Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T00:42:24.108Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Fagchild Tools: Softening the Body Politic and Sexualizing Paul Ryan in a Pussy-Grabbing Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2018

Queer J. Thomas*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh

Abstract

This article cautions against the strong impulse in the #MeToo movement to desexualize politics. Informed by queer theory, the article argues that the public desexualization imperative, represented by indignation toward President Donald Trump's pussy-grabbing antics and the concomitant, albeit justified, movement to expose decades of his sexual harassment of women, casts a shadow across queer citizens that chills sexual expression in democratic discourse and public life. The public desexualization imperative presents a double bind that creates, on one hand, public spaces that are less threatening and discriminatory to women and, on the other, public spaces that—from a queer white cisgender man's perspective, one whose only “marking” is his sexuality—erase queers’ valued differences. The author uses personal narrative to describe and apply tools (conceptualized as fagchild tools) that help navigate tensions between women's equality movements and queer efforts to gain fuller, more open sexual citizenship. The article focuses, first, on softening the body politic (implicitly a white cisgender heterosexual male body) to provide sociopolitical space for sexual pluralism. Second, the article uses the sexualization of House Speaker Paul Ryan to argue that making space for queer sexualities may require accommodating the expression of nonqueer sexualities, including those that most of us find offensive.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Butler, Judith. 1994. “Against Proper Objects.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6 (2–3): 126.Google Scholar
Chauncey, George. 2004. Why Marriage? New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Heckert, Jamie. 2010. “Intimacy with Strangers/Intimacy with Self: Queer Experiences of Social Research.” In Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, eds. Browne, Kath and Nash, Catherine J.. New York: Routledge, 4153.Google Scholar
Johnson, Jenna. 2016. “Trump Apologizes for ‘Foolish’ Comments about Women, Then Attacks the Clintons.” Washington Post, October 8.Google Scholar
Junn, Jane. 2017. “The Trump Majority: White Womanhood and the Making of Female Voters in the U.S.” Politics, Groups and Identities 5 (2): 343–52.Google Scholar
Kemp, Jonathan. 2013. The Penetrated Male. Brooklyn: Punctum.Google Scholar
Lorde, Audre. 1984. “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.” In Sister Outsider. New York: Ten Speed Press, 110–13.Google Scholar
Luscombe, Belinda. 2012. “Paul Ryan: All Pumped Up for His Closeup.” Time, October 11.Google Scholar
Monette, Paul. 1994. “The Politics of Silence.” In Last Watch of the Night. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 116–31.Google Scholar
Pensis, Evan R. 2016. “Fugitive Faggotry: Queer Rage and the Limitations of Equality.” Ethnomusicology Review 20. https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/content/fugitive-faggotry-queer-rage-and-limitations-equality (accessed October 1, 2018).Google Scholar
Phelan, Shane. 2001. Sexual Strangers: Gays, Lesbians, and Dilemmas of Citizenship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Radin, Margaret Jane. 1990. “The Pragmatist and the Feminist.” Southern California Law Review 63: 16991726.Google Scholar
Sontag, Susan. 1982. “Notes on Camp.” In A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.Google Scholar
Thomas, Jerry. 2017a. “Queer Sensibilities: Notes on Method.” Politics, Groups and Identities 5 (1): 172–81.Google Scholar
Thomas, Jerry. 2017b. “Queer Sensibilities and Other Fagchild Tools.” In LGBTQ Politics: A Critical Reader, eds. Brettschneider, Maria, Burgess, Susan, and Keating, Cricket. New York: New York University Press, 394413.Google Scholar
Thomas, Jerry [Thomas, Queer J.]. . 2017c. “Constructing Queer Theory in Political Science and Public Law: Sexual Citizenship, Outspeech, and Queer Narrative.” New Political Science 39 (4): 568–87.Google Scholar