Affidamento masculino: El arte queer del fracaso del varón patriarcal

Abstract

In the British film The King's Speech (2010), the friendship between King George VI and the speech therapist Lionel Logue, who treated his extreme stuttering, is depicted as an ensemble of unusual practices and affections between men, which open lines of flight from patriarchal and bourgeois hegemonic masculinity. I call this set of practices and affects, for which there is no specific name yet, male affidamento and consider it to function as a device of desubjectivation and depatriarchalization, since it enables the process by which men abandon passive obedience to pre-established patriarchal norms and risk losing their ontologically secure position as valid social subjects, even if it leads them to the uncomfortable boundary between the acceptable and the abject. Therefore, I propose that male affidamento is a form of the queer art of failure of the patriarchal male, since it resignifies the inadequacy to the normalizing prescriptions of subjectivity as an opportunity to find freer forms of being a man. I also propose that this type of popular fiction offers the public the opportunity to critically rethink their everyday experience, thus distancing myself from the position of cultural criticism according to which it is impossible to find queer proposals in products manufactured for mass consumption by multinational companies.