The essence of my Dasein is not included within the capitalist productive schema of gay interest appropriation through market potential.
My experiences of oppression in both primary and secondary hierarchies are connected and separate it seems. As a closeted gay male living the façade of the heteronormal capitalist my Dasein was of both the oppressor and the oppressed. I served the master narrative from which institutionalized oppression attempts to hold down the interests of queer society. My true Dasein as gay was oppressed and my reaction to this oppression was fear and heterosexual performativity. My early-closeted heterosexual performance shows the social construction of my sexual orientation within this primary hierarchy. A phenomenological account of my experience within a secondary hierarchy as overweight gay male shows my sexual orientation is now socially constructed on the parameters of inter-queer stratification. I have been designated a master status of bear and chub for my physicality will not permit any other classification in gay male society. My stratum within this inter-queer hierarchy is of the subordinated for it does not fit the ideological code of beauty and consumerist perfection as originating in patriarchal capitalist productive order. As such, the oppression of gay male sexuality is experienced in many layers, all-threading back to a singular ideology of capitalist productive symbolic order.
References:
Berger, P. L. & Luckmann, T. (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise In The Sociology of Knowledge. New York, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Butler, J. (1996). Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. In S. Case (Ed.), Performing Feminisms (pp. 270-282). Baltimore, MA: John’s Hopkins University Press.
Foucault, M. (1978). The History Of Sexuality: Volume 1 An Introduction (R. Hurley, Trans.). New York, NY: Random House, Inc.
Smith, D. (1990). Women’s Experience As A Radical Critique of Sociology. The conceptual Practices Of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge. (pp. 11-28). Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
Smith, D. (1999). Writing the Social: Critique, Theory, and Investigations. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press Incorporated.
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