Masculinities

RW Connell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000246537
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

When it was first published over a decade ago, R.W. Connell's ground-breaking text on the nature and construction of masculine identity rapidly became a classic. In Masculinities Connell argues that there is not one masculinity, but many different masculinities, each associated with different positions of power. In a world gender order that continues to privilege men over women, but also raises difficult issues for men and boys, her account is more relevant than ever before. In this new edition, Connell discusses the development of masculinity studies in the ten years since the book's initial publication. She explores global gender relations, new theories, and practical uses of masculinity research. She also addresses the politics of masculinities, and the implications of masculinity research for understanding current world issues. Against the backdrop of an increasingly divided world, dominated by neo-conservative politics, Connell's account highlights a series of compelling questions about the future of human society. Masculinities has been translated into many languages and in 2004 it was voted one of the ten most influential books in Australian sociology. This second edition will be essential reading for students taking courses in gender studies, and a valuable reference for readers across the humanities and social sciences. the fundamental study on masculinity as a formative factor of modern social inequality, and also one of the most important books in the social sciences in recent years' Professor Ilse Lenz, Ruhr University, Bochum

Part I Knowledge and its Problems

1 The Science of Masculinity

Rival Knowledges

The concepts ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, Freud observed in a melancholy footnote, ‘are among the most confused that occur in science’.¹ In many practical situations the language of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ raises few doubts. We base a great deal of talk and action on this contrast. But the same terms, on logical examination, waver like the Danube mist. They prove remarkably elusive and difficult to define.

Why should this be? In the course of this book I will suggest that the underlying reason is the character of gender itself, historically changing and politically fraught. Everyday life is an arena of gender politics, not an escape from it.

Gender terms are contested because the right to account for gender is claimed by conflicting discourses and systems of knowledge. We can see this in everyday situations as well as in high theory.

On the desk in front of me is a clipping from a local newspaper in inner Sydney, The Glebe, headed:

Why women ask the way

Women are more likely to stop someone in the street and ask for directions than men – simply because the sexes think differently.

The story, by-lined Amanda Park, quotes a psychologist and counsellor, Mary Beth Longmore, explaining that the sexes have different purposes when they speak.

Women also don’t understand that men view having information as a form of hierarchy – so people with more information are further up the hierarchy ... Ms Longmore said it was for this reason that men tended not to ask a stranger for directions, because it was admitting that they were in some way inferior.

Readers wishing to understand the different languages men and women speak are invited to a workshop conducted by Ms Longmore on the following Friday.²

Local newspapers are always short of news. But this item struck me as exceptionally helpful, at least for clarifying types of knowledge about gender. In the first place it appeals to common-sense knowledge: men and women act differently (‘women are more likely to stop someone’), and they act differently because they are different (‘the sexes think differently’). Without this appeal to a commonly acknowledged polarity, the story would not work at all.

But the report also criticizes common sense. ‘Men and women often don’t understand each others’ purpose [in speaking] . . . Women also don’t understand . . .’ The criticism is made from the standpoint of a science. Ms Longmore is identified as a psychologist, she refers to her knowledge as ‘findings’, and she enters a typical scientific caveat at the end of the item (‘her findings were true of the majority but not all men and women’). Science thus revises common-sense knowledge of gender difference. The revision warrants a new practice, which will be explored in the workshop. The nature of the science is not specified, but it seems likely that Ms Longmore’s claims are based on her stated experience as a counsellor.

In this short item we can see two forms of knowledge about masculinity and femininity – common sense and psychological science – partly reinforcing each other and partly at odds. We also get a glimpse of two practices in which psychological knowledge is produced and applied – individual counselling and group workshops.

In a more indirect fashion the story leads us to other forms of knowledge about masculinity and femininity. Workshops are widely used by therapists in the milieu that gave birth to the contemporary ‘men’s movement’ (explored in Chapter 9). This movement claims a knowledge beyond both science and common sense, an intuitive knowledge of the ‘deep masculine’.³

But if pressed on the question of sex differences, psychologist and journalist would more probably appeal to biology. They might recall research on sex differences in bodies and behaviour, brain sex, hormonal differences and genetic coding. These too have become staple media stories.

If The Glebe went in for investigative journalism and the writer stepped across Parramatta Road to Sydney University, she would find that these views of masculinity and femininity, uncontroversial in the biological sciences, are fiercely contested in the humanities and social sciences. On those parts of the campus, academics talk about ‘sex roles’ or ‘gender relations’, and speak of masculinity and femininity being ‘socially constructed’ or ‘constituted in discourse’.

Biologists and social scientists alike, after leaving Sydney University and turning right down Parramatta Road, drive past a soot-stained church. The vicar of St Barnabas proclaims to the world, via a well-known billboard, that the gender order is ordained by God, and like other parts of the moral order is perilous to tamper with. The divine billboard, in turn, is answered on signs put up by the publican of the hotel on the opposite side of the highway. The publican frequently comments on the scriptural messages from the point of view of an earthy working-class hedonism.⁴

I could offer more examples, but these are perhaps enough. Our everyday knowledge of gender is subject to conflicting claims to know, explain and judge.

These forms of knowledge are, as the Glebe article showed, connected with particular social practices. This is generally true of knowledge, though intellectual debates are often conducted as if ideas fell from the sky. The sociology of knowledge showed, two generations ago, how major world-views are based on the interests and experiences of major social groups. Research on the sociology of science, giving fascinating glimpses of laboratory life and prestige hierarchies among scientists, has revealed the social relations underpinning knowledge in the natural sciences. The point is reinforced by Michel Foucault’s celebrated researches on ‘power-knowledge’, the intimate interweaving of new sciences (such as medicine, criminology and sexology) with new institutions and forms of social control (clinics, prisons, factories, psychotherapy).⁵

So the conflicting forms of knowledge about gender betray the presence of different practices addressing gender. To understand both everyday and scientific accounts of masculinity we cannot remain at the level of pure ideas, but must look at their practical bases.

For instance, common-sense knowledge of gender is by no means fixed. It is, rather, the rationale of the changing practices through which gender is ‘done’ or ‘accomplished’ in everyday life – practices revealed in elegant research by ethnomethodologists.⁶ The knowledge of gender deployed by Sigmund Freud and Mary Beth Longmore is intimately connected with a professional practice, the practice of psychotherapy. The knowledge offered by constructionists in the social sciences has a two-fold genealogy, stemming from the oppositional politics of feminism and gay liberation, and from the techniques of academic social research.

Accordingly, in discussing the main attempts to construct knowledge about masculinity, I will ask what practices enabled that knowledge to emerge. I will also ask how the practices shape and limit the forms that knowledge takes.

The different forms of knowledge do not stand on an equal footing. In most contexts, scientific claims have an undeniable edge. In the Glebe report, just a whiff of scientificity was enough to establish a right to criticize common-sense knowledge; common sense did not criticize science. Science has a definite hegemony in our education system and media.

This has shaped the development of ideas about masculinity through the twentieth century. All the leading discourses make some claim to be scientific, or to use scientific ‘findings’, however grotesque the claim may be. Even Robert Bly, in Iron John, uses scientific language for his gripping idea that one-third of our brain is a ‘warrior brain’ and that our DNA carries warrior instincts.

But the appeal to science plunges us into circularity. For it has been shown, in convincing historical detail, that natural science itself has a gendered character. Western science and technology are culturally masculinized. This is not just a question of personnel, though it is a fact that the great majority of scientists and technologists are men. The guiding metaphors of scientific research, the impersonality of its discourse, the structures of power and communication in science, the reproduction of its internal culture, all stem from the social position of dominant men in a gendered world. The dominance of science in discussions of masculinity thus reflects the position of masculinity (or specific masculinities) in the social relations of gender.⁷

In that case, what can be expected from a science of masculinity, being a form of knowledge created by the very power it claims to study? Any such knowledge will be as ethically compromised as a science of race created by imperialists, or a science of capitalism produced by capitalists. There are, indeed, forms of scientific talk about masculinity that have capitulated to the dominant interests in much the same way as scientific racism and neoconservative economics.

Yet there are other potentials in science. Natural science arose as critique, from Copernicus’s rejection of the idea that the sun revolved around the earth, to Darwin’s rejection of the idea that species were created individually by divine providence. A heady mixture of critique, empirical information and imagination has been at work in each great scientific revolution. And in everyday scientific research the testing of hypotheses and the drive for generalization constantly push beyond the immediately given, and make science more than a simple reflection of what exists.⁸

Can we take another step, and connect this element of critique with the social critique involved in the analysis of masculinity? Or connect the drive for scientific generalization with the idea of generalizable interests in social life and thus with the concept of justice? These proposals are subject to the full weight of postmodern scepticism about ‘grand narratives’ and economic-rationalist scepticism about justice.⁹ I will come back to the critique of masculinity in the final part of the book. Here I want merely to register the political ambiguities of scientific knowledge. Sciences of masculinity may be emancipatory or they may be controlling. They may even be both at once.

In the course of the twentieth century there have been three main projects for a science of masculinity. One was based in the clinical knowledge acquired by therapists, and its leading ideas came from Freudian theory. The second was based in social psychology and centred on the enormously popular idea of ‘sex role’. The third involves recent developments in anthropology, history and sociology. In this chapter I will examine the character of knowledge about masculinity produced in each of these projects; then turn to the knowledge produced by movements of resistance in gender and sexual politics. The mis-matches among these projects raise the question of what, precisely, knowledge about masculinity is knowledge of. I will try to answer this question in the final section of the chapter.

Clinical Knowledge

The Oedipus complex

The first sustained attempt to build a scientific account of masculinity was made in the revolutionary depth psychology founded at the turn of the century by Freud. Psychoanalysis has had so tangled a development, and so vast an impact on modern culture, that its origins in medical practice are easily forgotten. The founder himself was always clear that psychoanalytic knowledge was based on clinical observation and was tested in a practice of healing.

This connection with medicine has linked psychoanalysis throughout its history to efforts at normalization and social control. Yet there have also been radical potentials in psychoanalysis from the start.¹⁰ Freud’s early work coincided with a ferment in the European intelligentsia that produced modernist literature, avant-garde painting and music, radical social ideas, spirited feminist and socialist movements, and the first homosexual rights movement. Freud was sufficiently open to this ferment to question – as his clinical practice levered him away from professional orthodoxy – almost everything European culture had taken for granted about gender.

This is what makes his work the starting-point of modern thought about masculinity, though most later masculinity researchers have known little and cared less about the detail of his ideas. It was Freud, more than anyone else, who let the cat out of the bag. He disrupted the apparently natural object ‘masculinity’, and made an enquiry into its composition both possible and, in a sense, necessary.

Freud nowhere wrote a systematic discussion of masculinity, but it is one of the continuing themes in his writing over thirty years. His ideas developed in three steps.

The first came in the initial statements of psychoanalytic principles: the idea of continuity between normal and neurotic mental life, the concepts of repression and the unconscious, and the method that allowed unconscious mental processes to be ‘read’ through dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue and symptoms. Freud understood that adult sexuality and gender were not fixed by nature but were constructed through a long and conflict-ridden process.

He increasingly saw the ‘Oedipus complex’, the emotional tangle of middle childhood involving desire for one parent and hatred for the other, as the key moment in this development. What precipitated the Oedipal crisis, for boys, was rivalry with the father and terror of castration. These ideas were documented in two famous case studies, ‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’, in 1909. Here Freud identified a formative moment in masculinity and pictured the dynamics of a formative relationship.¹¹

In his theoretical writing, however, Freud had already begun to complicate this picture. Homosexuality, he argued, is not a si...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the Second Edition
• Part I Knowledge and its Problems
• Part II Four Studies of the Dynamics of Masculinity
• Part III History and Politics
• Afterword: The Contemporary Politics of Masculinity
• Notes
• References
• Index