Neutrality narratives,gender,and fear of cuckoldry in public administration

Abstract

Administration draws its legitimacy from neutrality in cultural contexts where power relations are shaped by gendered norms. Neutrality bestows legitimacy where power is vested in the male generative force and is heritable. In the public sphere, neutrality renders administration nonthreatening to politicians and justifies administrators’ use of discretion despite their lack of democratic accountability and oversight. We examine historical and cultural roots of administrative neutrality as embodied by the physiologically transformed man and the resulting genderedness of public administration. We highlight two examples of power and sexuality in anime and different implications of neutered maleness. We also discuss enforced administrative neutrality in practice—the Hatch Act in the United States—which prevents administrators from engaging in political activity, rendering them “political eunuchs.”

Introduction

“Politics ain’t beanbag” is attributed to longtime Chicago mayor and Democratic Party boss Richard J. Daley and is meant to suggest that the rough and tumble of big-city politics is not for the faint of heart. Nor is it for the fairer sex, as Cam Stivers argues. Interrogating the origins of public Administration, Stivers (1995) observes that the narrative surrounding women’s suffrage shaped the reform activities of both women and men. Reform movements during the Progressive Era arose in two general areas: Public welfare and city administration. The context of public administration’s founding moments produced a field with an enduring identity crisis that is aspirationally masculine yet equivocal with respect to gender roles. These origins, against a cultural backstop of patrilineal inheritance and heritable power, produce an affinity for neutrality. Stivers (1995) traces the evolution of male and female reformers’ agendas to locate the origin of the field’s masculine aspirations and its gender-role uncertainty. Women’s public roles arose from their domestic roles (p. 525, emphasis supplied):

But because electoral politics and the spoils system were stereotypically masculine, male advocates of nonpartisan managerial government risked appearing unmanly. They were referred to by professional politicians as . . . political hermaphrodites.

Although female reformers were criticized as aggressive and moralizing, their efforts remained consistent with women’s roles in public life. Their femininity was not at stake. Male reformers, however, were thought unmanly. It was bad enough that, in certain circles of economics, government was referred to as the “sterile class” compared to the “productive class” in the process of wealth creation economy-wide (Charles, 2003; Hebert, 1996). Arguably to preserve their “manliness,” governmental reformers pursued a Scientific Management agenda and it’s narratives to counter urban machine politics. Male reformers espoused Scientific Management and established the field of Public Administration while female reformers launched the profession and scholarly field of Social Work (Stivers, 2000).

In an effort to conceal the inherently gendered origins of the field, scholars and practitioners rendered the study and practice of public administration as sometimes hermaphroditic and sometimes intersexed—at once female and male. We argue, in contrast, that the study and practice of public administration is best depicted as asexual or neutered, capturing the enduring angst associated with being transformed or shape shifted (Barry et al., 2006). Moreover, the notion of an ideal administrator as neutered male dates much further back than the Progressive Era (Roberts, 2019). Public administration legitimates itself through alignment with scientific management narratives, with reform, and with efficiency and effectiveness at the expense of alternative narratives such as social equity. These arguably masculine, scientific narratives are held beyond reproach as they are coupled with parallel narratives of neutral/neutered competence. Historical accounts document the use of eunuchs and castrati across cultures and in multiple governmental roles, nearly all of which are administrative. Together, these narratives represent a cultural tie to ritualized practices of transformation with both profound gendered overtones as well as specific, codified power disparities. Where power is vested in the male generative force—quite literally in some narratives associated with testimony—administration must be transformed into a state of neutrality. In this paper, we contrast examples of neutered public service and associated implications of unconventional and uncontrollable intersexuality. We also discuss narratives surrounding the Hatch Act, an American law that effectively prevents government workers from engaging in political activity and thus enforcing administrative neutrality. We close with the observation that neutrality may be a problematic source of legitimacy and power for public administration.

Neutrality and public administration theory

Scholars of public administration avoid “engagement with political and moral values by embracing an ethic of neutrality” (Spicer, 2015: 188). Public administration scholars have debated our very ideas about what it means to be neutral (Thompson, 2007) what it means to be biased (Marini, 1971), and how both neutrality and bias are impacted by political-administrative culture (Raadschelders, 2009). The narrative of neutrality rather than the commonly understood expression of “neutrality” understood as a function of egalitarianism often falls short in practice. Specifically, the continued administrative reforms of the 20th century continued to reflect a general discomfort with discretion.

The ideal public administrator is historically a physically or metaphorically neutral/neutered male because women were not trusted to act with reason, and “whole” men could not be trusted to act in the best interests of the state or the collective. Neutral/neutered men embodied the ideal intermediary, possessing the reasoning inherent to their gender but lacking the incentive to act in the best interests of their own progeny. In cultures where power is heritable and surnames are handed down via patrilineal inheritance—patronyms—and alliances are made through marriages, men can and will expand their power by having more children. Men who possess the ability to reproduce act in the best interests of their households and their families to accumulate power as a means to maintain and develop such interests. This power resides in the purported “generative force” based on the potential to “procreate” spheres of influence and other manifestations of power, including political. To maintain these spheres of influence and avoid divided loyalties among their administrators, political leaders demand neutered agents to mitigate the potential exercise of power by administrators working on their behalf. This desire for neutrality has been codified in U.S. Constitutional arguments, given the assertion that unelected and therefore unaccountable administrators should not possess power that is not granted by a sovereign people or their representatives. Political actors typically strive to remove the capacity for generative force from administrators, thereby maintaining neutrality and as a consequence, order. Administrators lacking personal agendas may legitimately possess delegated authority and exercise discretion because it is assumed that they act in the best interests of the state based on their enforced neutrality.

Historically, large public sector organizations have enforced neutrality by removing the generative force as an a priori for service. In historical practice—particularly in China, India, and Byzantium—governments have relied on scores of professional eunuchs and castrati to handle administrative matters in capacities that required trust (Ghosh, 2015, Liu, 1959). Trust in this case was not necessarily earned, but instead was manufactured by the creation of the eunuch. Underlying this manufactured trustworthiness was a physical inability to reproduce, which precludes them from participating in practices like cuckoldry, or female sexual infidelity, limiting the impact of raising offspring of questionable parentage. Where power is heritable and specifically patrilineal, cuckoldry is a real threat to a political leader’s power base since it could undermine legitimate and positional power of leaders such as monarchs, heads of state, and other politicians. Female sexual infidelity might also jeopardize a political leader’s ability to control his household. The eunuch is trusted because he is physiologically neither woman nor man: “Eunuchs existed outside of the dominant social values and institutions of family, offspring, and procreation. This made them ideally suited to serve as servants, agents, and proxies for their masters or employers, male or female” (Ringrose, 2004: 5). Eunuchs were separated from their families of origin and physically unable to start their own families, so loyalty was strictly bound to the house they served. An absence of divided loyalties made the eunuch a perfect servant (Ringrose, 2004). Similarly, neutrality and a devotion only to technicism legitimates administration and gives it purpose (Connell, 2006). Acting from a position of neutrality, or at least the appearance or conceit of neutrality, “government officials will be able to justify their action as fair, even-handed, and in accordance with the rules” (Stivers, 2015: 243). Neutrality plays an indispensable role in the legitimation of administrative action.

Acting in one’s own interests extends to organizational life as well. Modern-day political leaders require allegiance from their inner circle of staff and neutrality from administrators. However, it remains in administrators’ best interests to maintain neutrality in the exercise of discretion as administrators are not “democratically” accountable. Public Administration was founded with a narrative that politics and administration should be separated; this is the so-called “politics/administration dichotomy.” This dichotomy, “naïve as it is, is apparently a necessary fiction for modern democratic government, because it insulates administrators from ‘partisan politics’” (Heidelberg, 2015: 163). Claiming fealty to abstract concepts like technicism, efficiency, and effectiveness, allows unelected administrators to dodge criticism through neutral dedication to nonpartisan principles (Connell, 2006). “Belief in the politics/administration dichotomy and its corollaries regarding the political neutrality of public administration and the value-free role of experts in democratic governance remain significant aspects of many public administration theories” (Luton, 2015: 147). Public administrators can claim to have no stake in political outcomes. Administrative neutrality is “the loyal subjection of civil servants to political orders and regulations regardless of their own personal persuasions and personal relations” (Triantafillou, 2015: 174). Without cover from neutrality narratives, public administrators would attract undue scrutiny when exercising discretion.

Enforced neutrality secures administrators’ power because they do not represent threats to patrilineal power. Fidelity to the ideology of neutrality, alongside a deep-seated fear of loss of power tied to what we might call organizational cuckoldry, reveals further layers of gender, and gender issues in public administration. To understand this, we must offer an alternative argument for the relationship among the administrative state and public employees examining the roles, responsibilities, and use of eunuchs and castrati in their capacities as public officials. Specifically, these historical practices and contemporary metaphorical practices represent tools of control expressed by arguably male power elites to prevent or limit situations of organizational misbehavior and guerrilla governance. Indeed, guerrilla behavior by public administrators represents such an existential threat to power that whistleblower laws are codified to protect against retaliation (O’Leary, 2014).

Manufacturing neutrality: Eunuchs as perfect servants

Perhaps the first element of our argument that we need to consider is the belief if not the acceptance that the neutering of people can physically manifest something akin to a docile body (Foucault, 1977). Yet the underlying theme of enhanced control, reducing aggression, and improving focus appeal to organizational leadership and administrative behavior at least conceptually. Culturally, at least one narrative claims that eunuchs, by virtue of being castrated, lack the necessary elements to be a source of testimony. The narrative claims the origin of the term “testimony” is the Latin word testis, referring to a special application of the verb “to witness.” Specifically, it is understood to mean to bear witness to virility though a ceremonial pledge, though this is contested in some circles (Katz, 1998). The associated narrative still works as long as we are operating from the assumption that power is vested in a generative force and cuckoldry threatens or even co-opts patrilineal power. Eunuchs become ideal administrators through elimination of their generative force. Eunuchs can therefore be entrusted with tasks that their patrons might not be comfortable giving to unaltered males including attending to spouses. Eunuchs “are accepted into the most “private” and “vulnerable” realms precisely because they are supposed to be unable to abuse this vulnerability” (Karakayali, 2006: 322). Eunuchs historically are believed to be more trustworthy in general than their intact counterparts due in part to their social dependence on some sovereign or other political actor. Dependence is manufactured by removing the eunuch from his family of origin and preventing him from building his own power base through heirs and marriage alliances.

The narrative of trustworthiness is reinforced throughout discussions of governance. Common practices were adopted to routinize the assimilation of neutered men into governing staff. Most eunuchs are removed from their families as young boys, as part of a process to establish docile bodies (Foucault, 1977) and establish biopolitical control (Foucault et al., 2008). In practice, they become dependent on the state, kingdom, or other governing structure that serves as their de facto family unit: “Eunuchs were assumed to be unfailingly loyal to their masters or patrons; this was true of eunuchs in Byzantium, China, and Islam” (Ringrose, 2007: 502). As stated earlier, they represented their patrons in roles that would be inappropriate for the patron to fill: “Their ambiguous gender status allowed them to fill liminal roles and it placed them in a marginal situation, in part because it was assumed that they did not (or ought not) hold power in their own right” (Ringrose, 2004: 7). Eunuchs often served in utility positions, as service providers, or as disinterested participants: “Both at court and in the church, eunuchs were acculturated to become perfect servants . . . many important court offices could only be held by eunuchs and reflected traditions dating from at least the third century” (Ringrose, 2004: 81). The acculturation process of eunuchs established them as ideal boundary spanners (Ringrose, 2004: 84):

Mediating between distinctive groups, defining the sacred space around the emperor, and connecting that space to the regular world . . . eunuchs were necessary as go-betweens in a society where elite men and women were separated from each other and the elite as a whole was rigidly separated from the rest of society.

Because eunuchs are used for jobs that insiders/members are unwilling to do, they occupy a liminal space. They possess access to private spaces and commit to a household but are not members of the household: “Neither a full outsider, nor an insider, the eunuch becomes the police of limits and boundaries” (Karakayali, 2006: 322). In contemporary terms, the neutral administrator—particularly the street-level bureaucrat—still occupies what can sometimes be highly contested space between the state and citizen. The space between citizen and state is highly contested any time the state seeks to force the citizen to do something against his/ her own wishes as in the instances of arrest or removing a child from a home. In this way, administrators do the “dirty work” of the state (Karakayali, 2006). These boundary-spanning positions are tied to political perspectives that attempt to prevent unelected officials from enacting power or engaging in individuated political discourse by politically neutering them. Moreover, both laws like the Hatch Act and codes of conduct explicitly prevent administrators from expressing political positions. Note this is merely one perspective on administrative thought. Yet, it is a common enough discourse that elevates the narrative of neutrality to a position of dominance within political arenas, and we argue, legitimacy.

Enforcing administrative neutrality: The Hatch Act

Connections between power and virility in public administration are not new. Trust, loyalty, and administrative neutrality are linked to the male generative force repeatedly in critiques of the (American) Hatch Act (Minge, 1973). The Hatch Act was passed in 1939 to prohibit US government employees from engaging in political activity. It reaffirms the metaphorical castration of administrative officials by removing their access to a generative force that might emerge from engaging in political activity (Boyle, 1991). Similarly, enthusiasm for public-sector reform also produced the Civil Service Commission and the Pendleton Act in the late 19th century in the United States; both of which fueled passage of the Hatch Act in 1939.

This implicit fear of political cuckoldry reached a zenith during the Great Depression. While the interest in curbing political activities of public employees is centuries older and predates the US itself, it was only after the exponential growth in government through New Deal social programs that eventually prompted passage of the Hatch Act (Bowman and West 2009; Bozeman et al., 2018). In 1940, the Act was extended to state and local government employees. Under Hatch, public-sector employees cannot run for office while still holding administrative positions, nor can they campaign for a candidate or display or distribute candidate campaign materials at work. Public-sector employees are also prohibited from engaging with anti-American organizations like the Communist Party of America. Although the application of the Hatch Act beyond federal government employees applies only to those who work in areas that receive federal funding, it effectively enforces administrative neutrality at all levels of government. Minge (1973) observes that “because state and local employees are confused by the Hatch Act restrictions, they apparently refrain from engaging in permitted activities because of an improper understanding of the Act, giving it an even broader effect” (p. 536). Although he credits Progressive Era reforms for curbing corruptions such that “Patronage, spoils, and machine politics are no longer the rule” (p. 537), reform has come at a steep price. Doubling-down on the metaphor, Minge criticizes the Act as enforcing “political celibacy” (p. 536) that may deter potential employees from pursuing a career in public service. “As a result of the Hatch Act, several million state and local employees have been made political eunuchs” (p. 543). The Hatch Act prevents public administrators from realizing their own potential generative force and prohibits administrators from cheating on the United States with, for instance, the Communist Party of America. The link we seek to establish between administrative neutrality and procreation is not novel. Ideal administrators are neutered administrators.

Next we undertake some investigation regarding what “cheating” might look like as well as how it might engender fear of cuckoldry. To accomplish this, we use methods from critical management thought (Bell, 2008; Rhodes and Westwood, 2008) to help illustrate the anxiety that emerges from this fear of cheating. To be fair, the impact of such cheating would be profound regardless of the intent, making it a practice that should be minimized if not completely eliminated. To highlight the sort of anxiety that might occur, it becomes important that we conduct a parallel presentation using fiction to illustrate what triggers the emergence of anxiety as well as the potential consequences of it.

Distrusting the Generative Force: Two Examples from Anime

Within our brief investigation of the cultural history of eunuchs, we have uncovered situations where the perceptions associated with the narrative of trustworthiness did not hold in practice. Specifically, in Asia, there were a few notable situations where a court eunuch attempted to elevate himself to the throne. Within the story, the person in question wore a false beard to cover up the fact that he was incapable of growing one naturally which is a consequence of full castration. When caught, the person in question was prosecuted and put to death. This situation repeats itself in Chinese examples where shifts in the monarchy granted additional rights and powers to the eunuchs that served the court including the ability to adopt children. Such a decision allows the emergence of an ersatz generative process that might include opportunities for cuckoldry. The adoption process afforded eunuchs the ability to produce offspring by proxy despite their biological inability to threaten patrilineal, heritable power. More importantly, it illustrates seams in the argument for eunuchs as perfect servants while undermining the logic for control mechanisms that made the narrative historically appealing and somewhat effective.

What if someone reimagined this narrative of eunuchs and castrati in the context of a discussion of intersexed people and their functions in society? Someone who is only partially transformed? At first blush, it might be attempting to adopt the cultural narratives associated with eunuchs, but that would be an error. Intersexed people are not neutered and as such do not fit neatly into existing categories even if they display themselves similarly. Rather, such intersexed individuals might in practice maintain their generative force even while being labeled as neutral or neutered (Scholz, 2001). This sort of hidden, unconventional, and unpredictable generative power that defies biopolitical control can be a source of potential resistance (Scott, 1985), organizational misbehavior (Vardi and Wiener, 1996), guerrilla governance (O’Leary, 2014), and even untapped potential for revolutionary action.

To understand this particular liminal space and how gendered transformations impact the roles its occupants might engage in, we turn our attention to an investigation of intersexed beings and their portrayals in public service in popular culture. We argue this can illustrate how one might understand this seemingly vexing mixture of power and powerlessness, as both insider and other. The complexity of liminal space provides us with a number of insights into organizational power relationships and governance. To look at the gradations of difference among genders we need only consider the application of the anime trope of the bishonen in Japanese media. A bishonen is translated to mean beautiful boy. This is used to refer to someone who has a beauty and sexual appeal that transcends gender and even sexual orientation—yet is still male. Bishonen manifest as characters in anime and manga in a variety of roles that range from the heroic to villainous. In each case, however, they are not perceived as asexual. Nor are they neutered. Rather, they are seen as male even in cases where there physically indistinguishable from their female counterparts, sometimes leading to confusion among fans especially when such bishonen are voiced by female actors.

The specific case of the bishonen highlights a profound difference from the eunuch in the face of some surface resemblances. Specifically, eunuchs are transformed, they are neutered while bishonen are not. In that sense, bishonen retain their generative force as they are able to both metaphorically and in practice engage in a sort of cuckoldry that has been historically feared by men in power. Political circumstances could lead bishonen to occupy positions that differ from eunuchs in practice. Arguably, they embody elements of homo sacer (Agamben, 1998), in the sense that such people cannot be trusted with administrative power. Due to the retention of a generative force, bishonen could be deemed unfit for administrative roles. The practical problem is that bishonen bear enough similarity to be almost indistinguishable from eunuchs allowing them to participate in such positions in practice. We provide two examples of bishonen characters illustrating how their intersexed presentation and context influence the reactions of others. Interaction among characters drives the perception of the bishonen character in question. As such, it shifts one’s perspective from observation to experience.

Within bishonen there are gradients of masculinity and femininity and characterizations that range from truly heroic to the truly malicious throughout the media. We select different characters from two different anime series to illustrate the range of disparities for how one might occupy this liminal space. The first example is the relatively conventional pretty boy Kenshin Himura, from the series Rurouni Kenshin. The second is Jakotsu from the anime series Inuyasha.

Kenshin Himura

Kenshin Himura is a character in the historical manga and anime Rurouni Kenshin. Kenshin Himura is the prototypical “reformed” ronin living a peaceful life, common to a number the stories in the Meiji era. The elements that separate Kenshin Himura from other characters is his relative tranquility and good nature. He was a fierce soldier who became passive. Simultaneously, this hardened soldier was presented as a pretty boy retaining a youthful appearance despite a long military service. Kenshin Himura is prototypically heroic. He comes to the aid of the weak, he defends the defenseless, and never seeks to initiate combat. Yet the experience of war transformed him into a more passive, less masculine, and less threatening individual. The trope of the persecuted hero plays very easily in this story line which has gained a great deal of critical and popular praise. One might summarize his personality as a soft spoken yet valiant person who seeks to uphold justice despite personal risk.

The heroic bishonen however, despite multiple examples of engaging in acts of resistance against some of the oppressive forces common during the Meiji restoration, are treated the same as any other character. In many ways, the pretty boy aspect of the character is downplayed except in situations where there is romantic intent. It is almost as if the intersexed nature of the character is more tolerated given the heroic role he occupies. The heroic past of the character somehow counterbalances suspicion that might emerge from being a bishonen, making him more trustworthy to his allies in practice, alleviating anxiety about cuckoldry. This is just one way a feminized or intersexed person might be portrayed as a bishonen. The associated narrative reflects this positive depiction such that service to others in the male-only infantry redeems this character’s other flaws in a cultural context equating femininity with flaws.

This bishonen gains a degree of organizational acceptance through his actions and responses to lived experiences. It is important to note that Kenshin Himura becomes respected despite being pretty boy rather than because he is a pretty boy. His character is still marginalized, but he becomes respected based on reputation, while often being underestimated at various plot points. This is not the only way that feminized or intersexed characters are portrayed. In contrast, we offer the character Jakotsu.

Jakotsu

In the fifth season of the anime series Inuyasha, the protagonists run into a different and arguably uncommon representation of a bishonen. Jakotsu was a criminal. He is a member of the band of seven, which was a group of bandits that terrorized the entire region. Jakotsu in particular represents a highly feminized bishonen that has created extensive discussions among fans who often expressed shock that Jakotsu was in fact a gay male and not a woman. This is a conscious choice by the creators of the series. They employed a female voice actor both in the original Japanese anime as well as in the English dubbed version. Contextualizing matters further, we find in the story that Jakotsu adds to the dramatic tension because this murderous bandit is singularly attracted to and obsessed with Inuyasha, the male protagonist of the story. In this case, the bishonen is a villain that causes great chaos; not a public servant (Sementelli, 2019). Repeatedly, Jakotsu’s interaction with other characters reveals their overt discomfort with his presence. Simple contact elevates anxiety based at least partly on his intersexed presentation alongside a fear of generative power.

Jakotsu intentionally crafts his identity to unsettle and elicit discomfort in others. Barry et al. (2006) refer to this as strategic shape shifting (p. 282):

This approach to identity work leaves open possibilities for women and men to act in a variety of ways even, and perhaps especially for strategic purposes, contrary to expectation. Women may adopt behavior characterized as masculine or macho whilst men might choose to act in ways considered feminine, deploying and challenging stereotypes for special effect.

Expectations are central to this approach to identity: Strategic deployment of identity only works when considering a broader context for behavior. Enacted identity elicits a reaction only if expectations already exist against which the enactment compares. Anxiety emerges when identity contradicts expectations and an organizational actor can provoke discomfort for strategic purposes or to produce comfort by behaving in concert with expectations. One might understand Jakotsu as an employee that manipulates anxiety while engaging in organizational misbehavior. Rather than a passive body upon which gender is projected, Jakotsu transforms and performs his intersexed role within or against expectations (Berg et al., 2012) to a situational advantage. There is no attempt to comply with social or organizational standards, rendering people like Jakotsu forces for disruption. Palpable discomfort arises in the characters who experience Jakotsu, making his character more similar to historical reactions to eunuchs. Similarly, eunuchs “made their contemporaries uneasy because they were seen to move too readily between the worlds of men and women, between earthly sensuality and heavenly spirituality, between imperial presence and ordinary space, and between the church and the secular world” (Ringrose, 2004: 7). Jakotsu is inherently untrustworthy, uncontrollable, and unburdened by conventional ethics. He has no desire to fit in. Organizational members also can make use of different identities for different purposes (Barry et al., 2006). Within the series, Jakotsu is intensely interested in the capture and murder of the protagonist Inuyasha much like an organizational zealot (Downs, 1968) or guerrilla (O’Leary, 2014), but without any sense of organizational loyalty beyond that to the leader of the band of seven. In essence, the intersexed nature of Jakotsu is unlike the intersexed nature of Kenshin Himura. The often-passive character of Kenshin Himura becomes at least marginally accepted and trusted thereby reducing anxiety, while the aggressive Jakotsu enhances anxiety and is never trusted. Inherent in the distrust of Jakotsu is some palpable fear of deception, possibly combined with a fear of being cuckolded or at least being taken advantage of; perhaps even being sexually violated.

Consequences for public administration

Interrogating neutrality creates opportunities for inquiry, questions for practice, and teachable moments for public administration education. We highlight the dilemmas associated with narratives of neutrality using both practical and cultural references. Specifically, the claim of neutrality itself in contemporary administration is inherently deceptive. Political actors often believe or at least desire administrators to perform their tasks as neutral if not neutered servants of the public (read as obedient servants of political actors). To privilege neutrality as a guiding principle “runs the risk of ignoring the fact that administration is always connected to a given social order” (Cawley, 2015: 240). In a best-case scenario, administrators might behave as Kenshin Himura, a bishonen who presents as a relatively harmless pretty boy until it is time to use his military honed skills. Kenshin Himura might present as a good and trusted administrator, transformed by war. However, if one’s actions diverge too far from the narrative, under Hatch, administrators could experience a different response with consequences that ranging from political retaliation to the possible loss of the position they hold. This intersexed, gendered anxiety can be linked to the 1960s and 1970s debates about activist public administration and its consequences for the administrative state. Considering this tension, Stivers argues “Civil servants can buy in wholeheartedly to an ethic of neutrality, but it is literally impossible for them to practice it, since to do so would amount to . . . trying to see without an eye” (Stivers, 2015: 245).

Rather than “seeing without an eye,” we favor a rethink the notion of neutral or neutered public servants from the perspective of the bishonen rather than the eunuch. Bureaucracies are not neutral (Meier, 2019). Neutrality creates opportunities to process the arguably heroic actions of whistleblowers and others who might engage in guerrilla governance similar to a Kenshin Himura. Enforced neutrality may produce a Jakotsu type character to engage in organizational misbehavior. Regardless, the mechanical or even metaphorical neutering of administrative professionals is neither possible nor merited in the 21st century. Though political actors continue to cleave to the idea that neutering can be expressed at least metaphorically through budgetary and other control mechanisms like the Hatch Act, it becomes increasingly likely that the functionality of neutrality narratives is overstated. Rather than simply experiencing anxiety, administrators should instead explore, examine, and understand the possibilities of such experiences in contemporary society. Drawing both from history and from popular fiction begins unpacking some of the concepts and set them in contradistinction with their preconceived notions of neutrality, gender, and administration.