"Wake Thor and Woden . . . in our Saxon breasts": American Anglo-Saxon-Nordic Normative Masculinity and the Patriotic-Paranoid Style
Presenter Title/Affiliation
University of Nebraska, Omaha
Start Date
21-5-2021 3:45 PM
Event Name
Panel discussion
Panel Number
9
Panel Chair Name
William Leap
Zoom URL to Join
https://ciis.zoom.us/j/99085517274
Zoom Meeting ID
990 8551 7274
Abstract
‘White male centrality’ (Katz 2021). ‘Aggrieved entitlement’ (Kimmel 2013). ‘Politicized anger’, ‘white nationalist’ (Kimmel 2018). ‘Trumpist.’ The 6 January 2021 insurrectionist attack on the US Capital produced numerous analyses that sought to describe, often using phrases like these, the masculinity on display that afternoon. Most argue that the largely White, male crowd of extremists display a potent form of right-wing masculinity characterized by what Kimmel (2021) has called ‘amped-up militarism and violence and hypermasculine posturing’ that can be traced to conservative discourses of the 1960s through the 1980s that sought to cultivate and then harness White males’ ‘aggrieved entitlement’ for political gains.
While images of the insurrection readily demonstrate its largely white male cohort, decked out in flannels, ball caps, hoodies, and paramilitary gear, there are a few participants who at first glance fail to fit the MAGA/Proud Boys/Three Percenters mold. I was particularly struck by the appearance of Jacob Anthony Chansley, aka Jake Angeli, aka the “shirtless horned man”, aka or “QAnon shaman.” Clad in faux buckskin, carrying a white bullhorn and an American flag on a spear-tipped staff, he was, unlike any of the other protestors on that chilly January day, bare-chested, his face painted in an abstract American flag design. The right side of his naked chest is covered in Nordic tattoos (Valknut, Yggdrasil, and Mjølnir), with other patterns on his arms and wrists. Perhaps because of his Nordic tattoos, journalists frequently described his headdress as Viking, following a line of reasoning based on white nationalists’ appropriation of pre-Christian Scandinavian symbols. But Chansley’s headdress appropriates indigenous North American buffalo warbonnets, worn by certain clan-members and other warriors of distinction from Sioux and other northern Great Plains nations.
This presentation focuses on how Chansley’s gender-political embodiment reflects an enduring discourse of American gender-normativity that was central to the nation’s formation as a settler-colonial ‘republic’ and to national belonging/citizenship, and which remains central to the present moment. This discourse draws on 18th and 19th-century notions of Anglo-Saxon-Nordicism, as well as a style of patriotic embodiment that requires dedication to the Nation’s ‘founding Anglo-Saxon values’ and to the constant surveillance of both one’s own masculine style and that of others in order to ensure the success of the Nation.
Thus 6 January 2021 is symptomatic of a gender-political habitus, a “practice-generating grammar[]” producing a “common repertoire of representations” (Bourdieu 1990: 35) flexible enough to accommodate various displays, including Chansley’s, yet enduring enough to ensure the normative ideological core remains intact and is reproduced.
In offering this presentation, I am not ignoring Leap’s (2020) recent call for a queer historical linguistics that refuses linear, teleological narratives. What I propose here is consistent with the spatiotemporal inquiry associated with a scavenger methodology (Halberstam 1998; Leap 2020: 45-50) that QHL requires. Moreover, instead of treating hegemonic masculinity as something that endures eternally, outside of history, this presentation encourages us to ask why these notions of (hetero)masculinity have been (re)imagined repeatedly in the U.S. and similar contexts, and why Anglo-Saxon-Nordic ‘savagery’ is so often the basis for that imagery.
Presenter Contact
davidpeterso1@unomaha.edu
"Wake Thor and Woden . . . in our Saxon breasts": American Anglo-Saxon-Nordic Normative Masculinity and the Patriotic-Paranoid Style
‘White male centrality’ (Katz 2021). ‘Aggrieved entitlement’ (Kimmel 2013). ‘Politicized anger’, ‘white nationalist’ (Kimmel 2018). ‘Trumpist.’ The 6 January 2021 insurrectionist attack on the US Capital produced numerous analyses that sought to describe, often using phrases like these, the masculinity on display that afternoon. Most argue that the largely White, male crowd of extremists display a potent form of right-wing masculinity characterized by what Kimmel (2021) has called ‘amped-up militarism and violence and hypermasculine posturing’ that can be traced to conservative discourses of the 1960s through the 1980s that sought to cultivate and then harness White males’ ‘aggrieved entitlement’ for political gains.
While images of the insurrection readily demonstrate its largely white male cohort, decked out in flannels, ball caps, hoodies, and paramilitary gear, there are a few participants who at first glance fail to fit the MAGA/Proud Boys/Three Percenters mold. I was particularly struck by the appearance of Jacob Anthony Chansley, aka Jake Angeli, aka the “shirtless horned man”, aka or “QAnon shaman.” Clad in faux buckskin, carrying a white bullhorn and an American flag on a spear-tipped staff, he was, unlike any of the other protestors on that chilly January day, bare-chested, his face painted in an abstract American flag design. The right side of his naked chest is covered in Nordic tattoos (Valknut, Yggdrasil, and Mjølnir), with other patterns on his arms and wrists. Perhaps because of his Nordic tattoos, journalists frequently described his headdress as Viking, following a line of reasoning based on white nationalists’ appropriation of pre-Christian Scandinavian symbols. But Chansley’s headdress appropriates indigenous North American buffalo warbonnets, worn by certain clan-members and other warriors of distinction from Sioux and other northern Great Plains nations.
This presentation focuses on how Chansley’s gender-political embodiment reflects an enduring discourse of American gender-normativity that was central to the nation’s formation as a settler-colonial ‘republic’ and to national belonging/citizenship, and which remains central to the present moment. This discourse draws on 18th and 19th-century notions of Anglo-Saxon-Nordicism, as well as a style of patriotic embodiment that requires dedication to the Nation’s ‘founding Anglo-Saxon values’ and to the constant surveillance of both one’s own masculine style and that of others in order to ensure the success of the Nation.
Thus 6 January 2021 is symptomatic of a gender-political habitus, a “practice-generating grammar[]” producing a “common repertoire of representations” (Bourdieu 1990: 35) flexible enough to accommodate various displays, including Chansley’s, yet enduring enough to ensure the normative ideological core remains intact and is reproduced.
In offering this presentation, I am not ignoring Leap’s (2020) recent call for a queer historical linguistics that refuses linear, teleological narratives. What I propose here is consistent with the spatiotemporal inquiry associated with a scavenger methodology (Halberstam 1998; Leap 2020: 45-50) that QHL requires. Moreover, instead of treating hegemonic masculinity as something that endures eternally, outside of history, this presentation encourages us to ask why these notions of (hetero)masculinity have been (re)imagined repeatedly in the U.S. and similar contexts, and why Anglo-Saxon-Nordic ‘savagery’ is so often the basis for that imagery.
https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/lavlang/2021/friday/34
