“If a boy didn’t care for barbecued chicken or potato chips, people would accept it as a matter of personal taste, saying, ‘Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds.’ You could turn up your nose at the president or Coke or even God, but there were names for boys who didn’t like sports” (Sedaris 5)
In this passage, the narrator of Sedaris’ Me Talk Pretty One Day ruminates about the strange power of the expectation that all boys will be invested in sports, something that he himself does not enjoy. Eve Kosofky Sedgwick’s discussion of how institutions come together and speak with “one voice” in order to create and reinforce meaning is useful in thinking through the narrator’s frustration with the connection between gender and sports in this part of the text.
Speaking about the way Christmas has become an institutionally constructed and enforced monolith tightly linked to the family, Sedgwick argues, “They all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourses of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a year” (6). Although the narrator does not reflect specifically on the way these institutions enforce the link between sports and masculinity, this passage reveals his frustration with the “sports/manhood” tautology; to borrow Sedgwick’s words, it is a monolith that he views with “unhappy eyes” (5). His recognition of the fact that desire for certain foods is seen merely as “personal taste” in a way that the lack of desire to participate in sports culture is not demonstrates his understanding that the “boys/sports” connection extends beyond the realm of the individual and is functioning on the level of institution.
Furthermore, the fact that the narrator can simply say “there were names for boys who didn’t like sports” without specifically providing those names only reinforces Sedgwick’s claim about institutions lining up and speaking with one voice; as readers, we are already familiar with the sorts of names the narrator is referring to, because we too have experienced the ways institutions discipline gender roles. The narrator asks for the sort of unpacking and “disarticulating” that Sedgwick calls for. He wants to live in a world where, “Oh well, I guess it takes all kinds” is the response he would receive if he opened up about his lack of interest in football. But this would require disengaging masculinity from the realm of sports, and an unpacking of the terms “boyhood” and “sports” in order to see why all their parts actually have multiple “possibilities” and “gaps” and “overlaps” (Sedgwick 8). Disarticulating monoliths in this way would open up the potential for the narrator’s (and everyone’s) relationship to sports to be seen merely as personal preference, no more linked to gender/sexuality than his relationship to “barbecued chicken or potato chips.”
It is interesting to analyze how society divides up desire- desire for food is an everyday thing and is just a personal preference, but sexual desire is political and allows for other people to weigh in. In the era of Sedaris’ childhood, there was thought to be only one type of sexuality, heterosexual, whereas there were, even in that time, many different flavors of chips, food, etc. Given the perceived lack of options, it was easier for society to come up with negative terms for people who are not “normal.” Interestingly, in personal experience, there are many people who will express shock and awe if they find out that someone likes or doesn’t like a certain kind of food. Chocolate is a prime example. Say that you don’t like chocolate, and most people will respond “That’s crazy!” or the like. It takes numerous people jumping in and saying “Oh no, I don’t like chocolate either” for the chocolate-disliker to be left alone by the chocoholics. It would be interesting to see if the queer community would mirror this sort of support.
You could talk about how this statement is phrased through inaction. The indication of queerness that Sedaris shares with us is the lack of interest in sports instead of an active interest in something perceived as queer. Maybe delve deeper into how the lack of perceived masculinity immediately indicates queerness in our current culture. Why does lack of masculinity immediately equate to gayness? Does femininity in people who are designated male at birth also indicate sexuality? Is there a connection between the structured “inaction” of the passage and why Sedaris doesn’t actually use the word gay?