Jock Homo: How Gay is the Super Bowl? is an article that made me giggle. A lot. But it’s also an interesting look at the culture of masculinity and – the reference hit me like a sucker punch, since I hadn’t been expecting in an opinion piece about football, of all things – the “performative” nature of gender as proposed by Judith Butler.
Now, to this day I still have screaming flashbacks of trying to slog through the selected pages of Butler’s Gender Trouble, but I also think the woman’s got an interesting take on things if you can just get past the wall of unnecessarily complex academic language. There’s a lot to her work, but the bit that matters to this article is that she views gender as not something inherent, but rather a culturally enforced performance. Seeing that idea applied to masculine rather than feminine performance was really, really interesting.
If nothing else, I like seeing that feminist theory isn’t just for us women-folk.