Does masculinity have a race? Queering white masculinities

Abstract

While it seems entirely reasonable to query how a university educator might take up the issue of queer and/or transsexual masculinities with undergraduate students in a women and gender studies classroom, such a question presumes that knowledge is transparent, distributed by the professor alone, and already in controlled circulation at the beginning of the class. Instead, this chapter begins by reformulating the question: How might the female-to-male transsexual gender studies professor trouble the way that students are already taking up gender in the women and gender studies classroom through the trans-body of their teacher? Drawing upon the deconstructive methodologies of queer and trans theory, this chapter documents the transformative potential of transsexual masculinity in the women and gender studies classroom. Such potentialities necessitate working ignorance or the absence of knowledge, against overdetermined heteronormative knowledge. In an essay called “The Privilege of Unknowing,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993) argues that ignorance is not the absence or opposite of knowledge but its silent co-creator. “Knowledge is not itself power,” she writes, “although it is the magnetic field of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with it in mobilizing the flows of meaning” (p. 24). Sedgwick uses an example of language to illustrate her point: If, for instance, a French Canadian knows English but an English-speaking Canadian lacks French, it is the Francophone who must negotiate meanings through an acquired tongue while the ignorant Anglophone may dilate in his/her own mother language. In this instance, the “flows of meaning’’ are delimited by the Anglophone’s deficient interpretative practices or knowledge. These ignorance effects or epistemological asymmetries, Sedgwick argues, are harnessed, licensed, socially sanctioned, and regulated on a mass scale for what she calls striking enforcements of meaning-making activities. This chapter will track similar asymmetrical flows of meaning around transsexual masculinity to argue that such ignorance effects can be used effectively in the classroom to both trouble heteronormative trafficking in fictions of authentic gender and to guide students into a surprise encounter with what they may not know about gender instead.