Sissy Insurgencies: A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness

by Marlon B. Ross

In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.

Genres: Queer, LGBT, Nonfiction, History, Race, Gender Studies, Gender

456 pages, Hardcover

First published February 11, 2022

Reviews

[Gerard J · Rating 5 out of 5]

Addendum to Original Review

Sissy Confessions

After reading Sissy Insurgencies during the fall of 2022 it inspired me to write a review hoping that it would inspire others to join the conversation and offer their thoughts and feelings around the book, particularly those who have insecurities around their gender performance. Unfortunately, my standard boilerplate academic book review did not engender much conversation.
After reading the book a second time I’m not sure if I got all of Ross’s gender theory correct and I probably oversimplified some points in order to explain a rather complex text. If you would like to read perhaps a too personal reflection on the book keep reading here. Otherwise, skip ahead to my previous review. I hope my more personal reflection will inspire others to share their own stories and struggles or triumphs around their gender and racial identity.

For all the famous and successful Black men like the insurgent sissies portrayed in this book there are men like myself who have suffered in silence, and shame unable to negotiate their complex relationship to race, class and gender. Men who feel they are not black enough, or manly enough, or white enough, in order to make it up the rung on the class social ladder. Men whose racial and gender identity is suspect.
I was not ready to write a personal review after the first reading. I was still trying to process my feelings from having a deep comprehension and identification with the sissy character as articulated by Ross. Reading Ross was like a punch to the gut. Suddenly I had a lens to examine the events of my life through. The best I could do was try to assimilate the material by doing a review. The second reading has reminded me that reading Ross requires wading through some thick academic prose that may be a little off putting for nosome folks. I had to reread his sentences several times in order to ponder the meaning of what he is saying, particularly in the first chapter. It took me several months to finish the book. The second reading has also revealed how much I missed the first time around

My gender disorientation occurred at about the time I started high school, I enjoyed being a boy and had a variety of male friends. Fortunately for me I was athletic and strong but not big. I was never the last one picked when dividing up for sports teams however in high school I became more self conscious as I was supposed to grow into a youngman I felt like my body did not want to cooperate. Perhaps something within me was rebelling against it as well. I was light skin with curly hair with an unfortunate youthful pretty face that I attempted to hide behind a mustache that I would not dare to shave off until recently. In retrospect I felt too exposed, too fem. I have always been a bit high strung and overly sensitive. When deep in teenage angst and feeling depressed my mother sent me to a psychiatrist. After the conclusion of several visits he said I was just sensitive. I don't remember him offering any suggestions about what I should do about my sensitivity. This was well before the days of much research on HSP’s or highly sensitive people. I'm not sure if I even took his diagnosis that seriously. I don't believe it was in the DSM because he put down depression on the insurance reimbursement form.

By the age of 16 I reached my current height of 5ft 6 in and a body weight of 128 pounds which would remain my set weight up until very recently when I gained 10 pounds during the Pandemic. No matter how much I ate and consumed weight gain shakes I could not move beyond 134 pounds on a good day. After my first wife left me in my late 20’s I lifted weights so hard the cartilage tore in my chest. I would never develop a dad bod. With my light skin, short stature and sleight build my physical presence was suspect in the Black community. My mere presence enacted some sort of inner revulsion at my lack of manliness. I remember one athletic young man announced to anyone listening that he could crush me. Gender non-conformity is linked to perversion in the African American community. Ross utilizes Richard Wright's character Shorty to exemplify the perverted light skin degenerate sissy. I suspect that is why I have been estranged from the African American Community, but I never could never put all the pieces together until reading Sissy Insurgencies. My mere presence and demeanor is deemed a perversion. I have suffered silently with this shame for years but not totally comprehending why until now.
My gender issues were compounded by my upbringing. When I was 9 my mother remarried a white upper middle class Princeton trained college professor. I believe I subconsciously modeled my gender performance based on his. A major theory of Ross's work is that gender is experienced through racial and class identity. My gender performance would have been fine if I was an upper middle class white college professor. However as a Black man this gender presentation would silently haunt me.

Sissy Insurgencies Original Review

While reading this book I had one of those red pill moments to use an overused metaphor. Like in the Matrix movie when Morpheus says to Neo,

What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with (me) the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. (Morpheus The Matrix}

However in my case I thought there was something wrong with me but I could not quite articulate the nature of my condition. I turned sixty this year, typically a moment of reflection for most people when they realize they have more life behind them than ahead.
I feel fortunate to have come across this book at this particular juncture in my life. “Sissy Insurgencies” has provided me some clarity into the nature of my particular angst and provided a window into my own soul or subjectivity to use as an academic term.

The term sissy makes my stomach reflexively tighten. When I was growing up in the 70’s if you got called a sissy you were being called out. I hate the word, and find it difficult to embrace. That's why Marvin Ross’ Ross' Sissy Insurgencies A Racial Anatomy of Unfit Manliness is such a much needed book. As Ross informs us,
“Sissiness haunts every sphere of vaunted masculine empowerment as a cautionary figure of the failure to win, which is assumed to result from a failure of manly drive. American men are still quick to call another man a punk. a wuss, a pussy, a sissy if he loses, especially if he loses in good conscience from over scrupulousness in following the rules.”

Although the book's specific focus is famous African American men Ross does important and groundbreaking work in constructing a new framework for analyzing gender nonconformity in general. He distinguishes the term sissy from gay since many gender non-conforming males are not necessarily gay and some gays dont want to be considered sissy as he will illustrate in the chapter on gay professional athletes. As Ross writes,

“Unlike homosexuality, which has become increasingly an articulated identity anchored in language, laws, and institutions in a plethora of ways , sissines remains shadowy, inchoate, disarticulated, noninstitutionalized even as its speculative existence shores up seemingly more solid racial, gender and sexual categories.”

In other words, the boogeyman of the sissy is never mentioned but always lurking about quietly enforcing social norms that undergirds a white patriarchal society. This important shift in perspective expands the theoretical and rhetorical analysis of gender non-conformity to the examination of the lives of men whose masculine comportment or sexual orientation were not at issue. Men such as Booker T, Washington, James Weldon Johnson and Louis Gates Jr, as well as other writers, and activists. Additionally, men whose outward comportment and sexual orientation were at issue are included as well. Including such famous men as George Washington Carver, James Baldwin and Little Richard. Ross admits that this framework may be questioned by some, however he believes this perspective allows for a much richer understanding surrounding the rhetoric of race, class and gender throughout American History. For example, this statement regarding Booker T Washington's way of

“ negotiating acceptable racial leadership by developing over time a gender practice that signals a non intimidating type of black manliness to white supremacists….. It also inflects his social practice with a tinge of sissiness– a demeanor not so much read onto the body itself as read into his mode of public and racial engagement.”

The first chapter is the most heavily theoretical and for me the most important where Ross takes care of some academic arguments regarding performance theory versus his focus on conduct. As Ross elaborates,

“Conduct focuses on the ways in which we as subjects form a sense of individual character through habitual behavior in relation to larger, social, political, legal and moral codes. Certainly, performance is an element of conduct, but I find that emphasizing character and conduct, we get a different dimension of the ways in which gender is overly assumed to be intrinsic to the self. Perhaps wrongly, conduct tends to be seen as a manifestation of a coherent self, rather than a series of repeated performances half- consciously acted out for a judging public.” (6)

Ross identifies and elucidates what he refers to as cognates of conduct, related ways that gender performance is evaluated by the self and others. These conduct cognates are not rigid fixed assessments but are contingent on time period, race, class, and social circumstance. The gender conformity of individuals and groups within society are evaluated using different metrics. An example of this would be the old wisecrack “ he’s not gay, just English”. Of course that joke is from the perspective of an American viewing an individual's gender performance based upon a certain English class. Ross elaborates further

“These cognates of conduct–including behavior, habit, practice, compartment, deportment, manner, gesture, speech, and gait–suggest the difficulty in pinning down how a male’s temperament directs or is directed by his gender orientation. By temperament, I mean the repertoire of emotions, sensations, senses, and rationales that orient a person’s relation to himself and others as a gendered actant or objectified subject. Rather than merely a social manifestation of individual character, one’s temperament orients a person toward and within a social structure.” (7)

Significantly, the author maintains that conduct is inextricably linked to one's character. Those individuals who fall outside of these cognates of conduct are considered morally and ethically flawed and outside the boundaries of society. For Ross, this is the essential policing mechanism of the sissy accusation. A very important, and I believe crucial term is Ross’s use of the temperament in relation to these conduct cognates. For Ross, temperament is the body's engagement with large cultural and social forces. In my reading it's the closest he comes to suggesting a partially innate biological basis for the sissy, however he stops short of such a pronouncement. Ross will use the term sissy sensorium throughout the text as a shorthand for the above complex set of emotional, social, mental and physical interactions within the individual. If ever there was a term that should be entered into the lexicon of gender studies it's “sissy sensorium”. Although this term seems merely descriptive, the two words placed together imply something greater; perhaps a certain neurological orientation shaped by both biology and culture.

Most Importantly, for the author, we experience are gender through our racial identity. To underscore his point regarding the complex intersection of race, class, and gender Ross provides the quote below from writer Vershawn Ashanti Young who writes

“ Literacy habits, like reading novels of a certain type and speaking what might be standard English, have always made me seem more queer, more white identified, more middle class then I am. When I fail to meet the class, gender and racial notions that others ascribe to me, I’m punished” Vershawn Ashanti Young, Your average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy and Masculinity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), xv.96*


If all of these theoretical concerns with masculinity over time feels a bit overwhelming for the general reader, Ross provides plenty of examples throughout the book to illustrate his point. In fact, the strength of the book is his ability to create a historical narrative that richly illustrates the different permutations of the sissy character throughout time, place and social setting. Starting in the antebellum period, and moving through the early twentieth century Black masculinity will be examined through the lives of Booker T Washington, George Washington Carver and James Weldon Johnson. James Baldwin will be the focal point of Mid twentieth century America as well as other writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Significantly, Baldwin had to negotiate a public persona, in the age of television, in spite of being outwardly gender nonconforming. For Ross, gender non-conforming men are at the heart of the African American story. They are the writers, musicians, civil rights leaders, fashionistas and athletes who have influenced American culture more broadly.

Although a complex scholarly work Ross does his best to keep the reader with him by sprinkling the narrative with his own personal stories and frustrations. His writing can be both academic and lively, mixing street terms with academic parlance. For instance, he will point out when someone is being “punked'' as when Dubois went after Washington in the press for being a sycophant of powerful white people. Perhaps the most lively chapter in the book is the last on professional athletes. Focusing on athletes allows Ross to examine the intersection of race, masculinity, celebrity and fashion amidst the spectacle of our entertainment economy. Although Obviously adept at textual analysis he is equally if not more capable dissecting photographs, book and magazine covers and other media. Ross's work is a dense, four hundred page long work if you are a footnote reader. It's the kind of book that you can randomly open to any page and find some historical antidote or analysis that you had not heard of or considered. Like many groundbreaking important works, there is ample room for interpretation of his text.

Each page is filled with historical anecdotes and analysis. My brief review only scratches the surface. It is my hope that this book finds an audience beyond theorists and historians.
My sense of reading the book was of an academic in his prime who has been diligently working in his field of studies delivering his magnum opus.

[University of Chicago Magazine]

From our pages, Summer/22: “Once we begin to look for them, we see sissies everywhere.” So begins this historical and literary analysis by Marlon B. Ross, a University of Virginia English professor who defines sissiness as nonconforming gender conduct assumed to result from a failure of manly drive. Reconsidering figures from James Baldwin to Little Richard, Ross draws a distinction between sissy and gay, upending stereotypes and long-held ideas about masculinity in America—particularly in Black culture.

https://mag.uchicago.edu/university-n...