Entitled Fountain, rotated from its usual axis, and signed with the mysterious initials “R
In some ways the ?exibility of normative masculinity often facilitates its easy defusing of the disruptive potential of these nonnormative sexualities
Let us then be brave, as our sons were brave; let us be thankful that it has been our privilege to give our sons to our country and to the cause for which they so nobly sacri?ced their precious lives. – Robert Leighton to Thomas Brittain, June 24, 1918, on the loss of their sons in the war17
or homosexuality. The most important point to be drawn from Fussell’s argument, viewed from this angle, is that, while war functions in general to reinforce masculine and national power, World War I paradoxically set in motion experiences that served to unmask the absence at the heart of these narratives of progress, undermining their truth value and leading to a culture of cynicism and irony (a culture perfectly exempli?ed, in its most extreme form, by the work of the Dadaists). The so-called Great War, then, undermined not only nationalism and the corresponding unquestioned belief in progress that was promoted as part of untrammeled capitalist development but also masculine subjectivity, pointing to the fact that these three ideological and psychic structures (nationality, capitalism, masculinity) are intertwined and interdependent. (lebih…)