ABSTRACT
Like the men classified as “stingless mosquitoes” in Atlas, the twenty-two-year-old man renamed No. 169 tilts his hip, in expression of what psychologist William Herbert Sheldon called “mesopenia,” or, a hyperreactivity against the “norms.” The norm against which No. 169 rebels, Sheldon argues, is cisgender masculinity, which was encultured and demanded by US military, which idealized hardened, loyal, obediently aggressive, muscular, and combat-ready men. No. 169’s identification by Sheldon as a World War II-era soldier politicizes the subject’s deviance from a cisgender masculine norm. Whitney represents himself for posterity in his albums as a girl-chasing, cisgender male, in accord with class expectations. To reinforce a pervasive and persistent cisgender normativity by automatically assuming subjects of photographs are “straight” by default obligates them to conform to abide by cisgender norms in historical perpetuity. Whitney’s hyperactive, eugenics-abiding, hairpin-trophy collecting, copiously-documented dating life involving a revolving door of female companions provided an ideal performance of Brahmin cisgender masculinity expected of man of his social caste.
