I've been consistently skeptical of the whole "metrosexual" thing. While, by many accounts, "metrosexual" is a category to which I might be assigned (though i'm not sure that i'm either emotionally mature or well-dressed enough to really qualify, nor interested in personal hygeine or food -- Ah, fuck it, i'm a slob) i question the assumptions about gender and sexuality, not to mention class and "culture", that underly this kind of categorization. And articles like this one seem to both feed Promise Keeper anxieties of the dissolution of traditional masculinity while ultimately reifying and unquestioningly accepting such notions as gospel. There is a similar dynamic at work here governing articulations of sexuality. What I mean by this is that "metrosexuality" is really a deeply heteronormative construction. And metrosexuality defines as Gay the "gay" James Kirchick wants LKI to enshrine, the white "Gay," the male "Gay," the cosntruction of "Gay" whose notions of sameness and difference are deeply rooted in the logics of class, race, and gender, "innocuous and quotidien, unthreatening and placid," in evan cobb's words.
One cannot fuck a city, at least in the sense that cities constitute more than the people and objects by which they are populated. (Although as an etymological sidenote, the "metro" of "metropolis" doesn't even mean "city." That's what the "polis" is for. "metro" comes from "metron": measure, size. That fact in no way excuses my crappy espanol.) And metrosexuality seems, as this article suggests, as much if not more of a marketing tool as/than an imagined symbolic community. Of course, it can easily be both at the same time, even to the same people. Or maybe this article is just really Foucauldian in its imagining of gender performance as a managerial technique. Indeed, Nancy Halpern articulates this notion of a new mextrosexual supervisorial stratum as ideal for the management of workplaces feminized by the new gender formations of labor and the increaisng centrality of the production of affect. I'll leave this open ended for now, because i've been up since four AM and am having trouble focusing. Plus, it's the world series, and i am living in boston, and well, you get my drift.
FUCK SCOTT STAPP!
The thing with metrosexuals was that it wasn't sexual at all. It was however a sign of material acquisition and compliance, more or less, with what Queer Eye told you you ought to have in terms of an astringent lineup. So it was a real smack to -sexualities, flaunting the fact that they were othered where the metro- was not; but worse still, it did it in terms of consumer signifiers the access to which was entirely a product of class to begin with. As if "gay" wasn't hard enough to arrive at from outside economic privilege, now that very same mode of capital-subservient tolerable sexual deviance had been extended to the heterosexuals, and capital had got the source of some more points on the margin.
ReplyDeleteI mean, I love my metro friend Eric, he's so cute and such a sweetheart and he's almost like the straight boyfriend you can't sleep with, oh wait, THAT'S INSANE. But a nice, self-consumptive fantasy, right where they want it. Not only do you get to sell the current gay niche to hets, but the gays will think up other stuff to buy and wear to differentiate themselves again.
As far as fucking a city... I don't know, a lot of gay literature paints The Life as essentially sex with an urban space. My sense of New York has essentially been that there's a degree of sexual contact with the location itself amidst the general fuckfest.
Pardon my language... I read two books for my dissertation tonight that had chapters about Deep Throat, and not the Watergate kind.
Whoops, sorry, that other comment was me, forgot to sign it.
ReplyDelete-Evan
I didn't have a TV or a home internet connection when the whole metrosexual thing seems to have recieved the bulk of the attention focused upon it, (ah, New Haven,) and so i think i failed to pick up on the very salient point you make about material acquisition and consumer signifiers. I also think i was reluctant to confront class and to the extent that i should have because I was having trouble articulating the interaction as coherently as you do.
ReplyDelete"But a nice, self-consumptive fantasy, right where they want it. Not only do you get to sell the current gay niche to hets, but the gays will think up other stuff to buy and wear to differentiate themselves again."
right, and that's next year's model
"As far as fucking a city... I don't know, a lot of gay literature paints The Life as essentially sex with an urban space. My sense of New York has essentially been that there's a degree of sexual contact with the location itself amidst the general fuckfest."
Yeah, that's a good point. I think that part of the post was mostly my inner ex-classicist trying to show off with a half hearted and badly articulated attempt to illuminate the threat of Empire's etymological colonization of sexuality as a way of telling myself that the six and a half years of latin and four years of ancient greek weren't entirely wasted on fetishizing the problematic gender politics of bitter two-millennia old lyric poets. And as far as the language goes, well, i started it.