Melancholy and the Productive Negotiations of Power in Sissy Boy Experience

Abstract

This chapter considers the sissy boy and schooling, and begins some theorizing of the sissy boy experience. To date, little theoretical work has been done in the arena of queer theory about sissy boys. Yet, in considering the experience of sissy boys, a political potential emerges that extends beyond liberal notions of inclusion, tolerance, difference, or diversity to more disruptive and lively engagements with gender as a cultural formation. Notions of tolerance and inclusion work on the assumption that there is an outside to power—a place where all of us can be accepted, equally and in celebration of our difference. These ideas ignore the necessity of power in the formation of gender and sexuality. Against this liberalism, the chapter argues that keeping in view the (per)formative production of gender prior to the mobilizing of discourses of tolerance, demands that the recognition of who young men and boys are be uneasy and contingent. An uneasy recognition is politically useful because it refuses the naturalness of gender and foregrounds the processes through which gender is formed and valued.