Who’s Eligible For Employment at Femboy Hooters?
Feminine Boys in the Male Gaze, Part Two!
Have you ever seen a twink and thought, my God, what a handsome lesbian? Or vice versa? To me, this is the spice of life. I love girly men and boyish women, because I love and am attracted to queers. (See the screenshot below of a close friends story I posted last March.) One of the wonderful things about being queer is you get to embrace and step between that close gap between femininity and masculinity. As it should be! Butches are sexy! Femboys are hot! Tragically, though, there are some out there—usually academics and twitter users—who would take the beauty of queer gender expression and subject it to Discourse.
“Femboy erasure” was one such Discourse. It was an insignificant argument, the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it kind of Discourse that you probably encounter not because it matters to you, but because a conflict-hungry social media algorithm detected a fight going on somewhere and showed you a post about how stupid it is, and then maybe you clicked on it and looked around to see what all the fuss was about. Near as I can tell, the femboy erasure panic happened in response to the over-attribution of transfeminine identity onto girly boys or nonbinary figures in media and pop culture. The tacit argument, as far as I can reconstruct it, was that calling all gender-undefined feminine boys “eggs,” as if they were pseudo-trans girls, is an act of violence in that it essentializes gender nonconformity down to the binary of man and woman. The people upset about this generally fell into three categories: femboys and nonbinary people angry about the binary; anime fans mad that a certain feminine boy character was retconned into a trans woman; and fascists who just hate trans people altogether.
And I don't mean to weigh in on this Discourse. But I do think that some proponents of femboy erasure theory have a point. Almost.
Insofar as it’s useful to draw boxes around these things, femboys are definitely an independent, freestanding gender, and not a subset of any binary trans or even nonbinary identity. Here’s a quote from one ongoing research study on and by self-identified femboys:
“Although all our participants find use for the terminology of ‘male’ and ‘female’, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, ‘masc’ and ‘femme’, the ways in which they mobilise it can be very different — and in fact the only common thread across all individual stories is the constant struggle to find meaning in them. Almost all our participants came to their current understanding of their identity after attempting a more conventionally binary transition and finding it unsatisfactory.”
There’s a reason identities like femboy emerge. For those who embrace the term, it’s filling a linguistic/conceptual/subcultural hole that western trans identity fails to fill. It’s understandable to be pissed when someone imposes an identity on you that you know doesn’t fit right.
In fact, the western conception of transness is imposed all the time onto individuals and groups it doesn’t fit. Kit Heyam presents this criticism really well in their 2022 book Before We Were Trans, which btw I enjoy and highly recommend. Western transgenders typically talk about ourselves as having a singular, true sense of self that we articulate through the gender norms of our cultural context, in an effort to make our social/sexual/personal selves reflect the truth inside of us. Heyam points out,
“For one thing, not everyone (in the past or in the present) understands themselves as having a core, stable internal self that remains the same at all times: there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that this understanding of selfhood is culturally specific and, in Western Europe and the USA, dates back only to the late eighteenth century.”
Contemporary western queers are not wrong for embracing this mode of thinking, because in their particular context, it works. The problem is when those same queers–often white queers, to be specific–impose their understanding of normative trans identity onto people and groups where it just doesn’t apply. Like, on one end of that, you have femboy erasure, I guess. But on the other end, you’ve got the far more serious problem of white queers conflating two-spirit people, or hijra, or fa’afafine under the label of “trans” or "nonbinary" without respect for their specific cultural contexts.
That’s why for this particular question—is it gay if the boy is pretty?—I want to avoid speaking in categorical terms about what people are and stick, instead, to how people are seen in the particular context of US straight male sexuality. For that, I’ve defaulted to the idea of the male gaze, which is, of course, a concept with its own flaws and cultural biases. Feminist psychoanalyst Laura Mulvey coined the term fifty years ago in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” where she uses the works of Freud and Lacan to deconstruct the ways patriarchy manifests on screen. A recent New Yorker piece by Lauren Michele Jackson does a good job at breaking down the essay’s ideas and charting the many branching lines of criticisms that come from it, including bell hooks’s theory of the Black oppositional gaze, and Mulvey’s own retrospective on her original idea one decade later. Today, “the male gaze” has traveled far from its Freudian roots on its way into our vernacular speech, where it has come to basically refer to any unfavorable representation of a woman, usually by a man. Jackson suggests that speakers today often use the phrase as a “cudgel,” meaning a concept applied bluntly and without much nuance, to label a work sexist.
What does Mulvey actually say?
“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”
Note that Mulvey’s talking about depictions of women in mainstream western film. Her insights come in part from the influence of another art critic, John Berger, who declared in his 1973 book Ways of Seeing that
“Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Berger’s claims are more general, but both he and Mulvey have something similar to say: women are positioned as visual objects, and deeply imbued with the understanding of themselves as on display.
For our purposes here it’s not necessary to critique either essay in full, but it’s worth noticing the ways both Berger and Mulvey treat MAN and WOMAN as static, definite things which can be accurately described in big, sweeping claims. Take Mulvey’s statement, “According to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like.” If that’s true, then I guess we can wrap up all this talk about feminine boys in the male gaze and call it a day! Except that, as we’ve seen, at a glance, man isn’t always sure what “his like” really is. Or more accurately, he’s got a lot of very funny particularities in how he chooses what’s male like him, and what’s not male and therefore eligible for eroticization/domination.
Similarly, Berger ends his seminal chapter on European nudes and the female form with an interesting little thought experiment. To illustrate his point, he tells the reader to go pick a random nude he’s printed in his book, and to “Transform the woman into a man... Then notice the violence which that transformation does. Not to the image, but to the assumptions of a likely viewer.” Like, what do you mean by that, John? Is it that the “likely viewer,” in this case presumably a straight guy—which is a little hypocritical, since Berger just spent a whole chapter critiquing the way European art assumes male viewership—will be shocked and appalled at the inversion of woman to male? Is the “violence” Berger is referring to a kind of righteous violence, meant to set things straight in the backwards patriarchy? That is, is he trying to set up a gotcha moment for the sake of promoting cross-gender empathy?
Either way, with both these ideas, we’re left in the present wondering how the fuck all this applies in a world where male and female are not actually the solid, stable categories we were told.
Luckily, people write about this all the time. One perspective that has helped me organize my thoughts is “Faggotization and The Extant Gender Ternary,” a materialist feminist Substack essay by my friend (and favorite living poet) the Sizhen System. Then there’s the classics, including transfeminist Julia Serano’s influential (and very readable!) book Whipping Girl. Serano’s chapter “Dismantling Cissexual Privilege” is where we get the idea of “gendering” as a verb: the automatic cognitive/social process of determining another person’s sex and gender using visual and aural clues. Her insight on gender entitlement—the power of any gender-privileged person, male or otherwise, to declare and impose their understanding of sex and gender on others—is essential to building a coherent understanding of the male gaze in a world where gender is not deterministic, and where male entitlement is not directed at cis women alone. Power and perception, not categorical identity, have to be the starting point of any worthwhile analysis into how western pop culture and visual media objectify and eroticize feminine men.
So then, when we picture the staff at the Femboy Hooters—as imagined in the 2019 twitter meme—who do we see? The answer isn’t so hard: after all, it’s a business darling.
Whoever serves is whatever the men will pay to look at.
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your forbidden bromance,
evergreen<3