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Desiring Brotherhood
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various sexual behaviors in human society. The term “sexual
inversion” was coined and used by sexologists such as Richard von
Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and then by Freud to classify sexual
behaviors that “deviated” from the presumed existence of a
normative heterosexuality.
9
As a quintessential form of sexual
inversion, homosexuality was viewed as a form of arrested
development or a failed Oedipalization. This clinical and scientific
discourse on homosexuality surely influenced McCullers’s
portrayals of her homosexual characters and their inverted desire.
However, while drawing on the deprecatory association of
homosexuality with inversion, McCullers struggles to
deterritorialize and reterritorialize the meaning of effeminacy in
homosexual men, exploring its powerful force in the expansion
and transformation of the dominant masculine stereotype.
Masculinity as a regulatory ideal must guard against
effeminacy and weakness. Gender differences have to be sharply
demarcated and feminine traits kept firmly in their proper place: in
men they are a sign of weakness and pathology. In his study of
masculinity and modernity, George Mosse charts the rise and
gradual erosion of what he variously calls “normative masculinity”
or “the manly ideal” (Mosse, 1998: 4). In his book, Mosse argues
that the manly ideal is partly defined by what it excludes, those
dangerous, pathological, or unhealthy elements that are thought to
pose a threat to the healthy body of masculinity and ought to be
vigorously resisted. In
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, Langdon, as an
epitome of this manly ideal, asserts his heterosexual, white, and
9
Despite Freud’s radical early thoughts on the inherent bisexuality of all men,
psychoanalysis reverted to the views held by the sexologists, who saw
homosexuality as a treatable disease. For a discussion of the documents of the
pioneers of sexology, see
Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science
(1998), edited by Lucy Bland and Laura Doan. See also George Chauncey’s
Gay
New York
(1994) for a historical account of words such as “inverts,” “perverts,”
“degenerates,” “faggots,” “fairies” or “queens.” As Chauncey shows, these words
were highly volatile and went beyond the conventional or homophobic
understanding as terms of insult.