Radical “Boyhood” Futures for the Twenty-First Century, or, Pinocchio (Finally) Gets His Phallus

ABSTRACT

This article considers radical “boyhood” futures for the twenty-first century and the ways transmasculine subjects are creating exuberant, phallic subjectivities through working the gap between body and psyche. In Female Masculinity, Jack Halberstam asked, “What happens when boy rebellion is located not in the testosterone-induced pout of the hooligan but in the sneer of the tomboy?” Recent transgender movements compel a revision of this question, for what if boy rebellion is located precisely in this “testosterone-induced pout” but in the body of a child or adult assigned female at birth? Availability and advances in medical technologies allow boyhood to occur at any stage of life, in effect queering the life cycle, while new cultural production and community support systems offer unprecedented opportunities for change. Some of these developments suggest how Pinocchio and other childhood stories become important touchstones used by transmasculine subjects to construct their own boyhoods. The 2016 documentary Real Boy tells the story of a young musician who transitions from female to male despite his family’s rejection. “Camp Lost Boys” offers transmasculine folks the experience of summer camp, a place to reflect on what it means to be masculine. Responding to the problem of White transnormativity, the 2012 documentary The Aggressives by Daniel Peddle brings to a larger audience the struggles that trans* subjects of color assigned female at birth experience endure due to economic precarity, violence, and the prison industrial complex (PIC). “Brown Boi Project” helps trans* folks to ask what it can mean to be a man or a boy in communities of color. Testifying to their power, nonnormative boyhoods augment existing anxiety and resentment among White, cisgendered men, helping to perpetuate the self-created “state of emergency” over POCs (people of color), women, and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) persons “infiltrating” (in their minds), the heteronormative, cisgendered “mainstream.” The violent reactions of White supremacist men’s groups suggest how the transmasculine tampers with the sanctity of boyhood, disturbing what Homi K. Bhabha calls the “manifest destiny” of masculinity.

Notes

¹ I place “boy” in quotation marks here to indicate the instability of the category, but to avoid categorical confusion, I do not place the term, or related terms, in quotation marks elsewhere.

² The term I invent here, “phallic exuberance,” is inspired by Corbett (2009), who speaks about “fantastic phallicism” (p. 208). I depart from the word “fantastic” because of its primary relationship to the imaginary. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines “fantastic” as “Existing only in imagination; proceeding merely from imagination; fabulous, imaginary, unreal (obs.)” (“Fantastic,” n.d.). I prefer the term “exuberant,” defined in the OED as “Luxuriantly fertile or prolific; abundantly productive” (“Exuberant,” n.d.). Exuberant captures the capaciousness and the connection between the “imagined” and the “real” that I’m conveying through trans* experience.

³ I use the term “transboi” and “transboihoods” to underscore the ways that “boi” (a common identification in the LGBTQIA+ community) consciously departs from “boy,” and includes communities of color. See Van Bailey’s (2014) explanation of the term “Brown Boi,” in Transgender Studies Quarterly “Keywords” issue, in which he associates the term with the “Brown Boi Project” out of Oakland, which I mention later in this article (Bailey, 2014, pp. 45–46). B. Cole, the founder of the organization, elaborated on the terms that masculine-identified people of color were and still are using various terms to describe themselves, “boi” among them. It’s not common for folks to refer to themselves as “transboi,” but I wanted to underscore for the unknowing reader the fact that “boi” is a form of transmasculinity. In an effort to unite the many ways folks identify with masculinity, B. Cole coined the term masculine of center, which Bailey defines as “an umbrella term to include all gender-nonconforming masculine people of color” (Bailey, 2014, pp. 45–46).

⁴ For an interesting historical discussion on transnormativity, see Emily Skidmore’s (2017) recent work, True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Skidmore reveals how some White trans men were able to “pass” in their communities, even after discovery of their “true sex,” through a combination of heteronormativity, Christianity, and “hard work.”

⁵ Within two years after the election of Barack Obama, the number of hate groups nationwide increased to more than 900. Antigovernment, or so-called patriot, groups tripled, to 1,200, while nativist extremist groups, who make it their “job” to harass immigrants, saw 80% increase, bringing the total to 1,600. Statistics on hate groups undermine the enduring stereotype of a “racist” South and a “progressive North”: 32 hate groups sprouted in Alabama after Obama’s election; 31 flourished in New York State, 44 in New Jersey, and 60 in California (Hate Crime, 2018; Hate Map, n.d.). According to the FBI, gun sales rose to a record high of 1.5 million within the month of Obama’s election. See www.splcenter.org for these statistics (and more) on hate groups; gun sales statistics are available at www.fbi.gov, https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/nics_firearm_checks_-_month_year_by_state_type.pdf/view).

⁶ According to Salamon (2010, p. 98) and others, including Bobby Jean Noble (2006) in Sons of the Movement, Women’s Studies can provide Transgender Studies with a more systemic understanding of structures of gender/relations of power underlying those structures, historicity of category “gender,” and account of how the present state of gender emerged, which can be used to counter these masculinist attacks. However, if trans* becomes for Women’s Studies just another identity category to add to the intersectional wheel, we miss the opportunity trans* provides to take apart the category “woman” itself, and to radically alter our understanding of the psychic and material formation of gender.

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Notes on contributors

K. Allison Hammer

K. Allison Hammer, Ph.D., is a cultural studies scholar and critic, and currently teaches in the Women’s and Gender Studies program at Vanderbilt University. Their intersectional research applies transgender, queer theory, and theories of masculinity to the analysis of U.S. cultural production in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their articles have appeared or will appear shortly in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Feminist Formations, Journal of Lesbian Studies, and NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies. Their current work analyzes the role that culture plays in the co-construction of dominant and subjugated masculinities in the United States.