Jonathan Borofsky: Male/Female (2000)
colour lithograph and screenprint (47" x 32")
If losing a mother may be written down as a Wildean misfortune, then to lose one's sister and an ex-wife in the same year certainly looks like carelessness on my part - although since two of the above removed themselves from my life of their own volition, that perhaps mitigates any accusation of negligence.
What's striking is how these deaths have resulted in a significant defeminisation of my world and how it got me thinking that perhaps that's not such a bad thing; that, arguably, wider society might also benefit from a cultural defeminisation (and, indeed, a dequeering).
For perhaps just as we need what is most evil in us for what is best in us, so too an active element of masculinity - even at its most heteronormatively toxic - is essential for human wellbeing.
However, as models of masculinity have varied across time and place, what it might mean to remasculinise culture is debatable and I can't stand those idiots who think it's just a question of manning up [1].
D. H. Lawrence would probably insist it's more a matter of rediscovering what he terms phallic tenderness [2].
Notes
[1] Having said that, I have in the past been willing to let this phrase pass: click here.
[2] Lawrence introduces this notion in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) and other works from this late period. In brief, for Lawrence, the phallus is not merely an organ belonging to the male body, but a sacred symbol of relatedness which forms a bridge between man and woman (and to the future); as for tenderness, that's his term for a passionate form of human contact based upon the inspiration of touch - i.e., it's his word for the desire that is productive of social reality.
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