Quote: Masculinity

Masculinity has been and continues to be a normative rubric that has policed the sex/gender system. I see very little advantage in recuperating the term masculinity because, as a category, masculinity has normalized heterosexual and masculinist privilege. Masculinity is, among other things, a cultural imperative to enact a mode of "manliness" that is calibrated to shut down queer possibilities and energies. The social construct of masculinity is experienced by far too many men as a regime of power that labors to invalidate, exclude, and extinguish faggotry, effeminacy, and queerly coated butchness. This is not to discount the possibility that a discourse on masculinity might produce some theoretical traction for scholars working in the field of gender theory. But I do aim to suggest that any such project that fails to factor in and interrogate heteronormativity and masculinist contours of such a discourse reproduces the phobic ideology of masculinity.

-- José Esteban Muñoz (Disidentifications pp. 57-58)