Abstract
Two recent additions to the Sexuality, Identity, and Society Series published by Oxford University Press register the hopes and dreams of an expanding multiverse of gender and sexuality. Both The Declining Significance of Homophobia by Mark McCormack and The Monogamy Gap by Eric Anderson are forward-looking, optimistic assessments of where current trends are taking us. I desperately wanted to dream along with both authors but found myself in each case more perturbed than inspired by the visions they invoked.
McCormack’s The Declining Significance of Homophobia offers a hopeful portrait of a brave new masculinity no longer fettered by what the author terms homohysteria (i.e., the cultural fear of being homosexualized; McCormack borrowed this term from his friend and academic mentor, Eric Anderson). In his ethnographic study of boys (16 to 18 years old) attending three different British schools, McCormack observes a surprising degree of tolerance for homosexuality as well as the marked decline of an old-style masculinity characterized by aggression, emotional distance, and dominance. He shows us a remarkable group of young heterosexual men who speak openly of their love for each other, while devoting little energy to policing the boundary between the homosocial and homosexual. This is welcome news indeed.
Unfortunately, there are a number of significant problems with McCormack’s study: there is too much academic throat-clearing in the first half of the book, he consistently underestimates possible reactive effects, and he too often interprets the adoption of practices once marked feminine as evidence of homosexual acceptance. What follows will focus on two of the book’s more consequential weaknesses.
The first is theoretical. Early in the book, McCormack defends his rejection of queer and poststructural approaches with a powerful anecdote. He recalls how, during a heated debate with a colleague, she could identify only one difference between Butler’s (1990) “performativity” and West and Zimmerman’s (1987) “doing gender”—i.e. the former’s assertion that there is no “doer behind the deed.” “Well quite,” replies McCormack, “but try telling that to kids who are being bullied by homophobic thugs” (p. 8). This too easy dismissal comes back to haunt McCormack, and it implies an insensitivity to the materiality of the body that Butler has specifically refuted (1993). Moreover, it creates significant blind spots in his analysis. McCormack devotes an entire chapter to detailing how the boys at one of the schools manage their heterosexual identities without resorting to homophobic language or behavior. But it was unconvincing that the boys cared all that much about maintaining their heterosexual status. On the contrary, they apparently were behaving rather queerly, in that they seemed relatively untroubled by how their various behaviors (lots of physical touch, with one young man even sitting in another’s lap) were being judged, despite the fact that on some level they must have been aware they were subverting traditional norms of masculinity.
The most obvious blind spot was in McCormack’s analysis of Max, an out gay but wildly popular boy who was elected student council president by his peers. As evidence of the easy acceptance of homosexuality at Max’s school, McCormack includes a photograph of one of his campaign posters. It features Max as a slightly-built, non-threatening Bieberesque boy wearing only underwear trunks, and flashing a peace sign. How might the poster have been received if instead it depicted Max as an aggressive, powerfully-built topman rather than a submissive bottom boy? The idea that it is actually only a very narrow and “digestible” version of homosexuality that is being accepted at these schools is borne out when another boy (Thomas) confirms that no one hassles him because he’s gay, “They just think I’m really, really gay” (p. 77). The idea that Thomas’ acceptance may be because, rather than in spite of his flamboyance never seems to register with McCormack.
Needless to say, the author’s rejection of poststructuralism presents challenges for his analysis of popular but problematic utterances like “no homo” and “that’s so gay.” Near the end of his book, he presents an elaborate model for understanding the evolving (and he argues, non-homphobic) nature of such phrases. In some situations they can actually be understood as pro-gay, depending upon the intent of the speaker. Of course, from a poststructuralist standpoint, speakers themselves are the products of language and individual intent is discounted. Having already rejected this position, McCormack is compelled to engage in some rather tortuous theorization. Overall I found him far too confident in his ability to assess the negative effects of such phrases. Even in the most accepting environment it is difficult to ignore the cumulative effects of the consistently negative associations with “so gay” and “no homo.” On the positive side, he reports that several of his subjects use the “L” word (love) freely when describing their relationships with “their best mates” (p. 117).
But the most consequential weakness in McCormack’s book is methodological, in that he seems to have missed a golden ethnographic opportunity. He is overly concerned with the generalizability of his study (never a strong point of this type of research) while at the same time maddeningly incurious about the relevant “how” questions, which ethnography is exquisitely positioned to address. Perhaps most readers will care little about the study’s generalizability but will be keenly interested in how they might cultivate such idyllic gender practices at their local high school. Here McCormack offers little, beyond some general speculations about the effects of the internet and “wider cultural, political, and legal changes regarding declining homophobia more broadly” (p. 126). Local and case-specific elements are neglected, and the study places an emphasis on documenting prosocial gender practices, rather than understanding or explaining them. Despite his efforts to the contrary (pp. 84–87), McCormack was unpersuasive that there may be something peculiar about the area he studied (e.g., a highly publicized local teen suicide, a high-profile intervention or education campaign, or local funding tied to policy changes, etc.). His interview data seemed thin; he devotes almost no effort toward probing the attitude formation, influences, or key incidents in his subjects’ lives that might be informing their gender practices.
Is the significance of homophobia declining? There is a certain prefigurative power in McCormack’s analysis which I am loath to challenge, but recent events loom large: homophobia has not lost any of its sting in France, Russia, or Uganda. Indeed, the Gay British Crime Survey of 2013 strongly suggests that homophobia may be alive and well in McCormack’s backyard. Furthermore, considering the arc of his overall argument, I was reminded of a powerful concept from critical race theory (2001). The empathic fallacy recognizes a naïve tendency to assume a kind of linear moral progress in history, based on people’s empathic identification with the oppression of others. CRT argues, conversely, that the arc of justice zigs, zags, and occasionally reverses while innovative forms of oppression replace more traditional ones. Indeed, beyond the empathic fallacy there is no guarantee that equality can ever be fully achieved. In a similar vein, despite the undeniably swift legal and normative changes that have taken place around gender and sexuality, there is still no guarantee that the next decade will be one wherein homophobia no longer obtains. The issue may play out more like abortion has in the United States, with a powerfully entrenched resistance continuing to make restrictive inroads despite abortion’s de jure acceptance. Like abortion, homosexuality touches on reified concepts of “natural” sexuality, often rooted in deeply-held religious beliefs. Male homosexuality in particular continues to figure as a deeply disruptive threat to certain exercises of patriarchal power. While I certainly hope my fears here are misplaced, The Declining Significance of Homophobia offered little reassurance.
Eric Anderson’s The Monogamy Gap primes the reader for a peak experience. As McCormack’s friend and academic mentor, he receives high praise throughout McCormack’s book. This abundant (and occasionally cloying) admiration piqued my interest. Here again I confess disappointment.
The gap Anderson’s title refers to is not the gap between men’s and women’s devotion to monogamy, instead he focuses exclusively on men and “the difference between [their] somatic desire for extradyadic sex and the socialized desire for monogamy” (p. 104). In other words, men experience a tension between a desire to be faithful to their partners and their biological natures. In the end, “sex wins out” (p. 115). He positions himself as a liberator, counseling his readers to emulate gay men (“Gay men are promiscuous. Most are very promiscuous”) and to “Be proud to be a slut” (p. 20).
Actually, this advice seems to be directed at men, as women’s voices are all but absent from the analysis. Readers will have to look elsewhere if they are interested in how women feel about alternatives to monogamy (e.g., Stacey 2012). Anderson does not simply exclude women’s perspectives, he creates a world hermetically sealed off from the feminine. This suggested to me a fear, or at the very least a significant discounting of women’s sexual agency.
Anderson’s data was gleaned from interviews with 120 young men between the ages of 18 and 22, all of them students and half of them athletes. He is aware that this is not a representative sample, noting that the men “were strategically selected for variables that enhance their chances of cheating” (p. 23). Since what he wants to study is the gap between normative pressures toward monogamy and actual behavior, it matters little that non-students, older men and married men are excluded from his interview pool. However, he seems oblivious to the fact that in this particular group the tension between intention and behavior may be non-existent. It is more plausible that many of these young men simply naturalize their “extradyadic” sexual adventures as an extension of their maleness and as a taken-for-granted part of male privilege.
Anderson seems only too willing to help out. He draws on cognitive psychology and biology, but asserts that in the end his analysis is “primarily sociological” (p. 22). What really informs his work is a resurrected sociobiology, which he positions as a melding of the polarized positions of social versus biological determinism (p. 23). But he is unable to offer any systematic means of distinguishing social from biological effects; he simply invokes biology and evolutionary psychology when they help him advance his naturalizing argument. Needless to say, female biology is all but ignored. Just when a robust and intellectually nuanced sociology of the body is beginning to find its footing, Anderson invites us return to the simple comforts of old school sociobiology.
Like McCormack, Anderson rejects the complications of poststructuralism. “Most of the time I read poststructural works, I have absolutely no idea what the author is going on about” (p. 32). I had no idea what he was going on about in his fifth chapter, which is devoted entirely to scientific studies of physical attraction. Here he apparently forgets that he is writing a book about why men are attracted to cheating, rather than why they are attracted to other people. Finally, the book suffers from extraordinarily sloppy copyediting and contains an embarrassing number of typographical errors.
After finishing these two books I felt anxious and overwhelmed by something like the opposite of schadenfreude. Given their objectives, I desperately wanted to be able to recommend these two books; instead my misgivings left me wondering how they had found their way to publication. I had the uneasy sense that something important had shifted in the world of academic publishing. With an unquiet mind I retired for the evening. What dreams may come, I hoped, would give me cause. Alas, in place of dreams came spirits. I was visited by three ghosts.
The first was Miss Bertorello, my irascible high-school English teacher. “Clarity” was the single word she uttered. Both of these books exhibit an admirable impulse toward clarity. Both explicitly associate their writing style with a commitment to an accessible public sociology. As an instructor, I am distressed by the frustration my undergraduates suffer as they wrestle valiantly with abstruse and often needlessly complex theoretical jargon. Occasionally a bright student will boil down pages of text to a few pithy sentences, a la C. Wright Mills’ sardonic summary of Talcott Parsons. So I am entirely sympathetic with the authors’ objective here. Yet they both go too far. By rejecting poststructuralism, McCormack does indeed produce a more readable text, but also an impoverished analysis. In reducing the social body to sociobiology, Anderson revives a familiar and all-too-clear essentialism.
My second ghostly visitor was the renowned best-selling sociologist David Riesman. “One million” he declaimed, referring of course to the one million copies of The Lonely Crowd sold throughout the 1950s and 60s. In a 1997 Contemporary Sociology article, Herbert Gans tallied the sales figures for sociology books with crossover appeal and found The Lonely Crowd the only sociology book to even come close to this benchmark. Reviewing the otherwise dismal sales figures for sociology books he concluded that “the discipline has a long way to go before it makes a significant impression on the general public” (Gans: 135). Moreover, a recent update in Contexts (Longhofer, Golden and Baiocchi 2010) substantiated many of Gans’ findings. Presciently, Gans warned that “part of our informational role is being taken over by talented journalists”—think Malcolm Gladwell. Perhaps McCormack and Anderson, in an admirable gesture toward popular appeal, have simply cut too many corners. The attempt is laudable—sociology is in dire need of effective popularizers. Can the weaknesses in these books be attributed to an attempt to dethrone the likes of Gladwell and deliver popular sociology back into the hands of credentialed academics? Perhaps, but I’m not sure it excuses them.
My final and most formidable spectral guest was no less a personage than Margaret Thatcher. “Impact!” she huffed imperiously. “Aha!” thought I. Both of these authors have to contend with the U.K.’s research assessment method known as the Research Excellence Framework (REF), widely decried as an incursion of neoliberalism into the groves of academe (Fernández-Armesto 2009, Holmwood 2012). Thatcher, who once famously observed that “There is no such thing as society” (McSmith 2010), got the ball rolling with the first assessment of university research in 1986. Since then a series of research assessment exercises have paved the way for the REF, which will be fully implemented in 2014. Chief among the REF criteria for assessing research is “impact,” broadly defined. In terms of the REF’s own impact “The stakes could hardly be higher” (Scott 2012). Many departments face decreased funding or outright obliteration.
Thus the REF’s impact criteria, as Holmwood observes, provides a powerful incentive for scholars in the United Kingdom to abandon “core sociological concerns” (Holmwood: 5) in favor of research likely to shake things up outside the ivory tower. “[The REF’s] central innovation is that it wishes to reward impact outside academia,” notes Andrew Oswald (2009). I have no idea how prominently such concerns figured into the work of the two authors under review, but for me it explains an awful lot. In light of the REF, McCormack’s misplaced obsession with the generalizability of ethnography looks like a pre-emptive strike against charges of parochialism, while Anderson’s more inflammatory claims read like a talk-show host’s dream. On the other hand, in terms of its extra-academic impact the commercial appeal of poststructuralism probably lies somewhere between zero and null.
In spite of their flaws these two books suggest real changes, and in some cases real improvements in men’s lives. They also suggest a future wherein men may grip the reins of gender orthodoxy a bit less anxiously, perhaps one day casting them aside altogether. Now that’s what I call a consummation devoutly to be wished. Until then, there’s no law against dreaming.