Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity

Richard Howson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415653763
• eBook ISBN: 9781134262670
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

In the past twenty years there has been a growing interest in the issues surrounding men and masculinity. Driven primarily by the second-wave feminist critique of the legitimacy or hegemony of masculine practice and culture, the hegemony of men in social spheres such as the family, law, and the workplace can no longer be taken for granted.

Beginning with the work of Antonio Gramsci and a focus on developing the full complexity of his theory of hegemony, Howson's fascinating new book then moves on through theory, applications and analysis of various topical issues, discussing and extending the work of R.W. Connell, and drawing out new possibilities for social justice in gender. Over the course of several informative chapters, the book considers:

* a tripartite model of hegemony
* hegemony in the theory of practice
* application of hegemony to gender
* the study of masculinity and family law
* radical pluralism
* radical organic protest in gender.

Presenting a detailed examination of hegemonic masculinity and its interpretations, this significant new book provides an important contribution to contemporary understandings of men and masculinity.

1
Masculinity, hegemony and the new challenge

In recent years there has been a rising interest, even concern, about issues surrounding men and masculinity, which as the Australian sociologist R.W. Connell (1998: 1) argues, now extends worldwide. Nevertheless, it has been in Western cultures, marked by what some have termed post-industrialism,¹ that the greatest transformations have occurred in the politics of gender. This is primarily because in these cultures the impact of second-wave feminism has been most acutely felt. For example, the feminist movement opened up and questioned, amongst other things, masculine relations, practices and identities which either directly or indirectly gave rise to various religious and secular based men’s movements, father’s rights and support groups, pro-feminist and anti-feminist activists, gay and queer movements as well as a plethora of literature, both of an academic and popular nature dealing with issues such as, men’s emotions, relationships, work, parenting, media representations, power and crisis. This nascent enthusiasm and concern about masculinity and its operation in gender relations became evident at the everyday level through the popularity of books such as, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus (1992) by John Gray, and in Australia, Manhood (1994) by Steve Biddulph. This visible interest and concern in the community about men and masculinity sat in contrast to the more traditional belief that discussing masculine emotionality, work and power, for example, is of little social importance because, for many men, to normatively express their masculinity they simply had to work hard, provide for their family and remain tough through the hard times.

However, a paradox emerges within the project of this popular literature in that, even though it encourages a new interest, with respect to men’s issues, within a significant yet, historically dormant section of the community, the bulk of the works that sit under this rubric continue to express traditional interpretations of gender relations and practice, in which biologically based gender delineations and functional reciprocity are sustained as legitimate grounds for knowledge about normative gender behaviour.² In contrast, the theme of much recent academic research on men is to expose within conceptions of masculinity the problematicity of essentialism and its concomitant rigidity about certain roles and practices. However, the history of academic research into men and masculinity, while spanning much of the twentieth century, took as its starting point, in sociology at least, the emergent social problem of boys after the Second World War. This work drew on the existing psychological research and, in particular, role theory. As a result, structural functionalist sex-role theory emerged as the authoritative paradigm through which the correct relations and practices for boys and their transition into men could be explained (Carrigan et al. 1987: 72–73). But it too, in the final analysis, was fettered to traditional principles of gender and gender relations. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the second-wave feminist challenge had begun to expose the problematicity of functionalism (see Millett 1971: 220–233) and opened up new trajectories for knowledge about men, masculinity and gender relations. Thus, the development of research that offers a progressive critique of the operations of masculinity, grounded in social justice, began with the second-wave women’s movement, and continues to be driven by the profound and systematic work of academic feminism.

In the past two decades there has been a significant involvement by heterosexual men in the elaboration and extension of this feminist critique (Petersen 1998: 1) which, in turn, reflects a desire by men and women (manifest in the consumption of the popular literature) to get closer to an epistemology about gender relations and practices that influence their way of life and which, until now, has simply been taken for granted. This quantitative and qualitative shift in interest has given rise to important changes in the method of developing critique, primarily by enabling an expansion of the scope of issues and perspectives through which they are now examined. But, most importantly, this broader representative involvement marks an ideological movement within a discursive dispersion that influences all those who seek to understand the issues that surround men. This creates a sense of equivalence, in so far as there is a shared commitment to give those issues surrounding men and masculinity a new importance.

The aggregation of interest in issues surrounding masculinity as it developed through academic research has not resulted in the homogenisation of knowledge. Rather, the emerging discourse of masculinity is a diverse field in which differing points of departure produce contrasting epistemological positions (Connell 1995: 3–42). However, through this heterogeneity, some provocative researches have been undertaken, which in turn, have exposed concepts and issues long in need of examination and development. A key contributor to the progressive academic research on men and masculinity is the Australian sociologist, R.W. Connell, whose rejection of the conceptual singularity of masculinity has opened up new possibilities for understanding it as a socially constructed multiplicity. This exposition and development of masculinity represents a significant attempt to provide a theoretical framework in which the concept ‘masculine’ can be constituted in a manner less antithetical to the aims of social justice. However, by viewing masculinity as ‘masculinities’, Connell contends that there exists within the multiplicity of types, a largely symbolic, though legitimate, ideal type of masculinity that imposes upon all other masculinities (and femininities) coherence and meaning about what their own identities and positions within the gender order³ should be. Crucially, though, while this ideal emerges and develops from within the socio-cultural milieu, it becomes essentialised and ultimately, reified as the benchmark against which all men must gauge their success in the gender order. This ideal is hegemonic masculinity.

More than fifty books have appeared in the English language in the last decade or so on men and masculinity. What is hegemonic masculinity as it is presented in this growing literature? Hegemonic masculinity, particularly as it appears in the works of Carrigan, Connell and Lee, Chapman, Cockburn, Connell, Lichterman, Messner and Rutherford involves a specific strategy for the subordination of women. In their view, hegemonic masculinity concerns the dread of and flight from women. A culturally idealised form, it is both personal and a collective project, and is the common sense about breadwinning and manhood. It is exclusive, anxiety-provoking, internally and hierarchically differentiated, brutal and violent. It is pseudo-natural, tough, contradictory, crisis-prone, rich and socially sustained. While centrally connected with the institutions of male dominance, not all men practice it, though most benefit from it. Although cross-class, it often excludes working-class, gay and black-men. It is a lived experience, and an economic and cultural force, and dependent on social arrangements. It is constructed through difficult negotiation over a life-time. Fragile it may be, but it constructs the most dangerous things we live with. Resilient, it incorporates its own critiques, but it is, nonetheless, ‘unravelling’.

(Donaldson 1993: 645–646)

Two aspects of this excellent description of hegemonic masculinity emerge as significant. First, it is possible to see the axiomatic position that hegemonic masculinity has assumed within the literature as both the symbolic representative of the legitimate masculine ideal, as well as the focus for the critique of masculinity. In other words, to understand gender in the contemporary situation, it is imperative to know how hegemonic masculinity operates. Second, hegemonic masculinity is not imposed upon the gender order exogenously but, rather, as emerging from and through the socio-cultural milieu itself. However, as its legitimacy develops, it effectively takes control of the gender order by directing the whole gender polity in line with its own ideality. In effect, the principles that define its nature and ensure its continued existence transcend the concrete everyday life of people and become a dominative force through which the possibilities for social justice in gender are made profoundly problematic. This is based on an understanding of social justice as a progressive aspiration, that is, the moment(s) at which closure within a hegemonic situation is subverted so that there is openness about knowledge and practice. However, as Donaldson argues, hegemonic masculinity provides its own form of justice, which is delivered through the adherence, or at least, the desire to adhere, to certain privileged principles that set the benchmark for social order. Therefore, it becomes an imperative of hegemonic masculinity to protect its principles against challenge, which in turn ensures that its justice is always already a system of closure that sits antithetically to social justice. Further, the discussions that follow will show this antithetic positioning is based on hegemonic masculinity’s precarious nexus with its foundational concept: hegemony, as developed in the work of Antonio Gramsci.

The etymological roots of hegemony can be traced back to the Ancient Greek etymon hegemonia, which effectively meant, ‘to lead’ (Wickersham 1994). However, more recently the term emerged in the emancipative discourses of the early Russian social democratic movement around the turn of the nineteenth century and, soon after, in the discourse of revolution that underpinned Leninism (Anderson 1976: 15–17). It is from this latter discursive frame that the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, was introduced to the term in a pragmatic sense. However, its development in his writings would not see it assume the same ossified politico-economic meaning. In effect, Gramsci’s employment of the term draws more closely from the Ancient Greek meaning ‘to lead’ and in this context its reconfiguration, beginning in his politico-journalistic writings and extending into his Prison Notebooks (between 1915 and 1935) enabled it to move beyond the conceptual closure of a socio-cultural system fixed to and determined by the dominant group’s fundamental principles. But most importantly, Gramsci’s work, and what might be referred to as his theory of hegemony, saw this politico-economic and dominative understanding as negativity from which the imperative was to develop strategies for its breakdown. This is achieved though self-knowledge, which can only develop and operate within and through culture. This, in turn, would enable a new and progressive aspiration for social justice.

Although Gramsci’s thoughts and writings with respect to hegemony were primarily couched in terms of a class-based discourse, the strength of his ideas exist in their ability to allow subsequent thinkers to employ concepts such as historical bloc, war of position and war of movement, moral and intellectual leadership and collective will in other domains of social and political struggle. Specifically for gender politics,⁴ the importance of the concept hegemony is, as Gottfried (1998: 5–6) argues, as a conceptual tool through which certain configurations of practice can be explored in ways that allow for the dissolution of the static opposition between agency and structure. Thus, structures of power are contingent and constitutive in the sense that they are seen as mobile and organic combinations of cultural and ideological meanings. In other words, the authority of a particular hegemonic group in a post-industrial situation can no longer be seen to emerge from the foundation of economics and politics but, crucially, from the dis- cursive space in which all socio-cultural factors are brought to bear and, through which, civil society is given a new-found importance beside that of political society (Laclau and Mouffe 1985).

The concept of hegemonic masculinity, as developed and articulated by Connell, is an attempt to synthesise some of the fundamental ideas from Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, such as the emphasis on socio-cultural and ideological structures and processes, the importance of history as a generative force and recognition of praxis or the nexus between theory and practice, with his own practice-based masculinities theory. However, the result, as will be shown, is the obfuscation of the full complexity of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony through the underdevelopment of hegemony’s aspira-tional efficacy, which is evident throughout the pre-prison and prison-based writings. This, in turn, works to emphasise the more passive and historically deterministic view of a hegemonic situation. More importantly, a consequence of this obfuscation is that hegemony and social justice are posited as mutually exclusive possibilities because the nature of hegemony is always as one of singularity, homogeneity and closure around the dominant group’s core principles, and where change occurs it does so only in spontaneous and ad hoc movements as a product of history. So, in the final analysis, this type of challenge and change within gender politics, as will be shown, will stifle aspiration for social justice because it fails to produce the holistic socio-historical critique required and, instead, imposes a systemic ambivalence that shields the core principles. Thus, the masculine hegemonic system that marks current gender politics represents a system of closure and oppression which, of course, reflects precisely the system of patriarchy that was so effectively exposed by second-wave feminism. However, by implying the simplistic, though neat, conceptual imbrication of hegemonic masculinity as the ideal gender type upon a patriarchal system, there is constructed within the masculinities literature a belief that just as the system must be removed, so too, its ideal type because their joint project is to close down any movement towards openness and social justice.

As stated earlier, a key objective of Connell’s practice-based masculinities theory is to develop a framework through which to conceive masculinity as less antithetical to the aims of social justice. However, the very nature of its central concept, that is, hegemonic masculinity, makes the realisation of this objective difficult. Thus, to overcome the inherent mutual exclusivity that currently marks gender politics, as understood through masculinities theory, the imperative is to find strategic possibilities from somewhere other than hegemonic processes. This is because hegemony, understood as a singularity, makes problematic the emergence in gender of a hegemonic other that will not, in turn, assume a dominative nature and impose closure upon the sociopolitical system it controls and directs. Thus, both hegemonic masculinity and the hegemonic system must be broken down and removed to make way for an ‘alliance politics’ that will produce a ‘de-gendered world’ where all configurations of practice are set as transparent (Connell 1995: 232–234). This ‘de-gendering strategy’ draws from early second-wave feminism and the aspiration for androgyny. But also, it reflects Connell’s determination to ensure that social justice emerges not just from the abstract realm of discourse and knowledge but, rather, from historically driven changes to relations and configurations of practice at the concrete level of social life. Further, through alliance politics, there is no necessity to alter identity at the level of knowledge because such changes will emerge through changes to practice.

The aim of this book is to challenge this strategy at both a theoretical and empirical level. In the latter case, by presenting a critico-historical study of family law case law that shows how, through the movement of history, change does occur around certain core principles but in a spontaneous and ad hoc manner and not in a direct and organic way. As a result, the masculine hegemonic system is marked by an ineffective politics producing systemic ambivalence that, in the final analysis, sustains closure within the hegemony. This book argues that alliance politics and de-gendering strategies are fundamentally flawed with respect to producing social justice because they are incapable of identifying and deconstructing the nodal points of closure, which is a crucial task in the development of a progressive organic movement. In other words, complicit identities remain effectively intact and give rise to a situation where alliance is unable to articulate and manage the profound and increasing demands that currently mark gender politics, such as those being projected by gay, lesbian and queer parents, men seeking access to work in the private sphere, black and ethnic women and men, working single parents. Thus, enabling possibilities for a de-gendering strategy will not necessarily construct alliances between these new demands because it cannot produce a sense of equivalent identity. As such, there is no active unity operating.

Instead, for a progressive social justice to develop, these active elements must be able to express their particular demands as antagonisms towards the hegemonic ideal. Most importantly, through a process that configures these antagonisms into a progressive equivalential unity, without obliterating the particularity of each identity. This requires not a de-gendering strategy focused on alliances and a partial development of self-knowledge but, rather, a re-gendering strategy that is supportive of an open politics which seeks to develop equivalence through self-knowledge and an extension and deepening of democracy. Further, such a re-gendering strategy must also recognise the relationality of gender with other spheres of life such as work, education, law and the media so that there is always a focus on how particular knowledge is produced as part of the universality of progressive challenge. This, then, requires a strategy for the radicalisation of pluralism, which can best be achieved through the re-instatement of hegemony. However, not hegemony conceived of as an aprioristic, singularly, negative and homogenising force, but through Gramsci’s analysis, as a fully complex system of knowledge that, at the highest point of synthesis, represents a new ethico-political system.

Thus, this book argues that to confine hegemonic masculinity to a theoretical singularity, that is, as always negativity, will ensure that the politics of gender continues to operate conceptually around the mutual exclusivity of hegemony and social justice. Therefore, it will be impossible to develop and project progressive strategies that do not return to the problematic de-gendering ideas and arguments of second-wave feminism where struggle is dichotomised rather than democratised and change occurs through conjuncture movements. What is required to overcome this strategic retrospective is not the removal but reinstatement of a fully complex hegemony, which will enable the development of a new organic protest within gender politics that is grounded in a radical plural democracy. Crucially, the intellectual basis for the achievement of these three requirements will be shown to currently exist and can be articulated through a careful reading of Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, re-working masculinities theory to incorporate a detailed analysis of the femininities bloc and applying to the new protest a radical post- Marxist politics. The development of these requirements and their intellectual bases will be the subject of the following chapters.

In Chapter 2, ‘Revolutionising the revolution: towards a tripartite model of hegemony’, the aim is to explicate the complexity of the theory of hegemony. A key objective will be to show that the singularity and negativity which has become axiomatic in the masculinities literature is only a partial representation. The resultant analysis produces ‘the tripartite model of hegemony’ whose significance to the argument is in its ability to outline the crucial points of delineation between dominative and aspirational hegemony.

In Chapter 3, ‘ “Ascendancy in a play of social forces”: hegemony and social justice in the theory of practice’, the aim is to examine Connell’s theory of practice as the base from which his conception of hegemony de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Masculinity, hegemony and the new challenge
• 2 Revolutionising the revolution
• 3 ‘Ascendency in a play of social forces’
• 4 The application of hegemony to gender
• 5 Constructing a study of masculinities and family law
• 6 A critico-historical analysis of masculinities and family law
• 7 Radical pluralism
• 8 Radical organic protest in gender
• 9 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography