Manhood Acts

Gender and the Practices of Domination

Michael Schwalbe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781612055473
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317256342
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In Manhood Acts Michael Schwalbe offers a new perspective on the social construction of manhood and its relationship to male domination. Schwalbe argues that study of masculinity has lost touch with its feminist roots and has been seduced by the politically safe notion of 'multiple masculinities'. Manhood Acts delineates the practices males use to construct 'women' and 'men' as unequal categories. Schwalbe reclaims the radical feminist insights that gender is a field of domination, not a field of play, and that manhood is fundamentally about exerting or resisting control. Manhood Acts arrives at the conclusion that abolishing gender as a system of oppression will require more than transgressive self-presentation. It will be necessary to end the exploitive economic relationships that necessitate manhood itself.

Chapter 1

Gender Theory after Auschwitz

I am haunted by Theodor Adorno’s essay “Education after Auschwitz.”¹ Adorno (1903–1969) was one of the major figures associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. The essay, first published in 1967, is both a cri de coeur and a somber exhortation. “The premier demand upon all education,” Adorno begins, “is that Auschwitz not happen again…. Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz.” What education must do, Adorno argues, is to disrupt the conditions that enable holocausts to occur. Adorno feared that such conditions were still in place in the 1960s. I fear they are still in place today.

Adorno points to conditions that are both internal and external to individuals. One of the external conditions is aggressive nationalism. Another is a “netlike environment” of hierarchical administrative control—much like Max Weber’s iron cage, albeit with real jailers at the ready. Cultural values that encourage the worship of action and efficiency, blind identification with the collective, and trust in authority are also enabling conditions. Adorno’s main concern, however, is with what education must do to ensure that individuals cannot be mobilized to perpetrate mass horrors. What it must do, he says, is to reveal the social mechanisms that render people capable of horrific deeds. Education must also nurture capacities for critical self-reflection.

The goal of education, in Adorno’s view, should be to create people who are sociologically mindful, self-reflective, and morally autonomous. Sociological mindfulness is an antidote to what Adorno calls reified consciousness—a consciousness “blinded to all historical past, all insight into one’s own conditionedness, and posits as absolute what exists contingently.” Sociological mindfulness makes it possible to see that the social arrangements to which allegiance is demanded are neither divinely ordained nor immutable, but rather human creations reflecting the interests of the powerful.² Critical self-reflection is necessary to recognize and resist one’s socially ingrained tendencies to obey, to identify with the collective, and to emotionally detach from the Other. The result, ideally, is an individual capable of making independent moral judgments and thus not being a willing or unwitting participant in the schemes of “desktop murderers.”

In Adorno’s essay, “Auschwitz” is a stand-in for the entire Nazi program of exterminating Jews, Romani (“Gypsies”), gays and lesbians, and communists. The scale, intentionality, and bureaucratic efficiency of this multifaceted genocide mark it as historically unique. Not so its enabling conditions. To see these conditions and counter the threat they pose, we must overcome investments in not seeing what is closest to us.

Although he does not speak of gender in the manner of contemporary sociologists, Adorno references it in several ways. He speaks of the “cult of action” that attracts those who desire to do something, to make things happen, and who vaunt “efficiency” even when it leads to irrational or inhumane results. He speaks of the “ideal of hardness” that encourages indifference to the pain of others. He speaks of virility construed as the ability to endure pain. He speaks of denigration heaped on the weak. He speaks of initiation rites that inflict pain as a condition of acceptance into the collective. Adorno has in mind the Nazi cult of masculinity.³ But his description of the character that makes holocausts possible—hungry for action, eager to get the job done, tough, patriotic—fits the contemporary ideal of American manhood.

Adorno’s essay haunts because it reminds me that the conditions that made Auschwitz and other Nazi crimes against humanity possible are not behind us. Aggressive US nationalism? Yes, see Afghanistan and Iraq. Hierarchical administrative control? Yes, in the workplace and, as the surveillance state has expanded post-9/11, ever more so in public life as well. Vaunting of action and efficiency, even if destructive in the long run? Yes, that’s what market fundamentalism and privatization amount to. Indifference to the suffering of others? Yes, as evident in rationing health care on the basis of what is profitable to sell to whom. Indifference to the suffering of others is also evident in the use of bombs and drones that inevitably kill innocent civilians. Admirable manliness defined by power, toughness, and a capacity for violence? Yes, today still, as in Homer’s day.

“All political instruction,” Adorno concludes, “finally should be centered upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again. This would be possible only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to this most important of problems. To do this education must transform itself into sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates beneath the surface of political forms.” The requisite instruction, it seems to me, is that which equips us and compels us to critically examine the taken-for-granted systems of inequality that shape us as persons and within which we live our everyday lives.⁴ Adorno believed, as do I, that the insights thereby possible can disrupt the processes that create humans with dangerous inclinations to dominate and to obey. What most needs to be disrupted, as Adorno implies but seems reluctant to say, is the making of particular kinds of men. To prevent another Auschwitz, what is thus necessary is a critical sociology of gender.

There is no shortage of sociologies of gender, as even a cursory perusal of textbook offerings and journals will make clear. More theorizing and research about gender goes on today than in Adorno’s day; it has become a mainstream academic enterprise. But this mainstreaming has come at the cost of domestication. It has entailed a loss, or sidelining, of the most critical perspectives—those that deconstruct gender at its roots, that treat gender itself as a system of inequality, and that give central place to the exploitation and oppression of females and women by males and men. So while we have plenty of sociological studies of gender-related phenomena, we are not looking at gender in the ways necessary to satisfy Adorno’s imperative. Until we do, as I argue in this book, we will remain poised to repeat the worst of human history, in between times of routine exploitation and smaller-scale violence. If there is a way out, finding it will require, as per Adorno’s admonition, offending all manner of authorities.

* * *

All critical social theory is sociological in the sense of taking culture, social organization, group interests, and interaction into account. Critical social theory is also particularly attentive to power and inequality, and to how power and inequality shape consciousness.⁵ All sociological theory, however, is not critical social theory. Both aim to make sense of the social world, but conventional sociological theory embraces the positivist project of reducing the social world to “variables” and trying to explain patterns of covariation among those variables. The goal of this kind of theorizing, when it is intended for practical application, is knowledge that policy makers and managers can use to more effectively control others.⁶ Conventional sociological theory thus seeks to emulate natural science theories that have yielded more control over the physical world. The aims of critical theory are different.

As noted, critical theory shares with mainstream sociological theory the purpose of making sense of the social world and how it works. I would add that both are concerned, or should be, with offering accounts and interpretations that are consistent with observation and experience. As hard as it can be to know what the facts are in some cases, theory must respect the best facts we have at the moment. If not—if theory is unmoored from observation and experience—it has little to make sense of. There must be, at some point, empirical referents for the sense-making work that we call “theorizing,” or else this work will gain no traction in the real world. But to return to the purposes of critical theory: the point is not to generate knowledge for the sake of gaining more control over the social world in the way that science has given us more control over the physical world. The point, rather, is to gain insight into ourselves and the workings of society, such that we can more effectively pursue liberatory social change.⁷

To those steeped in the self-interested Realpolitik that has come to hold sway in the post-Reagan era, the phrase “liberatory social change” might seem like a woolly cliché from the 1960s or ’70s. With a bit more historical perspective, however, the phrase can be understood to reference a project rooted in ancient Greek philosophy, Enlightenment rationalism, Marxist criticism of capitalism, and modern secular liberalism. The common thread is the expansion of human freedom and self-determination through rational thought and dialogue. This entails the questioning of superstition and tradition and overcoming ignorance imposed by those with greater social power. Critical theorizing is simply the disciplined intellectual effort to dissolve the bonds of superstition, tradition, and ignorance that hold exploitive social hierarchies in place.

I want to be more specific about the aims of critical theory, because these aims guide my efforts and will, I hope, serve as guides to others with similar interests. These aims also inform my critiques of mainstream sociological theorizing about gender. Much of that theorizing, in particular that which has to do with men and masculinity, is, when judged by the aims of critical theory, more a part of the problem than a part of the solution (see Chapter 2). Others might reject my critiques on the grounds that they do not share the liberatory aims of critical theory as I lay them out. Fair enough, provided that one puts one’s own cards on the table.

One aim of critical theory is to give people analytic distance on their socialization. The Socratic injunction “know thyself” is given a sociological twist by critical theory. The point is not only to know oneself, but to know how that self came to be what it is—as a result of culture, social relationships, and multiple social locations. To sociologize oneself in this way is to try to see how one’s values, attitudes, beliefs, identities, feelings, and desires are rooted in patterns of social experience. It is to try to fathom how one’s individuality has been shaped by a particular social environment. The aim, more specifically, is to help us see how what we have become as individuals is a consequence of the power relations and inequalities in which we have been caught up since birth.

Sociological self-reflection, as fostered by critical theory, is undertaken for the sake of seeing how we are trapped by ideologies and practices that sustain domination and subordination. An example from American culture is what has been called the “achievement ideology.”⁸ This is the belief that everyone, regardless of class or social category, has an equal chance to get ahead; that all it takes is talent, hard work, and a willingness to play by the rules; and that anyone who displays these qualities will be fairly rewarded. The achievement ideology legitimates inequality by implying that the rich deserve to be rich, having won a fair contest. It also implies that the poor have only themselves to blame. This is an ideology that is congenial to those who benefit from current economic arrangements and would like to see these arrangements preserved. As a counter to the achievement ideology, sociological self-reflection might begin by asking, How have I come to believe what is demonstrably false? How does the achievement ideology lead me to accept subordination or celebrate the powerful? and What does the achievement ideology lead me to do that helps to reproduce inequality?

Another example of self-misunderstanding is the belief that we are in essence racial beings. This is the belief that one is biologically white, black, Latino/a, Asian, or whatever. As scientists have recognized for fifty years, these categories and labels are cultural, not biological.⁹ They were invented, once upon a time, to construct some people as targets for exploitation, to impede solidarity among the exploited, and to legitimate the dominance of other groups. Racial ideologies still yield these results, and thus still help to preserve inequality. Sociological selfreflection can loosen the grip that fictions like “race” have on our beliefs about who and what we are. In this case, the questions might be, How did I come to think of myself as raced? What does this mean about the kind of person I am and about who others are? and What consequences follow when people define themselves as belonging to racial groups? A body of work that goes by the name of critical race theory provides resources for pursuing answers to these and other questions.¹⁰

It is a matter to which I will return later, but I want to note here what I consider a parallel self-misunderstanding when it comes to gender. The misunderstanding, as with race, is that we are biologically men or women. We are indeed biologically male or female, just as we carry genes that produce the phenotypical differences (e.g., skin color, hair texture, epicanthic folds, etc.) associated with race. But just as critical race theory deconstructs race and racial identities, helping us to see these things as divisive fictions, so, too, can critical gender theory help us to see how the belief that humans are fundamentally women or men is a fiction that upholds an exploitive social hierarchy. Given the deep investment most people have in their gender identities, I expect that critical gender theory will face a stronger ideological headwind than critical race theory. More about this later.

Self-reflection along the lines suggested above does not ensure that good answers will be found. Arriving at good answers depends on the conceptual framework employed and the facility with which it is used. The Frankfurt theorists used Marx and Freud. I, too, find Marx useful but prefer the American Pragmatist philosophers, second-wave radical feminists, and modern social psychologists to Freud.¹¹ But these are just possibilities; ideas useful for critical self-reflection can be found in many places. My concern here, however, is not with specific theories or lines of analysis. My concern is with the aims of critical theorizing. Self-reflection that can help us see how we are implicated and invested in systems of inequality is one such aim.

Another aim is to reveal the hidden workings of power. By “hidden workings” I don’t mean the backstage machinations of political and economic elites. Such things should of course be revealed, but journalism and ethnography can do the job. What critical theory aims to reveal is how dominant cultural beliefs and practices—those that are hegemonic in the sense of being taken for granted as true and proper, those that are right in front of our noses—both reflect and reinforce inequality. The propagation of the achievement ideology and belief in competitive individualism is one example. Critical theory puts these propaganda efforts into relief by showing how they are built into the otherwise unremarkable socialization processes that occur in families, schools, sports activities, and workplaces, and via popular media.

Workings that are hidden in plain view can also include the exclusion of dissident values and voices from the mainstream. Serious critiques of capitalism and equally serious considerations of economic democracy are generally not found in basic school curricula in the United States. Nor are they found in mainstream media—news, films, television, literary fiction, and art. Such exclusions matter; people cannot consider critiques and alternatives to which they have never been exposed. Some critical theories—Marxism, for example—offer critiques and alternatives, but it is no less important to inspire dissident thought by posing questions: What is the range of acceptable opinion here? What lies outside that range? What is being assumed about human nature or about how humans should organize themselves? and (again) Who benefits, how, if these definitions of reality are embraced and acted upon? It is an aim of critical theorizing to foster these kinds of questions and thereby begin the process of ideology critique.

The aim of ideology critique is to “decolonize the mind,” as it used to be said.¹² A closely related aim of critical theory is to reveal the unintended consequences of action. This is a matter of seeing how taken-for-granted practices, the typically unremarkable things we do in everyday life, have the consequence, often despite our intentions, of reproducing inequality. One of my favorite examples is Marilyn Frye’s analysis of the male door-opening ritual.¹³

On the surface, the door-opening ritual appears to be a gesture of respect. Men say it is a matter of being polite, and many women (especially young women in college classrooms) say they like having doors opened for them. So what’s the problem? As Frye points out, it is an unnecessary service, women being fully capable of opening doors for themselves, so its value is purely symbolic. Of what, then? If it were truly symbolic of greater respect accorded women in US society, one would expect to see women being paid more than men in every situation where all else was equal; one would expect to see men doing the bulk of the housework, especially the dirtiest jobs; and one would expect women to be free from sexual harassment, assault, and rape. But, alas, these things are not the case; just the opposite, in fact.

The claim that the door-opening ritual reflects the great respect men hold for women is thus belied by men’s behavior in other situations, and inconsistent with every other indicator of women’s status and power in US society. Men are willing to “show respect,” in other words, when it doesn’t matter and when it symbolizes women’s weakness. If women like the gesture, it is because of its compensatory value. “We might get the short end of the stick everywhere else,” the thinking goes, “but at least we get doors opened for us.” But not all w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Chapter 1 Gender Theory after Auschwitz
• Chapter 2 The Masculinities Industry
• Chapter 3 Theses on Manhood Acts
• Chapter 4 Drone Morality
• Chapter 5 Capitalism and the Compulsions of Manhood
• Chapter 6 The Limits of Trans Liberalism
• Chapter 7 Feminism or Barbarism
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author