this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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My point isn’t that gender is some sort of good thing, or even retrievable, but that “masculinity” is often used to refer to superficial aesthetics, of which people can often enjoy presenting as (or not). This wouldn’t go away if we abolished gender.
It might be worth interrogating the connection between aesthetic values and other values, as in Society of the Spectacle in its real meaning and not the flanderized "wot if e'erywun wah jus' wa'chin' the telly?" version. Gender is overwhelmingly what makes what we view as gendered presentations appealing, and this is demonstrated by the way that it varies across cultural differences in what gendered presentation is. To use a very obvious example, I would fully expect wearing a skirt to make a transmasc person here and now feel potentially dysphoric, but in medieval Scotland transmasc people were generally probably quite happy to wear kilts in the situations they could get away with doing so. Why? It's just a slightly different arrangement of cloth! Because it is a signifier for a certain position in a certain framework of social values, not just aesthetic ones.
I don’t think this is true though, because what I’m talking about is masculinity and femininity, not gender. The aesthetics of masculinity and femininity are influenced by and came from gender constructs, there’s no denying that, and what fits under those aesthetics constantly changes and varies based on circumstance and time, and of course these aesthetics can feed into and influence conceptions of gender and other things significantly, but they are still able to be treated as primarily aesthetics.
First of all, with your example, Scotland masculinity is associated with kilts and skirts because of a cultural association and how that aesthetic was constructed. Yes, it came from gender, patriarchal norms, conditions, etc, but the aesthetic itself is only a small part of gender and an aspect that would exist regardless of gender’s existence (as in, if we removed all the material and social pressures for people to be a binary gender, not if we removed it from existence retroactively); Definitely not in the same exact form, but people would still follow aesthetic trends and preferences. And, even if we were to snap our fingers and delete gender, people would probably still identify with and prefer presenting as masculine or feminine or both or neither or whatever new things people create. And of course, what they would perceive as each would vary significantly from person to person.
Case in point: GNC trans people. Trans tomboys and femboys exist, and they are not only valid but very based and cool. These are people who find gender affirmation in feminine aesthetics as a man and masculine aesthetics as a woman. Butch lesbian women exist, too, and consider themselves women despite many of them also explicitly presenting as masculine, as well.
My overall point is that a kind of revolutionary masculinity would not involve trying to rehabilitate reactionary ideas for the sake of appeasing men, by claiming that certain personality traits or behaviors are somehow manly or not manly, but instead a creation of an aesthetic that appeals to those who identify with the aesthetic of masculinity in general right now, but with more revolutionary undertones. Effectively, accelerating the abstraction of the signifier away from the material to then reground a new swathe of signifiers we create in revolutionary movements and material beliefs. That sounds right, idk