Making, Unmaking, and Remaking “Men”: New Work in Feminist Masculinity Studies

Abstract

Making, Unmaking, and Remaking “Men”: New Work in Feminist Masculinity Studies Sally Robinson (bio) BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity. By Arlene Stein. New York: Pantheon Books, 2018. Men in Place: Trans Masculinity, Race, and Sexuality in America. By Miriam J. Abelson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools. By Freeden Blume Oeur. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018. Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism. By Michael Kimmel. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing. By Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. when eve sedgwick published Between Men in 1985, she launched feminist masculinity studies in the United States, followed a few years later by Susan Jeffords’s painstaking documentation of the “remasculinization of America” through representations of the Vietnam War.1 While Sedgwick’s brilliantly articulated critique of homosocial bonding in English literature has been hugely influential, it is to Jeffords that a particular strain of feminist masculinity studies owes its aims and objectives. What Jeffords did was to raise the alarm about a set of ideological maneuverings that were not only literary, but also, frighteningly, real and material. The violence that attends the remasculinization of the United States was not, in Jeffords account, the mere side effect of efforts to heal the wound to national masculinity; it was, instead, a primary mode for the articulation of that masculinity. Although the texts she attends to in her study reflect a subgroup or subculture of American masculinity, embodied in the Vietnam veteran, her analysis suggests that responses to a threatened national masculinity are perhaps first glimpsed in a [End Page 455] subculture, only to spread out to the wider cultural and social terrain. Subcultures of masculinity are a particularly fertile place to look not only for what’s new in feminist masculinity studies, but also what’s new in the social construction and experience of masculinity. As many scholars have noted, masculinity is not monolithic, and much of the work produced by feminist scholars has focused on the relationships between dominant and subordinate forms and constructions of masculinity. Phillip Brian Harper’s Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African American Identity,2 published in 1996, was one among many books that addressed the specific dilemmas of men of color as they measured themselves against dominant white ideals of male identity. Peter M. Nardi’s Gay Masculinities3 and Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinity4 [End Page 456] pushed masculinity studies to think and to unthink the relation of gender to sexuality, a direction institutionalized by renaming “Women’s Studies” programs “Gender and Sexuality” programs and including courses on men and masculinities within university curricula.5 More recently, the focus on masculine identities — on how different groups of men embody different modes of masculinity — has given way to an emphasis on performances of masculinity, on how different groups of men and different modes of discourse illustrate complex negotiations of power and powerlessness and, in the process, remake the meanings of masculinity. The idea that hegemonic masculinity structures the social and psychological meanings of masculinity differentially for different groups of men and in different local contexts, first developed by R. W. Connell,6 remains a guiding force in feminist masculinity studies even as scholars have questioned the utility of posing one form of masculinity as hegemonic. We have, I think, moved away from the impulse to theorize masculinity per se and moved toward analyzing how struggles over the meaning of masculinity can best be understood by paying attention to specific configurations of gender, race, class, sexuality, and geographical location. Although I am a literary and cultural studies scholar by training, I have found myself most compelled by the books that aim to understand masculinity not by reading texts, but by paying attention to how men talk about their relation to dominant and subordinate ideas about masculinity within particular social and institutional contexts. Each of the books I discuss here focuses on a specific subculture of masculinity and, together, they constitute flashpoints...