What’s Eating Victor Cusack?: Come What May, Queer Embodiment, and the Regulation of Hetero-Masculinity

Justice is not only or exclusively a matter of how persons are treated or how societies are constituted. It also concerns consequential decisions about what a person is, and what social norms must be honoured and expressed for “personhood” to become allocated, how we do or do not recognize animate others as persons depending on whether or not we recognize a certain norm manifested in and by the body of that other.

Judith Butler, “Doing Justice to Someone”¹

In the first chapter of his 2009 autobiography Come What May, Dónal Óg Cusack pauses to reflect on the strange case of his brother Victor. Victor once showed promise as a hurler, we are told, but inexplicably has since lost all interest in the sport. Inadvertently recalling Freud’s baffled inquiries into the hieroglyphic illegibility of femininity and female desire, Cusack presents the reader with the puzzle that is Victor Cusack:

Victor, who had one year minor and three under-21 starting with Cork, is the most talked-about man among management teams. The enigma wrapped up in a riddle and then fogged in some mystique.

I don’t know if Victor just resisted falling into line with his two older brothers, but he can take or leave the hurling. This makes him so unusual that we worry about him, and ourselves. How do we get it out of him, how do we get Victor feeling about hurling the same way the rest of us do? How do we interest him again? What’s eating Victor Cusack? For the rest of us, hurling is just the bread and water of our days. His indifference, or whatever it is, makes us feel odd. Being born in Cloyne means you hurl, as our club motto says, come what may.²

If “queer” can be understood in its more expansive capacity, exceeding its function as either an identity category or a critique permanently sutured to the analysis of sexuality narrowly conceived, then Come What May can be understood within this wider purchase of queer. That is, the book written by a popular sportsman demonstrates how norms that might appear to fall outside the parameters of what is commonly thought of in relation to sex, desire, bodies, and their management are constituted and perpetuated. For in an autobiography that was, in terms of effect, most immediately significant as the enactment of Cusack’s public coming out as a gay man, that queerness of sexual orientation is, in the terms set by the narrative itself, eclipsed by another mode of queerness recounted (albeit tongue firmly in cheek) as more transgressive of disciplinary norms than Cusack’s veiled accounts of his sexual encounters. To recall Cusack’s account of his father’s reaction to his son’s disclosure of his sexuality, Victor, like his brother, can’t be “fixed.” However, whereas Cusack’s homosexuality, arguably, comes to be normalized in his autobiography and, much more problematically, in the media reception of his putative self-disclosure, in the normative context of Come What May Victor’s queerness is so radically other as to be unrecuperable.

The passage quoted above, affectionately comic as it is, is nonetheless underwritten by a genuine consternation at Victor’s perverse imperviousness to hurling, the symbolic and material center of local collective identity. For Cusack, being from Cloyne means that “hurling comes first.”³ He states this emphatically early in his autobiography: “The church was a minority interest. Hurling was, and still is, our one true religion. . . . It’s a fact of life in Cloyne. Hurling runs the town. The town runs on hurling. It’s our love and our celebration and our identity and our source of community. That’s what we talk about. Hurling. That’s what we daydream about. Hurling. That’s what we do. We hurl.”⁴

Within a heteronormative matrix, to be born male is to become a straight man or to call into question the norms that make gender intelligible—a troubling that has the consequence, in varying degrees, of having...