Endowed

Regulating the Male Sexed Body

Michael Thomson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135929688
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Diritto ambientale

Feminist legal scholars and health care lawyers have long engaged with law's responses to the female reproductive body, especially on what the legal regulation of women's reproductive lives can tell us about the broader relationship between law and gender. Acknowledging this work and building upon it, Endowed considers the interaction of law and ideas of male reproductivity. In particular, it seeks to uncover what these regulatory moments can tell us about contemporary ideas and ideals of masculinity and the male sexed body.

Spanning topics such as male circumcision and the regulation of state access to Viagra, the book uncovers recurring motifs that define masculinity and the male body in the legal imagination. In looking to these understandings the book engages with broader questions regarding the relationship between law and gender and between masculinity and social organization.

CHAPTER 1

Masculinity, Reproductivity and Law

Every woman he dares to sleep with bears his child.… To be so fertile was a curse. To be so timid was a curse, as well.

Jim Crace, Six (London: Penguin, 2003), 1–23.

Introduction

The celebrated actor Felix Dern, the focus of Jim Crace’s novel Six, is both hyperfertile (a “teeming alpha-male”¹) and crushingly timid. Negotiating this central motif, Crace’s novel maps out the actor’s life. Chapters of Dern’s life and Crace’s novel reveal the six women he has loved. Whilst the actor is astonishingly potent and cannot escape the consequences of his love making, his emotional life is a failure, his six children unavoidable reminders.

The novel provides an interesting starting point for a consideration of masculine corporeality and, more specifically, understandings of the male sexed body and reproductivity. Dern’s experience of his potency is at odds with law’s understanding of men and their reproductive bodies. Where historically legal discourse and practice has associated and tied women to their reproductivity, in law men have been comparatively distanced from this aspect of lived experience.

Whilst health is clearly multi-factorial, gender is an important determinant of health profile.² It also appears to be central to law’s understandings of sexed bodies. Looking to law’s engagement with the male body this book asks for an ethical interrogation of the gendered body of health care law and policy. In particular, it looks at the need to question the way in which law replicates ideas concerning male corporeality that are circulating in wider discursive fields. It highlights how the incorporation of this imaginary anatomy embeds and normalises within law the costs to male (and female) health that are the result of these understandings of masculinity and the male body.

In seeking to outline these understandings the chapter starts by addressing Dern’s corporeality/reproductivity. Here it is argued that whilst Dern is very (traditionally) masculine in his sexual desires—indeed we are frequently reminded of the rise and fall of our lead’s penis and the various causes of this arousal—his experience of the consequences of acting on these desires is in many ways a feminised experience. Dern is hyperfertile and is constantly aware of, and limited by, the possible reproductive consequences of his sexual acts. This model of a corporeal masculinity is at odds with circulating ideas of the male body and its reproductive functions and possibilities. Dern provides a counterpoint against which very different understandings of male corporeality can be assessed.

From here the chapter starts to examine theoretical models of masculinity. The chapter looks to Bob Connell’s influential concept of hegemonic masculinity. Subsequent work that has emphasized the need to address the idea of multiple privileged masculinities is considered. As already stated, gender is a significant determinant of health profile and here the chapter looks at the under-theorized relationship between health and masculinity. There is an emphasis on how defining aspects of the public performance of masculinity may contribute to health-harming activity. In the remaining section the subsequent chapters are outlined. The substantive foci and the questions to be addressed are mapped out.

Lix’s Love

Crace’s novel takes place in the “once famous City of Kisses.”³ The city is a romantic composite, a cityscape in flux; both generic and specific enough to respond to the reader’s desires. The romantic title, City of Kisses, emerged from a Life photojournalism piece looking at fifty of the world’s cities on one day. Dern’s city, briefly emerging from a time of political repression, was revealed in a montage of kisses, erotic and otherwise. The signature image became an eroticized non-kiss; a woman in a Cuban beret applying a lipstick kiss to a glass of wine with her red mouth. In the glass two men are reflected. Their own mouths are gaping and both are encircled—or consumed—by the kiss.⁴ Reminiscent of many such iconic images, the photograph lived on in mass-produced posters.

Against this backdrop the life of the “fertile and flamboyant”⁵ Lix unfolds. At its heart it is a familiar tale of the pursuit of sex and love. The tale is of relationships, their incompleteness, and of mis/communication between the sexes. Yet in a number of ways our expectations are upset. The most obvious of these contradicted expectations concerns Lix’s fertility. Whilst masculinity is often calibrated against a measure of potency (including impotency), we are drawn to what is understood as the more biological, and differently gendered, idea of fertility.⁶ As already noted, Dern is unable to have a sexual partner without fathering a child. His experience is far removed from Giddens’ “plastic sexuality,” The decentred sexuality that is freed from the needs of reproduction and is meant to define modern relationships.⁷ Each of his life’s sexual and emotional partners have conceived and born a child. Dern’s understanding of his sex life is in terms of his fertility and its consequences. This can be illustrated with a scene from our lead’s life. At one point he contemplates an act of infidelity whilst out at breakfast with his third wife, a woman who had the prior night conceived his sixth child. Contemplating this act Dern asks “What harm in that?”:

The harm in that for him was the misfortune—was it truly a misfortune?—that every kiss produced a child. Remember? Fertile Lix had never slept with anyone without—eventually—a pregnancy. There always was an aftermath for him.⁸

And whilst Crace recognises that “human biology is unequal in its distributions and rewards,”⁹ The formulation narrated here challenges (social) norms. Surveying the breakfasting women, Dern considers his possible fantasy companions. Of the many possibilities he finally decides on an older woman who is “oddly dressed, boy-haired and overdrawn as a cartoon”:¹⁰

How dare the over-fertile Lix take his jolie laide down to the beach…? Well, to all intents and purposes, that was not so problematic, he realized at once. Her age. Of course! He studied her again. Yes, in her fifties, certainly. Her fertile years long gone. Here was a woman he could safely cheat with, if he were the cheating kind. Perhaps that’s why he’d felt so free in his imagination in her company. Whatever they might do, there’d be no child. It could be his first and only nonproductive affair. Inconsequential sex!¹¹

Such awareness of fertility is, of course, more often associated with women. Literature is replete with stories of women’s (generally) unsuccessful attempts to manage their fertility and men’s disregard for the reproductive consequences of their actions. Crace’s character challenges this. Indeed, Dern questions the normal (clichéd?) triangulation of love, sex and gender. Watching Dern, the author observes that “Men fall in love more speedily and much more bodily than women.”¹² In some ways our lead is more generally feminised in his physicality. Dern wears a cherry-sized and shaped birthmark on his face. This birthmark, like his fertility, makes him aware of his physicality, his bodily place in the world.

At the same time, the wider gender topography of Crace’s world is very familiar. Dern is threatened by the female body, a fear translated to the cityscape. The City of Kisses—that city reduced to an image of a feminine and consuming mouth—is itself feminised, particularly in its (leaky) fluidity.¹³ The City of Kisses, lying in the fold or embrace of a great European river, is prone to flooding. Whilst Dern enjoys it playfully at times (stranded at one point on the roof of his apartment building with his new wife, his youth and few cares) at others the flood is violent, consuming and destructive.

In the following section, I briefly outline the “bare” understanding of gender and masculinity that is deployed within the analysis. This is developed further through the concept of hegemonic masculinities. This concept attempts to explain the gender relations whereby masculine privilege is legitimized. In looking to hegemonic masculinities the place or role of the corporeal is foregrounded.

Gender and Hegemonic Masculinities

Gender has long been understood as something other than the (re)presentation of sex-role identity or innate biological/psychological traits. Rather, gender has come to be understood as cultural, relational and dynamic. An understanding has developed of gender as a process, it is “something that one does, and does recurrently, in interaction with others.”¹⁴ In other words, gender is “a set of socially constructed relationships which are produced and reproduced through people’s actions.”¹⁵ In contrast to earlier models, gender is recognised as located outside the person. It is located within interactions and transactions that are understood or defined as either masculine or feminine. As such, gender needs to be constantly asserted, demonstrated or articulated.

As culturally dependent, the gendered meanings attributed to behaviour are not fixed. At any given time, however, there will be general agreement regarding behaviour or characteristics that are understood as typical of one gender or the other. Individuals are encouraged to conform to these stereotypes. These become ways of ordering social relations. Importantly, this ordering centers on our understanding of reproduction, both in terms of reproductive bodies and in terms of the social organization of reproductive processes. Gender can therefore be described as

a way in which social practice is ordered. In gendering processes, the everyday conduct of life is organized in relation to a reproductive arena, defined by the bodily structures and processes of human reproduction. This arena includes sexual arousal and intercourse, childbirth and infant care, [and] bodily sex differences.¹⁶

As argued above, Dern’s corporeality—his conspicuous fertility—is at odds with received understandings of men and their physicality. Whilst potency may be associated with masculinity it is more often meant as that which is not impotent, rather than that which is fertile. In other words, men’s bodies have historically been understood as sexed bodies rather than as reproductive bodies. This is perhaps most clearly seen in the discussion of circumcision in the next chapter. In a variety of ways, circumcision is about the sexed male body. Whilst this is expanded upon below, it should be noted that human rights activists frequently highlight the impact of female genital cutting on reproduction. No such comparable discourse exists within consideration of male circumcision. It is a moment where male reproductivity and male reproductive interests are erased. The dynamic whereby the male body is figured as sexed rather than reproductive can also be illustrated with the example of the discourses around the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra discussed in chapter 3. In particular, in this context, constructing the male body as sexed rather than reproductive is witnessed in Pfizer’s advertising campaigns for the drug. Here the focus is very much on images associated with a “manly” masculinity—primarily sporting and active—rather than foregrounding any procreative function.¹⁷ These adverts are considered in chapter 6 where the relationships between heterosexual masculinity, sport and sex are explored. The image of an active masculinity—sporting and potent—can be better understood by addressing Bob Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity. In discussing this concept I want to foreground the place of masculine corporeality. In particular, I want to underline the role that specific models of the masculine body have within the hegemonic project. This will inform the subsequent discussion of law’s masculine bodies.

Connell’s theory is a reworking of Gramsci’s idea of hegemony. Gramsci formulated the term in his attempt to understand class inequalities in democratic societies. Hegemony referred to “the cultural dynamic by which a group claims and sustains a leading position in social life.”¹⁸ Important within this model is the idea of consent. Ascendancy is maintained primarily through consent to the group’s moral and intellectual leadership. Looking to Gramsci’s formulation, Connell sought to map out the mechanisms through which inequalities in the gender order were reproduced. How are relationships of domination and subordination between men and between men and women routinely accepted? Hegemonic masculinity therefore becomes “the configuration of gender practices which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of [some] men and the subordination of women.”¹⁹ Given the class and gender inequalities inherent in these relationships, Connell (and Gramsci) argued that the hegemonic group was never static, it was always contested and contingent. In other words, at different locations and at different times the hegemonic ideal is open to challenge from those whose practices conflict with the current hegemonic structure. In short, hegemonic masculinity is the ideal ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Masculinity, Reproductivity and Law
• 2 Short Changed? The Law and Ethics of Male Circumcision
• 3 Reproductivity, the Workplace and the Gendering of the Body (Politic)
• 4 Viagra Nation: Sex and Prescribing Familial Masculinity
• 5 Regulating (for) Sperm Donor Identity
• 6 A Question of Sex? Sport, the Healthy Body and Masculinity
• 7 Conclusions: Perverse Fantasy and Bodily Possibility
• Index