Crime, Criminal Justice and Masculinities

Stephen Tomsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351570664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume features the leading contemporary articles that are part of, or related to, the 'new masculinities' approach in this sphere. These comprise an impressive range of theoretical and empirical work including important cultural and ethnographic analyses. They emphasise the relationship between masculinities, the causes and patterns of most criminal offending and victimisation and the broader workings of the wider criminal justice system of policing (public and private), criminal courts, corrections and prisons. All of the material has been selected from flagship international journals and was produced by a global mix of male and female researchers with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. These scholars share the view that masculinities are plural, socially constructed, reproduced in the collective social practices of different men and embedded in institutional and occupational settings. Furthermore, masculinities are intricately linked with social struggles for power that occur between men and women and different men. Crime, criminal justice and their cultural representation are key terrain for these masculine contests and are always overlain with issues such as social class, age, race/ethnicity and sexuality.

PART I
Theoretical Perspectives

1
Daubing the drudges of fury

Men, violence and the piety of the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ thesis

STEVE HALL
University of Northumbria at Newcastle, UK

Abstract

A substantial body of empirical work suggests that young, economically marginalized males are the most likely perpetrators and victims of serious physical violence. Interpreting these findings in a historicized way that has been neglected by the criminological discourses of the moment suggests that physical violence has become an increasingly unsuccessful strategy in the quest for social power in liberal-capitalist societies. Although it has been displaced by symbolic violence as the principal domineering force in capitalism’s historical project, physical violence has not been genuinely discouraged but harnessed as a specialist practice in a pseudo-pacification process. From this perspective, violence has a complex relationship with liberal-capitalism. Can the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ help criminology to deal with this complexity and inform violence reduction strategies? This article argues that, in the context of pseudo-pacification, the notion that violent males ‘rework the themes’ of an institutionally powerful ‘hegemonic masculinity’ inverts and distorts the concept of hegemony, which for Gramsci was the self-affirming cultural production of the dominant political-economic class. Thus the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ tends to downplay political economy and class power, which suggests that it is too far removed from historical processes and material contexts to either justify the use of the term hegemony itself or explain the striking social patterns of male violence. This intellectual retreat is representative of a general political evacuation of capitalism’s global socioeconomic processes, a move that is allowing sparsely regulated market forces to continue the economic insecurity, specialist roles and corresponding cultural forms that reproduce the traditional male propensity to physical violence.

Key Words

dimorphic violence

• hegemony
• masculinity
• neocapitalism
• pseudo-pacification

Introduction: scrutinizing the terms of the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ discourse

The claim that men commit most acts of physical violence is possibly the nearest that criminology has come to producing an indisputable fact. There is now a measure of consensus in the discipline that men’s violence has undergone a real increase in the past three decades (James, 1995; Levi, 1997), or alternatively that more penetrative analyses are revealing a traditionally high level (Newburn and Stanko, 1994). Working from this platform, criminology has made a major contribution to the placement of masculinity under the scrutiny of a number of critical standpoints, many of which have been influenced by varieties of feminism and profeminism. The intellectual tribunal emerging from this ‘gender turn’ has coincided with the gradual but seemingly irreversible erosion of the traditional male’s predominance in politics, culture and the labour market. For many commentators violence is a traditional masculine method of maintaining dominance and responding to challenges, and thus it follows that an upward trend in male violence is one of the clearest indicators that the masculine gender order is under threat and showing a ‘tendency to crisis’ (Ingham, 1984; Connell, 1987, 1995; Kimmel, 1987, 1996; Brittan, 1989).

In this climate of transition and crisis, the sociologist Bob Connell’s (1987, 1995) notion of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ has become highly influential in the study of the relationship between men, masculinity and violence. Connell, aided by a number of collaborators in the general profeminist project (see Kimmel, 1987, 1996; Morgan, 1992; Messerschmidt, 1993), has tried to support yet problematize the pivotal feminist claim that violence is an instrument of transhistorical male or ‘heteropatriarchaP dominance and oppression in the gender order. His claim that ‘[a] structure of inequality on this scale ... is hard to imagine without violence . . . [perpetrated by] . . . the dominant gender who hold and use the means of violence’ (1995: 83) is balanced by an awareness that, on the one hand, many acts of violence could be expressions of the continuity of that oppressive power or, on the other, reactions to its perceived discontinuity.

Connell’s introduction of the ‘threatened male’ into the discourse allows the totalizing image of the transhistorically oppressive male to be juxtaposed against its vulnerable alter ego. He builds on this tension by claiming that a diversity of ‘subordinated’ masculinities shadows the traditional oppressive norm, offering men alternative gendered identities that can contest this norm in progressive ways. Following Gramsci (1971), he names the traditional, oppressive gender form ‘hegemonic’ because it utilizes cultural production to reproduce ideologically its institutionalized dominance over ‘subordinated’ men as well as women (1995: 78–9). This reinforces his earlier claim that both the gender and internal masculine orders are structured by ‘. . . a historically constructed pattern of power relations between men and women and definitions of femininity and masculinity’ (1987: 184).

Summarizing this complex position would risk oversimplification, but it does rest on the pivotal concept of ‘hegemony’. The Italian neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci reformulated this old term to mean the use of popular cultural production—texts, images and ideas—to engineer among the subordinate proletarian mass a fragile consensus that the bourgeoisie’s power, wealth and privilege was the product of ‘natural’ values, forces and circumstances. Thus hegemony helped to reproduce the class order by incorporating the bulk of the working class mentally and emotionally into the dominant belief-system, preventing a conscious appraisal of their material exploitation and politico-cultural subjugation that might have led to the politics of social transformation. Gramsci furnished the intellectual world with a vital insight; how class and corporate power is no longer reproduced principally by crude, coercive means, but by the naturalizing, legitimizing and mystifying ideological production of institutions such as the state, the family, religion, art and mass media. The influence of this ideology on everyday life can be seen in practices such as politics, wage negotiations, social policies, family relationships, schooling and child-rearing.

According to Connell (1995), traditional males mobilize similar ideological techniques to reproduce their real dominance over women in the gender order and, more notably, over ‘subordinated masculinities’ in the masculine order. ‘Legal violence’ and ‘street violence’ combine with ‘economic discrimination’ to constitute a set of ‘. . . quite material practices’ (1995: 78) by means of which structures of dominance and subordination are enacted in real social and economic relations. Male-dominated cultural production ‘exalts’ these practices, giving men the impression that they have a legitimate right to call upon violence when it is deemed essential to the maintenance of the traditional order. In reality this often means in a brutal and arbitrary manner. This right has been distributed across the class order as one of a cluster of ‘patriarchal privileges’. Hegemonic cultural production, in conjunction with the recurring enacted practices that it encourages (Butler, 1993), reproduces the belief that it is legitimate and natural for men to use violence as a means of oppressing women and less belligerent males. Thus male violence is the brutal core of a politico-cultural strategy that is deployed to sustain an illegitimate position of dominance. Men who intimidate or physically attack women, gay men or less assertive heterosexual men ‘. . . usually feel they are entirely justified, that they are exercising a right. . . authorised by an ideology of supremacy’ (Connell, 1995: 83). Whether or not they are involved directly as ‘. . . the frontline troops of patriarchy’ (1995: 79), ‘complicit’ males in all class positions benefit from it because it distributes a ‘patriarchal dividend’ of privileged and legitimated entitlements throughout the traditional masculine order, one of which is the right to use violence. Thus what Messerschmidt (1993) labels ‘destructive masculinity’ can take its place as one of the hegemonic forms that dominate both the gender order and the social order.

Connell (1995) goes on to draw what could have been useful distinctions in the masculine order. He divides it roughly into three main groups, which bear some resemblance to those that make up the class structure. First, the specialist producers and circulators of culture; second, the complicit, aggressive (but not necessarily violent) mainstream redeemers of the ‘patriarchal dividend’; and third, the frequently violent ‘protest masculinities’ that inhabit the socio-economic margins. The members of this third group are the most likely to mobilize their entitlements to violence as a crude reaction to economic redundancy and the perceived threat of supersession by what they believe should be ‘subordinate’ gender forms.

However, although these formal distinctions give the impression that class divisions are not being entirely overlooked, they simply describe the differing ways in which class-based groups of men tend to ‘rework’ the same universal privileges and strategies of domination. The basic totalizing premise is retained: real male powers and privileges are hegemonically reproduced and distributed in the form of a universal ‘patriarchal dividend’ that permeates the class divisions of the masculine order. The central claim seems to be that traditional masculine culture has some sort of unifying, distributive property that overrides class divisions in order to maintain its dominant social position for the benefit of all traditional males.

However, Connell does not delve too deeply into the question of the real value that the privileged right to use intimidation and violence might carry, and whether it is enough to warrant such prodigious cultural production and a cherished place in the traditional male’s inventory of power strategies. The debate on whether or not social power is based on abstract rights and beliefs is too expansive to discuss here, but suffice it to say that Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984, 1990) economic metaphor is possibly more convincing. For him, the main purpose of displaying, enacting and reproducing the customary beliefs, rights, practices and expressive capacities that make up symbolic and cultural capital is that not only can they aid the maintenance of a perceived dominant social position, but also that they can be transferred eventually into economic capital. Although this might elicit a cry of ‘economic reductionism’ from some temporarily in-vogue theorists of the ‘cultural turn’, this protest often throws a smokescreen over their own tendency to reduce analyses of social power to the much less convincing premise of domination for its own sake. At least Bourdieu’s perspective furnishes us with an objective material purpose for the struggle over cultural privileges. If this is the case, does the specific privilege of using intimidation and violence allow men to redeem this ‘patriarchal dividend’ politically and economically, or does it limit them to the fleeting liminal satisfaction of wielding pointless, destructive force over others? If indeed a unified ‘patriarchy’ does exist as a real social power, then its ‘dividends’ must be in some real sense exchangeable across class divisions. Put simply, it must be possible for lower-class men to cash them in for some of the real privileges and benefits enjoyed by those men who—alongside many women and ‘subordinated masculinities’—inhabit the higher class or occupational echelons. If profitable exchange is infrequent rather than routine, then, in the case of violence, the personal is quite possibly not very political.

Connell (1995) glosses over this question of material reward in two main ways. First, he expresses the disparity of wealth between men and women in terms of a crude mean average income. This move ignores class divisions, not only allowing him to place a £3.60 per hour security guard or a £50 per night doorman in the same politico-economic category as a male billionaire, but also in a position of ‘structural’ dominance over a £300,000 per year female Q.C. or ‘subordinated masculine’ media executive. It also carries the tacit suggestion that, in the project of liberating homosexuality, a gay security guard might share mutual political interests with a gay media executive, an intellectual position in which the cultural politics of sex and gender override rather than ‘intersect with’ the economic politics of class, making his claim to give ‘. . . full weight to their class as well as their gender politics’ (1995: 75) sound rather hollow. If this statistical average were to be broken down, it would become quite obvious that it is heavily skewed by the vast fortunes owned by a very small number of men.

It is also difficult to see how the ‘patriarchal privileges’ enjoyed by the lower classes can ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• International Library of Criminology, Criminal Justice and Penology – Second Series
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Second Series
• Introduction
• PART I Theoretical Perspectives
• PART II The Spectrum of Masculine Crime
• PART III Cultural And Ethnographic Analyses
• PART IV Criminal Justice Settings
• Index