Tricks of the Light

While there is a growing literature focusing on clients in sexual economies, much of this relies on heteronormative and/or unproven assumptions about masculinity and men’s motivations for purchasing sex. This collaborative ethnographic research takes a comparative approach by studying performances of masculinity in heterosexual and homosexual commercial sex venues in Rio de Janeiro. The authors argue that masculine performances not only are about homosocial male bonding between clients but also are aspirational performances in which actors must work within and across particular class- and race-based structures to jockey for position within the local hierarchy of hegemonic masculinity. They conclude that the connection between masculinity in heterosexual and homosexual venues is fractal, refractive, and coconstituitive. That is, even though the performances of masculinity look different in outward appearance, they actually operate within a shared ideology of gender and are coconstructed through actors’ own pretensions toward class distinction.

Delectable pleasures: Alcohol, Drinking and Subversive Masculinities in the Comedies of Etherege and Wycherley

The year 1660 not only meant the return of the English monarchy, but it also signalled the return of parties and feasts, of drinking and eating in excess after eleven years of Puritanical abstinence. Both the tavern and the banquet halls were prominent spaces of homosocial male sociability at the time, intended for male bonding, sex talk and discussion of sexual prowess, three essential stages in the manhood-acquiring process. This paper argues that Etherege and Wycherley, two of the most prominent Restoration playwrights, not only present us with instances of banqueting and drinking in their plays, but also that their representations of drinking subvert the manhood-affirming nature of alcohol and drinking, thus questioning and subverting established gender roles. Keywords: Gender performativity, Drinking, Alcohol, Masculinity, Sexuality, Homosocial relations.

Introduction

To make sense of the presence of Catholic devotionalism in America’s putatively Protestant mainstream fiction, the Introduction recovers the mythopoetic criticism of Leslie A. Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, long-remembered only in gender and racial terms, to marshal his distinction between Protestant sentimentalism, in which Pauline anti-sexuality yields sexless households and male bonding, and the sanctification of passion in the Catholic Mediterranean, which re-sexualizes Mary and compulsively seeks redemption in transgression. Whereas Fiedler assumed that Roman Catholicism lost the literary battle for the American psyche, Transgression & Redemption argues that “the Protestant temptation to Marian Catholicism” anticipated by Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter really gets going by century’s end and culminates in the great American modern(ist) novels of the 1920s. It begins by identifying the core storytelling that dissents from Emersonian transcendentalism and that has dominated America’s novelistic canon since its inception: what a previous generation identifies as “melodramas of beset sexuality” that must now be seen, in a return to religious accountability, as martyr tales of forbidden love. Then the big reveal: it turns out that where there is sexual transgression in the American canon, there are almost always signs of redemption—and those signs are themselves almost always Catholic. The introduction proceeds from recent critical trends to outline further crucial changes in reading practices—leveraging female devotions against male delusion, thinking both/and instead of either/or, cultivating material immanence over transcendental symbolism—that prepare the way for comprehending the once-and-still-fearful religious Other central to the American literary imagination.

A Few Bad Friends: Dynamics of Male Dominance and Failure of Masculine Bonding in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross

David Mamet is often considered as the quintessential dramatist of American urban life whose stage is peopled exclusively, and at times questionably, with men. Glengarry Glen Ross is the outstanding epitome of Mamet’s avid engagement with the world of men and their primordial, instinctive thirst for dominance, authority, and the celebration of their masculine prowess. Exploring the turbulent dynamics of male interactions determined and affected by contemporary capitalism, the present study investigates the disturbed depiction of masculinity and male bonding. Mainstream masculinity has been fundamentally linked to power and organized for domination. Historically changing and politically fraught, masculinity is the product of social learning or socialization. Rather than a celebration of the camaraderie of men, as most criticisms of Mamet focus upon, it is argued that the play highlights the failure of such fellowship and the tragic consequences. In Mamet, capitalism and the market economy do to men what in a patriarchal system men do to women: marginalize, dominate, displace. Men, therefore, are losing their cultural centrality, and with that, their capacity for constructive male bonds. Glengarry Glen Ross faithfully captures the sad ethos of American capitalism. The dynamics of dominance and success, the exercise of power, and the hierarchies of control lead to a dysfunctional network of male connections and interactions. Men are expected to develop more instrumentally functioning abilities and roles while maintaining the more expressively dominant roles they used to possess. Caught in between, they are only subject to alienation. This is the paradox of contemporary American men.