Chapter 3 - The Effeminate Man in Nineteenth-Century America

Summary

During the nineteenth century, “the effeminate man” was frequently named as an object of derision, transforming him into a complete specimen of person well in advance of his still-unborn cousin, the homosexual. Despite this visibility, the effeminate man remains largely absent within recent queer and gender histories. Against such critical neglect, this chapter proposes that the effeminate man occupies a pivotal position within the overlapping genealogies of American literature, feminism, and race. First, he came to be counted among white liberalism’s constitutive castaways. Effeminophobia aimed to a binary sex system that claimed buffered autonomy for men while quarantining femininity – understood as vulnerability to influence – to women. Second, the effeminate man came was seen as excessively white. As whites understood it, exposures to European civilization left the effeminate man enervated. Effeminate men therefore confronted their fellow whites with anxieties about white supremacy’s emasculating influences.