Henpecked Man’s Gender

Contents

1. List of Figures

2. Acknowledgements

3. Introduction: Masculinity as a Biopolitical Issue

4. Part I Derailed by Desire

   1. 1 The Biopolitics of Masculinity Based on Schreber’s Case

   2. 2 Railways of Desire: Prus–Freud–Grabiński

   3. 3 Monstrous Queers

5. Part II The Fatal Man

   1. 4 Henpecked Man’s Gender: Sztyrmer and Sienkiewicz

   2. 5 “Homo Coco” or Witkacy’s Affair With Cocaine

   3. 6 In the Hell of Heterosexuality: On Male Friendship in Zbigniew Grabowski’s Novel Ciszy lasu i twojej ciszy

6. Part III Witold Gombrowicz and the Forms of Masculinity

   1. 7 Ship of Queers: Witold Gombrowicz’s Nautical Fantasy in the Story “The Events on the Banbury”

   2. 8 Gombrowicz From Behind: A Project of Anal Criticism on the Example of Ferdydurke

   3. 9 Trans-Male Migrations in Witold Gombrowicz’s Trans-Atlantyk

7. Part IV Beside Gombrowicz

   1. 10 The False Saint: Genet and the Polish Question

   2. 11 Polishness as a Source of Suffering: On Czesław Dobek’s Novel Na ratunek gołębicy

   3. 12 Saint Witold: Queer Autoimmunity in the Prose of Christian Skrzyposzek

   4. Bibliography

   5. Editorial Note

   6. Index of Names

Figures

1. Figure 5.1. Autoportret – Mr Hyde (Self-Portrait: Mr Hyde), 1938, pastel. National Museum in Warsaw

2. Figure 7.1. Verlag Gebr. Lempe. Kiel. No Sd. Postal Circulation: 15 November 1912 Wilhelmshaven. From the author’s collection

3. Figure 10.1. The Lady and the Unicorn: Sight. Tapestry. 1500s. In the collection of the Musée National du Moyen Âge

4. Figure 10.2. The building of the Prussian prison from 1891, Katowice. 1920s. From the collection of the National Digital Archives, reference code 1-U-2025

Acknowledgements

Writing a book always involves an encounter with the Other: with the otherness of the writer and the reader, with other perspectives and ways of thinking. Without these many encounters, this book would remain inconceivable. Therefore, all these individuals deserve special acknowledgement.

I want to express my deepest gratitude to the participants of the National Science Centre’s research project Męskość w literaturze i kulturze polskiej od XIX wieku do współczesności (Masculinity in Polish Literature and Culture from the Nineteenth Century to the Present), namely, Adam Dziadek, Krystyna Kłosińska, Krzysztof Kłosiński, Wojciech Śmieja, Filip Mazurkiewicz and Dawid Matuszek, who offered me valuable insight on vast sections of this book during numerous meetings and discussions.

Moreover, I am incredibly grateful to Ewa Kraskowska, the reviewer of this work, for her favourable editorial review. I owe special thanks to the older and younger generations of scholars, whose works determined my perspective on queer in the Polish context. It would be impossible to mention everyone here, but wherever possible, I remember them throughout this book. Nevertheless, I would like to sincerely thank Błażej Warkocki, Tomasz Sikora and Tomasz Basiuk, whose work and way of thinking I have known the longest and encountered most frequently.

Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge my colleagues at the former Department of the History of Post-Romantic Literature, as well as the supervisors and staff of the former Ireneusz Opacki Institute of Polish Literature Research at the University of Silesia in Katowice. I would also like to thank all those involved in the work on the English edition of the book: translators and editors, and in particular: Mikołaj Golubiewski, Jan Burzyński, Łukasz Gałecki and Cyia Mary Joy.

Finally, I would like to thank my partner, Kuba, for the many years spent together.

Introduction: Masculinity as a Biopolitical Issue

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, countless homosexual and heterosexual¹ men – and women² – experienced and attempted in various ways to express queer forms of masculinity that deviated from the heteronormative model, which scholarly research refers to as hegemonic masculinity.³ Queer masculinities received considerable attention,⁴ also in Polish masculinity studies.⁵ Following Tomasz Sikora’s suggestion, I employ the Polish neologisms “odmieńczy/odmieńczość” (queer/queerness),⁶ deriving from the word “odmieniec”⁷ (a queer),⁸ rather than “odmienny/odmienność” (distinct/distinctiveness), which connote a broad range of meaning and do not always refer to the subject’s identity. At least since its use in Maria Janion’s research,⁹ the queer started to represent (non)identities deviating from the accepted social, moral and sexual norms in a given culture. Queer masculinities constitute an oxymoron, just as effeminate men or masculinised women. Understood in their individual and subjective rather than model and general aspects, the masculinities I discuss always constitute a hybrid combination of opposites: a combination that breaks the binarity of such oppositions as masculine/feminine, hetero-/homosexual, human/monstrous, phallic/anal, public/private, true/false, foreign/one’s own and I/the other. One should interpret queer oxymoronically as the abolishment of opposites, but not the difference that becomes mobile and changes depending on historical and cultural conditions. Michael O’Rourke, one of the editors of Queer Masculinities, 1550–1800, admits in the introduction that “queer designates a range of acts, identities, propensities, affectivities, and sentiments which fissure heteronormativity. Only the word queer can adequately capture the fluidity and amazing plasticity of unstable gender identifications and sexual identities”.¹⁰

When studying queer masculinities in Polish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars must deal with the significant and widespread category of effeminacy, which conceals “a range of acts, identities, inclinations, affectivity, and sentiments” – although not exclusively in Polish literature, of course. The depiction of these differs to varying extents from the established model of masculinity, which steers in various ways towards what culture deems feminine. Monstrosity is another notion that closely and distinctively corresponds to this category; it even seems to exaggerate and shift man’s effeminacy into the realm of the inhuman and extra-human, “dehumanizing” the queer and rendering him vulnerable to the biopolitical interventions of state institutions. Effeminacy exhibits in a man the features of monstrosity previously attributed to women.¹¹ If femininity became a sign of monstrosity, then effeminacy becomes, by definition, a monstrous masculinity, by granting feminine characteristics to a man. It appears disturbing because it blurs the line between the masculine and the feminine in the natural order of genders.¹² Moreover, at least since the nineteenth century, monstrosity has been assigned to the category of the homosexual, identified as such in medical discourse.¹³

Furthermore, monstrosity closely relates to hybridisation, which the nineteenth-century contemporaries understood as a sexual interaction between races that led to racial degeneration and the decline of civilisation. Robert Young notes that, in the nineteenth century, hybridisation began to signify a broadly defined cultural interaction, which produced “a radical heterogeneity, discontinuity, the permanent revolution of forms”.¹⁴ Moreover, Young demonstrates the close connection between hybridity and homosexuality, which began being perceived as a product of mixed-race interactions that aroused social fear, like hybridity and effeminacy.

Effeminacy became a threat to the gender order to such an extent that it even seemed to autoimmunize the hegemony of masculinity and attacked it from within. I employ this immunising metaphor for a specific reason: to emphasise the historical view that equated effeminacy, along with a broad set of symptoms, with a disease threatening public health. An effeminate man insulted masculine honour and the entire nation, since maintaining manhood constituted a necessary condition for sustaining the national spirit. An effeminate man appeared as an internal enemy who infected the nation’s body from within. At the end of the nineteenth century, with the discovery of immune processes, the male body became the main object of concern, an object “worthy of defense”; threatened from within by decadence, effeminacy, weakness and the then-notable “disease of the will”. “Immunity-as-defense”¹⁵ became a directive of modern masculinity, understood as the capability to defend oneself against external and internal threats, because strengthening immunity/defence at the bodily level guaranteed immunity/defence on a national scale. Immunising masculinity, emerging from biopolitical discourses at the turn of the century, induced men to remain in a state of permanent readiness to combat the ubiquitous threats that infected the nation’s healthy body. At the turn of the century, the widespread belief emerged concerning the endangerment of masculinity and the effeminacy of societies. Max Nordau expressed it most clearly in Degeneration, and, according to Alan Sinfield, it was linked to the degeneration of the leisure class, immorality and the perversity of aestheticism.¹⁶ This belief led, in the case of judge Schreber, who serves as the starting point for my reflection, to the phantasm of a strong and resilient man – a superman or even superhuman – capable of defending humanity against any threats. The system of ideas created by the mind that fears the loss of masculinity introduces us to the core of the effeminacy issue. “Demasculinization”, the central point of Schreber’s phantasm, expresses the fear of losing masculinity, overcome by shifting masculinity into the realm of the feminine. Thus, Schreber appears as the sole and last warrior, fighting in defence of masculinity.

Krystyna Kłosińska argues that threatened masculinity became one of the most important biopolitical issues of the late nineteenth century, widely discussed especially in medical discourse, but also linked to other areas of social life, such as sociology, economy and politics.¹⁷ George L. Mosse believes that masculinity, understood in normative terms, emerged in medical discourse as an expression of concern for maintaining public health, threatened by numerous diseases, such as syphilis, tuberculosis and hysteria. Moreover, masculinity formed part of the vision of a modern, strong state grounded in nationalism.¹⁸ Therefore, a rather complex and heterogeneous system of representation, languages and discourses developed in the literature reflecting the anxieties of the late nineteenth century. It attempted to isolate this element threatening masculinity, from neuroticism to homosexuality. Thus, one can capture and examine queer masculinities by studying the threats contemporaries attributed to them. Therefore, the discourse of biopolitical concern for masculinity that emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries serves as a starting point for asking whether queer masculinities were present in Polish literature of that period.

At least since ancient times, effeminacy has remained in a close relationship with anality. As Kenneth J. Dover and Craig A. Williams, scholars of ancient sexuality, note, effeminacy almost always signified a tendency to submit oneself anally to another man, which befit the masculine virtue (virtus) and the dignity of a free man: “a man who plays the receptive role in anal intercourse is automatically effeminate, no matter how bold and courageous he might be in the arena of public life”.¹⁹ Associated with feminine submissiveness, anal pleasure became highly problematic for the masculinity of ancient Greeks and Romans. The negation of anality as a zone threatening the public good emerged as the guarantee of maintaining masculinity’s public status. A man enjoying anal penetration appeared submissive in other areas of life, and therefore incapable of exercising authority over his family, subordinate women or even the nation. To prove his masculine virtue, manifested in his ability to dominate others, a man had to deny through his attitude any connection with anal submissiveness. In psychoanalytical terms, the fear of effeminacy resulted in the repression of the anal components that comprise libido or in their sublimation in socially acceptable forms. Masculinity emerged then as a construct based on self-control of one’s own desire, manifested in sexual abstinence and the ability to control oneself. Allowing a man to prove his courage and restraint, sexual abstinence required moderation in enjoying genital pleasure and emphasised especially the negation of anal pleasure. In other words, the negation of anality became a necessary condition for masculine identity. Therefore, masculine anality, subject to strong taboo in subsequent eras, becomes another vector – alongside effeminacy, monstrosity and autoimmunisation – which one can employ to describe queer masculinities.

The parameters I assign to queer masculinities – namely effeminacy, monstrosity, hybridity, homosexuality, anality and autoimmunisation – do not constitute a closed set, yet they consistently emerge as biopolitical threats. Effeminacy appears as a threat to masculinity; monstrosity, to humanity; hybridity appears as a threat to the natural division of races and genders; homosexuality, to procreation; anality, to public life and autoimmunity, to the cohesion of the organism and the entire world-system. The negative qualification of these queer parameters found expression in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century work, burdening queers with all the stereotypes and even sacrificial traits. Queers have always evoked extreme emotions: most often laughter or terror (alternatively, disgust), but never admiration or respect. The grotesque conveyed these extreme emotions in literature best and perhaps most frequently. According to Lee B. Jennings, the grotesque constitutes “a combination of frightening and amusing features”.²⁰ Moreover, the grotesque involves “fantasy, a predilection for peculiar, eccentric, frightening, exaggerated, and deformed forms”,²¹ with a broad aesthetic base encompassing all human flaws and distinctness. Literary queer stands close to the aesthetics of the grotesque, sublimity, gothic and camp, understood as a strategy of resistance against normative gender and sexual identities.²² The terms most frequently assigned to the grotesque, such as monstrous, peculiar and weird, partially overlap with the semantic field of the word queer, that is, strange, suspicious, eccentric and homosexual.