the violent hazing in the military that builds brothers and a nation obscures the sexual, consensual nature of these relations.
Jane Ward’s understanding of the intimacy of violence and heterosexual sex is illuminating and discomforting, she compares the sexual and daily violence men perpetrate on women with that which is invoked to transform a homosexual act into a non-sexual act that proves their heterosexuality, e.g. We are taken from the bedrooms of college boys, to toilets in Central Park, on board military ships and to bars on the West coast of America, seeing how desire, homosexuality and violence come together to shore up domination, privilege and brotherhood. She looks at different places where homosexual activity occurs. She write about how this defining depended on elaborations of race and racial categories, so that heterosexuality seems to have always meant and has been meant for whiteness to occupy, and other sexual categories position the subject away from this white core. Jane Ward goes through queer (here meaning those who do not conform or desire to conform to heteronormative standards) Western history, looking at the ways queer men named themselves and the permutation of gender that can be found there such as fairy and trade and then the subsequent shift from naming gender categories to sexual category as sexologists set about defining humanity according to genitals and sexuality. Homosexual acts, when performed by heterosexual men become not a marker of an innate homosexuality but, bizarrely of heterosexuality. Being gay becomes not about desiring sex with men but about desiring to be seen as ‘gay’. Sexual identity categories function, in this text, in the same way ‘Nigerian’ or ‘Colombian’ does as cultural signifiers. Desire seems not to be directed simply, or only at bodies and genitals but the meaning of these things, the ‘social context’. This book is a queer, feminist, black analysis of heterosexuality.įor Jane Ward identifying as heterosexual isn’t about actually being attracted to the opposite gender (in a binary gender formulation) but more about seeking and remaining in a privileged position, in this instance heterosexuality. Instead it becomes a matter of conformity.
The main aim of the book seems to be destroying the notion that there is an internal, essential quality that makes one gay, straight, bisexual, etc. In fact she takes aim at these sexual identity categories. Nor does she aim to prove the idea that ‘everyone is somewhat bisexual’. I grew up on ‘slash’ fiction featuring straight white men that turn gay (thanks Fictionpress) gay porn with straight gay-for-pay white men fantasied about the straight white boy in my class turning gay.īut that’s not what Jane Ward aims to do. Gay men have been apparently obsessed with the sexual lives of straight white men since being gay was a thing. I was convinced to read it after seeing a thread on it on a queer Facebook group.
I first came across this book early last year, in an Interview on Queerty I think with the author, Jane Ward and I instantly thought ‘absolutely no way’. Well… if you’re imagining a book length argument for why straight men who engage in homosexual sex are really, actually gay or bisexual just stuck in the closet.