‘Be a man!’

Embodied Auto-Narratives of the Effeminate Body in Opera

Abstract

This autoethnographic article adopts Rosemarie Anderson’s (2001) notion of embodied writing to ruminate on the bodily violence done to the effeminate body by hegemonic masculinity, heteronormativity and femophobia. Specifically, this text seeks to underscore how the socio-culture discourse to “be a man” bears negative consequences for the effeminate body from childhood to adulthood and from the schoolyard to the opera stage. Masculinity and queer theories, alongside the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Audre Lorde, are interwoven with the auto-narratives and serve as theoretical lenses through which the author widens his narratives beyond the self, situating his experiences within historical and theoretical contexts to contribute to the scholarship around masculinity and opera. At the end of this text, the author suggests that by creating Lordeian connections, new expressions of masculinity might be sought, which could pave the way for new futures within opera.