"When in doubt do gender": Constructing Masculinities in "Penelope," "theyre all Buttons men"

Joyce Studies Annual, Volume 13, Summer 2002© 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78713-7819 1 Richard Brown, James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Though I mostly avoided using the term “gender” in this book, a central aspect of the research (especially in Chapter IV, pp. 89–125) was an attempt to see Joyce’s work, through the record of his reading, in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century discussions of gender, and to explore the working in such contexts of Joyce’s often elaborate and deliberate constructions of gender difference and perspective as well as his equally distinctive and playful transgressions and subversions of gender difference in the texts. “When in doubt do gender”: Constructing Masculinities in “Penelope,” “theyre all Buttons men” RICHARD BROWN Discussions of gender have now become an established and inevitable (as well as of course a welcome) aspect of the paradigmatic shiftings that make up the current shape of our academic discourses in the humanities, especially in areas of the subject that interest me, like Joyce’s texts (in which I tried to point out in Joyce and Sexuality that gender was a significant issue in Joyce’s reading of sex1 ) and contemporary fiction and theory, where issues of gender might be thought to be currently configured in a distinctively postmodern or millennial frame. This essay is an attempt to reflect on that, both to perform and to consider the mediated and reciprocal constructions of masculinity that can be found in the reading of a part line of the “Penelope” episode. This, I hope, bears on postmodern discussions of gender in a number of ways and allows us to re-affirm the continuing relevance of the Joyce text, both in terms of the opportunity it gives us to negotiate issues of gender across gender and in allowing us to 07-T2429 9/13/02 12:07 PM Page 147 148 “when in doubt do gender” 2 On the 23rd of November 2002, there will be a conference on “Joyce, Penelope and the Body” to be held at Leeds University, and a panel discussion on “cross-gendered perspectives.” 3 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), 245–64. Jeri Johnson gives a useful survey of the French and American feminist responses to Joyce in “‘Beyond the Veil’: Ulysses, Feminism, and the Figure of Woman,” in Christine van Boheemen (ed.), Joyce, Modernity and its Mediation (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 201–28. Bonnie Kime Scott, Joyce and Feminism (Bloomington: University of Indina Press, 1984). Suzette Henke, The Politics re-assert our right to write about gender, whether as women or men, as a legitimate and desirable aspect of our reading of Joyce.2 To reframe this in terms of the current academic teaching of literature , in the courses I teach (whether on Joyce, on contemporary fiction and theory or on Shakespeare) whilst it is never the only or an all-sufficient issue, gender is always an issue. It almost inevitably surfaces in free classroom discussion of text, is represented as a topic for essay assessment or on examination papers and it is regularly chosen as a topic on which to answer by typically around one third of the students of whichever gender, whether in order to engage with issues of agency and empowerment, to deconstruct gender as performativity or else, in some cases, less self-consciously to perform their gender. To that extent the sub-title of this paper might be thought to quote a repeatedly voiced bit of classroom advice in picking assignment topics: “When in doubt do gender.” That this is a topic on which students often write with considerable enthusiasm and sophistication is no doubt in part thanks to the years of accomplished critical work emerging from academic feminism and more recently from postmodern gender theory, masculinity theory and queer theory. In Joyce studies we are, of course, indebted to the classic French feminisms of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous as well as to subsequent European academic critics like...