Global Masculinities and Manhood

Ronald L Jackson, Murali Balaji, Ronald L Jackson, Murali Balaji

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780252093555
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Bringing together an array of interdisciplinary voices, Global Masculinities and Manhood examines the concept of masculinity from the perspectives of cultures around the world. In the era of globalization, masculinity continues to be studied in a Western-centric context. Contributors to this volume, however, deconstruct the history and politics of masculinities within the contexts of the cultures from which they have been developed, examining what makes a man who he is within his own culture. Highlighting manifestations of masculinity in countries including Jamaica, Turkey, Peru, Kenya, Australia, and China, scholars from a variety of disciplines grapple with the complex politics of identity and the question of how gender is interpreted and practiced through discourse. Topics include how masculinity is affected by war and conflict, defined in relation to race, ethnicity, and sexuality, and expressed in cultural activities such as sports or the cinema.   Contributors are Bryant Keith Alexander, Molefi K. Asante, Murali Balaji, Maurice Hall, Ronald L. Jackson II, Shino Konishi, Nil Mutluer, Mich Nyawalo, Kathleen Glenister Roberts, Margarita Saona, and Kath Woodward.

1

negotiating Jamaican Masculinities

MAURICE HALL

old pirates yes they rob i, sold i to the merchant ships, Minutes after they took i, from the bottomless pit.

Redemption Song, robert nestor Marley

Jamaican masculinity is a social construction that has everything to do with the ways in which slavery, colonialism, and now globalization have produced identity performances that are multiple and conflicted. There are several current analyses that examine the history of the construction of masculinity in the Caribbean generally and Jamaica specifically (see, for example, Lewis, 2003; Forbes, 2005; Lindsay, 2002; Reddock, 2004). These works approach analysis from interdisciplinary perspectives including history, literary studies, and sociology. The concept of Caribbean masculinity is a subject of significant debate between and among these scholars. In influential scholarly volumes by authors such as Lewis (2003) and Reddock (2004), the debate focuses on whether males in the Caribbean generally, and Jamaica specifically, have been marginalized, with boys left to fend for themselves, or whether it is in fact the privileging of males, rather than their marginalization, that has led to an erosion of male status and authority in Caribbean societies.

It is not my intent to reproduce those analyses here; rather, this chapter will focus on Jamaican masculinity using concepts drawn from the perspectives of performativity and postcoloniality. I will argue that there are three major performance stances that have come to characterize Jamaican performances of masculinity: rude boys, Rastas, and mimics, performances that can largely be understood in the context of Jamaica’s postcolonial history. I will use two well-known icons from Jamaica’s history and culture, men who are seen as leaders in their respective fields of endeavor, and I will argue that they are models for understanding the extent to which Jamaican masculinity has challenged Western notions of ideal manhood and reinvented and legitimized Africanized conceptions of manhood.

There are two important caveats in terms of how this discussion will unfold. First, I will embed the discussion and analysis of masculinity in broader discussions of culture, recognizing that gender and culture are largely intersecting discourses (Lewis, 2003). The mutual influence of these two discourses is at the heart of my thesis. Second, while there will be brief discussions of gender relations and issues pertaining to the status of women, this essay will focus on the construction of masculine identity. This is a choice made for reasons of space rather than a reflection or suggestion of a hierarchy of importance.

The concept of performance highlights the extent to which identity negotiation is a social construction. While performance scholars view a wide variety of rituals, media presentations, and literary/theatrical aesthetic creations as fitting under the rubric of performativity (Schechner, 2002), it is the concept of embodied performance as outlined by Conquergood (1991) that equates the body as a site of knowing. Judith Butler (1990) extended the concept of performativity to make the argument that gender is largely the product of repeated performances that, influenced by powerful social sanctions, produce an illusion of fixed identities linked to biological sex. From this perspective, masculinity, then, is an “acting out” of maleness, exteriorizing gendered behaviors through combinations of gestures, aggression, and gait (Lewis, 2004). The performances of the black male body in developing, previously colonized countries such as Jamaica have occurred in the context of European discourses that privilege the aesthetic and performance of the white, European, English body. Throughout the duration and aftermath of Jamaica’s colonial history, there was a systematic effort to privilege white, British cultural identity discourses as normative and to marginalize cultural identity discourses of “Africanness” as inferior and unsophisticated. Jamaican sociologist Don Robotham (1998) argues: “White and Anglo-American/European identities have established self-definitions more deeply driven by the historical experience of plantation slavery and the slave trade. These experiences have shaped the definition of whiteness and white hegemonies in deep contrast and contradiction to blackness and black subordination, as an entire hegemonic complex and structure” (p. 307).

One can conceptualize black subordination as the end product of enforced bodily performances that privileged white over black ways of being and behaving. The enslaved, black male body became a metonym for the savagery of Western European, specifically British, colonialism in the Caribbean. There has been a continuing struggle of the black male body to assert its own aesthetic and its own performance space in the context of dominant discourses that still regard it as periphery, strange, degraded, and marginal. The black male body’s daily social performances have always occurred in the context of countervailing discourses that are always asserting that it should not perform like that and that it should not look like that. As a culture with a history of colonialism that has also had a sustained culture of patriarchy (Lewis, 2003), constructions of what Jamaican male identity means, then, in postcolonial Jamaica have everything to do with understanding the intersecting discourses of race, class, and gender, and the extent to which white maleness became the construct against which blackness was both constituted and defined.

idealized White Masculinity

The colonial encounter and more recent discourses of cultural production associated with globalization have enshrined an idealized conception of masculinity that is largely Western and white, the election of U.S. President Barack Obama notwithstanding. For citizens of developing countries such as Jamaica, these idealized conceptions of masculinity are purveyed through influential narratives associated with literature, popular culture, and popular conceptions of leadership in the self-help and business literature.

High school students in postcolonial developing countries such as Jamaica are usually introduced through Western European literature to the concept of the hero. In Jamaica, Britain bequeathed its English-speaking colonies narratives in literature that merge conceptions of idealized masculinity with leadership and heroism. Many of these narratives revolve around the concept of the journey and the quest. Narratives such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain feature heroic figures with a noble cause whose journey, whether literal, metaphorical, or both results in the confrontation with and destruction of a literal and/or symbolic evil “Other” that threatens the community. The journey ends with the conquest of this evil and an often-triumphant return to home and safe harbor. In later narratives by authors such as Joseph Conrad, the evil “Other” subtly morphed into the nonwhite “Other,” the symbol of savagery and destructiveness that had to be civilized, enslaved, or destroyed. These constructions of the heroic, idealized male as leader and as the hero invested with characteristics of nobility or bravery feature protagonists that are represented as universal, but are, in fact, male, white, and European, thereby implicating the nonwhite, non-Western male as deficient and “Other” (Nkomo, 2006).

Western popular culture, often created and marketed from the United States to the developing world, features compelling constructions of idealized masculinity, usually associated with white, male, American movie icons. These portrayals of masculinity often assume a rugged individualism, even heroism, which is synonymous with white American male ideals of masculinity. The view of the idealized white male as hero is a well-represented staple of media construction, from the cowboy heroes represented by American actor John Wayne to the male heroes represented by modern-day icons such as Harrison Ford and Bruce Willis. In the electoral politics of the United States, the strong male leader has also become a standardized trope in the aftermath of 9/11, with media attention often focused on who is strong enough to keep the country “safe.” These portrayals of idealized white maleness are consistently represented as universal, with the motion-picture hero standing in as the modern everyman surviving against the odds.

In the popular and academic literature associated with business, the construct of leadership takes on strong associations of maleness. These conceptualizations of leadership and the link to constructions of maleness are important to consider, because the discourse of leadership, itself a deeply gendered discourse, is one of the most visible, prominent, concrete constructions of idealized masculinity that has influenced and continues to influence how we think about masculinity in terms of race, nationality, and class. Constructs of leadership, particularly North American leadership perspectives, tend to produce idealized, deeply gendered constructs of identity that have privileged maleness over femaleness, white identity over black, and Western over non-Western identity norms (Calas & Smircich, 1991; Fletcher, 2004; Parker, 2001). Embedded in constructions of leadership is an implication of idealized North American masculinity that is also presented as universal. Academic approaches to leadership, such as charismatic and visionary approaches, so-called heroic approaches to leadership (Fletcher, 2004), define leadership as an extraordinary phenomenon that is linked to the personally persuasive characteristics and charismatic behaviors of unique individuals. These heroic conceptions of leadership, such as transformational, visionary, and charismatic approaches (Nanus, 1992; Gardner & Cleavenger, 1998; Fairhurst, 2001), define leadership as a dynamic and interactive process in which the individual, usually male, leader has an exceptional ability to inspire and energize followers. Unfortunately, these approaches to leadership often assume the white, Western, usually male manager or CEO to be the leadership norm (Parker, 2001; Calas & Smircich, 1991).

non-Western Masculinity as “other”

These idealized constructions of white masculinity in literature, popular culture, and business literature gain their salience not just from innate positive characteristics associated with the constructions, but also from the contrast with that which is not white and male. There are few, if any, non-Western constructs of leadership or heroism representing an idealized form of masculinity (Nkomo, 2006). This deficit in representation helps lend credence to the suggestion that idealized forms of masculinity are exclusively invested in white male paragons of heroism. This is particularly true because the black male body has been inscribed with deficient characteristics that render the concept of black male leadership or heroism an oxymoron. Cultural scholar Ron Jackson, in his theory of black masculinity, reminds us that the black American male body is inscribed with racialized scripts that render it highly visible and yet peripheral. According to Jackson, the black masculine body is scripted as: 1) exotic and strange, 2) violent, 3) incompetent and uneducated, 4) sexual, 5) exploitable, and 6) innately incapacitated. Disturbingly, Jackson (2006) concludes, “race is about bodies that have been assigned social meanings” (p. 12). Jackson (2006) traces the history of the ideological and cultural scripting of the black body in the United States, particularly the black male body, from slavery through to current popular cultural expressions, arguing that “since the emergence of race as a social construct, black bodies have become surfaces of racial representation” (p. 12).

The scripting of the black male body in the context of the Caribbean, generally, and Jamaica specifically is equally as problematic. While Jamaica, and the Caribbean generally, have produced world leaders in the arenas of literature, the arts, and politics,¹ there are still enduring Western caricatures of the Caribbean male as breezily self-assertive, yet devoid of substance, exotic, and anti-intellectual. These caricatures are uncannily similar to the stereotypes attending images of the black American male (Allahar, 2001). These stereotypes of black Caribbean males can be traced back to white slave owners’ characterization of enslaved black men as “Quashee” (Beckles, 2004). “Quashee” is the stereotype of the patient, submissive, happy-go-lucky slave who was also irresponsible, lazy, and childlike. In this construction of black maleness in the white imaginary, “Quashee” is reduced to significant dependence on the white master. This link between past and current stereotypes of black men in the Caribbean illustrates the extent to which understanding constructions of black male identity in Jamaica, in particular, calls for understanding the extent to which the history of the country has produced constructs of masculinity that are complex and contradictory. Stephen Jay Gould (1996) argued for the ways in which race became a salient factor in negating the humanity of whole categories of human beings who were not white. These constructions of masculinity also have to be placed within the wider context of the colonial and neocolonial discourses, as described above, that have framed the black male identity as deficient.

Colonialism and the subjugation of Black Jamaican Masculinity

Jamaica, an island of 2.5 million people, achieved its independence from Britain in 1962. Political independence did not mean economic independence, however, and the country has continued to struggle in the aftermath of the colonial enterprise. Complex intersections of history, politics, and culture have had a significant impact on how identity is negotiated there. The subjugation of the nonwhite male body is at the heart of the conflicted production of Jamaican male identity. Linden Lewis (2003) argues that colonialism in Jamaica was itself a system of patriarchy that “inscribed male domination into the culture” (p. 103); however, under this system of patriarchy, not all men were equal. Lewis (2003) asserts that African men in Jamaica were infantilized by the system of slavery to the extent that they were robbed of autonomy in every sphere of major life decisions. There was an internalization of the patriarchy that was inherent in the systems of slavery and, later, colonialism, and this internalization was played out in conflicted relationships with women in the aftermath of colonialism, as black men struggled to assert themselves in a social system that privileged white and brown men.

Black men were not just infantilized by the systems of slavery and colonialism; they were also gendered as feminine to the extent that they were reduced to dependence on the white slave and then colonial master. As a specific example of this, Lewis (2003) points out that while all men benefited from the system of patriarchy, in postcolonial Jamaica not all men controlled the means of production. Class and race, therefore, became predictors of political power. A white colonial elite controlled the means of production in the immediate aftermath of colonialism (Braithwaite, 1995), and the black middle and upper classes attained mobility through education: they did not control, but worked for those who controlled, the levers of power. Black masculinity in Jamaica had to fight to preserve its own cultural heritage and sovereignty in the face of colonial masters and the white local mercantile caste, which reinforced the message of the inferiority of blackness and Africanized cultural expression and the superiority of white British culture (Robotham, 1998). In fact, Robotham (1998) argues that the aftermath of slavery, and then colonial rule, created a deeply stratified society divided along lines of race, skin color, and class. White and brown people are generally the property owners, with a relatively small professional black and brown middle class and a significant black underclass (Robotham, 1998; Patterson, 1995). In modern Jamaica, the owners of property and the means of production have shifted location, but the positions are still the same: black bodies mark the peasant class, the workers, not the owners.

Since Jamaican male identity negotiation and performances, then, are largely products of these intersecting factors of class, race, history, and power, the impact on the sense of masculine identity has been catastrophic in some ways and redemptive in others. In an effort to negotiate and constitute blackness as a resistance to enforced white hegemonic cultural constructs, Jamaican men have had to invent indigenous performances of black masculinity. Cultural scholars Carolyn Cooper (1993) and Deborah Thomas (2004) provide detailed analyses of the consequent invention of a Jamaican identity that has become synonymous with urban expression, a reaction born out of frustration with the meager political and economic gains achieved in the aftermath of Jamaica’s political independence. Cooper (1993), in particular, provides a detailed analysis of the extent to which the oral discourses that construct Jamaican identity are intrinsically linked to transgressive bodily performances: performances that are designed to bolster racial as well as cultural identity. Both researchers trace this identity to the polarized class structure in Jamaica, a legacy of colonialism. Thomas (2004) argues that by the late 1990s, most black lower-class Jamaicans saw the country’s worsening economic crisis as a failure of the leadership of the black and brown middle class that had moved into positions of ascendancy in the aftermath of colonialism. Thomas (2004) argues that a black nationalist sentiment became pervasive in the politics and the culture of the island, culminating in the election of the late prime minister Michael Manley, who strategically conflated overt identity performances of Africanness with cultural progress.

Cooper (1993) links this development of a modern black identity with the country’s oral culture and the tension of that orality with the written, “scribal” tradition that was imposed on the culture through colonial rule. Cooper (1993) argues that the legacy of the oral culture found its full expression in the Jamaican language, patois, religion, and music, such as dancehall² and reggae; but these expressions were those of lower-class, urban Jamaicans, designed to be a direct challenge to the sensibilities of the black and brown middle classes that still valorized aspects...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction: Conceptualizing Current Discourses and Writing New Ones
• 1. Negotiating Jamaican Masculinities
• 2. Queer(y)ing Masculinities
• 3. Disposable Masculinities in Istanbul
• 4. Wounded Masculinity and Nationhood in Peru
• 5. Postcolonial Masculinity and Commodity Culture in Kenya
• 6. War, Masculinity, and Native Americans
• 7. Representing Aboriginal Masculinity in Howard’s Australia
• 8. Beyond Jackie Chan
• 9. Body Politics: Masculinities in Sport
• Contributors
• Index