Slipping Out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History

Abstract

��� For many years after the completion of Manful Assertions with John Tosh in 1991, and my book on the British organization man in 1994, I was stuck for an answer when people asked me if I was still working on masculinity. For a while I stopped reading gender history, and I immersed myself in readings, courses, and seminars on psychoanalytic methods and on the history of psychoanalysis. I had, via the study of the history of gender, become interested in the history of subjectivity: in the emotional experiences of men as public actors, in the qualities and character of their relationships with others, and in the place of unconscious motivations in social action. I was no longer sure if the term ‘masculinity’ could encompass this interest, and until very recently, when I was called upon to write a commentary on the history of masculinity in twentieth-century Britain, I have tended not to use the term. This process of re-engaging with recent histories of masculinity has led me to revisit some influential conceptualizations of gender within cultural history, as a means of addressing the question of why it has been difficult to find a place for the study of subjectivity. This question is a complicated one, because some of the work that has helped to define the field, in fact promised a focus on the psychic determinants of gender. And yet the promise has remained largely that, a promise. A decade and a half ago John Tosh and I wrote in Manful Assertions that the concept of masculinity was a complex one because it was ‘the product both of lived experienced and fantasy’, and that further studies were needed to ‘explore how cultural representations become part of subjective identity’. 1 We indicated the need for approaches that explored points of connection between the social and the psychic. Four years later, in Men in Perspective, Nigel Edley and Margaret Wetherell commented on the difficulty that both social and cultural approaches tended to conceive of masculinity only in terms of external codes and structures. The processes through which men came to identify with such codes were largely assumed. 2 In Masculinities, also published in 1995, Bob Connell warned that a ‘purely normative definition gives no grip on masculinity at the level of personality’. 3 The problem identified a decade and a half ago, and reiterated a decade ago as the field consolidated, remains just as true today. Masculinity is still viewed, by and large, more as a matter of social or cultural construction than as an aspect of personality. An edited volume just published,