Class Enchantment Part IV

Class Enchantment,continued from Part III

The actual performance begins to take on reality from the energies of a community that forms around each of the participants to encourage him on. It’s almost as if the performance is a promise, an unreality to them all until these moments of community are enacted. The women gathered around the men actively call forth new performances of masculinity, brazenly and tauntingly in the case of the women on the street, and with shy delight in the case of the rehearsal audience — Horse’s mother, sisters, and niece Beryl. This reflection of pleasure gives the blokes a glimmer of the potential (including for their own enjoyment) of the performance.

The demand for a performance, the desire and anticipation of pleasure, the acceptance of the men physically, just as they are, by the potential audience, all enact a performativity of the constitutive outside, rather than of the subjects themselves. New masculinities are elicited by the community, not simply by male agents of self-transformation. And masculinity is only one of the things being produced here — what’s also being constituted (in our admittedly specialized and interested view) is a communal class relation, and one that would not have come into being without the community to encourage and foster it.

Becoming Community 2 (fourth set of clips: 2 mins 31 secs)

Two brief encounters: Guy, out running, crests a hill and finds several teenage girls sitting on a bench who shout out their unabashed appreciation of his body; Horse is asked by the worker in the unemployment office whether he has done any work in the past week, paid or unpaid. He responds in the negative and she gives him a knowing and complicitous look: “That¹s not what I¹ve heard.”

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Lomper¹s band practice: where the rest of the band has conspired to play a striptease tune without telling him. He gets ready to play, realizes he has the wrong music, and then sees the joke and sits with a sheepish and gradually more beaming smile on his face. The warmth and approval in this enchanted moment bring the performance closer to reality. In the scene that follows, two men pass Gaz on the street (after the front page story on the upcoming performance has hit the newsstands) and start bumping and grinding and egging him on〈an ambivalent mix of scornfulness and encouragement;

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Jean and Dave: Dave comes home to find Jean sitting on the bed holding his red G-string, weeping and seething with fury. As she stands up to confront and hit him, he grabs her hands and shouts at her that it’s not what she thinks, “it’s nowt to do with any fucking women.” He explains what he’s been up to, and it slowly dawns on her that he is really contemplating becoming a stripper. But then Dave admits he can’t go through with it: “Jeannie,” he says, showing us his large belly, “who wants to see this dance?” She responds without hesitation: “Me, Dave. I do” (sobs and tears from the audience). They head into a kiss.

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Continued, click here (or go to Part I or Part II or Part III)