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roticism. In Penderton’s sexual fantasies, he creates a mental
picture in which the barracks are the homoerotic background: “the
hubbub of young male voices, the genial loafing in the sun, the
irresponsible shenanigans of camaraderie” plague him with longing
and desire (McCullers, 2001c: 381). In his queer imagination, the
seemingly scrupulous rigor of the Army contains a repressed and
disavowed side. Put differently, his eroticization of a traditional
male zone exposes the dominant masculinity’s hidden relation with
the disavowal of homosexuality. It is only through that disavowal
that hegemonic masculinity, as epitomized by militarism, is
constituted, and through the institutionalization of that disavowal
that the idea of manhood and its heterosexual assumption are
perpetually
—
but anxiously
—
reconstituted.
Heterosexism as a prescriptive norm of manhood is
denaturalized by Penderton’s queer rearticulation of desire and
fantasies. Moreover, his critique of heteropatriarchy and his
Unmaking of the social construction of American masculinity are
further illustrated in his bold and outspoken defense of Anacleto’s
effeminacy. In response to Major Langdon’s insistence that
Anacleto should join the Army that “might have made a man of
him” and thus stop this “dancing around to music and messing
with water-colors” (McCullers, 2001c: 384), Penderton responds:
You mean . . . that any fulfillment obtained at the expense
of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring
happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally
honorable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the
round hole rather than to discover and use the
unorthodox square that would fit it? (384)
In this crucial passage, Penderton debunks normalcy’s claims
to universality and points out that normalcy obliges itself to the
regulatory and exclusionary imperative of those claims. Normalcy
suppresses heterogeneity in the name of universality; it dictates the
rules of legitimacy, happiness, morality and fulfillment. Normalcy
aligns itself with the regulatory imperatives of the state against