I loved you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I loved you madly.

Charles Dickens , The mistery of Edwin Drood

captainfart:

things bucky barnes did in europe for the past two years:

  • learn how to pair cheese with wine
  • write in his notebook on the riverbank of the danube watching the world go by
  • see the aurora borealis in norway
  • pick up knitting (badly) from the nice old woman in poland who told him about the War and how lucky he was to grow up in a better time
  • scope out the new street fashion all over europe. bucky thinks about what he would like best, looks at clothes in the store he would buy if he wasn’t trying to blend in
  • sleep in a small park in croatia his face turned towards the sun, soaking up the rays
  • help in the effort to clean up and rebuild sokovia after the avengers left
  • smile and wave back at little children who wave hi and grin broadly at him first
  • stroll down narrow streets in rome, looking at buildings older than any he’s ever seen before
  • practice what to say to steve when bucky meets him again

“Nice boots, Tinker Bell!”: Steve Rogers as an allegory for the impossibility of performative masculinity.

mathildia:

There’s nothing new about the consideration of male superheroes as icons of masculinity. Superman representing the pinnacle of wholesome, idealised masculine power, or The Hulk as an allegory for the angry, repressed male id. And these types of masculinity are not innate or inevitable. Masculinity, like all gender roles is a socially constructed performance.

But performative masculinity has a tension to it that performative femininity does not, because performing itself is seen as innately unmasculine. You cannot learn to be a real man, you are or you are not. You can’t make one or learn to be one. Because our story about masculinity is that it just is. It is an ur state of being. The most natural way for a human to be.

Steve Rogers came out of a bottle.

And Steve Rogers’s weapon is a shield. Steve does not attack, he defends. Steve Rogers is the only Avenger who does not thrust forward with a phallic weapon. From Loki’s staff to Clint’s arrows, Black Widow (who pairs so well with Steve because she is a phallic woman) has guns, Tony essentially is a giant penis (sorry, friends, that’s all I see), and of course no one would even pretend that Thor’s hammer isn’t Thor’s penis.

But Steve has a shield. And a shield isn’t particularly feminine. It is not a cup or a sheath or a hole. It is just anti-phallic.

And that is Steve. the non-phallic man. Because you can’t make a man in a machine. Only a strange kind of monster.

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