Masculine Mobilities: Daniel Hannah Guest Blog

From anti-mask protests, to conspiracy theories, to the repercussions of a Trump presidency, the global pandemic has done more than alter our daily routines, it has also forced us to confront some uncomfortable truths about ourselves and our societal ideals of masculinity. In this week’s blog post, MQUP author Daniel Hannah sheds light on what the public response to COVID-19 reveals about our relationship to gender roles and gendered behaviour.

In his new book Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form, Daniel Hannah examines the work of established writers – Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford – to reveal that anxieties surrounding white, masculine privilege and queer potential helped broaden the novel’s formal possibilities. In the process, he raises important questions about the current field of queer ethics, highlighting the strange companionship of queer openness to otherness and imperialist thought in modernist writing.

While the current global pandemic has recalibrated our relationship to so many daily events (going to work, grocery shopping, socializing with friends), it has also thrust into the spotlight many familiar patterns of gendered behaviour. It is no great surprise that public health measures aimed at curbing the spread of Covid-19, such as mask-wearing, hand-washing, and temporary shutdowns and curfews, have not infrequently run up against resistance in the name of a specific flavour of masculinity. I like to call this flavour “masculinity as mobility”—an idea of manhood as unfettered movement and unchecked desire, as a right to move through and take up public space.

Wary of “big government” interventions curbing individual liberties in public settings, numerous conspiracy-driven protest groups—groups not exclusive to but dominated by men—have railed against public health ordinances; their protests have frequently drawn on a wealth of iconic (often cartoonish) representations of masculine militancy (Thor turned up at a recent lockdown protest in Melbourne, Australia; the infamous horn-helmed Jake Angeli, the so-called “QAnon Shaman” made appearances at lockdown protests in Arizona before storming the Capitol in January). The often goofy, but nevertheless dangerous, theatricality of such protests—encapsulated in Donald Trump’s bizarre performance, complete with soaring soundtrack, of demasking on the White House balcony post-hospitalization—ironically underlines the fantastical quality of manhood being supposedly defended. And yet, as a sign of the implicit privilege inevitably bestowed on male acts of protest, the gendered dynamics of these gatherings only occasionally surfaces in reportage; masculinity more often figures as background noise.

While in my recent book, Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form, I am concerned, primarily, with fictions from the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, my argument traces a long-standing genealogy for the contradictions haunting dominant forms of masculinity in an Anglo-American context. Each of the novels discussed in my work turns around a central male character whose mobility bespeaks both his privileged freedom of movement (often through specifically transatlantic space) and his less obvious capacity to expose the fantastical nature of manhood itself. Indeed, as my title suggests, masculine mobility becomes the grounds in these fictions for an exploration of queer desire and identity—unfixed and evolving—at odds with the assumed heterosexuality of such characters.

It is, I would suggest, not outlandish to think of the scene of Herman Melville’s Captain Vere sentencing the sensitive, popular Billy Budd to public execution as no less perversely theatrical than Trump’s staged return from treatment for Covid-19. In Melville’s novel, Vere secures his masculine authority through this act of judgment by positioning himself as the upholder of “forms,” asking his hastily assembled drumhead court to recognize their duty not to their hearts, “the feminine in man,” but to a “formulated … code.” And yet Vere’s appeal to a depersonalized moral system repeats a larger pattern in the novel of men being moved by desires that precede them. Indeed, this is precisely how the novel thinks of Billy, the darling of the deck, being impressed into service by the state. Manhood is not, as Vere suggests, some monolithic, unbending form of action; it is always in motion and often emerges from men’s efforts to negotiate their fraught relationship to other men. Melville’s novel holds in tension understandings of masculine mobility as forcefully privileged and queerly unstable.

Trump’s attempt to cast himself as some kind of real-life superhero, capable of battling a virus without the aid of an emasculating mask, was the return of a familiar trope: American masculinity as unbridled force. But the dependence of that performance on a long iconic history—the Western gunslinger; the tough guy; the comic-book avenger—only served to expose its fictional quality. Recent events remind us of the lethal consequences of such nationalist fantasies. The storming of the Capitol on January 6^th, 2021 (which should be seen as a continuation of earlier armed, anti-lockdown protests like those at the Michigan State Capitol in 2020) was in many ways a predictable endpoint for the Trump presidency—while violent sedition was certainly the aim of some of the protesters, it should come as no surprise that many of the protestors had no clear goal in mind other than to walk around inside the house of government, break stuff, and get out maybe with a souvenir or a video of their movements. Such a shallow form of protest revealed the toxic potential of a national imaginary in which masculinity is understood as mobility.

Daniel Hannah is associate professor of English at Lakehead University. He is the author of Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form.