queerbychoice | Sexuality and the Question of Whether or Why or to What Extent It Is Male or Female

A gift from Joxn, Dreamer of Interesting Dreams. Sort of interesting. I don't quite like the ending, though:

The sexuality of the patriarch is less "male" than it is deadly, just as that of the subjected women is not so much "female" as suppressed, devivified -- though, sustaining less damage from its own work of suppression, it also contains the more beautiful possibilities for the future.

There's truth in this, but it also leaves out a lot. Males often "suppress" and "devivify" their own sexuality because of the pressure to eliminate anything about it that might be defined as "feminine." Females are generally under slightly less pressure to "devivify" themselves (e.g., they can get away with wearing most traditionally "male" clothes with no problem, but males can't do the reverse). Klaus Theweleit seems to be trying to acknowledge that males hurt themselves indirectly by hurting female and thus loading themselves down with a guilty conscience (or the necessity of never fully contemplating the implications of their own actions for fear of developing a guilty conscience) but I don't think he quite acknowledges that males also oppress themselves more directly, not simply by oppressing females but also by oppressing the "feminine" parts of themselves.

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You have to remember that Theweleit is speaking of a very special kind of male, the fascist male. It seems a bit inane to me to claim that the fascist male has a repressed female side.

By the way, I have the book and it is excellent.

I think he's trying to reach beyond the critique of the fascist males of the 1920s and 30s, though, and say that as long as fascist modes of production of reality are possible -- and there are situations under which they are, which still exist (today as well as in 1977 and in the early 1900s) -- then the relationship of "male" to "female" sexuality will have fascist aspects.

I agree that the fascist males he's analyzing are not repressing their "feminine" side. The first volume of Male Fantasies spends a lot of time demonstrating that "repression" is too weak a word for what they are doing -- for one thing, it has an implication that they are unconsciously afraid of it. Fascists are openly afraid of women and "femininity". They don't unconsciously repress it, they rip it out, slash it to pieces, and render it a bloody mass. They exult in doing violence to it.

The really scary thing to me is that fascists are not insane in the way that, say, paranoid schizophrenics are insane. Fascism is socially adapted. You couldn't have a society of paranoid schizophrenics, but you definitely can have a society -- even a Reich -- of fascists. Similarly, and this is what the first part of the excerpt argues, fascist's modes of reality-production are not particularly maladapted for "modern" (i.e., post-WWII) society. In fact, they can be all too common.

I wasn't using the word "repressed" in a sense that implied "unconsciously," and the reason I wasn't is that the word "repressed" is commonly used to describe what most men do to their feminine aspects, and I believe that most men in our society are really very consciously "ripping out" and "slashing to pieces" their femininity. I believe that most men in our society are quite openly afraid of "femininity" (not of "women," that's the wrong way to phrase it because they'd never admit to that), and they do exult in slashing any remotely "feminine" aspect of themselves a bloody mess.

In other words, I believe that most men in our society are fascist. Gender-relations-wise, anyway.

I do think there are considerable changes tking place in certain subcultures and certain generations of males. There are an increasing number of males who, even if they still really are absurdly and horrendously sexist, vehemently deny being so - and I take that as some kind of sign of progress, even though not an especially useful one. But I also know an awful lot of males (and at least in the generations from age 40-ish and upward they certainly constitute the majority of males I've met) who openly ridicule the very idea that women should have any rights at all - not that most of these men are actually out on the street campaigning to accomplish it (most of them are not oriented toward serious grassroots political campigns - they're more the helpless-feeling middle-class guys who sit around complaining without ever feeling there's anything they can do about it), but they express the opinion in a certain tone of "I must vehemently deny that women should ever have gotten the vote, because doing so will prove my masculinity! If anyone in future generations were ever to imagine that I had anything in common with those sissy feminist men I'd roll over in my grave! Feminism is for fags and for female ball-breakers who want to take away my right to wear the pants in my family and be a man!!!"

I focussed on the word "repression" only because Theweleit uses it in its psychoanalytic (Freudian) sense and mounts a major argument against its use to describe what's going on in the minds of these men. (I realize you haven't read the book, so this is just a clarification of where my terminology comes from, not a critique of your discussion.)

(The fascists in the book, by the way, really are openly afraid of women. They don't try to hide any of it. Theweleit's argument ends up being that they just don't have a psyche that corresponds in any way to the classical Freudian ego-superego-id psyche, or any variation on that. (It seems that Theweleit is much more interested in Deleuze and Guattari than Freud, but I have to admit that I'm far out of my depth in attempting to do anything more analytic than absorb the psychoanalytic theory as he presents it -- it's far outside my experience. I haven't even read D&G, and only ever one article by Freud!))

I agree with your comments there. And I think that Theweleit does too, which is what he means when he says that "as a form of reality production that is constantly present and possible under determinate conditions, [fascism] can, and does, become our production. The crudest examples of this are to be seen in the relations that have been the focus of this first chapter, male-female relations, which are also relations of production." (All the italics are in the original, btw.)

*blinks*

Why on earth wouldn't fascist males have a repressed female side? Are you suggesting they're biologically different from other people? How else could they possibly have eliminated all the feminine potential of their human nature than by repressing it?

They murder it.

No, I just don't think that people have a masculine and a feminine side. The very idea of an ideal synthesis smacks of Jungian psychobabble to me. Fascist men consciously shape themselves to be what they are - horrible murdering machines. That is not repression, it's creation (even if it is an awful kind - like splitting your cock).

On the whole, though, I absolutely agree with everythink joxn has written here. It's just the D&G streak in me that rebels against psychoanalysis and its host of hidden assumptions.

Actually I met D&G initially through Theweleit and i got one of my key concepts of my thesis partly from him. But the worst parts of his dissertation are where he goes overboard with psychoanalysis.

By "masculine and feminine sides" I mean that they have aspects of their personality which are labeled by their culture as being "masculine" or "feminine," not that those traits are actually inherently gendered.

I thought the ending was a weak, too, but I put it in rather than leaving it out to demonstrate the kind of over-reaching Theweleit is sometimes prone to. The two volumes of Male Fantasies were his doctoral dissertation and he tends toward idealization of what he perceives to be the opposite of fascism -- a fact which he acknowledges in some of the footnotes, for instance, one in which Christa King critiqued him for overidealizing gender relations among proletarian communities in the Ruhr valley; the workers were standing in direct opposition to the Freikorps proto-fascists which lead him to be less critical of them than he could have been.

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