potboy

via https://ift.tt/2zHKTn7

saturnmond:

So, I have
seen a lot of people talk about Kylux in terms of queer fetishisation or even labelling it a “crack ship”.

The
discourse has somehow made Kylux out to be
this straight-girl fantasy where two men are simply shipped because they
are white and handsome. Such an unfavourable interpretation completely
takes
away from many Kyluxers being queer and/or poc themselves as well as
shaming
straight people for seeing queer potential where it’s not canonically
stated to
be. Since the comic came out, there has been much elation because it
finally
“confirms” some of the things that appeal to Kyluxers, therefore
justifying the
ship. I don’t think, however, that Kylux has ever been anything but
rather conventional in its queer subtext. Kylux falls in line with a
long tradition of homoerotic aggression between two men. I will try to
put
this into words as eloquently as I can.

First,
let’s talk about how Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and Armitage Hux are queer coded on
their own before moving on to their relationship.

Armitage
Hux is almost comically queer coded. The act of feminising a villain to subtly
convey to the audience that he is gay and therefore “morally reprehensible” has
been a practice since the Hays code era (in some respects even before that -as
the Victorian Age marks the beginning of our modern understanding of gender and
subsequently, its subversion). He is seen to be physically weak, petty, moving
and snarling and “bitching” in a way society would stereotypically ascribe to women.

His
British
Accent, at least from an American point of view, already marks his
sexuality
as ambiguous. This is not helped by the fact that he speaks in an
abnormally
posh way, alienating himself from the common people.Hereby, the movies
draw a well-established line between decadence/queer and
pragmatic/heteronormative.

In the “Aftermath”
trilogy Brendol Hux states his son to be “weak willed” and “thin as a slip of paper and just as useless”,
robbing him of his masculinity – no matter how ridiculous of an endeavour this
is when talking about a four-year old boy. Hux is very early on criticised for not fitting into a socially expected form of manhood. This is especially evident when one
compares him to his resistance rival, Poe Dameron. Now, Dameron has his own set
of queer coding, but he is shown to be what is commonly viewed as “acceptably
queer”. He is masculine, trained and proactive. When he ridicules Hux at the beginning of The Last Jedi,
there is
this juxtaposition of the helpless, feminine villain and the dashing,
superior male hero. Hux is supposed to be
judged as vain and arrogant while Poe takes risks and although reckless,
is somehow to be admired. Further, Hux is constantly abused. He is
thrown into walls letting out high pitched screams, runs away in the
face of
danger (as seen in the recent comic) and is pushed around by his own
subordinates. His strength lies in being cunning and
calculated, not stereotypically masculine virtues.

Hux’s
destructive powers, his monstrosity so to speak, also follow a long-standing
tradition of queer villainization. Harry Benshoff’s The Monster and The
Homosexual articulates this as follows:

“[…] repressed by society, these socio-political and psychosexual Others are
displaced (as in a nightmare) onto monstrous signifiers, in which form they
return to wreak havoc […]” (Benshoff 65).

And what other, than a socio-political
Other, is Armitage Hux - the Starkiller?

Kylo
Ren/Ben Solo, too, is touched by the mark of queerness. It is no coincidence
that despite his raw power and muscular physique, Kylo Ren has not been adopted
by hegemonic masculinity in the same way Han Solo has, for example. When the
logical is traditionally seen as masculine, the realms of pure and unfiltered
emotionality is feminine. And Kylo Ren is unrestrained in his vulnerability,
his tears, his pain – People make fun of the dramatic ways he gives words to
his feelings precisely because it is regarded as weak, as whiny, as “womanly”. His
long curly hair, full lips and dress-like costume only strengthens this
impression. Kylo Ren is an amalgam of masculine aggression and feminine
expressiveness. Some of his outbursts even remind of the pseudo-illness of hysteria.
The gendered lines are blurred and unclear in Kylo Ren, diffusing any efforts
to appease the binary. Benshoff describes this as a form of queer existence
which does not only constitute itself in opposition to what is considered
normal but “ultimately opposed the binary definitions and prescriptions of a
patriarchal heterosexism” (Benshoff 63).

Both
are
not easily categorised. They are patched up by multiple, gendered
signifyers.
Kylo Ren’s masculine body in contrast to his femininized fashion. Hux’s
slender body with his stiff and masculinised military get-up. Hux’s
toxic tendency to avoid showing his emotions while also being shown as
weak, womanly, cowardly.
Kylo Ren is an excellent warrior, yet simultaneously being prone to
emotional outbursts.
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s famous work Monster Theory (Seven Theses) elaborates
upon this further, while acknowledging that queer figures are most commonly
depicted as the monstrous Other:

“The refusal to participate in the
classificatory “order of things” is true of monsters generally: they are
disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to
include them in any systematic structuration.” (Cohen 6).

Nonetheless,
many queer people feel empowered by these figures. Lee Edelman theorises
in his polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive about the nature of
queerness as a force of cultural resistance. According to Edelman, the queer
must always refuse societal expectations of a perpetual future and embrace the
death drive instead. In this sense, queerness stands in direct opposition to
futurity as it negates any meaning in sexual reproduction and marriage (cp.
Edelman 13). When Hux destroys planets, when Kylo Ren proposes to burn it all
down “The Empire, your Parents, the Resistance, the Sith, the Jedi”, they are
not merely killing the past. They are also negating the worth of
categories that make up future and present alike. They are resisting the heteronormative values of production.

Now that we
have the puzzle pieces that illustrate how Hux and Kylo are queer figures in on
themselves, it might be interesting to examine how they work together.

In her text
“Epistemology of the Closet”, Eve Sedgwick talks about a common gothic trope
where two men are caught in a feud full of mutual hatred. In this case, both
men are mirror images of one another, making them especially vulnerable to the
other’s advances: “[…] a male hero is in a close, usually murderous
relation to another male figure, in some respects his ‘double’, to whom he
seems to be mentally transparent.”

Kylo and
Hux are very clearly mirrors of one another. Aside from the gendered
oppositions I have already illustrated, they are each other’s double in
every
sense of the word. Born on opposite ends of an age-old war. Both caught
in
complicated relationship with their fathers whom both have killed out of
opposite
motivations (loving them too much vs. hating them with a passion). They
represent the opposite ends in the binaries for logic vs. spirituality,
restraint vs. wildness,
control vs. sensuality, technology vs. nature etc.

This shot
from The Last Jedi shows both of them mirroring each other visually, henceforth strengthening this impression.

They
are
“mentally transparent” to each other, because they are different
sides of the same coin which Snoke tossed around to his whims. Even
their
aggression takes on erotic forms. It is hard to deny the homoerotic implications
in choking another men to make him submit, forcing him
onto his
knees. The breaching of personal spaces and looming over each other, the
obsessive need to prove one’s own worth to the male other with which
one is engaged in a homosocial bond:

“The
projective mutual accusation of two mirror-image men, drawn together in a
bond
that renders desire indistinguishable from prédation, is the typifying
gesture
of paranoid knowledge.” (Sedgwick 100).

And
through all of this, I have not even talked about the collaborative
potential between the two of them. Their instinct to protect one another
despite insiting the opposite. How both of them could overcome their
trauma by engaging with the other, who suffered so similarly under
family obligation and Snoke’s abuse.

Works Cited:

Benshoff,
Harry: “The Monster and the Homosexual.” In: Harry Benshoff (ed. and
introd.)/Sean Griffin (ed. and introd.): Queer Cinema, the Film Reader.
New York: Routledge 2004. Pp. 63-74.

Cohen,
Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Jeffrey Jerome (ed.
and preface) Cohen: Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996): 3-25.

Edelman, Lee.
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. ,2004. Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick. Epistemology Of the Closet. Berkeley, Calif. :University of California Press, 2008.

Thinking about ‘embracing the death drive.’ I suppose it’s true that I recognize the rage that makes you want to destroy planets. I recognize the destruction of planets in the movie as an emotionally uplifting thing. Not something that my intellect approves of, but something that my shadow self rejoices in, as a vicarious victory over a society that thinks I shouldn’t exist at all.

I don’t think that’s got anything to do with not having children. I do have children. Having children is not the one and only vector of creativity or the future in a human’s life. It’s far more likely that ‘embracing the death drive’ = internalizing the message that society wants you dead, and reflecting that back.

There’s a lot of talk on Tumblr about monster lovers - how monsters stand for the parts of us that have been rejected by society. Sometimes these are necessary, beautiful parts of humanity turned monstrous by being depicted as the Other.

I think to a certain extent that’s why there are so many queer people in Kylux fandom. We recognize that these people are being depicted as monsters in the same way that we are sometimes depicted by society as monsters, and we want to take them out of the mainstream narrative where they are seen as evil and face only ridicule and death. 

We want to give them a happy ending because if they get an ending where they’re healed and happy, maybe so do we.