Transforming Masculinities

Men, Cultures, Bodies, Power, Sex and Love

Vic Seidler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134198207
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Critically exploring the ways in which men and masculinities are commonly theorized, this multidisciplinary text opens up a discussion around such relationships, and shows that, as with feminisms, there is a diversity of theoretical traditions. It draws on a variety of examples, and explores new directions in the complexities of diverse male identities and emotional lives across different histories, cultures and traditions. This book:

• considers the experiences of different generations
• explores connections between masculinity and drugs
• investigates men and masculinities in a post-9/11 world
• considers new ways of thinking about male violence
• recognizes the importance of culture and provides spaces to explore different class, 'race' and ethnic masculinities.

Written in a practical, versatile manner by an established author in this field, it points to new directions in thinking, and makes essential reading for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers in the fields of sociology, gender studies, politics, philosophy and psychology.

1
Introduction: Cultures, power and sexualities

Crossing borders

The discourses around men and masculinities have emerged in different national contexts in Europe and the United States since the early responses to the women’s movement and feminisms in the 1970s, with initiatives in Europe initially being taken in England, Holland, Germany and the Scandinavian countries. Sometimes we have been able to share diverse experiences across European borders, but it has been striking how this work has been interrupted at different historical moments and how it has fallen away in particular settings. The work in Scandinavia has been unique in being supported by national governments and also by governments working in cooperation. Even where the work has flourished it has taken time to organise gatherings in which diverse experiences can be shared and researchers and activists open up new areas of discussion. As work consolidated in the Protestant cultures of Northern Europe, the 1990s has seen significant developments in Southern Europe, particularly in Spain, Italy and Greece, but also notably in Central and South America, particularly in Mexico, Chile, Brazil and Colombia. It is these developments that encourage us to think about diverse masculine cultures that have been shaped within different religious traditions within Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and it is hoped that they will open up future dialogues between North and South.

Bringing together men and women involved in doing critical research on men and masculinities also allows us to rethink theoretical traditions that have informed our thinking as well as traditional positivist and interpretative methodologies in the research practices being developed. In different settings we have been able to sustain dialogues that were valuable in encouraging people to voice concerns that might otherwise remain unspoken. When I could not understand the languages spoken I could appreciate the thinking as well as the laughter and the love that was being communicated; this made me aware that not everything that is communicated is communicated in language. This is particularly significant when we are reflecting upon issues of intimacy, relationship and power.

We have been living through dangerous times in the aftershock of 9/11, when the United States and Britain took a critical position in relation to a war with Iraq that despite the widespread protests in different parts of Europe we were unable to prevent. This was a struggle that involved diverse global masculinities being locked into terrifying relationships with each other. Bush had won the support of Blair in his ‘war against terror’ where careful consideration of the new global realities were blocked by a simple warning that ‘you are either with us or against us’. That is, you will either take the side of the United States as the representative of ‘freedom’ and ‘good’ on earth or else you will be castigated as ‘soft on terrorism’ and ‘anti-American’, and treated as somehow identified with an enemy.

This was a discourse of global male power that largely worked in the war in Afghanistan but failed to mobilise when it came to the fight against the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There was a refusal, particularly on the part of France and Germany, to identify the war against Iraq with the ‘war against terror’, and there was a widespread feeling that the world would be made a more dangerous place if the war against Iraq took place. There was a fear that the occupation of Iraq, even if it brought the downfall of Saddam Hussein, could end up encouraging terrorist activities against the perceived occupying powers of the West. Many of these fears were realised. For a time it was unclear whether the war would go ahead immediately or whether it would be postponed as attempts were made to win the support of the United Nations. The global conflicts that can feel so threatening and immediate reflect the urgency of the moment and an awareness that issues in relation to men and masculinities have assumed a particular global significance in these dangerous times.

Such a situation gives urgency to our theoretical reflections but also forces us to engage with diverse cultural and ethnic masculinities and the danger that universalist discourses that have emerged in the West will too easily be applied to very different global settings. If we are to understand the sources of terror, then we have to listen to what nonWestern young men are saying about what attracts them into religious fundamentalist organisations. We need to appreciate the instabilities in traditional male identities that have been wrought through globalisation and high levels of young male unemployment, and the appeal of religious movements that can promise renewed male pride and power. We need to think about different ‘racial’, ethnic and cultural masculinities in order to understand the continuing appeal of religious traditions too often ignored within the secular traditions of a Western modernity.

Generations

As we appreciate the significance of a particular historical moment in which we reflect how our identities as men and women have themselves been shaped through particular historical contingent circumstances, we can recognise the significance of generation in opening up dialogues across different masculinities. We need to listen to young men and women in their late teenage years and early twenties, with their willingness to question the theoretical frameworks and methodologies developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather than assume the viability of these traditions that largely emerged in relation to feminism, we need to be aware of how gender relations have been transformed within patriarchal cultures, at least in the West over the last twenty years.

This does not imply that patriarchal relationships have disappeared or that violence against women and gays has lessened, but such relationships do not carry the same legitimacy for young people who have often grown up within very different gender and sexual orders. They do not have the same concerns as a previous generation; nor do young women and men identify the centrality of their relationships with feminism. Young men have to be reminded of the power they can still assume within patriarchal cultures and their silent collusion in the suffering, devaluation and violence so often endured by women. But when young women and men say they can no longer recognise themselves within the language of sexual politics, we have to take these insights seriously. Different generations have different concerns, and even though it might be misleading to think that issues of gender equality have been solved or that we have moved ‘beyond gender’, we need to recognise the resistance young people can feel to being ‘fixed’ in relation to their gender and sexual identities. Sometimes they are expressing a feeling that the difficulties they face in relationships and work can no longer be illuminated in these strict gender terms.

In Gender and Power and his later Masculinities Bob Connell remains caught within a framework of gender and power that insists that men can still take for granted privileges and opportunities that women are denied.¹ This can be helpful in reminding us of the continuity of patriarchal relations but it tends to render invisible the differences between generations and also the difficulties that boys can face in their own lives. Connell has continually resisted the idea that we can talk about men being ‘oppressed’ even if not in the same terms as we think about the oppression of women. But we have to be careful about assuming a duality that haunts his work, namely, that the oppression of women is ‘structural’ and so grounded in material relations of power while the ‘sufferings’ of men can only be considered as ‘personal’. Such ‘sufferings’ do not relate to their positions as men within a patriarchal society, but to emotional issues in their individual personal lives.

Not only does Connell’s work implicitly echo a radical feminist conception of men as the bearers of power, but it reinforces a radical duality in the ways we think of men and women and so frames the relation between men and masculinities reductively. We are encouraged to think of men as instances of particular masculinities that are related to each other through relations of power. This tends to reinforce the notion that masculinities can be thought of exclusively as relationships of power. It also frames masculinities as the problem that needs to be solved, as if we could do without the term at all. Having little sense that men can change, Connell is trapped into seeing masculinities as not part of a solution. At the same time a notion of ‘hegemonic masculinities’ works to silence the tension between men and their ambivalent feelings towards inherited masculinities.² This is something gay men have long explored as they have distanced themselves from established masculinities. They learn to treat diverse masculinities as performances they might choose to assume.

As we think about dislocated masculinities we are aware that we can no longer speak with the same assurance about the ways men and masculinities are positioned within patriarchal cultures. As we learn to think about different generational masculinities, so we have to face greater complexities in the ways we think about gender relations. We also recognise that ruling notions of ‘hegemonic masculinities’ have worked to make it more difficult to think about the relation between bodies, fears and emotional life. Rather than open up these concerns, we can find ourselves trapped into thinking about masculinities in ways that are strangely dislocated because they fail to interrogate positions from which men are speaking. Rather, we can find ourselves echoing the very universality that has been associated with dominant white European masculinities in their colonial relationships with non-European ‘others’. Rather than a diversity of male voices that can recognise diverse ‘racial’, ethnic and cultural masculinities, an implicit rationalism shapes how we conceive male power in universal terms within patriarchal cultures.

Threat

Anyone who grew up during what was called the Cold War supposedly knew where the threats were coming from; post 9/11 we no longer know this. We are living in a new global climate in which questions of masculinity need to be refigured. The world was traditionally divided into separate spaces, and Bush still insists on talking about the ‘free world’ as if it were a space of ‘the good’. This was set against the communist world that Reagan famously called the ‘Empire of Evil’ and Bush refigured in a post-communist period as an ‘Axis of Evil’ that was deemed to be a threat to the civilised values of the West.

Supposedly the West alone could take its ‘civilisation’ for granted, and it has long been seen as the moral duty of a European white masculinity to engage in a civilising mission to those who would otherwise remain uncivilised. Colonial projects framed within the terms of a European modernity deemed that colonised ‘others’ could only develop freedom and democracy if they accepted subordination to their Western superiors. The uncivilised remained a threat that needed to be contained. Paradoxically it was supposedly only through accepting subordination that they could gradually learn to accept the practices of freedom. Since the uncivilised could not be ‘reasoned with’, the only language they could understand was the language of force and violence.

Within a patriarchal culture where women are paradoxically positioned as a ‘civilising force’ in men’s lives, we often find a similar rhetoric invoked in relation to women and children when they dare to question patriarchal authority. If a woman dared to question her husband in public, she showed disobedience and proved deserving of punishment. Children were also expected to show obedience to their father’s word as law, for he represented authority within the family. Identified with their ‘animal natures’, children were deemed a threat to civilised family life. Within an Enlightenment vision of modernity ‘culture’ was to dominate ‘nature’ and human reason was to control bodily nature. A dominant white European masculinity alone could take its reason for granted and so could legislate what was good for others without having to listen to what they had to say for themselves.³

As Caroline Merchant has framed it, with the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution came the ‘death of nature’, as ‘living nature’ came to be represented through the scientific gaze as ‘dead matter’, governed according to scientific laws.⁴ This echoed an older Christian tradition of the sinful body that came to be regarded as the dead body, and then became the object of the medical gaze. This encouraged a dominant masculinity to assume an instrumental relationship to the body that within a Cartesian tradition was not ‘part of an identity as a human being but rather part of a disenchanted nature. As reason was regarded as an independent faculty radically separated from nature, so with Kant the notion of ‘human nature’ was fragmented, where the ‘human’ was identified with ‘reason’ and ‘nature’ came to be disdained as ‘animal’. By echoing a fundamental Greek/Christian distinction between the ‘human’ and the ‘animal’, reason came to be marked as a sign of superiority that allowed a dominant masculinity to disdain emotions, feelings and desires located in a body itself regarded as ‘animal’. As women were deemed ‘closer to nature’, they were more likely to allow their behaviours to be influenced by their emotions, which came to be regarded as ‘feminine’ and a sign of irrationality.

Reason was deemed to be a divine faculty, for it was through reason alone that a dominant masculinity could discern God’s plan for the natural world. Through reason the mind of God could be revealed. But this also established the authority of fatherhood, since it was as fathers that men were supposedly to exercise legitimate authority over women and children within the family. Within a secularised culture, scientific rationality assumed power in relation to nature and progress came to be identified with the control and domination of nature. This was something that men could exercise also in relation to their inner natures, where they learnt to identify masculinity with self-control.

Francis Bacon saw the reordering of gender relations of power with the Scientific Revolution as critical to a new ‘masculinist philosophy’.⁵ As well as occupying a central position in the scientific and political establishment, he served as a judge on witch trials. As Ehrenreich and English showed in For Her Own Good, women who had been healers were to be castigated as witches and brutally murdered in witch burnings in Europe and North America. When we think of the Enlightenment as marking a victory of reason over faith, we tend to forget the tragic histories that accompanied it. Within cultures with strong positivist traditions we often fail to appreciate links between masculinities and methodologies.

Bodies

This new vision of scientific progress was expressed in masculinist terms. A certain tradition of scientific rationality in research methods silently echoes this form of ‘masculinist’ philosophy. Even though space has been won for ‘feminist methodologies’ as a distinct paradigm for research, we have been less able to break the silences that accompany positivist methodologies so often assumed to be impartial instruments of science that have worked to eradicate forms of bias. Nature was no longer to be ‘listened’ to and human beings were no longer to understand themselves through a relationship with nature. With its death, nature had become mute and creation came to be revisioned within the image of the dominant masculinity that had learnt to think of nature as a threat. Femininity itself came to be experienced as ‘threat’ to a dominant heterosexual masculinity though its identification with emotion and irrationality.

As Bacon makes clear, nature would not give up her secrets easily; she had to be forced. So we discover that images of sexual violence inform relationships between scientific knowledge and nature. Metaphors of rape and exploitation in relation to nature came to frame scientific discourses as nature was no longer seen as a source of meaning and value. Inner nature was also framed as a ‘threat’, giving a secular form to a Christian disdain for the body. The body comes to be identified with sexuality and the ‘sins of the flesh’. Supposedly it was only through the punishment of the body that the soul could be purified. This helped shape an idea that men need to prove their masculinities by showing that they can endure pain.

We find this reproduced in a postmodern gym culture where the male body has to be constantly disciplined against the threat of ‘fat’. There is a disdain for the flabby body that reveals a lack of morality in the form of self-control. The gym becomes the new cathedral of body cultures—a space where men can prove themselves able to endure pain and so show themselves worthy of salvation and also of ‘winning’ admiring sexual partners. This becomes a way of affirming male identities in the present and confirming particular forms of superiority in relation to other men.

Even within secular cultures that have lost touch with their religious sources it remains important to identify how these religious traditions help shape contemporary subjectivities, in ways otherwise difficult to recognise. Within Protestant cultures there is often a hidden sense that people have to prove themselves worthy, a feeling that has become more equally shared with women in post-feminist times. Women can equally fear dependency as a sign of weakness, and this can make it difficult to negotiate emotions and feelings within relationships. Where it is difficult to express anger we find indirect ways of showing resentment. Sometimes little is said but emotional distance is created within the relationship, and people suddenly realise that their partner has become a stranger to them. This can come as a shock where both parties are so identified with their independent work lives that they have had little time and emotional energy for the relationship.

Even though we see ourselves as secular and learn to disown religious cultures as having little significance in the present, as Foucault was exploring in his later writings, they continue to influence and shape subjectivities. Unless we are prepared to explore connections between secular cultures and diverse religious traditions that can still unconsciously help to form them, we can be bereft of terms to illuminate predicaments we face in contemporary life. These latent structures can still be shaping our gender identities without our being able any longer to recognise their influence in the ways we learn to relate to our bodies, emotions and desires. As we explore the shifting forms of gender identity across different generations, we need to investigate the very different gender worlds in which young people are growing up. At the same time a sense that our natures are evil and cannot be trusted—so powerfully expressed in Luther and Calvin—can help shape the compulsive activity so many men can feel prone to. Hesitant to identify themselves as ‘workaholic’, they resist acknowledging their addictive behaviours. As a postmodern culture thrives on speed and constant activity, it can be difficult to ‘slow down’ enough to feel more of what is going on emotionally.

The traditional framing of gender relations that Aristotle originally terms an ‘active’ masculinity and a ‘passive’ femininity no longer resonates within a post-feminist culture, however we think of it. Both men and women, particularly in Scandinavian countries, participate more equally in the labour market, and they can easily identify with a tradition of rationalism that might historically have been identified with a dominant masculinity. Younger people tend to think beyond gender categories because they no longer seem to make sense of their lived experience. Often young men in their early and late twenties fail to find a sense of direction in their lives, and experience difficulty in leaving the parental home to which they have retreated. Sometimes they feel uneasy about the meaning of their masculinities, though they do not relate their uncertainties to feminism as a previous generation might have done. Rather, they can be concerned with existential issues in relation to their male identities that cannot simply be reduced to those of power. The ways we have learnt to theorise men and masculinities somehow fails to speak to their situation.

As we learn to think across different emotional cultures between, say, different Scandinavian countries, the United States and Britain, we might think about whether anger is expressed easily or no...