The Ethnicity/Culture of Gender Performance, or “Remember to Change your Gaydar to London Time"

One again, I am sitting in Russell Square, which has served as my blog-muse here in London, despite having to wander knee-deep through a gaggle of French children to find my own patch of grass. Thursday night’s outing to Edge (a gay bar here in London for which I have little context) left me wondering about the dangerously stereotype-steeped idea of gaydar as well as the cultural and ethnic attachments which our masculinities, femininities, and other gender performances posses.

I should begin this discussion by confessing that I am extraordinarily wary of the idea of gaydar; though I’m not sure I can dismiss its existence, I’ve always felt it to be problematic and downright medieval in the way it remains rooted in stereotypes. I found myself surveying the bar we were in (which, judging from the size of the bartenders’ biceps and the amount of gel which their hair contained, was certainly a queer establishment), and realizing that though I was taking the majority of the clientele to be gay, I had a hard time deciding which European men were certainly gay, which ones might be straight men stopping by for a particularly strong gin and tonic, and which might be most likely to break into choreographed Madonna dance.

I’ll admit, in fairness to my readers, that my own aversion to gaydar has been termed sour grapes by a number of people, which is to say that even in the States, I am a terrible discerner of gay men or women. I will stick up for my poor, malnourished Deviant Detection Device by saying that, even so, I am still usually able to pick out the queeniest among us in America.

On the one hand, it might seem quite obvious to expect, if gender is constructed socially, and perhaps as a cultural inscription of sex, that it might be established differently depending on cultural contexts and especially susceptible to shifts in culture. Culture is, after all, the medium by which gender manifests. Is seeing a shift in gender performance in another culture no more remarkable than finding that colors might manifest differently on a different type of painter’s canvases? Is the gender/culture relationship simply a relationship of mediums?

However, the idea that gender performances, in this case masculinities, might have ethnic strings attached to them quite disturbs me and seems to buttress the idea that sexual, gender, racial, and, economic troubles all reinforce and materialize each other. If I place myself in the mindset of the average (in this case American) xenophobic plumber from Western Ohio and presume that I have embraced the stereotype that French men are particularly effeminate, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to imagine that there is some element of homophobia bound up in my distaste for the French. Conversely, there seems to be a grain of Euro-phobia in my dislike of the (domestic) gay population. I wonder then, if this plumber persona (which is itself constructed from stereotyping) might be said, on some level, to dislike Europeans because they remind him of gay people and vice versa. Hopefully my ideas haven’t gotten too bogged down in the minutia of my example, but my questions are these: In what ways do existing stereotypes help form and inform the deployment of other stereotypes? What are the implications of the heterogeneous nature of “acceptable” gender performances? What does it mean that different cultural and ethnic identities sanction different masculinities and femininities while outlawing others?

As a short post script: Am I imagining it, or do British pigeons make much creepier noises than their Yankee counterparts? These two very sizeable rats-with-wings just decided that I had been writing for quite long enough and bum-rushed me, issuing a terrifying guttural sort of throat-warble. The bastards were quite successful in ousting me from my sitting spot, which leads me to conclude that these pigeons can smell fear…