Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Sissy That Walks: The Transformations of an Abject Figure

2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/10642684-11177990

1527-9375

Jovanté Anderson,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

There are sissies everywhere, or so Marlon B. Ross tells us. If such a proclamation seems to suggest the presence of a ghostly figure, he invites us to attend to the ways it haunts the politics of racialized masculinity. Studies that examine these politics often read the process of manning the race as the mounting of an assertive defense through traditionally patriarchal values. This has been an important critique because it acknowledges some of the strategies that Black men have deployed in response to being situated beyond the fraternal embrace of white supremacy. Perhaps, therefore, we are used to reading the sissy as a figure that is banished from the ritual making of manliness. In this groundbreaking text, however, Ross charts a genealogy that evinces sissiness not only as a wound but also as a cultural and political resource for imagining advancement.In Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness, Ross begins by challenging the conflation of two related, but distinct figures: the sissy and the homosexual. While the latter indexes an ostensibly discrete identity produced at the nexus of scientific, legal, and social discourses, the former remains slippery: a charge leveled at any Black man, regardless of sexual identity, whose politics are perceived as falling short of the masculine posture necessary for confronting white supremacy. Within this framework, Ross nuances Judith Butler's theory of performativity by emphasizing the deeply moralizing character of racialized gender expectations, what he calls "conduct." To conduct oneself as a sissy, then, is to risk treason. Yet figures as diverse as Booker T. Washington, James Baldwin, Little Richard, Henry Louis Gates, Dennis Rodman, and Glenn Burke all engage in sissy conduct to varying degrees in order to negotiate the demands of cultural and political institutions.Through autobiography, literature, and personal experience, the six chapters delineate multiple dimensions within sissy conduct. For example, it offers a subversive reading of Washington's Up from Slavery, arguing that rather than mobilizing alongside the militant masculinities of his contemporaries, "The Wizard" represents himself through domestic imagery, nostalgic memories of scrubbing floors and cleaning up after white schoolmarms in his childhood, what Ross calls "sissy housekeeping," as a rhetorical tool to support his own accommodationist agenda of self-discipline and racial uplift. James Weldon Johnson advances what Ross calls "gentle manliness," by carefully fashioning himself as a worldly man of politics and letters not bound by the parochialisms of white supremacy. Although he is constantly aware that such a framing might position him as a sissy, it is from this equanimous posture that he is able to counter the image of the threatening Black man, to challenge racist exclusions, and to make claims on full citizenship.The two final chapters perform a sophisticated double move. The penultimate chapter, titled "Sissy but Not Gay," examines a mini trend in the 1990s among Black heterosexual men intellectuals negotiating a changing US academy in which Black feminist and Black gay writers not only make a claim to power through the politics of vulnerability but also call on Black heterosexual manhood to reckon with past harms. Through what Ross calls "gender self-embarrassment," these men represented their boyhoods not as a stage of inchoate masculine prowess but as time spent in the kitchen with Black women, or poring through academic books, or negotiating abusive fathers. On the other hand, the final chapter "Gay but Not Sissy" tracks the ways in which gay men in sports asserted a claim to power by disavowing the figure of the sissy, Dennis Rodman and Glenn Burke being notable exceptions to this.Ross's most distinctive achievement, however, is the chapter on James Baldwin in which he takes to task the abiding critique that Baldwin never publicly identified as homosexual. The chapter labors to illustrate that Baldwin's person and his characters, many of whom are too-good boys raised respectably in the Black church, exemplify what he calls a "sissy sensorium." The chapter joins other figures such as Little Richard and Sylvester to Baldwin as church sissies out in the world, embodying other visions of masculinity that placed them squarely outside the Black Power ideal of heteromasculinity. At the same time, placing the sissy within the church, and bringing the church sissy into the street, upends the narrative of progress that would mark Black social space as antithetical to these gender-nonconforming men. Therefore Baldwin also circumvents the urge to reframe his world within the representational whiteness of gay social formations materializing in the mid-century, Ross argues.While this text is a necessary contribution to theories of autobiography, Black feminist studies, and Black queer studies, one wonders about the place of Black trans masculinities within Ross's theoretical framework. I am thinking here of a few trans masculine figures that appear in the documentary The Aggressives (Daniel Peddle, Jeanny Tsai, et al., dirs., 2006), such as Tiffany who reflects on how navigating the streets with "the boys" has meant conducting herself according to the codes of a more rugged masculinity. However, Tiffany also enjoys voguing in the ballroom and explicitly declares: "I consider myself a faggot," or what Ross might mark as a "homo-sissy." If we take Tiffany seriously as an insurgent sissy, then, at least some of Ross's theoretical attention might have also been invested in examining the interstitial and co-constituting space between trans and cis masculinities articulated within the figure of the sissy.Nonetheless, Sissy Insurgencies is an impressively researched text that encourages greater attention to the literary, political, and cultural processes of producing insurgent Black masculinities. Although the study was limited to the United States, I could not help but think that the text offers exciting new readings for what Nadia Ellis (2015) has called the "fraternal agonies" across the Black diaspora during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the continued agitation against colonialism. When, for instance, W. E. B. Du Bois (1921: 115) criticizes Marcus Garvey for "[prancing] down Broadway in a green shirt" or Garvey accuses him of being "purely and simply a white man's nigger," we might see the sissy lurking in the shadows of their heated exchanges (in Cronon 1955: 131). Ultimately, therefore, Sissy Insurgencies will be indispensable as a tool for unsettling the sedimentation that has lingered over our historical lenses and providing new conceptual ground to open discussions of the racialized sissy in the contemporary moment.