Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture

Tiger's Tales

Conn Holohan, Tony Tracy

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137300249
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria europea

Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger's Tales is an interdisciplinary collection of essays by established and emerging scholars, analysing the shifting representations of Irish men across a range of popular culture forms in the period of the Celtic Tiger and beyond.

Part I
Queering Irish Masculinity

1

Clubs, Closets and Catwalks: GAA Stars and the Politics of Contemporary Irish Masculinity

Michael G. Cronin

In October 2009 Dónal Óg Cusack published his autobiography, Come What May. In the following weeks this event received exponentially greater coverage in the Irish media than would usually be accorded to a sports memoir. There were several salient reasons for this. Since 1999 Cusack had been goalkeeper with the Cork hurling team, one of the few teams considered capable of challenging the dominance of Kilkenny in the national championship; they had won the All-Ireland Final in Cusack’s inaugural year and again in 2004 and 2005. But along with their success his team had also become noteworthy for their disputes with the governing board of the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) in Cork. The team had twice gone on strike to demand better conditions for players and to protest at what they saw as ineffective management. The second of these strikes, in the winter of 2008–9, had been particularly protracted and bitter, and Cusack, along with his colleague Seán Óg Ó hAilpin, emerged as the chief spokesperson for the players. This role augmented his ongoing advocacy for GAA players on a national level through the Gaelic Players Association (GPA), of which he is Chair. Hence Cusack had an unusually high profile, not only as a leading player, but also for his engagement in GAA politics. Nevertheless the publication of his book mainly generated such widespread interest, far beyond the usual confines of sports coverage, because he spoke publicly for the first time about being gay.

In December 2010 RTÉ broadcast an hour-long documentary charting a year in the life of Paul Galvin. Like Cusack, Galvin was a long-standing member of a highly successful GAA team; he made his first appearance as a county footballer with Kerry in 2003 and when the documentary was broadcast he had played in six successive All-Ireland Finals, of which Kerry had won four. Nevertheless his reputation was mixed. Generally considered one of the outstanding footballers of his generation, his performances were integral to the success of this Kerry team; that was acknowledged by his elevation to captain for the 2008 season. However, Galvin was unable to actually lead his team onto the field of play for most of the championship that year as he was suspended for three months by the GAA disciplinary authorities following an incident where he knocked a notebook out of a referee’s hand. These extremes of virtuosity and ignominy were captured by the documentary, Galvinised, which begins with Galvin being named Player of the Year in October 2009 and then receiving two lengthy suspensions for violently attacking opposing players during the 2010 season.¹ His aggression and volatility on the football field, along with the subsequent disruptions to his playing career, partly explain why the interest of the Irish media in Galvin exceeds that accorded to most other GAA players.² Strikingly, Galvinised takes this excessive media interest in Galvin as one of its main themes, while also being yet another instance of the same phenomenon. Likewise, in the documentary Galvin expressed his dismay at the media intrusion into his life while simultaneously demonstrating that he was actively expanding his media profile, modelling in fashion shoots and presenting a music programme on local radio. He also spoke at length about his interest in men’s fashion, and about leaving his job as a schoolteacher to return to college as a student of fashion. In January 2011 Galvin began writing a weekly column on men’s fashion for the Irish Independent newspaper.

There are clear similarities here: two works of life narrative by virtuoso but controversial GAA stars. However, the media response varied sharply in tone – heroic for Cusack, comic for Galvin – and offered quite different interpretations. For commentators, the meaning of Galvin’s story resided solely in what it told us, or failed to tell us, about his life and was not seen to have any broader significance beyond that. This was an entirely individual drama, in which Galvin was either a flawed tragic hero struggling to control those psychic forces constantly threatening to undermine his talent, or a vain and foolish dandy, distracted from the real business of football by the vacuous glamour of media and fashion.³ By contrast, Cusack’s story was seen to have powerful reverberations beyond his own life. He was an exemplary figure, whose honesty and courage offered inspiration to other sportspeople and encouragement to queer youth. His coming-out raised challenges for institutions like the GAA, while encouraging reflection on the condition of contemporary Ireland.⁴ Journalists repeatedly cited two incidents from the book to illustrate the persistence of homophobic attitudes: the response of Dónal Cusack senior to hearing his son was gay and a quite shocking incident where a spectator had used a megaphone to hurl abuse at Cusack during a game. The reiterated use of these two figures identified homophobia with minorities (older people struggling with new cultural norms; dysfunctional and disturbed individuals) and as a problem that needed to be managed – while also helpfully locating homophobia elsewhere, far from the worldview of the writer. Moreover, in this view, while Cusack’s story demonstrated the challenges that confronted lesbians and gay men in Ireland and in sport, the publication of his story demonstrated the degree to which questions of gender and sexual identity had been progressively sorted out in Irish society over the last few decades. Thus, for Terry Prone, writing in the Evening Herald, the generally positive response to Cusack’s coming-out demonstrated the successful transformation in attitudes towards sexuality that had taken place in Ireland in the last decades of the twentieth century. Prone implies that this was a process entirely driven by the media and she makes no mention of social movements – unsurprising perhaps given her profession as a PR consultant. She concludes that the proof of this progressive transformation is that Irish people are now ‘unshockable’ by such revelations and are focused instead on economic matters.⁵ This progressive narrative also took on a geo-temporal dimension, in which Ireland was moving from a position of backwardness closer to the norm; in a further variant on this, rural Ireland, and the cultural complex for which ‘GAA’ stands as a metonym, was also slowly moving closer to a metropolitan norm of civility.⁶

Clearly one should not underestimate the positive significance of Cusack’s story; the narrative of personal integrity and communal solidarity, as well as the performative effect of Cusack’s public persona as an openly gay GAA star – offering others the possibility to reimagine their lives, expanding the scope for freedom and challenging received ideas. Cusack’s willingness to deploy that public persona for progressive political ends was demonstrated by his participation in a campaign against homophobic bullying in schools in April 2012.⁷ Nevertheless, as this chapter will argue, Cusack’s memoir demonstrates the degree to which the modern sex-gender system in early twenty-first-century Ireland is far from settled, but remains deeply unstable and contradictory. This is inevitable, since that sex-gender system is part of the structure of capitalism – and we can hardly believe that contemporary Ireland has ‘progressed’ beyond capitalism and its periodic crises. Reading them together, we can approach Cusack’s memoir and Galvin’s film as narratives mapping the individual subject’s negotiation of hegemonic masculinity, and, specifically, the cultural embodiment of that masculinity through sport. As we will see, their narratives foreground sharply two aporias of modern Irish masculinity: the ongoing tension between homosexuality and heterosexuality, and the desire for an authentic experience of masculinity within late capitalism – a desire that is impossible, and predicated on devaluing the feminine as inauthentic.

We should not assume that Cusack’s and Galvin’s engagement with hegemonic masculinity is distinctively troubled, while that of their teammates, for instance, is unproblematic. On the contrary, hegemonic masculinity is best understood not as something more as less successfully embodied by individual men but as a reified identity which takes shape through institutions, practices and discourses. As R. W. Connell argues, hegemonic masculinity ‘is not a fixed character type, always and everywhere the same’ but ‘the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.’⁸ As Connell’s definition suggests, hegemonic masculinity allows us to recognize that masculinity is historically determined, and predicated on complex power relations. On one hand, hegemonic masculinity underpins the ‘patriarchal dividend’, as Connell puts it, which accrues in our society to all men qua men; this dividend takes a symbolic form but is also a material fact in capitalist societies, where men’s average earnings far outstrip the average earnings of women, for instance, and the burden of domestic work and caring falls disproportionately on women.⁹ Nevertheless the patriarchal dividend is hardly distributed equitably between men, no more than is any other resource under capitalism. Evidently, the modern sex-gender system interacts structurally with the systems of class and race relations, as socialist-feminist and Marxist-feminist thinkers have extensively demonstrated.¹⁰ The concept of hegemonic masculinity allows us to map the uneven distribution of power, not only between genders but also within masculinity.

A dominant or hegemonic masculinity structurally requires subordinate forms of masculinity. In the twentieth century homosexual and gay masculinity chiefly served this structural function, as ‘the repository of whatever is symbolically expelled from hegemonic masculinity.’¹¹ Nevertheless while sexual object choice was the most salient faultline between dominant and subordinate masculinities, even within heterosexual masculinity there were further subordinate masculinities marked as effeminate and therefore inauthentic. Following Judith Butler, we can say that hegemonic masculinity is a normative ideal, and one with complex effects: authorizing the patriarchal privilege enjoyed by men, while simultaneously regulating and disciplining them.¹² There is no clear-cut division to be drawn here between dominant and subordinate, minority and majority. Gay men and men marked as effeminate may nevertheless successfully accrue to themselves varying amounts of the privilege bestowed by hegemonic masculinity. Likewise, the denomination of certain forms of masculinity as subordinate does not merely serve to reassure those men whose subjectivity is not encompassed by such denominations; on the contrary, it serves as a constant and anxious reminder that the privileges of normative, heterosexual masculinity are always provisional, requiring constant endeavour and self-policing; for this reason homophobia is not, contrary to liberal pluralist aspirations, a lingering problem to be expunged but a structural component of the capitalist sex-gender system.

Kevin Floyd has mapped an early twentieth-century cultural transition from ‘manhood’ to ‘masculinity’. The nineteenth-century concept of manhood was an inner essence, a capacity for independence, self-control and self-mastery; its opposite was not womanhood but childhood. In short, it was the hegemonic ideal of a phase of capitalism primarily organized around production. By contrast its twentieth-century analogue, masculinity, ‘had to be performed: it was a physical demonstration not a moral or ethical code. And what this performance held at bay, its opposite … was not immaturity but femininity’.¹³ Paradoxically, masculinity was a reaction against the routinization, deskilled labour and bureaucratization of urban life in the advanced capitalist societies, while simultaneously making the male body conducive to the intensified consumption that was ideologically marked, and devalued, as feminine.¹⁴ The performance of masculinity meant acquiring a repertoire of skills and virtuosity, and thus compensated for the routine imposed in the factory or office. Moreover, these skills were invariably associated with nature and orientated away from the feminine domestic space (fishing and hunting) or involved transforming that domestic space into a location of manual labour (DIY and home improvement). Accomplishment in these skills required the acquisition of various forms of technology and the consumption of information through various media.

Modern organized sport clearly exemplifies this paradoxical dynamic. It offers player and spectator an excitement and intensity of purpose largely absent from the sphere of alienated labour, and does so through the acquisition and display of specialized, embodied skills; in the twentieth century sport became an exemplary site of what Floyd terms ‘labour without capital.’¹⁵ But those decades when the modern sex-gender system emerged were also the period in which sports became increasingly organized, regularized and capital intensive – including the foundation of the GAA and the codification of hurling and Gaelic football. These processes have intensified in our own period, with most players now highly specialized technicians and organized sport increasingly imbricated with corporations. In other words, organized sports promised men a refuge from the alienation of modern capitalism, but did so through an experience that was intensively routinized and commodified. Moreover, part of the intensity of experience promised by all-male team sports was the emotional relationships with other men made largely impossible elsewhere by the policing of masculinity, and the repudiation of homosexuality which this required. Thus, team sports became in the twentieth century an exemplary site of homosociality, and, as a structural corollary, of homophobia.

In Come What May Cusack discusses a strategy used to strengthen morale in his club team, Cloyne. In ‘truth meetings’ the team members would freely assess each other’s performance, on the understanding that there would be no recriminations outside of the meeting. These were, as Cusack puts it, ‘frank and manly conversations.’¹⁶ That certain modes of address, specifically direct and unvarnished ones, may be more ‘manly’ clearly informs Cusack’s prose style; short, declarative sentenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Queering Irish Masculinity
• Part II Musical Masculinities
• Part III Masculinity in Drama and Literature
• Part IV Onscreen Masculinity
• Part V After the Tiger: Gender and Economic Crisis
• Further Reading
• Index