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Warner tries to understand masculinity in its relation to “shame.”
While dominant masculinity is defined by its “immunity to shame,”
“drag queens, sissies, and bottoms are virtuosi of shame.” When
“shame” sticks to the masculine and becomes a scandal, it is always
associated with “feminizing” (Warner, 2009:
290). In an incident
that occurred soon after the Langdons married, McCullers
illustrates how dominant masculinity hinges upon misogyny and
homophobia. Taking his new bride out quail shooting, Langdon
guns down one quail and “gallantly” presents the bird as a gift to
Alison. However, upon discovering that the bird is still alive,
Langdon kills it mercilessly and then hands it back to her. Holding
“the little warm, ruffled body that had somehow become degraded
in its fall,” Alison “looked into the dead little glassy black eyes”
and “burst into tears” (McCullers, 2001c: 330). Being an
insensitive and heartless brute, Langdon considers Alison’s
softheartedness a personal failing and associates her emotional
susceptibility with feebleness and her weaker gender: “That was
the sort of thing the Major meant by ‘female’ and ‘morbid’; and it
did a man no good to try to figure it all out” (330).
Another pertinent example that demonstrates the dependence
of Langdon’s manhood on a repudiation against other sexually
stigmatized identities is his negative opinion of Alison’s effeminate
friend, Lieutenant Weincheck, who, according to Langdon, has the
same “morbid” temperament as Alison and embodies the scandal of
masculine shame. Nearing 50 years old and still living “in one of
the apartment houses set aside for bachelor lieutenants”
(McCullers, 2001c: 331), this old Lieutenant was frustrated in his
military career because at his age he “had never yet earned his
Captain’s bars” (331). Besides, within a heteropatriarchal culture
that affirms its power in “the traffic in women,” as Gayle Rubin
terms it in her landmark essay, Weincheck’s perpetual
bachelorhood arouses suspicion and suggests something of his