V-2nd C4 A Certain Feudal-Homosexual Element

[Dave Monroe]

"There was always a certain feudal-homosexual element in this division
of labor." (V., Ch. 4, p. 99)


"a certain feudal-homosexual element"

>From Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American
Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2006),
Ch. 2, "Machine," pp. 58-97:

"Politics is not here a game played on behalf of human society, or
even a social manipulation undertaken with some vague concept of
'humanity' in mind.  It is rather a project of engineering ... toward
a fully mechanized society, in the service of which humanity must be
destroyed.
   "This trope of the destructive, mechanized force of politics
returns in Herbert's reading of the back story of Schoenmaker, the
plastic surgeon.  As a youth during World War I, Schoenmaker worked as
a grease monkey on airplanes that flew missions out of France.  In the
midst of this story, the reader is suddenly informed that 'since those
days as we know democracy has made its inroads and those crude flying
machines have evolved into "weapons systems" of a then undreamed-of
complexity' [V., Ch. 4, p. 99].  The intimate correlation of the
spread of democracy and the development of technologies of destruction
suggests a relay system between the two: democracy as technologized
politics; weapons systems as democratic machines; each aimed at
parallel forms of human destruction....  Politics as human engineering
thus gives way to weapons engineering with ease, and both are revealed
to have the same goal in mind: a mechanized, if not yet properly
cybernetic, social control.
   "But Schoenmaker's story also reveals--as does Bongo-Shaftsbury's
arm switch--the levels on which this transformation of human into
machine is not simply metaphorical or ideological but very physical.
Schoenmaker, working on the airplanes and watching the heroic figures
of the pilots, develops a crush on the dashing young flyer Evan
Godolphin ....  This crush reveals another negative-feedback loop at
work between technology and male sexuality; Schoenmaker's work as a
mechanic redirects his desire onto 'improper,' nonheterosexual
objects, a redirection that has the effect of intensifying his
involvement in the mechanical...." (pp. 81-2)

http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com/

http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com/2006/04/chapter-2/

http://www.vanderbiltuniversitypress.com/books/11/the-anxiety-of-obsolescence

http://books.google.com/books?id=pdkDXNbPPuUC