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 âmight seem ⊠unnecessary in the midst of a dramatic tradition already heavily weighted toward the actions and experiences of male characters.â1 Three years earlier, the following question was posed in the introduction to Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman's significant volume, Theorizing Masculinities: âHow 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?â2
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 âyet anotherâ 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, âthe male protagonist or ⊠playwright has been critically treated as if he were non-gendered,â resulting in âcritical blind spotsâ that her work looks to illuminate.4 Comparably, of a range of slightly earlier, and politically diverse, texts on masculinity, Michael Kimmel observed that âwhat marks these new books as different is that they promise to be about men ⊠as gendered actors.â5 Whether in relation to the staged or âthe realââand what we can read as a collapse between the two, here, is useful for our purposes in situating the masculine as a performative constructionâthe ânewâ 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 âWhy write (yet more) about men?â to âWhy write yet more about masculinities?â The topic is not merely a firmly established field of study within the Western academy or a recurrent subject of âpopularâ 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 masculinitiesâas they are imagined, represented, interpellated and livedâhas 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, ârace,â 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, âthe 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.â6 Referring solely to work produced by the field of sociologyâarguably the most fertile ground for the initial growth of the discourseâhe further observed that âthe 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.â7 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 âculturesâ of masculinity; the eclecticism of masculinities now culturally visible and identifiable, ârealâ 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 âyet anotherâ 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 wholeâand I have, thus far, been guilty of using it rather opaquelyâthe term âmasculinityâ 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 âgivenâ risks reifying the practices by which it, and other dominant tropes of identity, retains the power of cultural invisibility and concomitant âuntouchabilityâ 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 âun/markedâ aptly summarizes these concerns in relation to the categories of âmaleâ and âfemale.â In theorizing these positions in and through âthe epistemological, psychic, and political binaries of Western metaphysics,â 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 âmaleâ and âfemaleâ 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 masculineâto unmask its constituent features and reify its very (re)markabilityâas 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 âunmarkedâ status, and, crucially, its implications: âwhen 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!â10 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 âmarkingâ the âunremarked,â 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, âauthenticâ 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 âhegemonic masculinity,â James W. Messerschmidt and Connell herself outline criticisms that have been aimed at the use of the term âmasculinity,â 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 ârealityâ of lived male experience(s) is not of primary significance to this discussion, the tentative âexclusionsâ and âdiferencesâ 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 âfalse unityâ implied by masculinity, where it appears as an undeconstructed and unqualified umbrella term that obfuscates the âfluid and contradictoryâ 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 âshowin...