Theorizing Masculinities

Harry W. Brod, Michael Kaufman

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9781506319643
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing together the broad range of theoretical issues posed in the new study of masculinity, contributors from diverse backgrounds address in this volume the different disciplinary roots of theories of masculinity - sociology, psychoanalysis, ethnography, and inequality studies. Subsequent chapters theoretically model many issues central to the study of men - power, ethnicity, feminism, homophobia - or develop theoretical explanations of some of the institutions most closely identified with men including the military and the men's movement.

1

Introduction

HARRY BROD
MICHAEL KAUFMAN

Each of us has previously written or edited two books on men and masculinities: Harry Brod’s edited volumes The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies (1987) and A Mensch Among Men: Explorations in Jewish Masculinity (1988) and Michael Kaufman’s edited volume Beyond Patriarchy: Essays by Men on Pleasure, Power, and Change (1987) and his book Cracking the Armour: Power, Pain, and the Lives of Men (1993). But neither of us has coedited a book before. That we feel the need to do so now is certainly testimony to the growth of the field and the growing difficulty of one person being capable of encompassing within one’s purview the wide range of topics needing to be addressed. Perhaps it is also indicative of the cooperative culture that is emerging in profeminist men’s work, in both intellectual and organizational efforts.

Though we have found through working together that our views of politics and scholarship are at least compatible, if not in many areas identical, we had each set somewhat different agendas for our earlier books. The Making of Masculinities intended to delineate a scholarly field of inquiry, interrogating different disciplines and approaches for new feminist understandings of masculinities. Though primarily written by men, it had some women contributors, too. Beyond Patriarchy aimed to be a more direct political intervention by men, many of them academics to be sure, but nonetheless men engaging in a more direct encounter with contemporary culture to further a feminist agenda for change. Though both books were committed to both scholarship and activism, they made different choices about foreground and background.

In this book we wanted to retain and further develop what we thought best about our choices of focus in our earlier books. We wanted to keep a simultaneous focus on both scholarship and activism and, indeed, to explore their interconnections around the thorny issues involving feminist work on men, performed mostly, but not exclusively, by men. Fortunately, another one of our aims for this book dovetailed perfectly with this one. We wanted the book to represent a sort of state-of-the-art look at theorizing masculinities in what seemed to us a new, second wave of work in this area. Brod had ended his introduction to The Making of Masculinities with the words “My greatest hope for this volume of essays in the new men’s studies is that it be a stepping stone for a newer men’s studies.” One of the hallmarks of this “newer men’s studies,” we believe, is precisely a greater awareness of the relationship between theory and practice in both activism and scholarship. Many of the chapters in this volume explore these issues.

One thing that should not be surprising is that most of the contributors to this volume are men who have been active in the profeminist men’s movement. For some this has meant the organization of activist groups working on issues of men’s violence, supporting women’s freedom of choice on abortion, or challenging homophobia and developing a gay-affirmative culture. For others it has meant such activities as taking antisexist initiatives into the school system. It has meant working to develop umbrella groups or coordinating organizations doing political action in all the countries we come from, and it often means working in men’s support groups. In some cases it has meant encouraging the development of a scholarship by men that is committed to research, writing, and teaching that is profeminist, gay affirmative, and dedicated to the enhancement of men’s lives.

Perhaps this interest in the relation of theory and practice dates us, accurately for the two editors and for most of the contributors as well, as children of the 1960s. After all, the 1990s often seems an intellectual era in which the world of theory all too often takes on a life completely inaccessible to all but a handful of people and in which the love of clever word play seems to have more attraction than using our knowledge to analyze the problems that surround us in order to effect social change.

The real issue, though, is that the existence of the chapters in this volume results not from the contemplation by men of feminist ideas in the abstract, but rather, in the case of those of us who are male, from our encounter with these ideas in the context of our own processes of change, perhaps from our experiences in men’s support groups, perhaps from looking at our own ideas and behavior, perhaps from being challenged in relationships, friendships, and work, or perhaps from our experiences doing public education work to reach other men. In all these things, we have been confronted with the necessity of:

• Learning to listen to the voices of those groups whose presence and knowledge have been suppressed, as a result of their color, sex, sexual orientation, class, and so forth
• Looking at our lives and experiences as the lives and experiences of men, rather than maintaining the patriarchal arrogance that our lives are the lives of generic human beings
• Seeing how we and our brothers get hooked into the privileges and psychological life of a patriarchal society
• Feeling the enormous weight of homophobia and heterosexism in our lives, regardless of our own sexual orientation, and feeling similarly the dynamics of other forms of oppression
• Identifying the sticking points that make change so difficult
• Sensing the diverse experiences and diverse articulations of sexism among our brothers of varying classes, races, sexual orientations, ages, physical appearances and abilities, ethnicities, religions, and nationalities

And so the notion of committed research is not research committed to a single doctrine or the production of ideas that will get our women friends nodding in appreciation. Rather it is a recognition of diversity: of the need for diverse lines of inquiry and of diverse perspectives on a range of experiences within the broad framework of feminist analyses. For the male contributors, the sense of commitment within our research is also a recognition that any theoretical challenge is a personal challenge for the simple reason that the objects of analysis are our own lives as men and the intricate relations of power into which we have entered with the men and women around us. In practical terms this means drawing on examples from our own lives—something we always do in terms of our own processes of inquiry, something we sometimes do in terms of the presentation of our ideas in these articles. It means grappling with our responsibility to challenge an oppressive status quo—in the realm of ideas, in relation to the structures and institutions in which we find ourselves, and in our personal lives—while avoiding the pitfalls of a politics of guilt and blame. All in all, we hope that the nature of our commitment to change does not saddle us with a set of preconceived assumptions that must then be proved, but rather that our intellectual inquiries will be freed from the dogmas,the prejudices, and the common sense notions handed down to us from the millennia of patriarchal life and culture.

Our title highlights other issues we wish to explore. This is a book about the methods, frameworks, and approaches for the theorization of masculinities. It is concerned not so much with documenting new empirical findings but with raising questions about what it really means to theorize masculinities through diverse modes and methods. How does one really go about placing men and their institutions at the center of an analysis without replicating the patriarchal biases of previous studies of men? A number of the authors here, and many others, have for quite some time now insisted that the difference lay in how one theorized men and masculinities, that the new studies we were producing and looking for were about men as men, rather than as generic human beings whose gender went unnoticed and untheorized or at least undertheorized.

Such studies are further differentiated from earlier and nonfeminist ones, and from much of the more popular contemporary genre of books about men, because they incorporate the fundamental feminist insight that gender is a system of power and not just a set of stereotypes or observable differences between women and men. As soon as we enter into studies of masculinities as studies of relations and manifestations of unequal power and the internalization and reenactment of those relations, a wide range of difficult questions emerges. Such questions are the object of the essays in this volume.

Among these questions, although perhaps often more implicit than explicit, is the question of how the fields of women’s studies, gay studies, and studies of people of color, as well as new and traditional approaches to the studies of class, can enter into the study of men as men. What can be the impact of the many new methodologies generated in these and other fields that place at the center of analysis persons and practices previously taken for granted?

One aspect, therefore, of an emerging second wave of critical studies on men and masculinities is the clear recognition that theorization concerns the elaboration and articulation of relations of power. The mention of sexual orientation, color, class, and so forth points to the other term in our title, highlighting that this volume is also about masculinities, not just about theorizing. The second aspect of a new wave of critical men’s studies is the ever-growing recognition that we cannot study masculinity in the singular, as if the stuff of man were a homogeneous and unchanging thing. Rather, we wish to emphasize the plurality and diversity of men’s experiences, attitudes, beliefs, situations, practices, and institutions, along lines of race, class, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, age, region, physical appearance, able-bodiedness, mental ability, and various other categories with which we describe our lives and experiences.

Although we reject the establishment of any hierarchy of oppression or insight among various subgroups, it is nonetheless the case that as the discourse about masculinities has emerged, gay studies has come to occupy a very central place. It is important to understand the nature of the special status of gay studies within men’s studies and its attendant rationales both because of the importance of gay studies itself and because examining this issue will help to understand the more general problem of what is involved in fully integrating the study of one category, such as gender, with others, for example, race, class, and so forth. Although some argue that integrating diversity is a move toward political accommodation that takes one away from scholarly standards, we believe it is a matter of making necessary commitments that are both scholarly and political. Scholarship here remains committed, but not doctrinaire.

One approach maintains that what is involved in seeing gay studies as central to men’s studies is a structural claim about the social construction of masculinities, a claim that heterosexism is more fundamental to the dynamics of sexism than is, for example, racism or classism. Another approach, in contrast, holds that an epistemological rather than structural claim is in evidence here, the idea being not that issues of sexual orientation are necessarily any more central to understanding gender than are issues of, for example, race or class, but that gay men are socially situated in such a way that they have particularly noteworthy insights into the social construction of masculinities across the board, and therefore their perspectives must be especially highlighted. Still another view of the matter holds that the special role of gay studies in men’s studies is neither structural nor epistemological but rather historical. On this line of reasoning gay perspectives merit special consideration because various historical forces have put gay issues on the contemporary agendas for change as well as for scholarship in a particularly crucial and pivotal way. This approach yields a more explicitly political rationale.

In the work of any one individual one often, of course, finds these three perspectives present in various variations and combinations. From various perspectives and for various sorts of reasons, then, the centrality of gay studies within men’s studies emerges neither as a case of granting most favored status to one group nor as a shunting aside of other concerns, but rather as a necessary component of any inquiry into men and masculinities.

Although we too set out to produce a book from a perspective that gave extensive coverage to gay studies within its consideration of men’s studies, we found that when we assembled the chapters in this volume we did not have as substantial a representation of gay studies as we had hoped for. We attribute this to the way academic publishing has become institutionalized. Gay studies had established its own journals, conferences, caucuses, homes in various scholarly presses, and the rest of the apparatus of academic publishing significantly prior to what has come to be called men’s studies. These venues have by now established a prior claim and loyalty among gay studies scholars. Thus, although we found an enthusiastic response to our solicitation of chapters from scholars who identify their work as being in men’s studies or gender studies or the critique of masculinity or whatever other appellation finds favor in their eyes, we found scholars who identified with the field of gay studies repeatedly telling us that other journals or books already had claim to their current work. We regret we were therefore not able to include more of their work in this volume, despite our commitments to integrating gay and straight men’s studies.

We found the same phenomenon at work in other groups we wanted to have well represented in this volume. For example, although a number of the chapters concern other cultures, they are written by scholars from the Anglophone cultures with which we are most familiar—the authors all currently work in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia. Although there is some representation of racial diversity, there is not as much as we would have liked, nor is there the number of women contributors we had hoped for, again often because scholars in these areas had their respective communities making the same prior claims on their efforts as we found among gay studies scholars. Our efforts have made us aware how far we still are from realizing the type of inclusive scholarship we would find ideal. Our hope is that this book becomes part of a dialogue among all these communities in order to establish more inclusive and integrated communities of theorists and activists.

It remains to provide the reader with a guide to the chapters that follow. This book is divided into two parts. Though all the chapters partake, to one degree or another, of our dual project of engaging both in a sort of metatheoretical discussion about how one theorizes masculinities and in an actual examination of certain configurations of masculinities, the chapters in the first part, which we call “THEORIZING Masculinities,” emphasize the former, while those in the second part, which we call “Theorizing MASCULINITIES,” emphasize the latter. In the first part of this book, the reader will find critical examinations of the conceptualizations of masculinities in various fields, primarily within psychoanalysis, social science, anthropology, history, sociology, and Marxism, while in the second part one will find critical considerations of, among other topics, feminism, postmodernism, homophobia, the mythopoetic men’s movement, black English masculinities, Mexican immigrant men, steelworkers, profeminist men, Superman, and the military.

R. W. Connell’s “Psychoanalysis on Masculinity” traces the history of thinking about masculinity in psychoanalysis, looking at the development of Freud’s own views, especially regarding the classical formulation of the Oedipus complex, Adler’s concept of masculine protest, Jung’s archetypal theory, critical debates triggered by Klein and Horney, the Frankfurt school, and more recent radical and feminist psychoanalytic theories.

Scott Coltrane’s “Theorizing Masculinities in Contemporary Social Science” attempts to synthesize micro-and macroapproaches to the study of gender, reflects on recent debates about essentialism, looks at cross-cultural studies of father-child relationships and women’s status in nonindustrial societies, and considers current methodological debates about feminism, postmodernism, and standpoint theories in the sciences as they impinge on questions about profeminist men’s studies.

Don Conway-Long’s “Ethnographies and Masculinities” examines anthropological studies of men, focusing on concepts of honor and shame in the Mediterranean, alternative sex-gender systems in the Pacific, the role of ritual, and the practice of daily lives.

Harry Brod’s “Some Thoughts on Some Histories of Some Masculinities: Jews and Other Others” reexamines the concept of “masculinities” and uses an examination of Jewish masculinity to consider the dynamics of analyzing nonhegemonic groups of men.

Jeff Hearn and David L. Collinson’s “Theorizing Unities and Differences Between Men and Between Masculinities” argues for an explicit theorization of both “men” and “masculinities” as categories that are produced by men and that describe certain men, their relations, discourses, and practices. The chapter emphasizes the need to recognize both unities and differences among men and masculinities, thereby providing a framework for considering different types of men without diluting attention to the power of men.

Michael S. Kimmel’s “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity” looks critically at the treatment of men in classical social theory and conventional histories. He argues for new conceptualizations of masculinity as power relations, as the flight from the feminine, as a homosocial enactment, and as homophobia, the latter itself then considered as a cause of sexism, heterosexism, and racism.

Michael Kaufman’s “Men, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power” develops his notion of men’s contradictory experiences of power and uses this as an analytical tool for understanding the possibility of men’s embrace of feminism.

In Part Two, David H. J. Morgan’s “Theater of War: Combat, the Military, and Masculinities” observes that war and the military traditionally have had the strongest associations with masculinity and the wider gender order. In these sites the male body is linked to the bo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• Part One: THEORIZING Masculinities
• Part Two: Theorizing MASCULINITIES
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• About the Contributors