Masculinity in Opera

Philip Purvis, Philip Purvis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136182150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica lirica

This book addresses the ways in which masculinity is negotiated, constructed, represented, and problematized within operatic music and practice. Although the consideration of masculine ontology and epistemology has pervaded cultural and sociological studies since the late 1980s, and masculinity has been the focus of recent if sporadic musicological discussion, the relationship between masculinity and opera has so far escaped detailed critical scrutiny. Operating from a position of sympathy with feminist and queer approaches and the phallocentric tendencies they identify, this study offers a unique perspective on the cultural relativism of opera by focusing on the male operatic subject. Anchored by musical analysis or close readings of musical discourse, the contributions take an interdisciplinary approach by also engaging with theatre, popular music, and cultural musicology scholarship. The various musical, theoretical, and socio-political trajectories of the essays are historically dispersed from seventeenth to twentieth- first-century operatic works and practices, visiting masculinity and the operatic voice, the complication or refusal of essentialist notions of masculinity, and the operatic representation of the 'crisis' of masculinity. This volume will not only enliven the study of masculinity in opera, but be an appealing contribution to music scholars interested in gender, history, and new musicology.

1 Performing Masculinity/Masculinity in Performance

Kate Whittaker

THE MASCULINITIES DISCOURSE AND
THE FEMINIST DILEMMA

During the 1990s, the fast-growing field of scholarship about men and masculinities was marked by bids to self-legitimize. Particularly for academics who situated their output as profeminist, or in sympathy with the (albeit heterogeneous) ethos and politics of the second wave, this often meant negotiating the political implications of (re)casting the male subject as a central concern. To take an instance that shares with the current volume an engagement with performance, Carla J. McDonough opened Staging Masculinity: Male Identity in Contemporary American Drama by conceding that the focus of her study ‘might seem … unnecessary in the midst of a dramatic tradition already heavily weighted toward the actions and experiences of male characters.’¹ Three years earlier, the following question was posed in the introduction to Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman's significant volume, Theorizing Masculinities: ‘How does one really go about placing men and their institutions at the center of an analysis without replicating the patriarchal biases of previous studies of men?’²

Encapsulated, here, is an awareness that masculinity studies risks phal-locentric reification, reinscribing the discursive and sociocultural privileges of the late-capitalist West. From a profeminist position, and owing much to the rise of identity politics from the late 1960s, the argument for ‘yet another’ book about men has broadly been reliant on a conception of them as explicitly and contingently gendered. This notion has at its root imbricated poststructuralist conceits: gender as a textual or discursive, rather than biologically determined, phenomenon, and a perception of the body as that on and through which gender, as a performative construct, gives and receives signification.³ Crucially, it is these very (re)positionings that have rendered the masculine visible for critical dissection in the first instance, moreover admitting the possibility for queer and feminist challenges to the masculinist binary. As McDonough argued with respect to earlier studies in her field, ‘the male protagonist or … playwright has been critically treated as if he were non-gendered,’ resulting in ‘critical blind spots’ that her work looks to illuminate.⁴ Comparably, of a range of slightly earlier, and politically diverse, texts on masculinity, Michael Kimmel observed that ‘what marks these new books as different is that they promise to be about men … as gendered actors.’⁵ Whether in relation to the staged or ‘the real’—and what we can read as a collapse between the two, here, is useful for our purposes in situating the masculine as a performative construction—the ‘new’ perception of men as always already gendered has been key in justifying the scholarly spotlight upon them.

Two decades later, from the other side of the millennium, the question to be addressed has, perhaps, shifted from ‘Why write (yet more) about men?’ to ‘Why write yet more about masculinities?’ The topic is not merely a firmly established field of study within the Western academy or a recurrent subject of ‘popular’ literature to be found in chain bookstores and on best-seller lists in the U.S., Australasia and Europe. Rather, it comprises something altogether larger and more nebulous: a prolific discursive trope that encompasses and cuts across numerous, diverse branches of sociology, gender, media and cultural studies, history and philosophy, as well as psychology, psychiatry, health care and medicine. In addition to this inexhaustive list, the recurrent stress upon, and interest in, multiple and multifarious masculinities—as they are imagined, represented, interpellated and lived—has highlighted the significance of identity axes other than gender in inter- and intradisciplinary research. Hence, the tendency for analyses that do not merely take account of but actively read the masculine by and through such categories as sexuality, ‘race,’ religion, class and nationality, has seen the discursive body divide and multiply in further, disparate directions. As British sociologist Tim Edwards claimed as long ago as 2006, ‘the study of masculinity has itself fragmented into multiple parts, reflections from a shattered mirror even, or, perhaps more accurately, an array of Petri dishes growing cultures of masculinity.’⁶ Referring solely to work produced by the field of sociology—arguably the most fertile ground for the initial growth of the discourse—he further observed that ‘the canon of studies of men and masculinities is now vast … and the task of reviewing all of this is simply not within the scope of a single project.’⁷ Much research that has also emerged out of the established terrain of the new century shares with Edwards's a signposting of the scale of the subject, and what might be encountered as the potentially disorienting, if not vertiginous, quality of its eclecticism.⁸ Masculinity studies has at once established itself as a secure and discrete discipline, made manifest through the space it has been granted in bookstores and on college degree programs, and, yet, it is evermore unruly in its vastness and hybridity. As Edwards suggests, this quality reflects the varied ‘cultures’ of masculinity; the eclecticism of masculinities now culturally visible and identifiable, ‘real’ and represented, performative and performed. The defining characteristics of the academic and cultural discourse, as sketched out here, underpin the necessity with which a question of definition needs to be addressed. This I embark upon as a means to begin setting out my own (profeminist) argument for ‘yet another’ contribution to masculinity studies.

The Hegemonic Subject and In/visibility

Not least as the term appears in the singular within the title of both this chapter and the volume as a whole—and I have, thus far, been guilty of using it rather opaquely—the term ‘masculinity’ is in critical need of some unpacking. If this move is largely unsurprising, it might seem, simultaneously, unnecessary, given the dimensions of the discourse as I have described them. However, although the contemporary condition of masculinity studies arguably renders its key term axiomatic, any move to presume or, indeed, perpetuate its status as such, runs counter to the queer and feminist politics of deconstruction that govern the current study. Indeed, leaving the masculine as some sort of nondissected ‘given’ risks reifying the practices by which it, and other dominant tropes of identity, retains the power of cultural invisibility and concomitant ‘untouchability’ for analysis. Noting that the very capacity to recognize such normative operations owes much to both Lacanian and Derridean thought, Peggy Phelan's seminal notion of the ‘un/marked’ aptly summarizes these concerns in relation to the categories of ‘male’ and ‘female.’ In theorizing these positions in and through ‘the epistemological, psychic, and political binaries of Western metaphysics,’ she argues that

the male is marked with value; the female is unmarked, lacking measured value and meaning. Within this psycho-philosophical frame, cultural reproduction takes she who is unmarked and re-marks her, rhetorically and imagistically, while he who is marked with value is left unremarked, in discursive paradigms and visual fields. He is the norm and therefore unremarkable; as the Other, it is she whom he marks.⁹

Without wishing to rehearse a problematic collapse between sex and gender, an understanding of the discursively symbiotic relationship of these categories, after Butler, and the fact that Phelan's construction of ‘male’ and ‘female’ here is always already discursive, permits a reading of the former term as a (normatively) masculine position. Her analysis sheds light upon the necessity of (re)marking the masculine—to unmask its constituent features and reify its very (re)markability—as central to the project of subverting problematic psychocultural norms. To provide a sociological supplement to this philosophical conceit, it is worth citing the realization that Kimmel voiced in the 1970s about his own ‘unmarked’ status, and, crucially, its implications: ‘when I look in the mirror, I see a human being. I'm universally generalizable. As a middle-class white man, I have no class, no race, no gender. I'm the generic person!’¹⁰ Just as the last of these statements in this context is, paradoxically, drained of credibility in the moment it can be imagined, so too does it highlight the relationship between in/ visibility and normative operations of power. As a means of ‘marking’ the ‘unremarked,’ critically dissecting masculinity, and naming its elements, thus contains subversive possibilities. In particular, this strategy hosts the potential to disrupt perceptions or constructions of the masculine as coherent, ‘authentic’ and transhistorical: notions which have, of course, been deployed historically in the service of naturalizing or legitimating the patriarchal and phallogocentric.

In reflecting upon R.W. Connell's enormously influential and oft-cited theory of ‘hegemonic masculinity,’ James W. Messerschmidt and Connell herself outline criticisms that have been aimed at the use of the term ‘masculinity,’ in the singular, within relevant scholarship.¹¹ Echoing certain of the problems of unnaming or unmarking, they note that

to Petersen (1998, 2003), Collier (1998), and MacInnes (1998), the concept of masculinity is flawed because it essentializes the character of men or imposes a false unity on a fluid and contradictory reality. The concept of masculinity is criticized for being framed within a heteronormative conception of gender that essentializes malefemale difference and ignores difference and exclusion within the gender categories.¹²

Although the sociological ‘reality’ of lived male experience(s) is not of primary significance to this discussion, the tentative ‘exclusions’ and ‘diferences’ against which the masculine is defined is something I will endeavor to explore as a central facet of a specific identity trope. In so doing, it is my intention to undercut the ‘false unity’ implied by masculinity, where it appears as an undeconstructed and unqualified umbrella term that obfuscates the ‘fluid and contradictory’ components of the subjects it purports to define. If my positing the masculine as a position imbued with agency and privilege, and my reference to Kimmel's awareness of his identity position, has not already had the effect of ‘showin...