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homosexuality with impotence seems to be a dangerous
stereotyping, in which negative images such as sterility,
unproductiveness, and, ultimately, death, are linked with
homosexuality. However, in reaction to a positivist paradigm of
liberal humanism, recent theories on gender and queer sexuality
attempt to chart a new course beyond the valorization of positivist
ideas, such as agency, power, and autonomy. For example, in
“Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity and Radical Passivity,”
Judith Halberstam identifies with a genealogy of “shadow” feminist
and queer art that “thinks in terms of the negation of the subject
rather than her formation, the disruption of lineage rather than its
continuation, the undoing of self rather than its activation”
(Halberstam, 2011: 126). Through strategies of refusal, radical
passivity, masochism, and “unbecoming” (129), Halberstam
suggests that such practices contest the political foundations of
humanist selfhood in which “‘being’ has already been defined in
terms of a self-activating, self-knowing, liberal subject” (126).
Similarly, in their influential and daring reconsideration of
masochism and the death drive, Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman also
interrogate the concept of identity politics buttressed by a
mastering idea of agency and subjectivity.
10
These anti-social and
anti-humanist queer feminist theories are compelling and inspire us
to think outside the tyranny of selfhood and its complacency. In
light of these queer theorists’ provocative rethinking of the
negative, Penderton’s affinity to impotence and passivity can be
interpreted in a new way. A more nuanced understanding of the
discourses of gender, sexuality, and nationalism can also be
distilled from this critique of masculine/self-validating connection.
Wrestling with his homosexuality, Penderton has no sexual
desire for women and is even repulsed by the female body.
Confronted with a wife with strong sexual desires and ambitions,
10
See Bersani’s
Homos
(1995) and Edelman’s
No Future: Queer Theory and the
Death Drive
(2004)
.