Femmunist Intimations

We come through the rave early as Jenny has to work the next day. This one, surprisingly, is at the Crown Heights end of Brooklyn. A decaying warehouse separated from new condos by some nondescript office stack. After we greet the door staff, we’re up the stairs. Faint trace of industrial solvent mixed with fog and poppers. No scent of sweat yet. It’s early.

Devoye is the opening DJ, doing the opener’s job of warming up the crowd. Dancers spread out, a few feet apart, not obliged to interact with each other. We dance low key, just working our way into it. Agreeable but not transformative. Easing into it for the first of the two headliners—Robert Hood.

Hood, for those who don’t follow these things, is a legendary techno DJ and producer. Part of the seminal group Underground Resistance, founder of minimal techno. He’s daddy. An imposing figure. Tall, dressed all in black, with a plain black ball cap. He chats amiably with Devoye at the handoff. Once in charge, the energy changes. Everyone loves a star.

This rave—let’s call it Flanger—is supposedly a queer one, but you wouldn’t know it from the early crowd. Straight girls in the wrong footwear. Boys who don’t know how to dress themselves. It’s a reminder of why Jenny and I avoid this kind of dancefloor. It’s the heterosexuality, or more specifically, the antics of cishet men. “Not all men.” Sure, I’ll get to that. But enough of them are annoying to curse the whole thing. Here’s three of tonight’s specimens, all basic white guys.

Specimen A: He pushes backwards through the crowd, landing right in my space. His attention is all on the cis woman he drags through by the hand. They clink beer cans together. I put my hands on his back. He turns around, puzzled. “Get the fuck off me.” “Oh, sorry,” he says, in a not-sorry way.

Specimen B: He leads not one but three cis women into the crowd, hands linked behind him, like a barrel-of-monkeys chain. His way of making space for them is to use his large body to shove people out of the way. He is holding a beer can aloft as he bulldozers through, the flag of jerk nation. I’m shoved by Specimen B back onto Specimen A. He gives me a look. “Oh, sorry,” I say, in a not-sorry way. Time for me to slip through the crowd myself and find a new spot.

I’m right up front now, which brings be within the gravity well of Specimen C. He is next to me, to my left, pressing himself into the cis woman in front of him. Big humans. The two of them together are a multiple of my mass. He’s waving his arm to the beat, some sort of fist-pump-cum-salute. As if his motions commanded the music. I’m trying to keep clear of this rando commander but every time I move away he moves closer.

Specimen C isn’t done yet. After someone behind reaches between me and him to put a water bottle on the DJ’s table, he moves it rightwards, towards me. I move it back, so its owner will find it where they left it. Specimen C then reaches for my water bottle, takes it off the table, rips the label off it, puts it back. What the fuck is that about? I’m tempted to smack him in the face, but instead I just slip out of the crowd and take a break. No more Robert Hood for me. I find Jenny, who’s had her own run-ins, and we decide to head home.

These are all specimens of punisher behavior. For the punisher, it’s like having a good time involves no concession or coordination with those around you. Anyone can become a punisher on the dancefloor. It’s helpful to acknowledge that we have all been the punisher in someone else’s dancefloor experience at some time or other. Usually, it’s just being oblivious to the situation, but it’s on a continuum that can pass through annoying to abusive. It’s just that it seems to be cis men who do it most, even though all of us can do a lil’ masculinity at times, if that’s what this is.

***

Photo: McKenzie Wark

I have a peculiar relation to masculinity. I cosplayed at it for years before finally giving it up and coming out as a transsexual woman. Alongside the greater comedy of that journey is a smaller story about the first time I ever encountered critical thinking about masculinity. It was via a book by R. W. Connell.

Mostly known at the time for work on class and education, Connell was one of my favorite professors when I was an undergraduate at Macquarie University, from 1980 to 1985. I later came to work at Macquarie alongside Connell and was there when Connell’s landmark book Masculinities came out, in 1995.1 I read it mostly because it was by a colleague and I tried to keep up with such things. Turned out to be an important book for me in more ways than one.

Here’s some useful stuff I learned: Masculinity isn’t reducible to the identity of men. It’s a social phenomenon, and women have a part in shaping it too. There’s no one masculinity. It doesn’t have an essence. It’s best approached as a field of social and cultural forces. There’s three main axes that shape masculinities: power, labor, and sex—all broadly construed.

Connell thinks nonetheless that one can classify masculinities into four broad kinds. “Hegemonic masculinities” practice the subordination not only of women but of other men. They emphasize physical power and emotional restraint. “Subordinated masculinities” may have some of those qualities too, but they are undercut by other factors, such as race and class—or homosexuality. It’s harder for gay, nonwhite, or working-class men to pull it off. “Marginalized masculinities” express behaviors and attributes considered unmanly or feminine. Too emotional, too fem-presenting.

Okay all that seems like a useful conceptual net for holding a wide range of observable things about masculinity. It was the fourth kind that gave me pause—what Connell calls “complicit masculinities.” This category includes all those who could dissent from hegemonic masculinity but don’t really do much about it. They are the beneficiaries of it, on the quiet. That, I have to admit, is what I was doing before I came out. I never wanted any of it. Masculinity fit me like a hair shirt. Yet I didn’t take it off. Only pushed back in the most marginal ways. I hid out in masculinity—to get on with writing.

Eventually I cast off the hair shirt. Here’s the kicker—so did Connell. She came out too! All her major works were published under the name R. W. Connell. The first initial now stands for Raewyn. When she came out it explained a lot. There’d been mutterings in the common room from other faculty about why a “man” was getting research grants to study gender. As it turned out, she wasn’t. 

It might also explain why she was one of my favorite professors. I remember her lecturing in thigh boots and jeans, a soft blouse in flowing velvet, and a beret. It was the early eighties, and this was hippie throwback, but there’s a way this style could be a place to hide complicated gender feels. I know I did before I switched to punk.

I wonder if Raewyn thinks she had been complicit. I would have loved to have been more of a marginalized masculinities kinda guy. And was, a bit, but not much. I’m slight, not strong, born with club feet. Was often called a girl, all through my life. (To which I never objected.) But I made up for it by leaning into the verbal arts of masculinity. A facility with language was—and is—all I have in this world. I used it, backed by inhabiting the space of whiteness, of middle-class confidence, and provincial ambition.

Eventually, I gave up the masculinity part.

***

Photo: McKenzie Wark

I come back to Flanger about five in the morning. Alone, while Jenny sleeps. I come for the other headliner—Juliana Huxtable. As I expected, this is a different crowd. Juliana is mother to Brooklyn’s nightlife queers, and a DJ who pushes techno forward into unknown sonic territory. I don’t have much trouble inserting myself into the front of the dancefloor. It’s tight but not that tight. Bring water with me, offer it to some ravers I know. Always welcome.

Front and center are who I take to be two black cis lesbians. Both are somewhere on the butch end of the spectrum. Both absolutely going off, giving everything. A black trans masc short king joins them after a while, bringing water, who will come and go throughout the set.

I find Q and her girlfriend in there, and a bunch of ravers I recognize but can’t name. We’re all just throwing ourselves body and soul into the mix. Letting Juliana fuck with us. Fuck us. You have to let the beat ride you to get anywhere. A queer rave is a celebration of the penetrability of the flesh.

Fashion comes through, and people make way for her. She’s iconic. Six feet something already and on stacked heels. She’s waving a bubble wand at Juliana who is laughing and batting bubbles back.

What looks like a circuit gay climbs on the speaker stack, house left. She’s fucking the mids. I see the DJ known as TT cut across in front of me, to reach up to the speaker-fucker. We like it deranged around here but we don’t want anyone crushed by a toppling stack. TT persuades her gently to come down. All handled smoothly in the disorienting light, fog, and sound.

This is a situation without hegemonic masculinity and its rituals of dominance, its space-commanding habits. Without main-character syndrome. Well, except for Fashion, but it’s generally agreed around here that she has a right to be a main character. She’s earned it. She has made her body, her being, her bearing, into a work of art.

A situation without hegemonic masculinity can still include men, of course. Without hegemonic masculinity, the other kinds rearrange themselves in its absence. There’s reversal: masculinity becomes the second sex, the supplement. That whose existence makes the language of femininity sing. The best kind of masculine object for this purpose is “trade.” A nuanced word in queer language, but “supplement” wouldn’t be a bad translation.

Here the universal pronoun is “she.” Everyone is addressed always with the honorific “girl.” The one complication is trans men, and there it’s context dependent: one has to be clear one is not referring to his sex assigned at birth but to the universal “she” of gay life. It’s a delightful double bind, actually. A trans man is truly a man without qualification in this situation when addressed as “she” like everyone else.

The short king wanders back, bringing the two black dykes more water. Which of the masculinities is on display here? All trans people are caught in a difficult dance, dodging the sanctions straight life deploys to hurt us, trying to pursue our autonomy, the freedom of the flesh. As Connell is saying, masculinities are both structural and contested. It’s just delightful when trans mascs and trans men commit to doing masculinity right. Maybe they can confound Connell’s categories a little. Find other ways that strength and restraint can be a useful comportment.

We’re deep enough into the passage of the rave, and the passage of this text, to broach a difficult topic. As a transsexual woman who came out late, what parts of my own former attempts at masculinity do I want to keep? Well, for one thing, I do indeed still have the confidence of a mediocre white man. I’d like to think I grew old enough to know the limits of my talents. And yet if I can radiate that confidence, others can take some of it for themselves. Others who didn’t just scoop it up as a bauble of birthright. It shouldn’t be like this, but it is.

***

This bubbling boil of beats and bodies, this spume of drugged sweat and sizzling sound—I like this situation, with all its subtleties. These bodies, this music, this morning. It’s an “intimation” of another situation for another life. I like the word “intimation,” with its suggestion of something intimate, indirect, subtle. An intimation of “femmunism.” Which we might begin to think and feel as the absence of hegemonic masculinity.

Not the absence of men. It’s a mistake to wrap the language of gender around the body too tight. Or imagine it springs from the body as if from its nature. A blunt example: trans-exclusionary feminists (TERFS) are all men to me. They do the work of policing the body that hegemonic masculinity usually assumes as its own. They’re doing subordinated masculinity. Best to dance all that loose, to lose it.

To be rid of hegemonic masculinity does not require the abolition of gender either. I’m always suspicious of this demand—as it usually means the abolition of this or that expression of femininity. As Simone de Beauvoir saw so clearly, masculinity posits itself as universal, as the human, pushing femininity into the role of supplement, for contrast, the other that is its negative. Hence abolishing gender ends up defaulting to a masculine norm.

Rather, let’s aim at the abolition of compulsory genders and their hierarchy. One of the hardest things is to have difference without antagonism or rank. To achieve that, to me, would be femmunism. Besides—genders are fun to play with. They’re a language of the body. A language which also articulates possibilities of sense and sensuality. Let’s have difference with frisson, play, challenge—which makes more difference, keeps things moving.

Femmunism has lots of genders, without compulsion or domination (although consensual domination play is still available). It’s for uncommon people, an uncommons. It’s not a communism, as it presumes no universal shared essence. It’s roots are pagan rather than Christian. There will still be forms of distinction: Juliana behind the decks, Fashion in front of them—they’re special. Iconic. That’s to be honored. They’re fabulous, as my rave theory sister madison moore might say if she was here.2 They’re giving fabulous. It’s to share.

This situation lasts about four hours. Then it’s over. Some stay for the closer. I’m a fan of DJ NE/RE/A, but I don’t have it in me. Outside it’s a bright fall Sunday morning. I sit in a nearby coffeeshop with my latte. It’s full of people with email jobs, working. I get some looks as I’m covered in sweat and rave schmutz. I don’t care. I’ve had an intimation, and it’ll hold me for a while.

Delving deep into the night in search of the rave, getting fucked up to get free in the intimate crush of disengendered flesh—is not everyone’s idea of a good time. Someone else will have to find and describe the other rituals of unbecoming. This is the one I know and love; these are the humans I know and love. If there’s to be a revolution of the genders, it will make many arts of seduction into collective practices of the flesh, of which this might just be one.