Manly States

Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics

Charlotte Hooper

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2001
• eBook ISBN: 9780231505208
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Much has been written on how masculinity shapes international relations, but little feminist scholarship has focused on how international relations shape masculinity. Charlotte Hooper draws from feminist theory to provide an account of the relationship between masculinity and power. She explores how the theory and practice of international relations produces and sustains masculine identities and masculine rivalries.

This volume asserts that international politics shapes multiple masculinities rather than one static masculinity, positing an interplay between a "hegemonic masculinity" (associated with elite, western male power) and other subordinated, feminized masculinities (typically associated with poor men, nonwestern men, men of color, and/or gay men). Employing feminist analyses to confront gender-biased stereotyping in various fields of international political theory—including academic scholarship, journals, and popular literature like The Economist—Hooper reconstructs the nexus of international relations and gender politics during this age of globalization.

PART ONE Theorizing Masculinities

CHAPTER ONE

The Construction of Gender Identity

RECENT debates about identity in political philosophy have centered around the adequacy of the Enlightenment concept of the autonomous rational individual as a universal model of selfhood and starting point for political action, a concept that has long been central in Western thinking.¹ In the analytical philosophical tradition, mind and body have often been treated separately, and abstract narratives of the mind dominate discussions of the human subject—at least in the case of the male subject, who stands in for the universal. The female subject, “woman,” where mentioned in modern political philosophy, has usually been constructed in rather a different way, as an opposite pole to “man.” If man is all mind, then woman is all body. For example, whereas men were seen by Hegel as pushing forward the dialectic of history, women were seen as incapable of the required self-consciousness of conceptual thought. Mired as they were in the concrete world, they would be condemned merely to repeat the cycles of life.²

Critics of this concept have drawn on feminist, communitarian, and postmodern thinking to argue that a redrafting of our philosophical understanding of the political agent would require more adequate recognition of the consequences of our physical embodiment, regardless of sex; of the way in which we are also embedded in social processes; and of the degree of indeterminacy and multiplicity in life situations. The concept of the embedded self would recognize that apparently strongly autonomous selves are themselves social products—products that emerge through interactive dialogue with others within a political and cultural framework that provides for their development—rather than individual starting points.³

Unlike the approaches to political identity taken by analytical philosophy, which focus on the rational mind, theoretical approaches to gender identity have, since their inception, grappled with both physical embodiment and social and institutional processes as important elements. The belated recognition by some political philosophers that men, too, are socially embedded and physically embodied, and that this could be of philosophical and political importance, shows a partial convergence of interest between what were two very different fields. This convergence might perhaps lead to a wider recognition of some of the more generally relevant insights that sophisticated and imaginative feminist approaches to gender identity have provided.

This chapter draws on feminist thinking about sex, gender, and identities to examine some theoretical accounts of the process of gender-identity formation. The literature on gender covers a wide field, with contributions from a number of disparate disciplines, representing a variety of interests and methodologies. There is no consensus on either the nature or significance of gender identities, how they are produced, or whether they should be reinforced, modified, or abolished, even among feminists, who by no means have a monopoly on gender theory. Nevertheless, in spite of their considerable differences and the complexity of the debate between them, this chapter will argue that the theories all tend to revolve around three dimensions of analysis; namely, (1) physical embodiment, including the body and the role of reproductive biology; (2) institutions and the gendered social processes that they encompass, including the family, the economy, the state; and (3) the discursive dimension of the gendered construction of language and its constitutive role in the gender order.

Some approaches have tended to emphasize the primary importance of one dimension, ignoring the others or demoting them to the status of effects. Others have discussed the relationship between two of the dimensions to the virtual exclusion of the third. During the 1990s, the center of the debate moved away from disputes both among feminists and between feminists and their critics over the relative contributions to gender identity of nature (listed above as 1) and nurture (2) toward a cleavage between both these groups and those who argue that the key to gender identity lies with discourse (3). Any adequate account of the construction of gender identity, however, needs to pay attention to all three dimensions simultaneously. It is important to trace out more of the complex interactions between these multiple factors, rather than trying to locate gender identity as being founded in any one of them.

The recognition of this need to take a more complex view of gender identity has been gaining ground among feminist academics. For example, Ramazanoglu and Holland (1993) discuss the development of feminist theorizing with reference to questions thrown up by their own research on teenage sexuality. During the discussion, they move from a position of identifying two poles of power that need to be reconciled—namely, the material and the discursive—to a final position where they argue that “there is a complex interaction between grounded embodiment, the discourses of sexuality and institutionalized power. Understanding this interaction is critical for targeting political struggles, but it remains an elusive area” (Ramazanoglu and Holland 1993, 260).

It is this move toward embracing all three dimensions of analysis as significant, while recognizing that none is entirely autonomous, that allows for the complexity of gender identifications to be analytically unraveled. Gender identity is not the product of a single cause or factor that then becomes fixed, but rather is negotiated in a lifelong process. The three dimensions and their interactions constitute a constraining or limiting field within which, or against which, such negotiations take place, whether at the individual or group level. Each dimension in turn is influenced by the power of the others, so there is a degree of indeterminacy in their relations. In particular historical periods, in different cultures or under varying circumstances, the configuration of power relations between bodies, institutions, and discourses will vary, such that the influence of each may construed as greater or lesser, and thus both the content and significance of gendered identities will also vary.

What follows is a personal and, of necessity, partial reconstruction of a more or less chronological development of feminist theorizing on the construction of gender identity, highlighting the way that the focus of theory has moved from the body, through the social, to the discursive, and back to the body again.⁴ Much of the discussion is conducted in terms of women and femininity. This reflects both the concerns of feminists and the fact that the female sex has been problematized as different from the male norm in Western thinking and practice. Nevertheless, the theories considered would apply equally to men, in structure if not in content, and are therefore potentially useful for understanding the relationship between men and masculinity.

“The Problem of Biology”

Given the importance that Western discourse has given to women’s biology as a basis for their identity as women, it is hardly surprising that the role of biology has loomed large in many accounts of gender identity, and to this day remains a contested area within feminism.

The second wave of feminism, at the beginning of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, was launched against the background of a fierce nature/nurture debate between psychologists, sociologists, and sociobiologists over the relative contributions of biology and social factors to “sex roles” and gender identities. From the newly popularized postwar discipline of primatology came various biological explanations for the existence of widespread disparities between the roles and publicly recorded achievements of men and women in modern societies. Psychobiologists sought to explain the contemporary sexual division of labor and male dominance in terms of aggression, submission, and dominance hierarchies among males and their supposed significance in the development of social behavior in prehistoric times.⁵ Sociobiologists, on the other hand, concentrated on genetic differences between the sexes and on genetic investment strategies. Both groups used animal behavior, especially primate behavior, as evidence of human developmental history or genetic heritage.

Many feminists regarded these theories as reductionist and conservative justifications of the status quo. They pointed out that biologically reductionist arguments have a pedigree that can be traced back for centuries in Western culture, culminating in the now discredited social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century. Psycho- and sociobiological arguments were seen as part of this tradition of “bad science” (Haraway 1991, 134) in which leaps from one period of history or level of analysis to another were made without explanation; in which human social categories were projected onto other animals and then used as a basis for explaining human behavior in the most crudely anthropomorphic fashion; and in which objectivity was never achieved due to the unacknowledged cultural biases of the researchers themselves (Sahlins 1977; Sayers 1982).

Meanwhile, a parallel line of inquiry, sex-difference research, sought to measure inherent differences between the sexes in the laboratory. In this kind of analysis, sexual character was also seen as unitary: “men” and “women” were assumed to be distinct personality types embodying stereotypically “masculine” and “feminine” traits and characteristics en mass. The research looked at “block” sex differences in such characteristics as aggression levels, tactile sensitivity, and spatial and linguistic skills. Such research has been beset by the methodological problems that all positivistic science encounters when trying to measure socially meaningful behavior. For example, how does one measure aggression? By personality testing? By hormone levels? What exactly is being measured when one measures aggression? Which behaviors count as aggressive varies according to social and cultural context; hence, it is impossible to measure objectively.⁶ Even when sex-difference research has confined itself to testing things that can be measured, the results have not shown many significant differences, but rather a huge overlap in traits and abilities between the sexes (Maccoby and Jacklin 1975). Eighty years of research focused on sex differences have revealed “a massive psychological similarity between women and men in the populations studied” (Connell 1987, 170). Meanwhile, cross-cultural studies suggested that few sex differences in social behavior seemed inevitable, and that “the plasticity of the sexes seems quite enough to allow for a gender revolution of any sort” (Rosenblatt and Cunningham 1976, 89).

Although the feminist critique of sex-difference research and some of the cruder reductionisms in sociobiology were undoubtedly justified, it was nonetheless true that socialist-feminist hostility to biological explanations was partly motivated by a conviction that biological explanations were either conservative or fascistic. If widespread gender differences were to have a biological rather than social foundation, then women were oppressed either by their own biology or by the biology of men. The only hope of emancipation would be through the technology of artificial reproduction, a conclusion reached by the early second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone (1971). Indeed, some feminist “maternalists” have since gone down this road, pursuing separatism, artificial insemination, and asserting women’s “natural” superiority over men, but the rest preferred to look for social explanations of gender that might provide a better basis for social and political change.

Sex and Gender

While the debate over sex differences and sex roles rumbled on, one way around “the problem of biology” was to separate it from the social by making an analytical distinction between biological sex and socially constructed gender. Popularized by Ann Oakley (1972) in the early 1970s and rapidly becoming an accepted norm in much feminist theory and gender studies literature, this distinction allowed gender differences encompassing the formation of gender identities and the qualities of masculinity and femininity to be treated as aspects of social and psychological development, separate from questions about biological sex differences (Bailey 1993, 100).⁷ This sociosexual division then enabled the analysis of gender identity to move squarely into the realm of social and institutional processes.

A great deal of feminist energy has always been focused around the institutional dimension of analysis on the subject of gender inequalities, ranging from liberal feminist campaigns on women’s equality in the public sphere, through socialist-feminist analysis of the relations of production and reproduction and their contribution to women’s economic subordination, to radical feminist theories of patriarchy as a linchpin of social organization.⁸ While these discussions have been of tremendous importance in detailing and accounting for the subordination of women, and have provided fuel for feminist campaigns, the category of “women” has been used as the relatively unproblematic basis of analysis. Because women themselves were not theorized, such accounts dealt only tangentially with gender identity as such.

Meanwhile, gender-sensitive studies of socialization have provided abundant evidence of just how differential the treatment of boys and girls is from the moment of birth, and how they are expected, encouraged, and coerced into thinking and behaving differently and into developing different skills and priorities.⁹ As well as socialization through the family, education, and the workplace, the role of consumption in promoting gender identities was also beginning to be examined in feminist cultural and media-studies literature.¹⁰

But even supplemented by evidence of differential socialization, feminist institutional theory still tended to leave gender identity itself undertheorized. Such things as the complexity of sexuality; the degree to which the innermost sense of self is gendered; the insecurities and contradictions of masculinity and femininity; and last but not least the continuing complicity of women in their own subordination even after feminist enlightenment—none of these were fully explained by accounts of institutional structures, conditioning, and coercion.

Psychology and Gender Identity

This deficit was made up for by a turn to psychoanalytic theory that, by introducing the unconscious, would provide a depth model of the links between male and female bodies, the institutional arrangement of the family, and the complexities of masculine and feminine character and identity. Unsurprisingly, classic Freudian analysis, which gives the penis a central role in the development of both sexes and supports the view that women are predominantly passive,¹¹ has gained little support from feminists;¹² instead, two revisionist psychoanalytic schools have been used by feminist scholars. These are, first, feminist object-relations theory, which developed largely in the United States; and second, British and French feminist uses of the Lacanian synthesis of Freud with Saussurean linguistics. While object-relations theory locates the formation of gender identity in a relationship between the institutional and the embodiment dimensions, Lacanian and post-Lacanian scholarship shifts the emphasis away from embodiment altogether and emphasizes the role of language, instead.

In a key move to develop a non-Freudian psychoanalytic perspective, object-relations theory shifted attention away from the penis and focused instead on the role of the maternal bond. In the pre-Oedipal phase, love and identification are undifferentiated. This presents no problem for girls, who may continue to love and identify with their mothers long after they have become aware of their own sex. But boys, in order to develop their sense of maleness, are forced to abandon their attachment to and identification with their mothers. In Nancy Chodorow’s account (1978), the absence of a close bond with the father at this stage means that masculinity is defined in reaction to the mother, is defined as that which is not feminine. The more powerful his mother’s influence, the more the growing boy struggles to separate from her to establish his own gender identity, the more exaggerated and aggressive his style of masculinity becomes, and the more he fears and abhors the feminine, whether within himself or in relationships with women. Thus while masculinity is overvalued in society, it remains fragile, precarious, and neurotic. This is exactly the right formula for the aggressive psychology needed for male domination and success in a competitive, capitalist world. And thus female power over male children is transformed into male power over adult women.

Arguing in a similar vein, Dorothy Dinnerstein (1976) concludes that the exclusive involvement of women in the care of young children and the psychological dynamics that this produces are leading us toward global destruction. The involvement of men in child care, however, would profoundly alter this dynamic, and such involvement is seen as the key to unraveling the oppression of women as well as providing more emotionally satisfactory experiences for antisexist men who see male power as not worth having, given the psychological (or environmental) price to be paid.

Critics of object-relations theory note that it tends to beg rather large questions about the supposed fragility of male gender identities, about the influence of outside power relations on the family, about what happens in nonnuclear families, and about the conventionality and uniformity of mothering and fathering practices. However, perhaps its biggest drawback is that by placing the weight of analysis on mother-child relations, it ignores the wider symbolic power attached to men and masculinity and treats phallocentrism as a product of neurotic male imagination rather than as a cultural reality (Segal 1990, 82). Analysis of gender identity in the object-relations school remains squarely at the institutional pole, and the only institution that is deemed to be relevant is the family.

Language and Psychology

An approach that attempted to introduce symbolic meaning into feminist psychoanalysis was built on the Lacanian synthesis of Freud w...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One. Theorizing Masculinities
• Part Two. Masculinities, IR, and Gender Politics
• Conclusion: IR and the (Re)Making of Hegemonic Masculinity
• Notes
• Reference List And Bibliography
• Index