Queer Company

The Role and Meaning of Friendship in Gay Men's Work Lives

Nick Rumens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409401919
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317072843
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: LGBT-Studien

Drawn from in-depth qualitative research, Queer Company provides the first extended, academic analysis of gay men's workplace friendships, offering theoretical and empirical insights into a subject that is timely and important. Although theoretically framed in poststructuralism and the sociology of friendship, this book also draws on feminism, organisation studies, gender and sexuality studies to explore the diverse roles and meanings of gay men's workplace friendships. Shedding light on the significance of workplace friendship for those who participate in them, particularly in terms of how these workplace relationships can help gay men to construct meaningful identities and selves, Queer Company examines the manner in which gay men's workplace friendships are established, developed and organised, whilst considering the effects of organisational contexts upon friendship processes. A detailed investigation of the links between friendship, sexuality, gender and intimacy in the workplace, this book will appeal to scholars of management studies as well as sociologists with interests in gender and sexuality, the sociology of organisations and cultural studies.

Chapter 1
Understanding Men’s Friendships

Introduction

In order to explore the role and meaning of friendship in gay men’s work lives, the rich canvas of men’s friendships must first be considered. However, men’s friendships have been saddled with a bad reputation. A recurrent view emerging from a raft of scholarly research is that men are less inclined than women to value friendship in their lives and less likely than women to develop emotionally intimate friendships. This view of men’s friendships has become deeply entrenched in academic and populist writing, to the extent that the problem with men’s friendships is often located in men themselves. In this chapter I argue that there is good reason to problematise the blithe assumptions about men’s friendships. First, we need to recognise that men’s and women’s friendships should not be judged by identifying the ‘masculine’ and feminine’ determinants of each. This has encouraged stereotypes on gendered forms of friendship that privilege the expressive dimensions of personal relationships, shading out alternative perspectives on how men and women relate intimately in friendship among and between each other. A poststructuralist approach is presented as a corrective to this dichotomous understanding of gender differences in men’s and women’s friendships. Second, it is important to develop an understanding of the variation within men’s friendships, in order to avoid treating men’s friendships as a homogeneous construct. Here I draw upon feminist analyses, critical scholarship on masculinities and historical research to demonstrate how men have understood and experienced friendship in dynamic and uneven ways. Thus the overall aim of this chapter is to examine the cultural discourses that surround men’s friendships, exposing the multiple meanings friendships hold for men.

Conceptualising men’s friendships

Research on men’s friendships has promulgated a commonly held view that men are not as intimate as women in friendship, and do not value friendship highly. As Wood and Inman (1993) assert, this stereotype of men in friendship was incubated in early academic research within the field of psychology (Bell 1981; Booth 1972; Caldwell and Peplau 1982; Lewis 1978; Rubin 1985; Weiss and Lowenthal 1975). Scholars argued that gender differences in men’s and women’s friendships are particularly apparent in how friendships are developed and maintained. Argyle and Henderson (1985: 75) exemplify the dominant perspective on this matter:

… pairs of female friends spend most of their time together talking, discussing personal problems, giving and receiving social support, and with a high level of self-disclosure … men are more likely to do things together – to play games or to engage in other joint leisure.

Some of the most frequently cited psychology studies on men’s friendships have used some vivid descriptors to depict men’s friendships as relatively deficient in intimacy, compared with women’s friendships. For example, Hacker (1981: 385) coins the twin-terms ‘blabbermouths’ and ‘clams’ to convey the degree to which women and men self-disclose in same-sex friendship respectively. In similar fashion, Wright (1982) suggests men’s friendships operate ‘side-by-side’, where men are mutually focused on a shared activity. Women’s friendships are described as ‘face-to-face’ because they are angled towards the mutual disclosure of personal information and the development of shared concern for one another.

From this body of work, it seems that men in friendship are apprehensive about self-disclosure. Of Lillian Rubin’s (1985: 63) 300 American male and female interviewees, one man says: ‘I’ve tried reaching out to men from time to time, but they don’t reciprocate … Nobody likes to feel they’ve been made vulnerable to another man’. In Rubin’s study, men tended to source intimacy elsewhere: ‘I get along better with women because I can be more open with a woman’ (1985: 63). Such findings have led some scholars to contend that men do not evaluate their same-sex friendships as highly as women. Studies indicate that women regard their friendships as a rich source of personal satisfaction (Bell 1981; Caldwell and Peplau 1982; Fischer and Narus 1981; Hacker 1981), whereas men appear to derive intimacy from other relationships including friendships with women, familial and matrimonial relationships (Komarovsky 1967; Lapota 1971). Taking all the evidence into account, psychologist Beverley Fehr declares: ‘it appears that men are less intimate than women in their friendships because they may not particularly like it’ (1996: 140–41). The sentiments behind Fehr’s contention have gained currency in respect of many friendship researchers but crucially not all.

Certainly, there is good reason to be sceptical about the extent to which gender differences in men’s and women’s friendships can be characterised in this way. Duck and Wright (1993) argue that because men’s and women’s friendships have for so long been regarded as fundamentally different, psychology scholars have tended to regard the assumption of (non)disclosure in men’s and women’s friendships as ‘safe’ ground on which to explore gender relations within friendship. Striking, therefore, is that Duck and Wright position themselves in the cabal of scholars who have ‘accepted this neat expressive-instrumental dichotomization without serious reservation’ (1993: 710). One problem with this dichotomy is that it encourages generalisations about how men and women go about making and maintaining friendships. For example, Argyle and Henderson’s (1985) study of human relationships supports an expressive-instrumental dichotomisation of women’s and men’s friendship. Regarding women in friendship, they state: ‘women often act as mutual therapists, and there is evidence that some of them are just as successful as professional therapists’ (1985: 75). This assertion is problematic not just because it leaves little or no room for considering how women’s friendships may be instrumental or intimate in other ways, but also because women do not have a ‘monopoly on closeness as a goal for intimacy’ (Wood 1993: 43). Research also reveals that women are just as likely as men to provide practical assistance to their friends (Duck and Wright 1993).

Significantly, the dispositional approach towards conceptualising gender, adopted by Henderson and Argyle (1985), which is typical of the psychology research on gender and friendship, fails to recognise that self-disclosure has been coded as a ‘feminine’ style of relating (Cancian 1986; Jamieson 1998). As Wood (1993) and others (Swain 1989, 1992) point out, by failing to treat gender as fluid, dynamic, historically conditioned and socially constructed, researchers are at risk of falling into an essentialist trap of declaring certain styles of relating in friendship (for example, ‘therapeutic’) as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ and, by implication, that some are more ‘authentic’ than others. On this point, some feminist theorists worry (with good reason) that the propensity to view disclosing intimacy as the quintessence of intimate friendship might inadvertently reinforce a sense of victimhood among women, who are constructed as only too willing to confide about personal, potentially damaging topics (O’Connor 1998; Raymond 1986). As I have previously suggested, it is misleading to think that certain intimacies are ‘authentic’. From a poststructuralist perspective, intimacy can be regarded as a discursive construction that is understood and experienced through historically situated discourses. From this perspective, intimacy is constituted through text, ideas, images and actions that, together, enable the individual to construct the experience of ‘intimacy’. Along these lines, intimacy has multiple meanings that are always culturally specific. This notion of intimacy discourages the study of ‘natural’ gender differences between men’s and women’s friendships because it refuses to see intimacy as an internal state, or as an essential property of the individual. Discourses on intimacy are shifting and changing, with some coming to the fore at specific historical moments.

While the argument that men’s friendships lack intimacy has been, without doubt, a persuasive and widely accepted one, there are also signs of change that suggest this view is beginning to lose some of its cultural currency (Butera 2008; Walker 1994a, 1994b). For example, Walker (1994a, 1994b) argues that stereotypes of men’s and women’s friendships are symptomatic of cultural ideologies rather than, as Walker (1994a) puts it, ‘observable gender differences in behaviour’ (246). Walker’s research reveals the contradictions in how men and women understand and experience friendship. For instance, one male interviewee is quoted as saying: ‘Men keep more to themselves. They don’t open up the way women do. Some women will spill their guts at the drop of a hat’ (1994a: 251). Yet when asked to provide exact detail about the object of their friendships, incongruence emerged between what friends said and what they actually did in their friendships. For example, despite one male interviewee’s vociferations to the contrary, he is reported to have regularly discussed sexual fertility problems with his male friends. As Walker writes elsewhere, gender differences in behaviour ‘reinforce stereotypes about gendered forms of friendship, even if the differences differ substantively from the substance of ideology’ (1994b: 390).

Striking, therefore, is the strong feeling among some scholars that neopositivist perspectives on gender differences, which treat the dynamic between gender and friendship as a matter of interest in directional and causal relationships, are inadequate for exploring the gender complexity of men’s friendships (Ueno and Adams 2007; Nardi 2007). Peter Nardi (1992b, 2007), noting the exhaustion in the scholarship on gender and friendship, argues that few researchers have taken as their starting point the idea that there may be greater variation within each gender than between genders. As should be clear by now, there is no inherent reason why men might be worse than women at intimate friendship, for example. It is for this reason and others that an understanding of how men’s friendships have been variously represented and experienced is useful to include in an exploration of the variation within men’s friendships.

Variation within men’s friendships

Subscribing to a poststructuralist approach seems particularly appropriate for developing a nuanced and critical appreciation of the diversity within men’s friendships. For we might, motivated by a poststructuralist impulse to denaturalise normative ideals of friendship, consider how men’s friendships have been variously understood and experienced in certain contexts and at specific moments in time. Men, like women, draw upon a myriad of discourses to develop and interpret friendships, but the ways in which they do so are not uniform, consistent and coherent. In this section, then, I explore some historical accounts of men’s friendships that demonstrate their fluidity and the contingent circumstances of choice under which they are formed.

Representations of male friendship

Easily construed as romantic and idealistic, classical representations of men in friendship paint a rather different picture of men’s friendships to the one we are familiar with in the contemporary era. In Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in Our Lives (1985), Lillian Rubin argues that as we move closer to examine contemporary portraits and realities of men’s friendships, past descriptions of ‘romantic and impassioned’ male friendship recede into obscurity. For Rubin, the ‘lyrical tributes to the glory of male friendship’ beautifully exemplified by Homer’s The Iliad are now replaced by ‘laments about men’s problems with intimacy and vulnerability, about the impoverishment of their relations with each other – at least among heterosexual men’ (1985: 60). For Nardi, this signals a quirk of fate:

How ironic, then, that some of the emotional and intimate descriptors of classic male friendship are the ones used today to extol friendship among women and to illustrate what’s missing from the friendships of those who embrace hegemonic masculinity. (1999: 30)

Before examining the reasons as to why men’s friendships seemed to have lost their place in the pantheon of human relationships, it is worth referring to Homer’s The Iliad, in which heroism, unflagging loyalty and intimacy loom large in men’s friendships.

Achilles’ friendship with Patroclus plays a pivotal role in The Iliad. When the fabled warrior Achilles receives news that Patroclus has been slain in battle his sullen mood gives way to agonising grief:

… a black cloud of grief engulfed Achilles. He picked up the sooty dust in both his hands and poured it over his head. He begrimed his handsome features with it, and black ashes settled on his sweet-smelling tunic. Great Achilles lay spread out in the dust, a giant of a man, clawing at his own hair with his hands and mangling it … Achilles was sobbing out his noble heart. (17: 23–34)

Patroclus’ death galvanises Achilles into a fatal course of action. Sharing her son’s anguish over the murder of his friend, the goddess Thetis warns Achilles that if he avenges Patroclus’s death he, too, will perish. Despite his mother’s premonition, Achilles declares:

[Patroclus] was more to me than any other of my men, whom I loved as much as my own life … I have no wish to live and linger in the world of men, unless, before all else, Hector is hit by my spear and dies, paying the price for slaughtering Patroclus. (17: 81–93)

The mighty Achilles is inconsolable. The death of his friend sets into motion of chain of events that is now legendary in Greek mythology. Achilles weighs into the Trojan War, dispatches Hector and, as his mother augurs, is unable to escape his own death.

Homer’s poetic representation of the friendship between Achilles and Patroclus has been greatly admired by countless readers who see in the bonds that unite the two warriors a friendship that is both virtuous and seemingly immortal (Konstan 1997). It is the steadfast loyalty, reciprocity, trust and love between the two men that many people marvel at. As Nardi (1999: 24) puts it: there ‘is no more perfect depiction of heroic loyal friendship than that of Achilleus and Patroklos from Homer’s The Iliad’. Yet Nardi’s reference to Classical images of heroic male friendship sounds more than just a cursory note of appreciation. For Nardi and others (Halperin 1990; Hammond and Jablow 1987), the epic narrative of Achilles and Patroclus’s friendship is understood as a potent cultural construction.

Halperin (1990: 76) elaborates this idea when he argues that The Iliad’s representation of male-to-male friendship is ‘a historical artefact, the product of a particular turn of thought at a particular juncture in the artistic celebration of the traditional material’. Halperin goes on to say that Homeric and other classical portraits of heroic friendships between men, produced around the same time as The Iliad, drew upon earlier legends for inspiration such as the Babylonian tale of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, and David’s friendship with Jonathan in the Old Testament. Collectively, these texts construct a model of friendship between warrior men that is characterised by unwavering loyalty, bravery and intimacy, all developed in adverse circumstances that often threaten the life of one or both friends. Further to this, Sherrod (1989) notes that classical representations of the intimate dimensions to male friendship are comparable to the images of intimacy associated with familial relations and romantic love. With this in mind, it is hardly surprising that in Ancient Greece the idea of male friendship finds a particularly high note (Konstan 1997). Of particular interest, then, is the net effect of these venerated fictions of men in friendship: namely, the cultivation of an idealised model of male friendship.

Feminist perspectives on men’s friendships

More than most, feminist critics have been acute at problematising the cultural discourses on same-sex friendships between men. For example, Hammond and Jablow (1987) acknowledge the contribution of the Greek narratives on male friendship as well as earlier literary accounts that elevate the heroic feats of men united together in friendship:

All make high drama of the relationship, endowing it with glamour and beauty. The friends are heroes: aristocratic, young, brave, and beautiful. In their free and wholehearted response to one another, they openly declare their affection and admiration. They engage in many adventures and battles, sharing danger, loyal to the death. Throughout life, they remain devoted and generous to each other. (1987: 241)

The context in which the ‘high drama’ of male friendship is played out is harsh and agonistic. Such landscapes, typically the battlefield, remind men they are subject to forces beyond their control, forces that are capable of rendering them vulnerable and expendable. The agonistic elements within these fictitious locales do much to accentuate the brave deeds of men. At the same time, these settings also provide the conditions for a particular discourse of masculinity to emerge, based on risk taking, adventure and danger. In the context of these homosocial settings, Hammond and Jablow point out that ‘mundane affairs such as marriage, making a living, or having a family, which make up the lives of other men are of little or no concern to them’ (1987: 256). In heroic male friendship discourse, men are led to believe they can find intimacy outside the family based on love and affection between equals, and thus a release from the tedious aspects of an ‘ordinary’ life.

Other representations of male friendship bear out Hammond and Jablow’s argument. Turning briefly to the genre of war movies and literature, it is possible to find countless illustrations of male friendships that invoke classical forms of heroic friendship. Wolfgang Petersen’s Hollywood version of the Trojan War, titled Troy (2004), valorises the friendship between Patroclus and Achilles while Oliver Stone’s anti-war film Platoon (1986) also pays particular attention to the salience of male friendship as a source of emotional support. In similar fashion, US literature provides a rich seam in which to mine examples that celebrate male friendship. Ernest Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) is centrally concerned with the friendship between two male US soldiers during World War I, and can be interpreted as a narrative that represents male friendship as stronger than men’s relationships involving women (Armengol-Carrera 2009). Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) is also notable as a sympathetic text on male friendship, illustrated in this case by the loving and affectionate friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg. While some texts on male friendship project a fantasy of male friendship based on absolute equality between men (Hammond and Jablow 1987), other dramatists have focused on the challenges men face in developing friendships that can help them to develop mutual respect for human differences and for exploring the limits of the human condition. MacFaul (2007) develops this argument drawing upon the work of William Shakespeare. For example, friendship is a hoped-for cure for the anxiety and the alienation experienced by the ill-fated Prince of Denmark in Hamlet and, elsewhere, by Antonio in The Merchant of Venice. Timon of Athens promotes a nostalgic Aristotelian image of virtuous male friendship over friendships of utility. From this very short detour into film and literature, it is clear that the subject of male friendship continues to inspire writers and movie-makers alike, often with mixed results regarding the emphasis they place on the ideal rather than the actualities of men in friendship.

Despite differences in how male friendship is constructed in literature and film, feminist Lillian Rubin (1985) complains that classical representations of men’s friendships have long been a template of what friendship is and how it ought to be. By comparison, women’s friendships have been passed over. It is only relatively recently that feminist theorists have sought to refurbish the meaning and credibility to the friendships between women across different cultural contexts and in different historical moments (O’Connor 1992; Oliker 1989; Traub 2002; Vicinus 2004). Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men (1981) was the one of the first and probably the most influential feminist historical analysis to act as a corrective against the iconography of male friendship. Exploring the romantic friendships of women from the eighteenth century onwards, Faderman highlights how women have been frequently cast as unsuitable for friendship, citing Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘On Friendship’ to illustrate her point. Quoting Montaigne myself:

… the normal capacity of women is, in fact, unequal to the demands of that communion and intercourse on which the sacred bond [of friendship] is fed; their souls do not seem firm enough to bear the strain of so hard and lasting a tie … there has never yet been an example of a woman’s attaining to this, and the ancient schools are at one in their belief that it is denied to the female sex. (1580/1993: 95)

Montaigne’s notion of friendship, indebted to a classical ideal of friendship as the exclusive preserve of men, is narrow and uncharitable to women. As stated earlier, such perspectives are now at odds with contemporary discourses that suggest women are emotion ‘experts’ and thus better at ‘doing’ friendship than men (Bank 1995). Arguably the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, as the qualities of friendship are heavily associated with normative constructions of femininity (Wood 1993). And it is feminist theorising, in part, which has turned Montaigne’s assertion on its head.

Indeed, some feminist theorists have underscored the political dimension to notions of ‘sisterhood’ and female friendship for feminist politics (Friedman 1993; Raymond 1986), and denounced men’s friendships as relationships that stunt individuality and intimacy (Daly 1978; Jeffreys 2003). This strand of feminist theorising has found more than a toehold in the minds of men and women alike. For many women, feminism’s critique of women’s relationships with men has spurred...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding Men’s Friendships
• 2 Gay Men and Friendship
• 3 Gay Men’s Friendships in the Workplace
• 4 Constructing Friendships in the Workplace
• 5 Gay Men’s Workplace Friendships with Men
• 6 Gay Men’s Workplace Friendships with Women
• 7 Workplace Friendships, Normativity and Identities
• 8 On the Significance of Gay Men’s Workplace Friendships
• Appendix 1: Researching Gay Men’s Workplace Friendships
• Appendix 2: Abridged Interview Protocol
• Appendix 3: Profiles of Study Participants
• References
• Index