[...boldly proving that I've never taken a gender-theory course in my life]

[reenka]

Thinking of cathexys' entry on slash queering and also just celebrating masculinity/gender-mapping stuff in conjunction with this utterly fascinating, huge(!) scholarly article on Q/Picard slash in Star Trek (that is, how it's pretty much intentionally on the show on the actors' side), I'm struck by the connection between queerness/gender (gender-queerness?) and theatricality, especially with this quote from the genders.org article:
    For Q gender is clearly a matter of performance. In fact, for Q just about everything he does in his interactions with humans is a matter of performance; de Lancie, an experienced stage performer, infuses his character with a hyperbolic theatricality.

This reminds me of the 'obviously gay' character in HP, for me (at this point), which is Draco (duh).


I mean, I'll admit he's bi 'in reality' to be reasonable, though this rings more like Star Trek's 'plausible deniability'. To me, objectively, Harry's 'gay' is just being naturally romantically/socially stunted (that is, it's immature of him to fixate on boys like he does, I think, rather than queer, per se) & Remus' 'gay' is more with the typical subdued/enforcedly socially stunted academic vibe (though I happen to only like him with Sirius as a pairing and of course he -could- be queered pretty easily), but my perception of Draco is that he's just Very Very Queer, and it's for exactly this reason: he's just so theatrical.
    And of course, what does that mean, really? About how I (and others, I guess) perceive gender & masculinity? I mean, y'know, theatrical/drama-queeny females don't strike me as 'extra-girly' or anything. I wouldn't say extraverted/projected emotionality always 'reads' queer to me or even 'feminine', precisely-- it's possible to be Italian (er, I mean, emotional while being macho).

So what is this 'theatricality' that makes both Q & Draco seem coded 'queer' to (some) people?
    I dunno, but I suspect it's more about conscious performance rather than the natural 'female-style' drama-queen theatrics, which seem more uncontrolled and less layered and intentional.
    To give an example, I was walking along 5th ave in Manhattan, and when I passed the City University Graduate Center, there were these big poster ads for a bunch of their professors. One was the theatre professor; and I just needed one look at him: the little smirk and the raised eyebrows and the sheer expressiveness of his face-- and I couldn't help it. He was just broadcasting QUEER, as if it was a bigtime radio station, and I'm a person who's usually totally insensitive to these signals (I'm absolutely lost and confused as to how most people supposedly 'know'-- my gaydar is pretty much dead in the water).

I'm really not sure what any of this means; could be that I'm just reinforcing stereotypes or stating the potentially offensively obvious (ie, there's just a current cultural trend where gay men are queeny as some sort of socio-political statement or as a way to be fashionable). And since slash is supposedly disconnected with 'real-world' queerness and/or markers, it seems pointless to talk about it, except here's the rub: these 'cultural markers' are often what influence us to slash in the first place, and to read these characters as, you know, 'so married' or 'so doing it' or whatever. Because like, Q & Picard are like, SO MARRIED, y'know?

This also reminds me of a quote by D. A. Miller from that same genders.org article:
    perhaps the most salient index to male homosexuality, socially speaking, consists precisely in how a man looks at other men.
    And hey, isn't that a big reason I slashed Harry and Ron and Cedric and Krum and everyone in the GoF movie?? I mean, boy, did they look at each other 'funny' or what! And we all know that is SO GAY! :D :D

Actually, it so is. I remember thinking this was especially explicit in Brokeback Mountain, where the first thing we see, the very first scene, is Jack and Ennis 'looking queerly' at each other. I swear to god, if those weren't two 'come fuck me' gazes, I don't know what they were! I thought it was funny how, you know, it sure didn't take Jack long, and Ennis was like, 'oh hey...' right back at 'im. Bang. Queer.

It's all more complicated & less stupid than that in 'real life', I'm sure (I mean, I don't know! as you can probably tell!), but in terms of the social markers, oh yeah. Expression, theatricality, performance: it all seems part of the same package, of kind of presenting yourself differently because you're being consciously(!) aware that you're 'not straight' (and shouldn't act straight?)
    Which just raises the question in an interesting way, for slashers, who're often picking up these 'signals' but generally (unlike Q, one assumes), the characters aren't purposefully/intentionally sending out any signals, and the whole point of the subtext is that the subjects themselves are unaware of how gay they're really being. Which, in retrospect, seems certain to be either active denial (possible!) or actually just complete ignorance of like, everything (as in Harry's case)-- I just don't think your 'normal' guy would miss it in his own behavior, even, in current times at least. I dunno, I'm totally shooting in the dark here :> :>

...Though I think most of what the article made me think of was, 'man, I really really enjoy the idea of Q/Picard, but omg most Q/P fics I read cross that line between subtext and text, boldly going towards utter romance-novelish extravagance'. Which, I suppose, would suit Q all right :> To me, though, it's more... delicious when implied (though if I thought either of them were all that hot, this would naturally be different). Or... it could be the extravagant power differential; really now. ^^;;
~~

    Trying to further the squee:
    I keep meaning to make a post on hydaspes' Merry_Smutmas fic, A Very Long Misadventure, but being distracted and-- eh, it's not gonna happen. But it's my first, 'eeeeeee, what I wanted, eeeee, IC!Harry&Draco! yeay, plot!' fic since `Eclipse'. Heh. (And now I'm picturing the next round of people who'll avoid it 'cause I recced it and later anonymously tell me my taste sucks-- ahhh, internets making me paranooooiiid). Anyway.

Yeah, time-travel, 5th century England, a Harry who keeps on truckin' with the being-distrustful-of-Malfoy and disliking-Malfoy-on-principle and a Draco who's snarky yet pathetic yet kind of cute. And also like, magic and time-travel and stuff. It basically hits my kinks; usually the author's fics have Draco be too in need of hurt/comfort, which just turns me way off since post-HBP!H/D + hurt/comfort = TEH DEVIL OMG!!1 (in my eyes), so Draco's (mostly) normalcy in this fic just allowed me to revel in her H/D dynamic more purely. Aaaand, it's got fumbly boysex (score!)

And on the yaoi front:
    I was actually thinking about how I don't just like angst/drama/romance stuff, I can like fluff a lot and I can prove it-- and I was gonna whip out the latest one-shot scanlation released of Yamada Yugi (which I posted at yaoi_daily here), and then I realized... uh.... That's not fluff, that's snarky cuteness. D'oh. -.-

Comments

[amelia-eve.livejournal.com]

My own sense of gaydar is that a lot of it is not so much about how a man looks at other men, but how he presents himself to be looked at by other men. He offers himself as an object of the male gaze in a way that straight men don't, and that can also be construed as theatrical.

I really like the thought that for Q, any embodiment is performance because he has no "natural" personality. One of the things that I think made de Lancie's performance so powerful was the way he constantly violated other characters' personal space, especially Picard's. He'd always stand just a little too close, and force others to pay attention to him. In other words, inviting the gaze.

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

Only tangentially related to the post, digressive, and not properly fannish, but.

He offers himself as an object of the male gaze in a way that straight men don't, and that can also be construed as theatrical.

Damn. I'm writing a dissertation on sixteenth-century depictions of Richard II (it's actually about historiography and theatricality but Richard II is my way into the issue), and of course I thought of Shakespeare's version of him all through this post, since Shakespeare's RII is both highly and self-consciously theatrical, and reads as so queer that one expects the articles of deposition mentioned but not read in the fourth act to include an item about the minting and promulgation of three-pound notes. But of course he's king (well, until he gets deposed) and that makes him an object of the gaze (and an object of desire) ex officio -- "the observed of all observers," as Ophelia calls Hamlet, and that has got me thinking about some of the issues in my diss in really funky ways. Is it possible to argue that kingship is inherently queer? And then if you put that style of rule into an Elizabethan context, the paradigms shift again because of Elizabeth's gender, but of course she's gender-bending too because as the monarch she has two bodies and...yeah. So thank you for getting my brain pinging. :D

For more speculation in this area, expressed through fannish-style avenues, I direct you to this fic. (http://community.livejournal.com/shaksper_random/7157.html) Just because. ;)

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I was totally thinking, as I said in the other comment, about this article (http://nymag.com/fashion/06/spring/15746/) on Karl Lagerfeld, and how he's called the Boy Prince of fashion at age 72, and how that seems to fit him, and that now led me to wonder if there's a reason there's something-- I dunno, archetypally resonant, about those poncey aristocratic boys in stories, at least-- pampered, narcissistic, with a flair for drama and an outsize ego with many insecurities and an obsession with attention-- that is to say, this is the stereotypical 'prince', and the prince makes the king, right?

I think kingship is different, though, at least ideally, because a true statesman (or more seasoned & experienced politician) is going to be... mellower, not drawing so much attention to himself and his ego, per se, as to his office and the symbols of his power. It becomes much more about power, I think, than personality (usually), but the more it's about a cult of personality, the more queer I think it seems. But this would be kind of alongside but not intrinsic to the guy being king, you know?

Aristocratic poncey princes with their lily-white hands and their ruffled collars and their excess & debauchery & all-around hedonism, on the other hand-- I think they're pretty queer :D

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

It becomes much more about power, I think, than personality (usually), but the more it's about a cult of personality, the more queer I think it seems.

Yeah, that works, certainly as far as Shakespeare's Richard is concerned because so many of his failures come from an inability to separate power and personality (this seems to have been equally true of the historical Richard). And then with Shakespeare you get history being viewed through an Elizabethan lens, and Elizabeth I really, really fostered the whole cult-of-personality thing, but it's different for her because she's female and can take on the role of the domina who's an object of desire for courtly lovers and that's a perfectly acceptable position for her culture. It's a bit of a common critical trope to take Richard II as Shakespeare writes him as a critique of Elizabeth, especially in light of the amount of controversy generated by the play when it was first performed, but then you get into all sorts of weird things where you have the fictionalized king who's gender-transgressive in one way standing in for the real queen who's gender-transgressive in another way because she plays with tropes of femininity but is also masculine by virtue of her office and...argh, it's all a great big fascinating genderfucky mess. And I'm not very articulate because I'm tired so I'm not really addressing what you said, which is very much on the mark.

(A while back I read Sir Thomas Elyot's Book Named the Governor and did a double-take when I got to his allegory of the bees and the line about how the "king bee" -- which is actually the queen bee but they hadn't determined how to figure out bee genders -- has no prick...)

As a tangential note one of the things I'm going to write about in the diss, though I haven't yet, is the way in which Elizabethan playwrights, when they're being politically critical, tend to appropriate the arguments made by opponents of the theater and deflect them onto the court -- like, there's theater and then there's theater. And so much of the opposition to the theater was cast in terms of sexuality -- anxieties about cross-dressing and its effects, and so forth. There's a famous passage in one antitheatrical tract which hysterically imagines performers and spectators leaving the theater "and in their secret conclaves they play the sodomites or worse."

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

I was just reading this article (http://nymag.com/fashion/06/spring/15746/) Karl Lagerfeld, y'know, the designer, and I kept trying to tell myself 'well, he doesn't -have- to be gay' especially when there were these stories about how he was obsessed with changing clothes several times a day when he was 4, though then it was basically stated that he is, and ping! Though I can't help but feel it's somehow deceptive, can't be assumed of course, but-- it's like, if a guy is only thinking of attracting females or just narcissistic (or whatever's driving the evolution of the peacock), it's like he wouldn't perform in the same way, 'cause like, don't females respond to rather different things--??

Of course, that's not true, precisely, 'cause a lot of girls like 'girly' guys and flashy clothes and (more) bared bodies on guys and more emotional displays and all that-- but somehow it seems like there's going to be some sort of blockage there, like insecurity or culturally built-in arrogance or some compulsive desire to leave the 'girly things' to the girls whether or not they even fit. I wonder if the theatrical-type projective queer men (and they're not all like that, I expect) have a different perception of women in general, of femininity, that's apart from any possible identification, or if some level of appropriation/identification of the female 'role' is naturally present. Argh, I feel in such murky waters again.

He offers himself as an object of the male gaze in a way that straight men don't, and that can also be construed as theatrical.
Anyway, that rings true. Maybe it can just be seen as a liberation of something that's suppressed in most straight men rather than an appropriation or 'performance' of something 'Other'.

I do think Q has some natural 'self' or identity, even if it can't necessarily be construed as 'personality' by humans or other non-Q beings, 'cause he has emotions, thoughts that he hides, that 'something' he wishes to tell Picard but doesn't-- those things are basically personality. He seems to play a lot, though, because I imagine he's more interested in what happens when he disregards what's the equivalent of 'raw Id' or the emotional basis of himself and manipulates people for amusement. Being sincere gets boring/predictable, I guess, 'cause people have nothing to guess at or resist/overcome/get to know.

Draco forces people to pay attention to him too... I mean, I'm tempted to call that quality queer, but suspect it isn't, 'cause I think that's only true when it's exclusively male rather than 'ALL OF YOU! YES ALL OF YOU, LOOK AT ME!'-- then it's just rather narcissistic :>

[mmoneurere.livejournal.com]

Here via metafandom...

One could almost use Draco as an example case for a dimension of "queerness" independent of sexuality. I tend to read Draco -- and, in the GoF movie most definitely Voldemort; quite often any self-consciously theatrical and flamboyant villain or anti-hero -- as "queer" in a way which is quite compatible with reading the character as "heterosexual". As for Draco (&c.), I may not really have any sense of a sexual orientation for the character -- it just doesn't seem to show up. Queer, though? Definitely.

Draco's treatment in fandom -- along with Snape's, for that matter -- do bring up an amusing dynamic, which could well be traced to what Sedgwick refers to as male homosocial desire. Specifically, the observation that "rivals are automatically slashable" -- and this dynamic is an at least somewhat cross-cultural trope (as anyone following the Japanese equivalents/parallels/corollaries to slash will be well aware).

I don't include Q in the above paragraphs because I think Q's queerness does deliberately include sexual overtones -- Q as a male character chooses to use that (apparent, but not "true") maleness to play with Picard's sexual and gender habits of thought; Q becomes both Queer and homosexual (or at least non-heterosexual). While Draco doesn't seem to bring the same dynamic, the rivalry and general theatrical "queerness" is oh so very, very there...if for no reason other than it being such a classic antagonist's trait.

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Oh man, I know it's easy for a person with a perverse mind & a bit of inventiveness to queer pretty much everything (I was gonna say 'except small fluffy yuppy dogs', but then OMG QUEER and thinking of big sleek black dogs just makes me go for the leather daddies-- um), but yeah-- Voldemort had -such- a queer vibe with Harry in the movie, all that stalking and hissing and getting-in-his-face. I think the the books, the slashiness of Tom/Harry is pretty there too, since they're all mutually obsessive, with many similar interests (har har) and like, a doomed connection binding their fates, etcetc, it's really quite romantic :D :D

But yeah, rivals are just begging for slash as much as friends are, so I dunno why in every 'scholarly' essay I encounter, it's always all about the friendshippers and a passing mention to the rivalshipping stuff. I mean, the truth is, any form of emotional connection can be slashed/queered, the more intense the uh, more sexualized. I think it's pretty possible to like, obliterate Platonic love in a sort of writerly rampage (not that I'd want to, but it's possible). Um, but that was a digression. :>

I do, regretfully, agree that it's v. possible to read Draco as 'queer' while retaining the implicit heterosexuality, the same way it's possible to be male and Italian, or male and a theatre major, or male and a fashion designer-- and all, y'know, straight. But! Since it's not -near- as entertaining, I didn't fully explore the dynamics of that, 'tis true. I do think it's a queer sort of heterosexuality, and I mean, without some element of heteroflexibility-- or bi-curiosity-- or something, it would still feel -wrong- because the personality-type seems too centred on attention/affection of all sorts, on sort of living off other people's desire and one's own narcissism. So that just seems to have the -potential- to put a dent in 100% hetero behavior even if no opportunity arises. I do agree Draco's not sexual in the text, really, just in my head.

I think when -I- write Draco, he does get into Harry's physical space in that sort of in-your-face Q-style way, which I didn't even realize until now. He's always demanding attention and challenging the pre-conceptions of (my) Harry, and it seems like sexualized attention would be merely one step further along the road. I think it's true, though, that the act of performance, gender-related or just personality-related, seems to read as 'queer' (transgressive? or just messing with set identity or with people's gazes/desires regardless of their gender) without having to do with the actor's sexual orientation per se.

[mmoneurere.livejournal.com]

without some element of heteroflexibility-- or bi-curiosity-- or something, it would still feel -wrong- because the personality-type seems too centred on attention/affection of all sorts, on sort of living off other people's desire and one's own narcissism.

It's the whole polymorphous-perverse, aristocratic-decadence angle...and it just works. It's the Dorian Gray effect (or, perhaps even more thoroughly, Lord Henry in the same novel). I'm fairly sure there's some sort of regressive trope lurking in the idea, which bothers me...but I'm also fairly sure the trope as a whole is transgressively redeemable. It may be something to do with the tendency of villains on the Dorian/Richard II/Draco model to draw the attention/identification (and sympathy) which would seem to be intended for the hero, or the species' perhaps even greater success as morally ambiguous (read: more genuinely human, even when aggressively alien) characters (Lord Henry, Draco, Q) rather than simple "villains."

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

This Dorian/Draco ambiguity thing is definitely a trope in anime-- like, that often has long-haired decadent villains-who-aren't-really-villains (who're either mercenary-noble like 06 in Gundam Wing or if not ambiguous, then insane-- and totally genderfucked-- like Dilandau in Escaflowne). I mean, I know what you mean about it seeming vaguely outdated or possibly offensive (I was thinking that with the whole queeny labelling frame of mind to start with),but, well, it's often observably true, anyway, isn't it? Those sorts of people exist, and how often are they 'really' straight in terms of, um, only liking girls? (Though my experience is so limited this is sort of a ridiculus assertion on my part).

But yeah, it's the perversity! Like, if a character enjoys messing with boundaries, why would they stop at who they'd sleep with? That's sort of too depressing for me, if it was just 'but no, that's icky', or whatever reason it is non-bi people have for... um, not being bi. :>

[mmoneurere.livejournal.com]

I think the regressive elements might have more to do with class than with gender or sexuality. The archetype (for lack of a better term...though I generally can't stand the "archetype" terminology) we're considering does seem to be pretty heavily coded as aristocratic (or at least [haut-]bourgeois/literati). It's the element of decadence -- I'm not sure I see many (if any) of this type given so much as a bohemian-decadent angle; it's a dominant-class image. Then again, it could also be read as a subversive commentary on aristocratic or bourgeois values on the part of a character who relies on aristocratic our bourgeois privilege...which produces another interesting tension. Oscar Wilde seems to angle for this tension in The Soul of Man Under Socialism -- which makes sense, I suppose, since Wilde devoted much of his energy to embodying the type of character we're looking at.