Impotent Masculinities in Made in China and InterMission

Abstract

When normative masculinity is threatened, the disruptive element must be rejected or incorporated for (the) order to be restored. Owing something to sacrifice’s economy of exchange, the performative resignification of encounters with the abject — and in particular, experiences of the male as abject — are important responses to repairing abjection’s emasculating and dehumanizing impact. Julia Kristeva draws attention to the manner in which that which is expelled ‘does not cease challenging its master’,3 by fuelling a drama of repulsion and attraction: ‘a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you.’4 Even as this dynamic shapes the conditions on which identity is constituted and relationality is mobilized, the symbolic crisis that the abject heralds must be contained in an effort ‘to establish a male, phallic power’.5 As Judith Butler implies, in order for normative masculinity ‘to figure on its surface the very invisibility of its hidden depth’,6 that which is physically and psychically excrementalized must always be excluded or performed with added value, while Others are routinely turned into shit.7