ANGLOPHONE
STUDIES
|
_______________ |
Editor-in-chief Trevor Harris |
|||||
(Literature,
Civilization, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Linguistics)
|
|||||||
GRAAT: Pronounce [greit]
|
|||||||
GRAAT: Getting to the bone
A
peer-reviewed journal of Anglophone Studies
James Penner, Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). $24.95, 318 pages, ISBN 978-0-253-22251-0—Georges-Claude Guilbert, Université François Rabelais, Tours. James
Penner teaches in the English Department at the University of Puerto
Rico, Rio Piedras (San Juan). His work has appeared in various drama
and gender studies journals. I hear that he is currently writing about
the intersection of drug culture and literary culture in the 1960s
and 1970s, which after the present book makes perfect sense. He will
discuss Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs,
R. D. Laing, the Living Theatre Company, the Cockettes, among other
topics, some already touched upon in Pinks, Pansies, and Punks:
The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture, which
seems to have happily stemmed from his PhD dissertation. After
an Introduction reminding the reader of some of the stakes of “macho
criticism,” Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity
in American Literary Culture is divided into five parts, entitled: As
the titles of these chapters indicate, Penner belongs to what is sometimes
called “literary gender studies.” He is in equal parts
a literary critic and a gender studies scholar (plus a cultural critic),
bringing the best of both worlds to the page. Penner
is best at exemplifying the intersections of class and gender, as
linked to more or less Marxist criticism, either of the “Old
Left” or of the “New Left”—both being prehistoric
now, of course. When tackling Michael Gold, he states that “much
of Gold’s criticism rests on the premise that one’s social
class is necessarily reflected in one’s masculine identity.”
[2] He also looks at race, unavoidably, especially when it is useful
to remind us of some racist clichés that persisted for decades,
such as the view of Jewish males as inherently feminine, or the connection
between racial myths and gender myths when it comes to African American
cultural concerns [39]. Throughout the book Penner observes dichotomies
at work or play: hard vs. soft, Apollonian vs. Dionysian, masculine
vs. feminine. Which is not to say he necessarily sees them as binary
himself, evidently, especially not the homo / hetero or effeminate
/ non effeminate divides. He convincingly argues against the use of
“masculinity in crisis” (oops, I plead guilty), showing
that what is happening (at various periods in history) is really “opposing
types of masculinity that coexist in the same historical moment.”
[15] If
the title sounds familiar, it is because it is a quote, as Penner
acknowledges: “Credit for the phrase ‘pinks, pansies,
and punks’ goes to Senator McCarthy. He used it in an attempt
to discredit Adlai Stevenson’s campaign staff in 1952, and thus
it conveys the American right wing’s discomfort with bohemians,
homosexuals, progressives, and a particular sector of the American
leisure class that gravitated toward left-wing politics in the 1940s
and 1950s (‘pinks’).” [24] among other things, Penner
reminds us of the frequent association (if not conflation) in the
minds of many in the past of idleness and homosexuality. Male homosexuality
is the one that worries people, specifically effeminate male homosexuality,
since, as Halberstam and Penner know, “our society is far more
concerned about effeminate males and tends to treat examples of female
masculinity with widespread indifference” [46], whereas male
“homosexuality is virtually synonymous with decadent leisure
culture.” [54] Style, of course, matters most, and throughout
the twentieth century there has been among the phallocrats or the
homophobes as well as among a certain type of working-class hero or
advocate a distrust of excessive style, or even simply of excessively
good English. “In a column in the New Masses, Gold
even goes so far as to associate ‘perfect English with effeminacy.’”
[27] Penner points out tremendous paradoxes in the matter, for example,
about the same Gold, that “the irony of Gold, the classic homophobe,
adoring Whitman is familiar in macho criticism.” [28] For indeed,
not only do paradigms shift, left and right and back and forth, from
the 1930s to the 1970s, but things are not always so simple when it
comes to the sexual orientations and literary choices of authors and
critics. “Thus, in 1930 some critics could be anti-effeminate
without being homophobic, but this distinction would become increasingly
blurred as the 1930s progressed.” [36] Penner
looks at Clifford Odets’s plays and the novels of James T. Farrell
and James M. Cain and other examples of tough-guy fiction, with femmes
fatales and hard-boiled pursuits. He looks at WW2 butch marines and
then at the Cold War and how America feared the penetration of Soviet
spies. He mentions on the same pages, and rightly so, Gore Vidal’s
The City and the Pillar, Truman Capote’s Other
Voices, Other Rooms, and Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior
of the Human Male, which all came out in 1948. That is really
my only qualm with this book: I myself would have made much more of
this, the visions of masculinity and homosexuality conveyed to the
American public by those three books are so interestingly different.
Of course, 1948 is also the year Leslie Fiedler published the oh-so-famous
“Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey” in the
Partisan Review [81]. Even though Penner and others now speak
of Fiedler’s “misreadings,” he did deeply mark American
literary criticism with this essay. Then
Penner studies the impact of some readings of Freud, in connection
with the writings of Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams, he speaks
of “sex role theory and the problem of the soft male in the
1950s” [111], of mothers and sons and of James Dean and Rebel
Without a Cause [114], and of Norman Mailer and “white
negroes” and hipsters. He has closely read the Beats and shares
some precious insights. The chapter on the 1960s and the counterculture
is equally enlightening, notably when it comes to his assessment of
the Living Theater, totally devoid of the sort of romantic nostalgia
one sometimes encounters in descriptions of their more or less sexual
antics. I particularly recommend his pages on Timothy Leary [181-193]
and on Susan Sontag and ‘camp’ [163, 171-175]. As a conclusion, Penner does not wish his reader to imagine that the US is now wonderfully free of hurtful conceptions of masculinity; although his object of study is the 1930s to 1970s decades, he sees that “any serious cultural critic must also concede that the narrative of hardness—both as a physical ideal and as a cultural myth—continues to have tremendous popularity in the culture at large.” [248] All in all, Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture is an invaluable book. © 2011 Georges-Claude Guilbert & GRAAT
|
|
||||||
|
|
|