Tag Archives: David M. Halperin

Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett of Pod Save America recently interviewed the inimitable Representative Sarah McBride (D-Delaware). Among McBride’s interesting insights and arguments is the idea that the two major U.S. political parties are gendered. Republicans are gendered masculine (or identified in terms of fatherhood). Democrats are gendered feminine (or identified in terms of motherhood).

Here’s their conversation (if you prefer to watch, jump in at 12:44):

Rep. McBride: I’ve been thinking about how do you fight back against Trump in a smart way . . . because we are so susceptible to sort of this Trump derangement syndrome dynamic. We’ve been screaming about democracy. . . rights and the rule of law for so long—and clearly, this country voted for someone who incited an insurrection. . . .

The Democratic party is the woman of politics and the Republican party is the man of politics. It’s why Donald Trump can scream and yell and people see him as strong—and why when [Democrats] scream and yell we’re seen as hysterical and shrill. It’s why Donald Trump can hate and insult more than half of this country—because we tolerate deadbeat dads, but Democrats can’t say anything about any voters that [impugn] their motives and their good faith—because a mom has to love every single one of her children. So, I’ve been thinking about how do you grapple with that reality that is a real double standard. . . .

Lovett: Let’s test this new way of talking . . . . You’re trying to make people understand how dangerous it is that Donald Trump is coming after basic academic freedom, but you’re worried it’s not going to resonate with people. How do you talk about it?

Rep. McBride: With all of these actions that we’re seeing against immigrants, against institutions, [the Trump Administration is] picking on the most unpopular, the most vulnerable. They’re picking on people who are easy targets. I do think . . . you have to go back to what we were talking about before, which is that if they can do it [to them], they can do it to you . . . . They can do it to my constituents . . . . I think we can do a better job by making the main character [of our story] our constituents.

Changing our political situation requires, McBride claims, recognizing how political party affiliation is gendered. For example, Republicans can get away with being angry, but Democrats must always be empathetic. “[A] mom,” McBride says, “has to love every single one of her children.”

Motherhood is often the object of politics because the public sphere, the sphere of politics, is gendered masculine. The traditional story is that politics is for men; the management of the home is for women. For McBride, motherhood is the subject of political action.

But what is maternal politics, exactly? In her response to Lovett’s question about how to discuss maternal politics in the context of education, McBride attempts to clarify the character of partisan gendered politics. Her answer, namely that the mother protects “easy targets” of public abuse, isn’t specific enough–so it can’t inspire serious Democratic political action.

In what follows, I ask a revised version of Lovett’s question to McBride: How do you talk about maternal politics in the context of early childhood public education? To answer the question well, we need a definition of maternal politics that is specific enough to avoid confusion (e.g., terrorist organizations like Moms for Liberty claim to love all children) and to provoke serious liberal and/or progressive public action. I propose the following definition:

Maternal politics = public action(s) to secure and defend a boy’s right to become a man who desires like a woman/mother.

Why a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother? Consider recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States regarding an opt-out option for religious conservatives who do not want their children exposed to readings that mention/feature same-sex desire in the public school classroom. It was a book about male same-sex marriage that caught the attention of conservative Associate Justice Samuel Alito.

Conservatives are manifestly not as passionate or concerned about a girl’s public education. What they care about is the reproduction of traditional or normative masculinity. Hence their focus on male same-sex desire. Conservatives think that male homosexuality is especially threatening to the future of straight maleness.

I think my definition of maternal politics helps explain the recurring outbursts of straight anxiety about male homosexuality and the “indoctrination” of boys in our public elementary school. Furthermore, the specificity of my definition of maternal politics (one of many possible proposals) allows us to form a more direct and beneficially partisan answer to (the revised version of) Lovett’s question about gender politics and academic freedom in Trump’s U.S.

Here is the take I will explain and defend below: Conservatives have used the public school system to indoctrinate boys, and we have generally failed to resist it because we (unconsciously) agree with the “obvious” meaning of the conservative premise: boys should be boys. Instead, we should reform early childhood public education by securing and defending a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother.

A traditional public school education entails learning skills, especially (though it is never explicitly acknowledged) the skill (and appreciation) of straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity). Between the ages of 5 and 6, boys are forced by law to leave the sphere of maternal power (i.e., the home/family) and enter the public school system. It is in the public school classroom that they begin to learn, formally (i.e., curriculum) and informally (i.e., socially), to desire “proper” manhood or straight maleness.

The irony is that the reproduction of “proper” manhood necessarily requires/inspires homoerotic desire. Boys must be motivated to undertake an education in normative masculinity. Thus, they are taught to want men/manhood.

You may argue that what boys are taught is the protocols of normative masculinity rather than to desire adult males–but the foundation of straight logic is that sex, gender, and sexuality are inextricably linked. Male/penis > masculine > heterosexual. In other words, a boy can’t want masculinity without also wanting men.

A second irony: the propagation of masculinity requires a boy to desire like a woman/mother. The transmission of normative masculinity from one generation to the next requires, at least initially, the misalignment of sex, gender, and desire (i.e., male/penis desiring man/masculine). It is at this early stage that normative masculinist logic shows its ass (= its vulnerability).

The vulnerability of normative masculinity is its unnaturalness. In other words, “proper” maleness does not inevitably proceed from being born with a penis. “Proper” maleness must be taught.

The fact that straight maleness is taught is not exactly the problem. The way normative masculinity is taught is the source of its tyranny. “Normal” masculinity is presented uncritically, and it requires uncritical acceptance to be mistaken for normal (i.e., natural) or, as the Trump Administration prefers, for “biological truth.”

Traditionally, this is why the acknowledgment of (male) homosexuality in public schools has been a source of straight panic. It exposes the hole of straight maleness: straight masculinity is not natural. It is optional.

Nowadays, homosexuality is not as often considered inherently opposed to straight masculinity. It’s an interesting development. Today, dudes sucking dick (homie head, brojob, etc.) is just another way for boys to be boys.

Straight ideology is flexible, and gay identity politics is clever. It’s a win-win situation: straight masculinity remains (if not natural) inherently desirable, and male homosexuals are welcome to enjoy its privileges–well, at least if they are good students, willing to learn/embody the protocols of “proper” masculinity.

So, recent arguments before the Supreme Court about readings in public schools that mention same-sex desire may be read as a form of social progress. Before books that acknowledge the reality of happy adult male homosexual relationships (happiness being what I think Justice Alito means by the “subtle” moral message of the book that offends religious conservatives) defiled God’s male children, the biggest threat to the “proper” education of our male children was the gay male English teacher. And before the English teacher became sus, the “gay” male philosopher was considered the corrupter of male youth.

“In a famous passage in The Divine Comedy,” writes David M. Halperin in “Deviant Teaching” (2007, 146-167), Dante represents himself as encountering, in the course of his journey through Hell, the soul of [philosopher] Brunetto Latini . . .” (146). Why did Dante put poor Brunetto in Hell? “His sin is tellingly not named in Canto 15, but other passages in Inferno remove any doubts about its identity. Brunetto is damned for sodomy” (146).

When Dante asks him about his companions in Hell, Brunetto answers that “all were clerks and great men of letters, in the world defined by one [and the] same sin” (148). “Sodomy,” Halperin declares, “is evidently a sin to which literary scholars, critics, and writers (such as Dante himself) are particularly prone” (148).

Halperin, a public university English professor trained as a classicist–and no stranger to controversy–reminds us of “how ancient is the association between teaching and sodomy, between paedagogy and paederasty” (149). “[T]he abolition of any clear or firm distinction between the relation of teacher and student and the relation of lover and beloved is,” Halperin writes, “one of the most notorious consequences of Plato’s metaphysical theory of erotic desire” (149). Teaching “has an extended history of association with deviance and has long figured as a deviant practice” (151).

If gender were a “biological truth,” as the Trump Administration claims it is, then straight anxiety inspired by the fantasy of homosexual indoctrination in public schools would be a genuine absurdity. The reality of old school straight anxiety exposes a glitch in the code of masculinist transmission: gender is a social–not a biological–reality. It must be taught and learned.

For a boy to become a man, he must leave the maternal sphere, the home. He must also leave his father’s side. A boy’s father “is too closely tied to the boy by blood and domesticity . . . so they cannot fully . . . incarnate the cultural ideal of male identity . . . ” (151).

“Every proper boy,” Halperin writes, “has to have at least two daddies” (151, emphasis original). Boys learn to become traditional or “proper” men in the public sphere (e.g., schools, sports teams, etc.).

The glitch in the heteronormative educational regime is further exposed by how it represents the social transmission of masculinity (154-155). Consider how the Sambia of Papua New Guinea ritualize the reproduction of strong warrior men.

Elder males take boys ages 8-9 off into the forest where they are forced to perform oral sex on adolescent males. Halperin observes that the young boys are taught to think of “cock-sucking as a kind of breast-feeding” (155).

Ingesting semen, the boys receive the nourishment they require to grow “into real men who will be strong warriors” (155). They continue to ingest semen until they turn 15, at which point they become “the breast” for younger boys.

Listening to social and religious conservatives today, one would never know that third and fourth grade boys in the U.S. are not being taught to suck cock in public schools. What they are being taught, and in ways not entirely different from how the Sambia “represent to themselves symbolically the means by which they reproduce themselves socially,” is how to become proper Western men (156, emphasis original).

Halperin considers the 1953 Western movie Shane an example of a Western form of masculine transmission. The movie’s focus on the mechanics of masculine reproduction makes it a standout Western (157).

Shane is about how a 9-year-old boy, Joey, is made into a man (i.e., taught how to shoot a gun and fight) by a mysterious stranger, “a gunfighter and a killer” (i.e., a social deviant), a cowboy named Shane (158). Joey’s father cannot teach Joey how to become a man because he is too busy managing and defending the family farm. For obvious reasons, Joey’s mother can’t possibly teach him how to become a man.

Halperin compares Shane to the Holy Ghost. “It is only when Shane’s potent shadow falls across the holy American family that the family succeeds in . . . reproducing masculinity . . . and ensuring its own futurity” (159–for my reading of the Holy Ghost, go here). And “[g]unfighting in Shane is,” Halperin observes, “like cock-sucking among the Sambia: both are cultural practices connected with initiation into the symbolic order of masculinity and heavily laden with phallic meaning” (160).

The relationship between Shane and Joey mirrors the relationship between Shane and Joey’s mother, Marian. It is not sexual, but it is erotic. Marian wants to play with Shane’s pistol, too.

Like his mother, Joey feels some kind of way about Shane. In desiring him, Joey gives Shane the “charismatic power necessary to enable those enamored of him (Joey and male viewers) to accede to manhood by means of identification, emulation, and endless, unfulfilled desire for him” (160).

Moreover, Joey’s desire for Shane is no accident. Like Socrates, Shane has a way with his young male students (160-161). Shane makes his manhood hot to both Marian and Joey (= it’s object a). He inspires Joey (and male viewers) to observe his gun obsessively. Masculinity is transmitted “ocularly” in Shane (162).

In seeing/receiving Shane’s manhood, the male viewers “make the supposedly identity-affirming, gender-consolidating experience of masculine identification coincide, as if nothing could be more normal, with the urgent and inescapable solicitation of homoerotic desire” (162).

Question: Did Shane indoctrinate Joey? Did Shane require Joey to accept his warrior manhood uncritically to begin becoming a “real” man? No. Joey wanted the manhood Shane offered him.

Masculine indoctrination requires boys to accept Shane’s manhood as “biological truth.” In that way, Shane becomes the “proper” man, the kind of man boys must become to be considered real men, the type of man women must desire and whose prerogatives they must support to be identified as pious/conservative/real women.

Shane’s “Republican manhood,” if you will, undoubtedly continues to appeal to women/mothers and their boys. I accept that, and I am prepared to secure and defend a boy’s right to want Shane and to become a man who either desires women/mothers or other men who desire men like Shane.

There is nothing inherently wrong with conservative masculinity. That is, I think, a liberal (if not progressive) position to hold–and it is consistent with McBride’s–and my own–definition of maternal politics. “[A] mom has love every single one of her children.”

Apparently, dads have a choice in the matter.

What I reject is the fascist spirit that often animates a traditional education in straight maleness. Republican manhood is manifestly not appealing to every boy. It is not even appealing to every boy’s parents, and there is no reason to believe it will appeal to all who will enter a boy’s life as an adult male.

Moreover, it is an offense to common sense and reason (and I, as a biblical Christian theologian, think it is an offense to the gospel of Jesus Christ) to enforce, as a matter of (unacknowledged) policy or law, Republican manhood. If “biological truth” requires the enforcement of norms and/or the sword of law, just how biological–or true–is it?

The assertion of the biological truth of gender reveals that social and religious conservatives have, like a God, forgotten themselves:

For with the old Gods things came to an end long ago–and verily they had a good and joyful Gods’ end! Theirs was no mere “twilight” death–that is a lie!

Rather: one day they–laughed themselves to death!

This happened when the most godless words issued from a God himself–the words: “There is one God! Thou shalt have no other God before me!” . . . a God, most jealous, forgot himself thus:

And thereupon all the Gods laughed and rocked their chairs and shouted: “Is just this not Godliness, that there are Gods but no God?”

He that hath ears let him hear (Thus Spoke Zarathustra [(1883) 2003], 201, italics original).

In a gloss on this passage, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, “God, in Nietzsche’s fabulation, forgot Himself, and even His own name; He thought he was God, THE God, when He was simply one among many others (inner superiority means we are on the wrong track, it means we are too intimidated) (Unforbidden Pleasures [2015], 42).

In another text–but in a similar context–Halperin describes how the “inner superiority” of straight maleness may work out in the context of sexuality and gender, nowadays:

If homophobia sometimes functions less to oppress homosexuals than to police the behavior of heterosexuals and to strong-arm them into keeping one another strictly in line with the requirements of proper sex and gender norms, for fear of appearing queer [remember: declaring “no homo” after receiving, e.g., homie head will protect you from appearing (too) queer] it may be that one of the functions of transphobia is to police the behavior of lesbians and gay men and to terrorize them into conforming to the gender style deemed appropriate to their respective sexes (How To Be Gay [2012], 307, italics mine).

As we discovered earlier, the propagation of straight maleness can accommodate a disconnect between sex and sexuality. Nowadays, being a homosexual doesn’t necessarily make you a sus male (i.e., gaaaaaay).

The chronic misalignment of sex/penis (male) and normative gender style (straight maleness) does, however, remain socially problematic. At some point, one must put childish ways behind them.

At this point, straightness has shown a lot of ass. It concedes that heterosexuality is not natural. No one (bi, lesbian, gay, straight, none) knows what determines one’s sexuality (or lack thereof). It also concedes that straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity) is not natural: it does not proceed naturally from having a penis. It must be taught (and even enforced).

And given that gender does not proceed naturally from sex or depend on one’s sexuality, it follows that anyone, of whatever sex or sexuality, can, if they so desire, learn a specific gender style. Women can, at least in principle, learn to embody normative masculinity.

What all this means is that the claim of straightness to have no other Gods before it is laughable. But the Gods before it need not laugh themselves to death! Instead, they can get on with baptizing newly persuaded converts.

The epigraph of How To Be Gay, a description of gay male masculinity, or masculinity that is gendered feminine because it is resistant to straight maleness, reads: “Let the pagans beget and the Christians baptize” (see also How To Be Gay, 532-533).

The epigraph of How To Be Gay echoes the central argument of Halperin’s essay, “Deviant Teaching”: The “introduction . . . to [non-sexual methods of instruction in maleness,] to non-standard ways of seeing, to distinctive ethical and aesthetic modes of relating to the surrounding culture, to a unique set of sensibilities, and to dissident ways of reading cultural objects (movies, opera, Broadway musicals, emblems of fashion and styles, embodiments of masculinity) [is] what I have been calling deviant teaching,” and what, in How To be Gay, is called gay male subculture (“Deviant Teaching,” 165).

Gay male subculture, as a deviant form of masculine propagation (i.e., it resists the allure of straight maleness), is similar to straight maleness in that it does not depend on either one’s sex or sexuality. It is a style that anyone who finds persuasive may learn to embody.

Gay maleness is among the gods a boy may reasonably desire. Accordingly, maternal politics entails defending and securing a boy’s right to become a man who desires women/mothers or other men who desire gayness.

As a non-normative gender style, a lifestyle misaligned with one’s sex, gayness is a form of Trans*ness (I use the * to indicate gender nonconformity in addition to sex nonconformity). However, Trans*ness moves us well beyond gender misalignment to sexual misalignment.

In her interview on Pod Save America, McBride addresses one of the challenges of Trans* politics (42 minutes in):  

I think one of the challenges that we have in conversations around Trans identities that’s different than conversations around gay rights is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust –and so they’re able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience. People who aren’t Trans don’t know what it feels like to be Trans–and for me the closest thing that I can compare it to is a constant feeling of homesickness, just this unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed and live as myself . . . .

I imagine one reality that Rep. McBride is expressing here is that her body initially provoked a conversation: Is this you? She answered either “No” or “Not exactly.” I am guessing (because I am unfamiliar with the details of her experience) that McBride desired a new alignment of sex and gender–and one made possible by a radically new understanding of sex: sex, like gender, is not a natural fact. Sex is an opportunity for conversation rather than indoctrination.

Although Evangelical men really want women to have penises, male to female Trans* experience constitutes an upheaval of normative thought. It inspires intense—and, unfortunately, intensely irrational—emotions.

The animus directed toward Trans* women is a fruit of the fascist spirit that often underlies the commitment to the reproduction of Republican manhood–and one that more than a few fruits enjoy. We have only to think of Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is usually an interesting and nuanced public intellectual, but his screeds against “big trans” are becoming increasingly overdetermined (i.e., inspired by irrational forces). On a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Sullivan comments:

I love the idea that Democrats should get back into building things, into making things happen, into deregulating, into supercharging the economy. I just think that until the Democrats address some of the core issues, they seem not to want to control immigration. They have extremist views about race. They think that boys should compete with girls in sports, and that children should be… have their sex reassigned. Until they grapple with that. . . .

We have not taught civics in this country. They’re too busy learning that America is white supremacist without learning that there are three branches of government. They’re all separate. They’re kept apart so that we can be freer than other countries. Why are we teaching that? We should be teaching that (italics mine).

The claim that Democrats “think . . . that children should be . . . have their sex reassigned” is blatantly false. I am curious, though, about the Levitical themes of Sullivan’s commentary: separation and purity.

Sullivan seems to think biological males should not be separated from their penises–even when they desire to be so separated. In his view, effeminate gay boys are being misled by “big trans” into thinking they are Trans* women rather than gay males. “Big trans,” again in Sullivan’s view, is “transing away the gay.”

The second of Sullivan’s falsehoods, related, I think, to the first, is: “We have not taught civics in this country.” Sullivan seems to believe that “we” have not learned anything about the separation of powers–and too much about the separation of racial groups enforced by those same powers for several centuries.

Is his argument that “we” would become less preoccupied with white supremacy if “we” were taught the philosophy of “separate but equal”? If I am not mistaken, “we” were taught in school that Sullivan’s approach is not unique in history. Hence the focus on white supremacy.

I don’t think it’s uncharitable to read the argument of the unruly forces underlying Sullivan’s Leviticus-like political theology this way: In a good society, penises should remain attached to their original bodies; races, like the branches of the U.S. government (like the sexes?), should be separate but equal.

Maternal politics, at least as I understand it, entirely rejects Sullivan’s (unconscious) definition of a “good” society. Instead, it defends and secures a biological male’s right to discern who they are, really–including a woman/mother who desires women and/or men who desire a new alignment of sex and gender.

Maternal politics, as I understand it, is a form of deviant politics. Securing and defending the right of boys to become (wo)men who desire like women/mothers takes us into scandalous and fraught territory.

How do we talk about maternal politics across a range of issues that are important to our fellow citizens? In other words, how do we make it an electorally desirable politics? If we allow ourselves to have a real conversation about the political body, what is our answer to the question, Is this us?

If maternal politics appeals to us, it could be defined more broadly as taking public action(s) to secure and defend everyone’s right to have complicated conversations about the political body, especially now. Among the lessons Trump has (unknowingly) taught us is that we require a genuine upheaval of political thought.