(the) American (Novel of)

62 Trent H. Hamann
behavioral guidelines as a set of tactical rules used to enact, embody, and
reproduce some of the sexist gender norms that have been strategic for
institutionalized heterosexuality in postwar America. The absence of the
need for an explicit rationale here has two primary functions. First, it
operates as a mask for the hidden connections between what is prescribed
and the unmarked social strategies that depend on the active
participation of those subjects conditioned by them. In light of this
function we see that it is absolutely crucial for etiquette to appear
autonomous and arbitrary if not trivial. Second, it produces the effect
of causing the actions of those who do refuse the prescriptions of
etiquette to appear arbitrary and unfounded. Such individuals necessarily
come across as merely willful, petty, immature, stricken with bad
taste—anything but resistant to the strategic forces that often covertly
determine how we fashion ourselves as subjects. 6 To even consider
questioning contemporary etiquette is already to risk disappropriating
oneself from the coherent domain of propriety, thereby rendering
oneself as either inappropriate, incoherent, or some combination of
the two.
The Différend: Manners in Dispute
It is always possible one could speak the truth in a void; one would only be
in the true, however, if one obeyed the rules of some discursive “policy”
which would have to be reactivated every time one spoke.
—Michel Foucault, “The Discourse on Language”
In his letters to his son, wherein he coined the word “etiquette,”
Lord Chesterfield emphasized again and again the fact that the actual
substance of the behaviors of genteel company matters not at all if one’s
sole purpose is simply to belong to that company. What is important
is that one manage to appropriate the form and formality of those
behaviors, no matter what they are:
Take the tone of the company that you are in, and do not pretend
to give it; be serious, gay, or even trifling, as you find the present
humour of the company; this is an attention due from every individual
to the majority.