Looking for Something Forever Gone: Gothic Masculinity, Androgyny, and Ethics at the Turn of the Millennium

In this essay I describe two popular modes of gothic masculinity as a prelude to discussing recent theories of gender. Over the past twenty years or so, gothic narratives of masculinity have had a noticeable impact on mainstream youth culture. In the 1980s and early 1990s such narratives were visibly influenced by goth, a subculture that emerged from Anglo-American punk music in the late 1970s and, since that time, has provided stylistic and cultural alternatives to youth of both sexes in many countries.¹ Nonetheless, gothic nar-ratives of masculinity resonate beyond the limits of a particular subculture. Indeed, such narratives have been germinating ever since the culture of the Enlightenment began to impose new and deeply gendered understandings of heterosexual coupling, reproductive difference, and ethical dividedness onto the Western experience of modernity.

The gothic narratives I describe in this essay obsessively rehearse a male desire for completion, dramatized by a male experience of pain. Such narratives, I suggest, are motivated by a desire for androgyny, a term that in recent feminist and queer theory has been eclipsed to a large extent by alternative categories such as transgender, gender preference, and gender performativity. Although androgyny has many meanings, not all of which warrant recuperation, the term, I will argue, has the potential to speak to the ethical cast of post-Enlightenment gender and sexuality in ways that these postmodern substitutes do not. Gothic narratives thus suggest the importance of reevaluating this underused term.²

"Looking for something forever gone / but something [he] will always want"

A single glance at any men's or women's magazine illustrates today's relentless stress on sexual difference, the banal and ubiquitous logic of women from Venus and men from Mars.³ Men, wrote a columnist in a 1995 issue of Men's Journal, "feel outclassed in the feelings department." Biology dictates that they fixate on "ball," "beer," and "wimmin," while the other sex cultivates "poetry," "higher thoughts," and "feelings" (Blount, 31, 34). Since the mid-1990s, gendered scripts of this kind have rigidified and proliferated. Incommensurable sexual difference has become the commonsense of advice discourse on romance and marriage; has been legitimated by popular theories of evolutionary psychology (see Herrnstein Smith); and, perhaps most important of all, has become integral to a lucrative economic strategy in which gendered products are marketed to gendered audiences, via gendered media—all of which trends serve to enhance the impression that what gender is, nature itself has dictated.

Yet for all its connections to today's allegedly postfeminist and neoliberal consumer culture, the idea of incommensurable sexual difference derives from the eighteenth century when, as Thomas Laqueur has shown, it provided the foundation of a new "natural" order.⁴ Female nerves, argued one mid-Victorian physician "are smaller," "more delicate," and "endowed with greater sensibility" than male nerves (quoted in Poovey, 213–14, n. 47). Such accounts of female physiology helped situate women as the ideal domestic complements for men in the public sphere. Male sensibility, by contrast, was subordinated as nineteenth-century masculine nature was increasingly defined in terms of rational faculties, competitive instinct, and heterosexual desire. This ideology of incommensurable sexual difference coincided with an ideology of incommensurable ethical difference. As Seyla Benhabib has shown, Enlightenment theorists inserted a rift between male and female domains, masculinizing a public world of civilization and culture, and feminizing a private world of nurture and domesticity. As the sphere of justice, the public sphere "move[d] into historicity," while the private sphere of care and intimacy was viewed as "unchanging and timeless" (157).⁵ Moral and political theorists thus came to presume a deep-seated incompatibility, predicated on gender, between ethical relations as conceived in generalized terms (involving a universalized abstraction of rational and rights-bearing individuals) and as conceived in concrete terms (involving a partic-ularized understanding of individuals based on their life history, personal views, and emotional constitution). The effect of this split between "justice" and the "good life" was to relegate considerations of difference and particularity to the...