Edited by Moe Meyer - Get a Free Blog

disclosed an integrity and capacity of self useful to the social majority.
Substituting a self (a content) where there had been a body (a surface), bourgeois
liberalism held that consciousness was political, while the surfaces of the body
were not. This model of the self-as-content favored the rise to ideological
dominance and political centrality of the middle classes by insisting on the utility
and consistency of the self against a simple privilege of place. It is important to
note that what was at stake was not the invention of a model of psychological
depth, but the increasing identity (or equivalency) of self-performance and selforiginality:
the performance of identity increasingly found its necessity in an
origin located within the unique subject.
SEEING THE SELF, OR HOMOSEXUAL
HERMENEUTICS
PERFORMING “AKIMBO” 23
The paradigmatic body upon which these models of the self were negotiated was
implicitly male. 3 For this reason, the problem of effeminacy frequently served as
a test case for the reliability of the semiotics of the body. For John Bulwer,
“effeminacy” had several implications. Occasionally, he used this or similar terms
misogynisti cally to describe the presence in men of behaviors that he attributed
to women. More frequently, he used the term effeminacy to describe the
arrogance, affectation, and sloth of the ruling classes, and what he perceived as
their difference from the bourgeois values of dependability and productivity. In his
manuals on the gestures of the hands, Bulwer distinguished effeminate gestures
by their difference from two normative gestures representative of Protestant
bourgeois values—the handshake, by which business partners sealed their
negotiations and showed trustworthiness, and the hands raised in prayer or
thanksgiving. In Bulwer’s “Alphabet of Manual Expressions,” the extended,
open, or offered hand appeared frequently as a sign of good will. To the open
hand, he contrasted excessive gesturing with the hands, which he described as
“subtle gesticulation and toying behavior”—terms generally used to describe the
actions of courtiers and women. Excessive gesturing was like the “sleight of
hand” of magicians, pickpockets, and actors, all of whom “mock the eye” (229–
230). Gestural excess, then, was the lowest common denominator of all sorts of
effeminacy.
Bourgeois ideology was increasingly concerned with limiting excess through a
criticism of its content. Throughout his treatises on gestures, Bulwer seems
caught between understanding effeminacy as a sign of excessive or dissimulated
interiority (a false use of one’s body), or as a new kind of interiority, a new
content (a characteristic use of the body by a particular kind of person). At one
point, Bulwer argued that wagging the hand in a swinging gesture indicated that
“kind of wantonness and effeminacy” that should disqualify a man from military
service (62–63). Moreover, as a habitual mannerism, wagging the hand was not
only effeminate as a gesture, it indicated an inherent effeminacy of the subject.