Jordan Pailthorpe's List: Cappello 339 final paper research

• • Mentions Orient, and James Baldwin....could be a common thread between Barthes and Baldwin? Orientation, and Orientalism? Queer Identity and Western Appropriation?
• So what is so “straight” about Mailer’s eroticism of black masculinity? Even Mailer’s essay states that “many hipsters are bisexual” (351). Ahmed reminds us that the root of “orientation” is “Orient,” the object constructed by the west to define itself as the center that faces the other. By facing the other, the self doesn’t just define the center, but extends its reach: “The otherness of things is what allows me to do things with them. What is other than me is also what allows me to extend the reach of my body” (Ahmed 113-14). Through a particular orientation achieved partially through jazz-love, then, the white hipster extends his reach by “looking at” the black man, and the black man who is “looked at” is fixed as an object and blocked as a subject in relation to this line.¹⁰ As Gerald Early puts it, “Mailer expresses a very simple and very old idea here, namely, that the black male is metaphorically the white male’s unconsciousness personified” (138).

• James Baldwin’s open letter to Norman Mailer, first published in Esquire Magazine in 1961, calls attention to the effects of the white hipster’s gaze on actual black men. In “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” Baldwin re-claims a subject position by doing the “looking.” He critiques Mailer’s presumption of black men’s consent to functioning as the intentional “object” that facilitates the construction of the white hipster:

    

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  I think I know something about American masculinity which most men of my generation do not know because they have not been menaced by it in the way that I have been. It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one’s own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others. (172)

• Like the 1920s white modernist, the “White Negro” veers off the beaten path without losing his way. Queering and straightening are operating at once, and not because one man identifies himself as heterosexual and the other as gay, but because the “White Negro” travels the well-worn path of primitivism—a straight line of whiteness, and, indeed, a sexual orientation that constructs a pleasurable self through fantasy projected on the bodies of an Other.¹¹ Appearing in the same 1959 collection as “The White Negro” reprint is Mailer’s scathing essay on writers, in which he evaluates Baldwin as “too charming a writer to be major,” adding that “even the best of his paragraphs are sprayed with perfume” (Mailer, “Evaluations” 471), language that suggests his critique extends beyond a “straight” literary analysis. He disqualifies Baldwin not only from his idea of “major” writers, but from his definition of authentic “black masculinity.”

    

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  In the white hipster debates, then, straightness and queerness are operative: homoeroticism, homophobia, orientation, reorientation, and disorientation occur at once, and on fields of intersecting lines that facilitate different extensions and blockages for different bodies. The hipster’s improvisation on race, sexuality, gender, class, and nation transforms some structures in liberating ways, but does so by repeating patterns so pleasurable and commonplace as to pass unnoticed by the players who inherit them and by objectifying their beloved models of resistance.

    

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