03 July 2007
a short note about this blog
Title
Introduction
Part 1
A woman’s body is familiar. Several decades of feminism, and several decades of consumerist branding of the female (sexed) body takes us to this moment. Where the female body is cushioned in multiple discourses of what it means to be, or to have, a woman. We speak of anorexia, abortion, the burqa, contraception, women’s work, motherhood, diet and sex; and through this, we feel that we know her body. We know her. A body on posters, a body marching in protest, a body violated, a body of music videos, medical conditions, classical art. A body put into words, a body made pregnant.
With an interest in feminism, I have read much about women’s bodies, and the fascinations they evoke. But it is particularly the work of Luce Irigaray that I am interested in, and the way she speaks the female body into philosophy, into existence. Doing so without essentialism – speaking of ‘woman’, yet not fixing her into any one existence, not assigning the female body to particular roles, purposes, subordinations. In Irigaray’s world, a woman should exist without any need to be like men.
Irigaray’s project aims to give voice to women, yet does not argue for equality in the way other feminisms might – an equality that argues for a rational subjectivity of women, enabling them to contribute to society, and partake of it, as men do. For Irigaray, this sort of equality takes ‘woman’ closer to extinction. For her, woman is not man, nor is she his opposite. She is woman, of a category unto herself. And it is as a female subject (of a female body) that she must exercise her autonomy.
Irigaray seeks an embodied female subjectivity, acknowledging the dangers of denying the body, as much Western feminism has done, and as men do. For without bodies, a woman cannot be. Irigaray cannot accept Freudian understandings of a female sexuality shaped via male sexuality – as man’s other, a lack to ‘his’ fullness. She does not so much argue against Freud, Plato, Aristotle, Lacan and others, but, through language, she undermines their theories of subjectivities, sexualities. Her work is poetic, erotic, subversive, and it is through this non-combative language that she brings down ‘the masters’. This method itself, illustrates the feminine difference she speaks of. Where engagement does not have to involve rational argument, an attack, a mastery – those things that masculinity has become dependent upon. Hers is less of an argument, more of a dialogue, a dance, a seduction.
And it is the work of Irigaray that seduces me into asking questions, (and considering her questions) about the male body. For until recently, male embodiment has not been discussed. The male body is not cushioned in discourse like that of the female body, whether we look at reproduction, celebrity culture, the workforce, pornography, or literature, there is less trace of, less turmoil surrounding, the male body. And here I ask why.
A man would never set out to write a book on the peculiar situation of the human male (Beauvoir 1997, 15).
It seems the male body has been negated through ideals of (male) subjectivity, as that which de-values bodies. For man is of the mind, not the body. It is his mind that ‘owns’ and constructs knowledge, that which he uses to shape a world outside of himself. Apparently. His body is subordinated, and like the slaves, animals, and women of history, it is an instrument with which to achieve his role, his place, his story of domination. But as argued by phenomenology, and much contemporary feminism, the body is knowledgeable. Its movements are not so much orchestrated from above, by the God-like mind, but are of the knowing body. The body that knows itself well enough to dodge bullets, fight disease, sleep, eat, and find pleasure.
So what might it mean to speak of man as embodied? As flesh and desire? Does man, as bodied, lose power? Or might he gain it? And what sort of power might this be anyway? What of the power of desire, of that force that escapes, perhaps denies, rationality?
The male body I speak of (and through) cannot be clearly defined outside of the world it moves in, the language it is shaped by, the ‘other’ bodies it encounters, the shifting ideas of self. It is an abstract body, not just flesh and blood, and certainly not divorced from mind. This body is a pathway into the world, to other people, to the self. The body is what gives me a sex, is what permits my desires. The fluidity of the body ruptures any sense of cohesion of the bodied self. The body, like desire, is unknowable. It is beyond our grasp, unreachable, never achieved.
A mind/body separation denies the body an active role. In a quest for rational subjectivity, for the knowledge of ‘man’, man has robbed bodies of much of their power. Their flows have been stopped, the processes of the body dealt with, hidden, undiscussed. Yet, much anxiety still lurks in the body and its processes – its waste, its sexual functions, the risk it poses to the knowable, rational subject.
The body I will write about is the body never achieved. I am not interested in the development of the bodied subject, but the process of embodiment. Psychoanalysis expresses a body arrived at after following a series of paths and developments from the womb to adult life. Such pathways, particularly in early childhood, are seen as crucial for the achievement of sexually heteronormative selves. While this is a simplistic account of psychoanalysis, it is for its traditional role of normalising that I do not wish to discuss the body in this realm – as part of the developed self. Yet, I acknowledge the importance of Freud’s realisation of the unconscious, and the central role of desire within this field. Even if I do not support a desire built upon lack (as Freud and Lacan do), but a desire that is productive and willful (like that proposed by Deleuze and Guattari).
Therefore, this body I speak of, is not the body ‘being’, but the body ‘becoming’. As a work in progress, we cannot know this body. It is in constant flux, shifting in various directions at once, operating on invisible levels of desire, always decentring itself. Like the language that brings it into existence, it is forever changing. This body is discursive. It is shaped by language as much as it shapes language. It plays itself out as metaphor in everyday speech and writing. Language, like desire, is productive. Therefore, is it not possible to write words that change the history of bodies? Words that insert the body into the world of the individual and create an awareness of the unknowable self.
The project of embodiment necessarily involves language, the exploration of a discourse that disentangles mind from body – a dualism that only serves to subordinate, separate, delegate the body. To position the body as passive, as feminine, incorporating other binary splits of male/female, masculine/feminine, heterosexual/homosexual, allows men the privilege (?) of not speaking their bodies.
In order to destabilise phallocentrism, as that which upholds the dominance of (some) men, it seems necessary to challenge the foundations of this dominance. Ideologies, knowledges, and the privilege of rational thought that supports a philosophy of binaries (exclusions), allows one to speak of ‘the history of man’ without complication. ‘Man’ is often used as a catch-all term, which further denies a discourse of man as male, as a sexed being, as different to other people. For predominantly, difference does not belong to him, but is measured through him. Everything that is not him, is different.
To speak of man, as sexed, positions him within difference. To speak of women, and then shift the gaze to men, further articulates his difference, and problematises the notion of a neutral subjectivity – that from which man speaks the self. It is through difference, language, sex, and ideas of ‘becoming’ that I wish to look at the possibilities of the embodied male subject.
This thesis is not a singular argument, not in search of an end-point, a resolution. For I do not wish to engage in this topic through a masculine rationality that could only betray my study. I wish to get beyond such masculine ideologies that deny male embodiment. Instead, I want to turn the male body back onto itself, and find within it, a maleness that is not disembodied, not masterful, but creative, desiring, in flux. In thinking through the body, he may no longer be able to know himself as master of the world he thinks he created. But creation need not be about mastery, it can be about exploration. About becoming something other, never becoming whole, moving beyond a definable position in order to grow, adapt, continue. And for this reason, the body is important. As a symbol of the self, the body subverts power, produces desire, defies containment.
The body I discuss is mostly that of the Western male subject. The study of bodies is quite limitless, and as a result, I have forfeited in-depth discussions of bodily ethnicities and the post-colonial body. Instead, the focus is upon the sexed body, even though it cannot be unhinged from its ethnicities and other cultural/identity factors. Unfortunately, limitations also prevent any discussion of violence, as something also tied to sexed bodies, and found within and between bodies.
This thesis is split into three chapters. The Trouble with Bodies chapter looks at the frameworks in which bodies take shape, questioning some of the binary structures that situate bodies, such as sex/gender, male/female, masculine/feminine. It is necessary to unpack such terms that inform ideas about bodies, before they can be challenged. To unfold ideas of ‘truth’ and ‘nature’ in relation to bodies – as limitations, as imperative to masculine and heterosexual privilege.
The Sexed Bodies chapter takes us into difference, feminist notions of embodiment, and brings us closer to embodied male possibilities. It is here that some tensions arise between feminist theory and male bodies, and whether such theories can be justifiably used in relation to male bodies. Treading lightly, I give some examples of what this discursive, bodied male could be, evoking the methods of Irigaray, and questioning the body’s senses, the sex within vision and touch. Here, phenomenology raises its head as a particularly useful too for the emergence of an embodied male.
The final chapter, Irrational Male Bodies, takes another step toward the possibilities of male bodies, speaking to ideas of becoming, fluidity, and other spaces between the binaries I attempt to dislodge. Particularly the passive/active binary, and its investment in other binaries mentioned. It is here that the project of dephallicisation is explored further, through possibilities of a plural, changing, and complex male sexuality. Man’s denial of the abject, of the body processes that destabilise wholeness, is situated as a major contributor to male body anxiety. If the focus is taken away from the phallus, building a self beyond it, where might this take men?
Part 2
The uncertain body
This thesis is problematic. The more I have read, the more difficult it has been to capture my subject, my topic. My argument, that bodies are not self-contained realms distinct from mind/self makes me wonder if I’m actually speaking of bodies at all. Am I not speaking of the self? And where do I sit amongst all this? What I am doing goes beyond bodies, beyond gender, beyond me.
I am arguing against the idea of rational objective thought, the idea of author, the proclamation that any knowledge is superior, more true, than another. Does this not defeat the purpose of writing a thesis? The further I go, the more I want to draw a line through the words I have written.
And how do I write? How did I get here, to this thesis? My sex, my skin colour, my education, my country of birth are not insignificant. None of these can be assigned to ‘me’ without the others, and more. Such traits usually preclude ‘my kind’ from acknowledging such traits – of what it means to be male, white and educated – to posses the arrogance to think I can make a difference. (Sadly, I want to change the world).
This thesis is a compilation of the thoughts, theories, and observations of myself and others. But mostly, I channel others. Without the likes of Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Moira Gatens, Rosa Braidotti, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Jane Gallop, Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, Calvin Thomas, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Anais Nin and Jean Genet, I would not be able to shape such ideas and opinions. I would not have the tools to construct this thesis.
In working with French texts, Jane Gallop prefers the term ‘transference’ over ‘translation’ – the later being in past tense, positing the text as dead (Gallop 1985, 44). My/this project involves transference in the way I am (it is) taking the words of others, sometimes changing the context, not always sure of initial intent, removing ownership (despite acknowledgement), and shaping another text.
I collect, I deposit, I struggle to form an argument when it is argument that I do not want. I want exploration, dialogue, creativity, the unfolding of an array of possibilities that acknowledge, support and encourage difference. I want text that bleeds, cries, tastes. Bodies that speak.
The author’s intentions, emotions, psyche, and interiority are not only inaccessible to readers, they are likely to be inaccessible to the author herself (Grosz 1995, 13).
I, like Gallop, do not wish to speak as authority, to be masterful of my thoughts and words (which are not even mine). I am no expert. I am not master of this text. I make collage.
Tearing pages, inking pages, shifting paragraphs; a layer of glue on my fingertips and black indecipherable words on the palm of my hand. I am a student, in many senses of the word.
This is not an argument, a manifesto, a proclamation of truth. Rather, it is an assemblage of thoughts, ideas and possibilities. Perhaps.
Chapter 1 – The Trouble with Bodies
Mind-Body
Descartes spoke of the knowing subject, where ‘to know’ is proof of one’s existence – “I think therefore I am.” This Cartesian principle positions the mind as the subject and the core of one’s humanness. The body however, is positioned as an object of the self (the subject). Following on from Plato, Descartes further distances mind from body through his belief in the masterful mind, mastering the body along with other materials of nature. As natural matter, the body is an object to be tamed, controlled, and employed as a vehicle for the (internal) self.
Centuries later, a mind/body dualism remains. A dualism critiqued by many scholars of philosophy, phenomenology and sociology, particularly those working from feminist perspectives of embodiment. Here, the mind/body distinction is discredited as a supporting foundation for other gender-related dualisms that continue to subordinate women and other ‘non-masculine’ groups. Such dualisms include, but are not limited to, concepts of culture/nature, active/passive, masculine/feminine. In each of these, the former takes the dominant role, as evidenced by Western culture’s privileging of cultural, active, masculine minds over natural, passive, feminine bodies (Gatens 1991; Grosz 1994; Plumwood 1993).
The ‘natural body’ is framed as an object of biology, a container for the thinking subject. The rational mind is a product of a history of thought and philosophy – that which has been penned by bodies considered neutral, natural, insignificant. Yet if the philosophers themselves are studied, their bodies brought to light, such bodies are sexed. It is only through their particular sex (considered rational, disembodied, objective) that these men had access to such fields of knowledge – a position where thoughts could develop, be spoken, and carry the weight of reason. A neutral speaking position is a masculine concept, and only those permitted to have a masculine engagement with the world are allowed this pleasure.
‘Man’, the neutral observer, was thought to have transcended nature (his body) and moved into culture (his mind). His neutrality was based on the notion of a universal subject, a speaking position that was the same as all others, untainted by body, flesh or desire (the natural, untamed urges of animals) (Plumwood 1993).
Bodies, as objects, were not thought to have any bearing on rational thinking and constructions of knowledge, yet the flaws of this theory are revealed upon consideration of female bodies. In the era of Enlightenment, women are contained by a discourse of bodily limitations – assigned to roles of wife and mother (for sexual, childbearing and child rearing duties that would sustain a familial order of patriarchy). As creatures of their bodies, with uteruses, menstrual flows and ‘feminine sensibilities’ that forbade the possibility of rational thought, women are bound to a form of silence. ‘Woman’ (as wife of man) was not only constructed to support patriarchal order, but to allow time in which a knowledge (history) of man could be built. A knowledge that did not recognise women, or their absence.
Over time, Western mind/body dualism has given rise to an endless catalogue of dualisms that feed into common understandings of gender difference. Further to those mentioned are man/woman, subject/object, rational/emotional, hard/soft. Each dualism reinforces the next, creating room for more, and further stabilising a framework of complementary positions that might be reduced to an underlying split of superior/inferior, or being/other. According to Val Plumwood, this relies upon ‘radical exclusion’, whereby two forces are oppositional, distanced, and ‘othered’ in such a way that the difference seems natural and unchangeable – the two oppositional forces never blending, each reinforcing the other (1993).
Through an ongoing denial of otherness on the part of the rational subject, emerges an endless and expanding list of other identities positioned beyond ‘normal’. Such identities are marginalised on the basis of their difference to an unstated norm that has only recently been named as white, heterosexual, middleclass, able-bodied, and male. This ‘othering’ not only names (and pathologises) those outside this speaking position, but maintains a sense of the rational self. Irrationality is pushed onto ‘others’, reinforcing a subjectivity that is neutral, and therefore beyond critique. Meanwhile, ‘other’ categories share in common a realisation of their bodied selves – the black woman, the gay man, and the working class citizen each evoke bodies of particularity, whether involving black skin, limp wrists, or manual labour (not to mention concepts of ‘cultural lack’, promiscuity, and disease).
Psychoanalysis has been credited with challenging some of the gendered binaries that stabilise women’s subordination, and it has been said that Freud was one of the first figures to address the importance of the body to the self, blurring the mind/body and nature/culture divisions. Freud’s Oedipus principle relies upon psychical developments that are shaped and sustained through revelations of, and ideas about, anatomical difference. This is articulated in Freud’s concepts of penis envy (the castrated female who seeks a phallus) and the Oedipal conflict (the boy who fears castration). Despite obvious problems with Freudian psychoanalysis, the concept of an unconscious that harbours unknowable desires cannot entertain a mind/body separation.
[Freud’s] assault on dualism is perhaps most readily perceived in his notion of sexual drives, the drive being a concept that lies midway between the mind and the body, irreducible to either (Grosz 1994, 52).
According to Freud, it is through the sight of the parent’s sex organs (or perceived lack thereof), that the infant’s sexual development is initiated. For Freud, the trajectory of sexual development is shaped through the body – its contact with others, its difference to others, and a series of processes in which the body becomes controlled. Here, the infant must move through the oral and anal drives in order to reach the genital drive (sexuality). Despite the anatomical underpinnings of some of Freud’s work, it can be said that he “is not really concerned with the question of anatomy per se, seeking instead the psychical implications of anatomical differences” (Grosz 1994, 57).
Lacan’s psychoanalysis was heavily influenced by Freud, yet lessened the focus on anatomical difference by introducing the notion of the ‘Symbolic’ as the realm of language – a necessity for the constitution of self. Criticism of Freud’s ‘anatomy as destiny’ was overcome through focusing not only upon the material self, but the discursive self. The discursive and material are presented as interwoven – both being necessary in order to speak of (and from) the self. In Lacan’s concept of the ‘mirror phase’, the child first discovers her/his self through recognition of the self reflected in the mirror – “the mirror-image would seem to be the threshold of the visible world” (Lacan 1989, 3). As with Freud, recognition of material bodily difference (from the (m)other) is what propels the (male) child into the symbolic world.
According to Lacanian psychoanalysis, it is only when the child speaks (a bodily act) that he/she can move beyond the need phase, to the demand phase – both necessary in the construction of desire. Desire here is framed as ‘lack’ – an ongoing pursuit to attain the phallus. Need, demand and desire, take the place of Freudian drives, and shift the focus further from anatomy to language (Grosz 1990).
Lacan distinguishes between the anatomical penis and the symbolic phallus. The phallus signifies power, and while the penis-bearing subject may be thought to possess the phallus, it is beyond the material world, yet can be signified through body parts (including the penis) or bodies (the woman, or mother). The phallus “can play its role only when veiled, that is to say, as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck, when it is raised to the function of signifier” (Lacan 1989 319). Lacan considers the mother, the powerful figure in an infant’s life, as the original phallus. However, the phallus is re-located to the Symbolic father when the child discovers her/his alienation from the mother, and upon realising that the mother is unable to possess the phallus within the Symbolic order. The child’s father (situated in the Real) is not the Symbolic father, yet for the child he may signify the Symbolic father (Grosz 1990).
But for many second wave feminists, psychoanalysis was considered phallocentric, another symptom of male power, an instrument for sexual domination of women, as ‘hysterics’, as a frail, underdeveloped sex. The focus of much second wave feminism was for equality – women’s battle for social, political, and economic freedoms. Such feminism was anchored in the material world, the focus upon visible inequalities within the workforce, the domestic sphere, and the objectification of women. To achieve equality, women sought to prove that they were capable of taking on roles traditionally assigned to men – in the workforce and in public and intellectual spheres. This approach requires a downplaying of bodily differences between men and women, and perhaps adopts the Cartesian principle of mind over matter. The denial of body, like the privileging of male-developed systems of government/law/workforce, means that women’s equal participation can only be generated and sustained through their appropriation of masculine ideals and standards.
For many feminists, the body was dangerous territory, so was often ignored. Any hint of woman as ‘natural’ rather than ‘cultural’ might trigger a return to naturalised presuppositions, where woman is hormonal, weak, emotional, delicate and disfigured in relation to the dominant idea of the gender neutral (male) ‘public citizen’.
The denial of bodies and bodily difference meant that uteruses, menstrual flows and hormones remained symbols of women’s inability to be (men’s) equal. There was much to lose should women’s bodies enter the debate. Of feminists who did discuss bodies, many treated the body as the cause of oppression, and looked for ways to escape biological servitude.
…women, biologically distinguished from men, are culturally distinguished from “human.” Nature produced the fundamental inequality – half the human race must bear and rear the children of all of them – which was later consolidated, institutionalized, in the interests of men. Reproduction of the species cost women dearly (Firestone 1972, 232).
In her bid for equality, Simone de Beauvoir speaks of bodily transcendence as something that is only achieved by men (1997). Women however, are bound to immanence due to their biological ties to maternity. According to Beauvoir, this marks women’s subordination and inability to participate in culture as men do – as intellectual citizens. For Beauvoir therefore, the body is a liability, an obstacle to transcend (Beauvoir 1997).
An alternative feminist approach has been to disentangle negative assumptions tied to women’s bodies. This is the approach taken by ‘difference feminists’, who through post-structural analysis question not so much the meaning and subordinations placed onto female bodies, but the phallocentric codes that shape these meanings. Through a different framework, what might it mean to embody woman?
Has a worldwide erosion of the gains won in women’s struggles occurred because of the failure to lay foundations different from those on which the world of men is constructed? (Irigaray 1993a, 6).
Phenomenology also gives the mind/body deconstructionist another possible avenue, particularly through the work of Merleau-Ponty, who speaks of ‘the lived body’ (Crossley 2001; Williams & Bendelow 1998). In this approach, the individual’s experience of the world as through their bodies, where a subject is necessarily bodied in order to have a relationship with the world. Therefore, an impartial world-view as dislocated from the self is impossible. According to Merleau-Ponty, “[t]he body is our anchorage in a world” (1968, 144).
We are our bodies and can therefore never completely stand in the distantiated relationship to them which is demanded in regarding them as an object or a ‘something’ (Crossley 1996, 36).
Spinoza asks not what a body is, but what it can do, which paves the way to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the body without organs (the BwO) – “what a body can do in terms of affecting and being affected by other bodies” (Knights & Thanem 2005, 38). The BwO is framed as a desiring-machine, removed from the bind of its material form – that which distinguishes its separation from mind, or self (Deleuze & Guattari 1983). The BwO is positioned beyond gender, and allows for greater fluidity, uncertainties, flux. For Deleuze and Guattari, it transcends binary traps that rob the subject of its desiring possibilities.
It is said to be Foucault, who introduced the body into contemporary social theory (Gatens 1996). Through his genealogies of the flesh, he investigated ways in which bodies have been shaped via discourse. Volume One of The History of Sexuality illustrates a seventeenth century shift from sovereign power to bio-power, whereby regulatory systems of control were developed via institutions such as the school, the hospital and the prison (Foucault 1979). Through enacting control on the micro-level (individual bodies), such institutions fed into macro-level systems (social bodies) of surveillance, categorisation, and social order. Here, the confessions of the flesh (via the doctor/priest/psychoanalyst/etc.) informed, and were informed by, the roles of governing institutions (law/medicine/education/etc.). Such ‘confessions’ were embedded into discursive flows that further regulated citizens considered by Foucault as ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault 1977).
Foucault argues that sexuality is productive and not repressive – again, something that feeds upon itself – an ongoing discourse that allows a continual spiraling production of our ideas, beliefs, and sexual selves. Yet, Foucault speaks not so much of the body, or the mind, but of sex and sexuality. Foucault’s history of sexuality was not so much about bodies engaged in sexuality, as bodies engaged in the discourse of the truth of sex. Through the discourse of truth and sex comes “a knowledge of the subject; a knowledge not so much of his form, but of that which divides him, determines him perhaps, but above all causes him to be ignorant of himself” (Foucault 1979, 70).
Judith Butler extends upon the work of Foucault, whereby sex is discursively produced, but also informed by a ‘heterosexual imperative’ (Butler 1990). Butler theorises material and sexed bodies, making the universal body (as used by Foucault) redundant. For Butler, gender is a performance (of sexed bodies) influenced by discursive notions of sex as truth. In relation to Foucault, Butler asks: “Is it true that ‘sex’ as a historical category can be understood apart from the sexes or a notion of sexual difference?” (Butler 1996, 61). In other words, universal notions of sex are impossible, for it is only through difference between “the sexes” that we can speak of sex.
Sex-Gender
The sex/gender divide has long been discussed and the uses and definitions assigned to each have been inconsistent. The looseness of these terms often results in a blurred distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, one often collapsing into the other (Gatens 1996).
Sex, gender, sexuality: three terms whose usage relations and analytic relations are almost irremediably slippery (Sedgwick 1990, 27).
In 1968, Robert Stoller wrote: “It is rarely questioned that there are only two biologic sexes, male and female, with two resultant genders, masculine and feminine” (1968, 29). Stoller articulates a ‘core gender identity’ as the basis of an individual’s self-determined gender, influenced by the interrelated factors of anatomy, parent/peer attitudes, and ‘a biological force’ (ibid.). The child’s recognition of her/his sex precedes recognition of her/his gender – for example, the boy develops a phallic awareness from which he can think ‘I am male’ some time before he may think ‘I am masculine’ (ibid. 40).
Simone de Beauvoir’s account of gender-becoming (where one is not born a woman, but one becomes a woman) positions gender as something learnt (Beauvoir 1997). From this perspective, gender is not real, but a role anchored by the realness of biology, a path to becoming woman. Here, sex and gender are different, yet bound.
While most second wave feminism acknowledged a relationship of sex to gender, it was perhaps the gap between sex/gender that was the major focus of English-language feminists. Sex was commonly understood as natural and fixed, with gender as socially constructed. Therefore, patriarchy could only be eradicated through challenging gender, as something constructed, and therefore able to be deconstructed, reconstructed, changed. Ideals of women as irrational, emotional and sensitive were located within gender, so could be overcome. However, this methodology fails to ask why such traits might be subordinated in the first place.
The nature/culture distinction between sex and gender was highlighted by Ann Oakley, who saw great potential in shifting (cultural) aspects of gender, once removed from (natural) sex – from a biology traditionally used to naturalise and cement inequalities (Oakley 1972). Oakley paraphrases much of Stoller’s work on gender identities, whereby people have the option of considering themselves masculine or feminine, regardless of sex. But while gender is positioned as mobile and potentially subversive, Oakley relies upon a culturally specific binary whereby transsexuals and the intersexed must fit into one of two categories – male or female (Stoller 1968; Oakley 1972).
Judith Butler asks: “Is sex to gender as feminine is to masculine?” (1993, 4). In other words, are sex and femininity the passive sites that gender and masculinity act upon, or penetrate? Could it be that the feminised natural woman will always be outside the masculine, cultural world of man? Something to be colonised, tyrannised, exploited?
In Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, Kessler and McKenna highlight the inconsistent usage of ‘gender’ and ‘sex’, and instead adopt the term ‘gender’ in reference to biological distinctions between males and females – “to emphasize our position that the element of social construction is primary in all aspects of being female or male” (Kessler & McKenna 1978). They argue that ‘gender’, when held as distinct from ‘sex’, is still treated as dichotomous, with one gender being mutually exclusive to the other (1978, 7).
Kessler and McKenna highlight Western cultures’ acceptance of only two possible sexes (referred to as ‘genders’). When a person’s sex is uncertain through their outward appearance, it is only then that reproductive functions, hormones, and sexual organs are assessed to clarify one’s female/male-ness (1978). This illustrates that sex is most commonly determined without knowledge of such defining characteristics. Therefore, sex can be performed outside of one’s biological status – or rather, it can be crossed.
The difficulty in re-visioning sex/gender is perhaps most apparent through transexualism and intersexualities. Here exists a potential to view not just two sex categories, but many. As has been highlighted however, transsexual and intersexed people are commonly viewed as those who ‘cross’ gender – moving not from one sex to ‘another’ but from one sex to ‘the other’ (Kessler & McKenna 1978). This is evidenced in gender assignment surgery performed on babies of ‘indeterminable’ sex (indeterminable because they are born into a culture that can only see two possibilities of sex) (Fausto-Sterling 2000).
Elizabeth Grosz questions the validity of the sex/gender division, which presupposes that a removal of gender would reveal a pre-cultural sex – a ‘tabula rasa’ body. Yet, she also highlights the impossibility of removing the social layer of gender that is said to shroud our sexed bodies (1994, 18). Her argument leads her readers to ‘difference feminism’ which, rather than trying to solve gender, is more intent on disrupting the sex/gender division, focusing on neither sex nor gender, but on the sexed body – how it is articulated, regulated, lived and expressed (ibid.).
Butler is also critical of the sex/gender distinction and argues that by attempting to find equality through an interrogation of gender (as the mutable aspect of sexual difference), sex is left unchallenged, and remains unchallengeable so long as it is considered a natural fact (1993). According to Butler, if gender is the social construction of sex, and there is no access to sex, then sex becomes a fiction (ibid. 5). Yet, sex is not a fixed position, but a regulatory ideal. Butler believes that the ‘heterosexual matrix’ that remains current so long as sex is untheorised, as a process that prevents the articulation of sexual identities outside heterosexuality (Butler 1993).
…being sexed and being human are coextensive and simultaneous; sex is an analytic attribute of the human; there is no human who is not sexed; sex qualifies the human as a necessary attribute (Butler 1990, 142).
Focusing upon bodies can challenge the sex/gender and culture/nature dualisms. The body as subject can be considered both sexed and gendered, and the sexed body can be both cultural (discursively and socially produced) and natural (biological). Breaking up dualist frameworks that partition the body from the self can assist in further understanding how bodies might be integral to selves, subordinations and the process of ‘othering’, through mutual exclusion. The focus upon bodies (as discursive, material and imagined) opens new channels for debate involving those who face social disadvantage on the basis of bodily difference.
A focus upon bodies also reveals the instability of gender:
Gender is not the issue, sexual difference is. The very same behaviours (whether they be masculine or feminine) have quite different personal and social significances when acted out by the male subject on the one hand, and the female subject on the other (Gatens 1996, 9).
In other words, gender is tied to bodies, but the actions and traits of (sexed) bodies are guided by, and themselves shape, regulatory systems of normative gender. So much so, that a particular act/appropriation (eg. a stance, a gesture, a hairstyle) performed by men and women cannot be interpreted in the same way. As Grosz highlights, “gender is not an ideological superstructure added to a biological base” (1994, 58), but is fielded differently amongst different social actors, such as men and women.
Woman-Man
This domain of the less than rational human bounds the figure of human reason, producing that “man” as one who is without a childhood; is not a primate and so is relieved of the necessity of eating, defecating, living and dying (Butler 1993, 48).
Identities are commonly shaped by classes, ethnicities, sexualities, religions, and other factors understood as cultural markers attached to specific bodies. Many of these aspects, like sexualities, may not be visible on the surface of bodies. Therefore, sexual orientations can be considered less real, more able to change, grow, attach to, and separate from the individual. A lesbian may have once considered herself heterosexual, just as a heterosexual woman may have once described herself as lesbian/bisexual/queer/other. Yet, the fluid sexualities of such a woman does not challenge her ‘true’ status as ‘woman’. The position of male or female, when understood as an underlying truth, is exempt from constructionist theories.
A naturalised concept of sex ensures that Western cultures have only to negotiate between two sexes. Regardless of sexuality, class, ethnicity, etc, all people at all times in Western societies are positioned (sometimes despite self-negotiation) as male or female. Feminist history is founded upon this principle and furthers this binary through a focus upon ‘women’s rights’ and a destabilisation of male power. For many, feminism is the struggle to make the rights of men accessible to women. Equality pre-supposes a clear distinction between men and women – yet, one that must be erased for this kind of feminism to succeed.
The criticism of such positions brought to the fore by post-structuralism and post-colonialism have disempowered notions of men and women as homogenous groups, not to mention the idea of sex as a natural, unquestionable, fact. How is it possible to argue for the needs of all women, at all times, in all places, for all classes and sexual groupings?
The desire for a unified community among women is a dangerous illusion. In this multidimensional, contradictory society no person is a unity, but a confluence of several group affinities that do not necessarily cohere (Young 1990, 10).
So how might we speak of men or women if these two categories cannot represent real, homogenous groups? How might I argue for an embodied maleness if this presupposes a maleness that is real and definable? Butler notes the problematics of the term ‘woman’ used in feminism, yet sees this as necessary if used tactically (1993, 29). To critique the concept of woman (or materiality, as Butler further argues) is not to reject it, but to challenge and reform it, acknowledging its limitations. Deconstructing bodies and/or sex is not about abandoning such concepts – “To call a presupposition into question is not the same as doing away with it” (1993, 30).
Grosz asks: “If we are not justified in taking women as category, what political grounding does feminism have?” (1995, 55). This question signals a wariness with which post-structuralist feminists approach categories of ‘sex’. But it is acknowledged that in some ways and at some times, the binary concepts of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ are necessary, particularly for the sake of coherency (Gatens 1996).
Throughout this thesis, I will employ the descriptors male and female, though will try to avoid positioning men and women as oppositional, universal, or fixed categories. Cross cultural studies reveals that a Western model of gender dualism is not universal, and that male/female is just as much a discursive construction as masculine/feminine, despite certain reproductive ‘facts’ that condition the beliefs of a natural, heterosexual binary.
Psychoanalysis draws a hard line between male and female, relying upon Freudian concepts of Oedipal development that results in hetero-normative sexuality. According to Lacan, women are unable to participate in the Symbolic order due to a fragile and perhaps transient subjectivity in which they can only relate to the ‘the Other’ – the Symbolic father whose name she bears, but only until she takes the name of another – moving from one father to the next, never purely existing as self (Gatens 1996).
The Name of the Father relates to a system of genealogy that is as socially visible as it is symbolic. Unlike most women, ‘man’ has a history, a genealogy, a name that carries him as son and descendant. His relationship with woman, as wife, does not alter this. Rather, it cements it. His history is fixed, stable, continued, unquestioned. He has a place. ‘Woman’ makes it possible to sustain this patriarchal model by sacrificing her own name, her own genealogy to maintain his, bearing him sons to continue the process of a male-centred history (Lorraine 1999, 32-4).
Gatens highlights how certain traits are more valued in men but not in women and vice versa (1996). This understanding might be broadened and applied within the categories of ‘men’ or ‘women’? Surely some men are allowed to own/express certain ‘femininities’ more than others. When factors of race, class, culture, ability and sexuality enter the scene, the differences among males, or among females, are perhaps as significant as those between males and females. That all men are unable and unlikely to express the same levels of ‘masculinity’ underscores the problematics of categorising man (Connell 1995). The male artist in Surry Hills may not have much in common with the male farmer in Bega, regardless of similarities in age, time, and a relative proximity. This is not to say that one or the other is closer to ‘woman’, but that maleness has many manifestations, as does our perceptions and acceptance of various gendered roles/actions/identities. It still might be the case that neither of these men has thought about what it means to be a man.
Without woman, there is no man. Without female bodies, there is no male body. Yet, the latter is exempt from critique because he is the basis from which all else is measured, given shape. Yet, the categories ‘men’ and ‘women’ do not fit nicely as opposites or complementaries. There are differences within and without these categories. How might feminist ideas of embodied selves be taken up by men?
Struggles around the attainment of women’s autonomy imply that men’s struggles against patriarchy, while possibly allied with women’s in some circumstances, cannot be identified with them. In acknowledging their sexual specificity, men’s challenge to patriarchy is necessarily different from women’s, which entails producing their own sexual specificity. (Grosz 1995, 54).
It is said that the male subject “pushes confusion and lack of clarity onto the feminine other” (Lorraine 1999 24), and in this sense, the understanding of masculine/feminine and male/female as mutually exclusive terms might be said to be a masculine concept. That which serves males, paints them into a position in which ‘man’ can recite the world at a distance from his self, observing, naming, creating, as God.
According to Butler, philosophy itself is only possible through its exclusion of women (1993, 37). This violence of exclusion might be overcome if women learn to ‘disidentify’ with regulatory norms of heterosexuality (ibid. 4). But heterosexuality is not so much the problem, as is the way it frames one sex as mutually exclusive of the other.
To approach the subject of “man” or “woman” only via sex is insufficient, and in some ways, relies upon an understanding of difference through sameness, where one is not one only through being its other. But as Butler reveals there are other exclusions at play, such as race, class, sexuality and so on. Such things make it impossible to prise the sexes apart, to draw a line down the centre of his and hers. As does love – something that binds individuals, makes alliances, casts doubt in a feminist project that is thought to be ‘one sex against the other’. As with a philosophy of the neutral person, a feminism of the neutral woman is flawed and disadvantaged.
In The Straight Mind, Monique Wittig equates the categories of man/woman with master/slave, and believes that the categories of sex are not natural, but political, created through oppression – “There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary” (Wittig 1992, 2).
For Wittig, sex also implies compulsory heterosexuality, and women, lesbians and gay men are imprisoned in a discursive system that ensures they betray themselves each time they speak their selves – the use of the word “I” implying the universal (male) subject. The male subject is the only subject that is not sexed, whereas woman cannot escape her sex.
For the category of sex is the category that sticks to women, for only they cannot be conceived of from outside of it…. [W]e must destroy the sexes as a sociological reality if we want to start to exist (Wittig 1992, 8).
In order to challenge male power, Hearn and Collison propose not to abolish systems of sex, but to decentre male/masculine discourses (1994). They believe that as men are at the centre of all discourse it is impossible to address male power without an investigation of ‘man’. Hearn and Collison speak of ‘maleness’ and ‘masculinity’ as strongly bound, and at times it seems they are the same thing, indecipherable. Perhaps a more beneficial way to decentre masculine discourse might be to disentangle “male” from “masculinity”. Together, such concepts can only reinforce each other, and masculinity might be nothing more than a protective layer over maleness. Judith Halberstam separates masculinity from maleness by applying masculinity to women, and thereby displacing the role of males in constructing and owning what is deemed masculine (1998).
Masculinities
Masculinity does not belong to men, has not been produced only by men, and does not properly express male heterosexuality (Halberstam 1998, 241).
Within gender studies, masculinity has been presented in contradictory and conflicting ways. It is, like ‘gender’, slippery. Yet it is often used without qualification, presupposing a common understanding. Dictionary meanings indicate that to be ‘masculine’ is to possess ‘man-like qualities’. But if we believe that there are as many ways of being men as there are men, then this term is redundant. Within gender studies, masculinity is usually discussed in terms of a gender role – something cultural, performative, and related to, yet distinct from, biological definitions of sex. However, as noted by Judith Halberstam, the discussion of masculinity has rarely strayed from ‘men’ and male subjectivities, focusing upon masculinities as a gender construction that shapes men, particularly white men (Halberstam 1998). With the pluralisation of ‘masculinity’, came the categories of ‘black masculinities’, ‘gay masculinities’, ‘working class masculinities’ and more – recognition that there are various ways to enact masculinity (Connell 1995). Yet, where is the discussion of masculinities that do not fit neatly into categories of men (as black, gay, working-class)? Where might masculinity exist beyond the male? How might female, queer, and transgendered subjects, or those falling somewhere between black and white, participate in the construction of masculinities?
It is a common assertion that masculinity is shaped through negation, defined by what it is not, eg. not female; not homosexual (Segal 1990), and therefore it is arrived at through a series of denials (Alsop et al. 2002, 156). This is supported by R.W. Connell’s notion of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, as a masculine ideology shaped through men’s distancing of themselves from women and homosexual men, as well as other subordinated masculinities (1987).
Hegemonic masculinity is constructed in relation to women and to subordinated masculinities. These other masculinities need not be as clearly defined – indeed, achieving hegemony may consist precisely in preventing alternatives gaining cultural definition and recognition as alternatives, confining them to ghettos, to privacy, to unconsciousness (Connell 1987, 186).
Connell acknowledges the difficulty most men would have in achieving hegemonic masculinity, believing it is sustained less through its achievement, than through a complicit acceptance of most men. John MacInnes takes this further, and argues that it is impossible for the biological male to express hegemonic masculinity (1998, 15). As a ‘cultural ideal’ it is “an uninhabitable goal for the majority of men” (Alsop et al. 2002, 142).
The terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ point beyond categorical sex difference to the ways men differ among themselves, and women differ among themselves, in matters of gender (Connell 1995, 69).
In this statement Connell appears to be saying that masculinities denote the ways men differ among themselves. He does not discuss the masculine possibilities or actualities of women. As hegemonic masculinity is an impossible goal for most men, an unreachable ideology, could it not be said that it is also an impossible goal for women. Women are not exempt from performing masculinity, and it might be said that some women are closer to hegemonic masculinity than some men.
Connell appears to use “masculinities” as a tool to pluralise maleness, and ties masculinities to male bodies in a way that seems counterproductive. Here, black masculinities are what black men have or express, as with gay men and gay masculinities. Does this mean that men who are gay and/or black are exempt from the goal of hegemonic masculinity? Do they not contribute to masculine imperatives? Articulating such streams of masculinity draws divisive lines between men, downplaying the overlaps between black, white, gay, straight, working class, etc. This allocation of differences along class, sexuality and race lines, does little to interrogate male power, and the forces of masculinity with which all men (and all women) live and contend.
While such categories bear evidence that masculinities (and/or males) have various constructions, and that masculinity can not be apportioned to all men in the same way, could it be that male sub-groups reinforce the ideal of white heterosexual middle-class man as normal? He who remains undiscussed, implied. Framing masculinity as what it is not – beyond the categories of black, gay, female, etc – further positions it as beyond reach; a force we cannot pin down.
By destabilizing the link between sex and gender, between the male body and the construct ‘masculinity’, queer analysis potentially explodes the very foundations upon which the ‘new men’s studies’ is built (Alsop et al. 2002, 132).
To interrogate masculinity, it might be best to untangle it from sex, from the idea that it is owned and enacted by men, that it can be likened to an essential power that lurks within the male subject, whether he likes it or not. The concept of masculinity as dominant, rational and objective might rely upon projection. Whereby, anything that obstructs or potentially undermines the rational position of the masculine self must be projected onto others. The abject (as that which threatens the unitary, impenetrable body), and embodiment itself, are therefore projected onto others – women, gay men, non-white people, others. As long as such groups maintain an opposition to masculinity, the masculine position remains so.
Queer theory has been pivotal in the interrogation of masculine subjectivity, as well as the heterosexual matrix that supports masculinity, being that which is “fundamentally dependent on that which it must exclude” (Butler 1993, 52). Accordingly, Butler sees at the core of heterosexuality (and masculinity), “a possible identification with an abject homosexuality” (ibid. 111). For without homosexuality, heterosexuality could not be conceived. The gay/lesbian ‘identity’ was created by and through heterosexuality, and this identity, even when ‘owned’ or embraced by those who it names, strengthens a heterosexuality built upon mutual exclusion (ibid. 113). Therefore, to speak of ‘gay masculinities’ (or ‘gay man’) as Connell and other masculinity theorists do, reinforces the heterosexual imperatives through which masculinity operates, giving it, and heterosexuality, a “false unity” (ibid.), failing to challenge mutual exclusions that keeps the queers, the women, the irrational, at bay.
Much has been written about a ‘crisis of masculinity’ (Alsop et al. 2002, 30), yet unfortunately this is not seen as a good thing. This masculine crisis has been the motivation for many books and anthologies about men and masculinities in recent years (see Horrocks, Kimmel, Kaufman, Brod, Hearn, etc). In Australia and elsewhere, this has encompassed public debate about the struggle of men and boys (all men and all boys, apparently) to keep their footing in a gender-changing world. A technological world where physical prowess is no longer valuable, and the economic stability of the family via a male ‘breadwinner’ is a more remote possibility. It is said that the expectations on men as fathers, employees, colleagues, and husbands have changed (Pease 2000). Much of this ‘crisis’ is informed by traditional Western values of family and nationhood. A specific example is the current Australian government’s pledge to increase the number of male school teachers on the basis that more male role models will decrease learning difficulties in boys. Through this, maleness and masculinity become one. The father/son emphasis, whereby role models can only be same-sexed suggests misogyny, homosocial privilege, and ongoing heterosexism. As Foucault might have predicted, the recent ‘crisis of masculinity’ is both a product of, and continues to produce, a governance of men, boys, fatherhood and ‘masculinity’. ‘Woman’ is excluded from such discussion.
Halberstam is critical of queer accounts of ‘drag queen’ performance that focus drag queens to illustrate gender performativity (1998). She proposes that drag performances by women and men are incomparable, as men in drag tend to exaggerate femininities, whereas drag ‘kinging’ involves downplaying in order to become masculine. Halberstam believes this is so because masculinity is non-performative. As a neutral role, it is undeveloped; it ‘just is’. Whereas femininity is culturally framed as artificial – as expressed through drag queen performances (ibid. 234).
While Halberstam undermines male/female dualism, she fails to interrogate other dualisms such as masculine/feminine or passive/active (Alsop et al. 2002, 161-62). She is confident in her usage of the term masculinity, as something that is butch, assertive, and non-girly, while femininity is positioned as passive, ineffectual. For Halberstam, femininity is a negative term – something to work against. This is done through her allegiance with masculinity, and performative masculine subjectivities. Parallels might be drawn between her stance and that of second wave equality feminists who support an erosion of femininities (as constructed), maternity (as prohibitive) and difference, in order to achieve an equal status to men (the dominant class).
Aside from such flaws, I find Halberstam’s approach to masculinities refreshing in that it is not oppositional or combative to male-centred constructions of masculinities, but is simply indifferent to these. Of her goal to extend current understandings of masculinity, she states:
Such affirmations begin not by subverting masculine power or taking up a position against masculine power but by turning a blind eye to conventional masculinities and refusing to engage (Halberstam 1998, 9).
This approach undermines goals of renegotiating gender through encouraging men to be more feminine and women to be more masculine – arguments that do little to destabilise gender roles, but continue to rely upon masculinity’s relationship to maleness and femininity’s with femaleness. But masculinity is not produced by male bodies. It is a cultural ideal that privileges men through a denial of embodiment. Apparently, the sex of men does not inflect the voices in which we speak. Masculinity is neutral, and neutrality is an investment made by men in order to deny an unstable, irrational, emotional existence, allowing an impartial world-view. Could it be said that the very construction of subjectivity is masculine? – subjectivity as a unified self.
Nietzsche says “there is no being behind doing, affecting, becoming” (as quoted in Gutterman 1994, 220). In other words, it is not a matter of being masculine, but doing masculinity. This relates to Butler’s conception of gender performativity, whereby gender is not innate or owned, but rather, it is performed (1990). Perhaps this is where the studies of masculinities have failed to transgress the ties between ‘masculinity’ and ‘maleness’. For if one’s maleness causes him/her to possess a certain kind of masculinity, and this masculinity is how one ‘is’ a man, then this circular relationship between men and masculinities seals off any male possibilities that lie outside masculinity. It might also prevent ‘others’ from accessing masculinity. If masculinity is re-cast as something men do, rather than something men are, this makes masculinity available to all people, as something inhabited, performed, and if need be, discarded.
Masculinity exists only as various ideologies or fantasies, about what men should be like, which men and women develop to make sense of their lives” (MacInnes 1998, 2).
Here, John MacInnes argues that masculinity does not exist as an identity. He believes that gender (as an ideology) is imagined, and therefore, it makes little sense to discuss ways of changing gender/masculinities when they are not real. Masculinity is not so much what one has, or even does, but perhaps what one aspires to do. It does not belong to people, so much as it is a series of assumptions (1998, 39). It cannot be challenged at the level of the individual if it does not belong to the individual, yet this is common practice among masculinity theorists such as Connell.
Gender is positioned here as a fetish of sexual difference, and MacInnes discusses the replacement of religious fetishism (where God decides our role) with the sex fetish, where “existential anxiety is often dealt with by projecting it onto sexual difference, imagined as gender” (1998, 13). To further the impossibility of containing masculinity, MacInnes likens it to national identity, which is also non-locatable within the body, also not real. We do not look for signs of national identity within the individual, as it is not an essence or a component of self, but is a belief about the self (1998, 40). The subject believes that he/she belongs to a national identity, just as the subject believes in their masculinity/femininity. And as with other beliefs, these cannot be measured.
In a similar fashion, Jeffrey Weeks believes that gay identity is a myth, a belief, “a necessary fiction” created to combat homophobia (1991). If homophobia did not exist, if gay men were not harassed, scorned, pathologised, bashed and feared, would there be such a thing as ‘a gay man’? Or was the identity created through an ongoing discourse that features opposing assertions of homophobia and gay pride, and all that lies between?
Might the existence of gay and lesbian pride relies upon shame. According to Sally Munt and her work on butch/femme lesbian identities, “[w]e interminably reconstitute our lesbian pride out of shame” (1998, 7). Might it also be said that all pride, whether sexual, racial or otherwise, is constituted through shame? To what extent might ‘man’ be actualised through shame? Is pride not considered a masculine trait?
In butch/femme, lesbian gender and sexualities are discussed in all their complexities, and various ways of belonging to each category are explored (Munt 1998). Unlike masculine/feminine, butch/femme does not translate to man/woman in any straightforward way. While it might be said that butch is masculine and femme is feminine, these terms can apply to both men and women in ways that are not deemed positive/negative (unlike the association of femininity with men and masculinity with women). Butch/femme, unlike masculine/feminine, does not assume heterosexuality. Within a lesbian framework it can be said that neither term is privileged in such a way as the masculine subject is favoured in the straight world.
How might the butch/femme model be applied to men? The butch man might be fetishised by some gay men, yet discredited by others who favour/desire the femme. The gender frameworks of gay men must differ from straight men, as maleness is not only applied to the self, but to those desired (desire itself being plural and relative). The maleness of the self and ‘the desired other’ might not be the same, and may reside anywhere in the continuum of butch/femme. Where might straight men locate themselves within butch/femme? Would they relate to butch in the way that they are tied to dominant conceptions of masculinity? Do heterosexual women desire butch or femme men? Perhaps neither, perhaps both. Perhaps women and men desire positions located somewhere between these two points.
It might also be said that butch/femme are impossible categories, stereotypes pushed to their limits. Butch seems to parody masculinity, and highlight its performative role. Femme could also be conceived as a parody – more woman than woman, the ultimate femininity. This widening of the margins, and with it the impossibility of falling into one of two categories, expands the field of gender. Through such a queering of the subject (as butch/femme), gender might become a more open, less restrictive playing field, and an adherence to heterosexualised polarities may not be so necessary/desirable.
Connell asks:
…is it actually masculinity that is a problem in gender politics? Or is it rather the institutional arrangements that produce inequality, and thus generate the tensions that have brought ‘masculinity’ under scrutiny? (1995, 42-3).
Rather than answering Connell’s question, I wish to question it. ‘Masculinity’ is referred to here as the behaviour of men, and the goal of ‘gender politics’ is presumably for gender equality. This question therefore asks, is it the fault of men that inequality exists, or is inequality institutional? The question seems to deny the role of men in the production and reinforcement of “institutional arrangements” that promote masculine ideologies. By anchoring masculinities to male subjects, Connell does not consider masculinity as an ideology of such institutions, and the systems of knowledge on which they are built. Connell supposes that it is men that are under scrutiny, rather than a masculine ideology in which all people are entangled. An ideology that privileges (perhaps only recognises) subjectivities within the grounds of neutral rationality.
The strength of the masculine order is seen in the fact that it dispenses with justification: the androcentric vision imposes itself as neutral and has no need to spell itself out in discourses aimed at legitimating it (Bourdieu 2001, 9).