Summary

Halberstam begins this second chapter with a section entitled, “Making Masculinity,” in which he introduces the historic lack of women in studies of masculinity, despite the plethora of different types of female masculinities. Halberstam notes that, throughout the Victorian Era and before, alternative masculinities were actually used to define the modern, standard male masculinity: “working-class men, black men, immigrant men, and even feminist women…prompted middle-class men to attempt to ‘remake manhood’” (49).

Next, in “Perverse Presentism,” Halberstam explains that using the term “lesbian” to define historical “models of same-sex desire” actually erases the many varieties and intricacies of different types of historical same-sex relationships (50). He thus proposes a model of “perverse presentism”: rather than applying modern conceptualizations of sexuality to the past, Halberstam intends to convey a “denaturalization of the present” while...