I woke up to that disgusting Vaseline-lensed NYT essay about how the world of Epstein was a long-ago different time when male power bonds emerged according to the ancient affective paradigms of NYC, lost in the mist of #metoo and I am desperate to know why no one ever thinks to look at the tremendous work on those affective paradigms written by those who could see them clearly at the time. Eve Sedgwick's Between Men (1985) will do nicely. She was declared dangerous for describing male affect:
Discussion
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She argues (beautifully, hilariously, enragedly) that patriarchy replicates itself by recruiting men at all levels of socioeconomic/political power to find themselves in brotherhood and solidarity through ritual, mutual humiliation of others (women, children, etc.). Even gay men can be invited into these emotional bonds, as willing participants, or they can become victims. Her great insight, I think, is that patriarchy is material but also emotional--a misty glorious past that is still with us.
This sense of patriarchy as always passing, but never gone, something to be mourned even as it still holds (or temporarily rents) every seat of power, is part of how patriarchal violence recruits willing participants. (We don't want to lose this feeling, this manly feeling, the brotherhood of heroes feeling, right, guys???) Sedgwick's most upsetting claim is that patriarchy is firmly homoerotic--not homosexual, but *erotic* in its vectors of desire. (Prove you love us more than her.)
That women's solidarity is homoerotic doesn't surprise anyone, I think. Sedgwick shows how "women loving women" could be sisters, lovers, coworkers, strangers, parent and child, sexual or not, with or without power differential, and that homoerotic zone of intimacy can allow us to care for one another--grooming, feeding, embracing. "Men loving men" as she recasts it is also about bodily intimacy. But because it is also homophobic, it recruits violence to express fear. Someone has to be the dog.
The dog can be a child, a woman, a gay man, a trans person, an animal, or even the least favored of the bros that day. Violence and humiliation are the backbone that holds up the emotional life of patriarchy. Of course they're going to get panicky and frightened when their privacy is threatened; that's where all their emotions get to happen. But I don't think we need another "back in my day" always-already-gone retrospective of the misty watercolor world that is also just the world today.
So how does this affective patriarchy end? There are many who are, correctly, focusing on ending the outrageous, world-destroying wealth hoarding of patriarchy, which is good and must happen. But I think we do well also to offer an affective alternative. How can men form bonds with others without making someone "the dog"? Sedgwick saw that homophobia was crucial to the violent infrastructure of patriarchy, because it's what prevents men from loving men without cruelty--fear of being cast out.