Masculine Ethic Research Articles

Men Sharea El Haram: The Ethics of Masculinity and its Vernacular discourse in Kuwaiti Television

This paper provides a cultural analysis of the popular Kuwaiti TV series Men Sharea El Haram (translated as From Haram Street). Combining religion, class, race, nationality, and patriarchy, Haram Street showcases pertinent issues that today’s Kuwaiti society has to face. Attending to the scarcity of previous research on vernacular communities and their salient concerns, this paper explores the following research questions: How does Men Sharea El Haram capture the intersecting nature of women’s resistance? What does a feminist Kuwaiti vernacular look like, and how does it intersect with privilege? The analysis outlines how Men Sharea El Haram touches upon several silenced themes in the conservative Kuwaiti society of Kuwait, showing the many and varied ways in which Kuwaiti women are oppressed and showcasing the ways in which women can—and do—resist. Together, the findings provide a deeper understanding of several central issues in Kuwaiti society, especially around masculinity.

The Status of Women in Leadership

The Status of Women in Leadership

Having an Opinion vs. Knowing the Facts: Success Strategies among Men and Women in a Global Bank

This article contrasts the strategies that men and women have employed in pursuit of their career advancement in an elite professional services firm. Analyzing narratives in interviews of 115 senior leaders in a global investment bank, I find that women and men have used markedly different strategies to advance their careers and achieve success. Each group pursues the same objective–building relationships–but utilizes different means. Men “have opinions;” women “know facts.” Men emphasize having a point of view, assuming connections with colleagues and clients that can withstand conflict. Women emphasize their technical capabilities, not only to prove their competence, but also to establish connections with colleagues and clients grounded in achievements and expertise. Despite their differences, successful men and women’s strategies have similar aims: legitimacy and connectivity. For men, having an opinion fits within a culture that privileges a “masculine ethic,” practicable due to the social fabric tyin...

“You are the Most Beautiful Creature”: The Ethics of Masculinity in Revolutionary Road

British director Sam Mendes is obsessed with American men. American men appear and reappear in his films until the latest installment of the James Bond franchise, Skyfall. Since American Beauty (19...

<em>Virtus</em> without <em>Telos</em>, or the Ethics of Vulnerability in Early Modern England

VIRTUS WITHOUT TELOS, OR THE ETHICS OF VULNERABILITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND VIRTUS WITHOUT TELOS, OR THE ETHICS OF VULNERABILITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and Ethics of Masculinity by Joseph Campana. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. Pp. 296. $55.00 cloth.The Pain of Reformation posits masculinity as an ethical condition, not just a social role, in Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faene Queene. This shift in inquiry highlights heroic masculinity's propensity for and domination, and suggests tensions inherent a poem that purports to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle as Letter of Authors famously avers. Rather than a didactic project that depends on creating an invulnerable masculine subject from imposition of codified discipline, 1590 Faerie Queene emerges as poem concerned with vulnerability, including a fundamental openness bodily experience. In Joseph Campana's deft analysis, vulnerability becomes the source of a new understanding of masculinity and ethics, which might be united in term (8). This book does not just attend vulnerability as underside of in Spenser's expansive narrative. Instead, Campana argues that the 1590 Faerie Queene is in fact an allegory of vulnerability, one that disarms and reforms masculinity as a project of (204). Violence becomes subject critique, and programmatic habitus of traditional virtue is superseded by a reformed model of masculinity attuned pain and suffering as well as pleasure and joy.Sensation, not governance, organizes this new masculinity. While Campana acknowledges that a powerful Protestant ethos runs through Spenser's poem, he connects this militant form of selfmastery trauma of suffered in wake of England's break with Rome. The of Reformation suggests that an impervious moral identity is only a meager defense against, and therefore an insufficient solution to, experience of pain wrought by decades of religious upheaval. Spenser instead elaborates what Campana calls a sympathetic sociality (168 passim), which might mend harms of a community rent by generations of suffering. An ethics founded on an acknowledgment of shared vulnerability reforms heroic masculine subject and provides new grounds for ethical action that acknowledges bodily experiences of all those involved.As exemplars of this reformation, knights of 1590 Faerie Queene are caught in a bind between inviolable heroism and vulnerable compassion. Campana identifies this aporia as characteristic of sixteenth-century poetry, so that Spenser's effort create an aesthetics that expresses flesh's sensitivities as a new foundation for ethical action is rendered through struggles of Knights of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity. To reformulate masculinity as an ethical condition-one that re-members classical virtus-is create a new model of virtue responsive Reformation's manifold harms. Rather than predicating ethical life on prescriptive norms or moralistic rules, virtue, as Campana analyzes it across Spenser's 1590 narrative, emerges from shared relations of affect, energy, and sensation. Rethinking Spenser's ethical project makes a profound difference ways we might read Legends of Holiness, Temperance, and Chastity.In charting Redcrosse Knight's difficulties in book 1, Campana acknowledges appeal of a dematerializing moral regime that asserts control over pain, violence, and suffering. Yet, even if we recognize defensive reassurance that fantasy of rational control over insensate matter might hold, a series of unsettling encounters in Legend of Holiness works undermine this model of masculine virtue. Chapter 1, Reading Bleeding Trees: The Poetics of Other People's Pain, focuses on Redcrosse Knight's inability respond suffering of others, and questions how we witness and respond violence even when that is supposedly sanctioned as part of purifying process of ethical reform (73). …

Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability by James Kuzner, and: The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity by Joseph Campana

Journal Article James Kuzner. Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability.Joseph Campana. The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity. Get access Open Subjects: English Renaissance Republicans, Modern Selfhoods, and the Virtue of Vulnerability. By James Kuzner. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011. Pp. x + 222. $120.00 cloth, $34.95 paper.The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity. By Joseph Campana. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012. Illus. Pp. x + 286. $55.00 cloth, $24.00 paper. Giulio Pertile Giulio Pertile Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Shakespeare Quarterly, Volume 66, Issue 2, Summer 2015, Pages 238–241, https://doi.org/10.1353/shq.2015.0027 Published: 01 July 2015

Searching for a Masculine Model: Missteps Made during Three Decades of the Men's Movement and Why Moderation is the Key

This article examines contemporary male ethicists' search for a revised masculine ethic by surveying three stages of the Men's Movement—the Feminist-Friendly, Mythopoetic, and Moderate Men's Movements. These first two movements created an ideological and political gulf that blunted their social and political efficacy and undermined this search. The third, however, minded these missteps by chartering a course of moderation and balance and so the Moderate Men's Movement succeeded by offering men what its predecessors could not—namely a more suitable and appealing way of being male in the world today.

The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity by Joseph Campana

Reviewed by: The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity by Joseph Campana Chance Woods (bio) Joseph Campana . The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. x + 286 pages. $55.00. In Joseph Campana's incisive study The Pain of Reformation, the Spenser of the 1590 Faerie Queene becomes a manifestly ethical poet. With admirable lucidity, Campana demonstrates, much as previous generations of scholarship have done for poets such as Virgil and Dante, that Spenser should not be read merely as an inveterate propagandist for the ideology of his time. While it is presently a scholarly commonplace to dismiss as naïve those readings that construe Virgil as a straightforward defender of the Roman imperium or Dante as an outright condoner of Christendom's infelicities, Spenser is still too often implicitly read as the Elizabethan mouthpiece of English Protestant nationalism. Such a facile assessment of The Faerie Queene (and more generally of Spenser himself) overlooks many dimensions of the narrative, including most importantly questions surrounding gender and the constraints of masculinity. Indeed, the nature of sexuality and the dynamics of gender construction within the poem are still vigorously contested areas of inquiry. Campana's impressive study, which "examines a triangulation of vulnerability, masculinity, and the ethics common to many literary writers grappling with that peculiar admixture of triumph and trauma in the wake of massive religious and political changes" (3), achieves a great deal in elucidating how Spenser registered the importance of vulnerability within his understanding of Christian virtue. The result is an impressively original intervention in Spenser studies that reveals some of the ramifications of the Protestant Reformation in English literature by charting how tropes of masculinity were aesthetically, not just culturally, refashioned. Campana suggests that the poem assumes a greater ethical urgency by foisting a decisive claim upon its readers: "[m]asculinity, or manliness, [End Page 166] must . . . be reformed to accommodate vulnerability and an openness to the pain of others" (4). Campana's close reading of The Faerie Queene is consistently informed by a sophisticated awareness of the poem's intertextual relationship with figures such as Virgil, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, but this functions more to illustrate Spenser's unique ethical vision than to establish his dependence on previous templates of poetic practice. What emerges in Campana's study as the most important notion for understanding Spenser's poetic endeavor is the prospect of vulnerability, which, in this reading, "provides a critical alternative to violence" (12). Whereas previous poetic analogues supplied ample imaginative resources for collapsing martial prowess and masculinity into a single conception, "Spenser recalibrates the age-old dynamic between love and war in heroic poetry, making vulnerability—an openness to sensation and affect that implies an ethical openness to others—the poem's governing ideal" (23). Here we witness an astute interpretation of Spenser that both gains solid traction on the poem while also protecting itself against the charge of anachronism (cf. 11-13). By taking careful strides in expounding his idiosyncratic heuristic of vulnerability, Campana shifts the focus away from polysemous terms such as "violence" and "embodiment" toward a more nuanced conception of mutual human orientation that significantly deepens our understanding of affect and subjection. After briefly positioning itself in relation to religious historiography in the introduction, Campana's argument unfolds in six chapters. Chapter 1, "Reading Bleeding Trees: The Poetics of Other People's Pain," addresses one of the affective dimensions of (Protestant) Christianity's central paradoxes: reverence for the archetypal figure of a suffering Christ coupled with a robust disdain, instilled through Christian worship practices, for compassion and pity. As a poet, Spenser writes against a religious cultural backdrop wherein a protracted emphasis on pain can initiate a dangerous awareness of bodily sensation that must, in turn, be controlled through devotional observance. An inordinate emphasis on matters of the flesh can evolve tempestuously into forms of idolatry, as the physical, embodied nature of suffering occludes more spiritual senses. The ideological dimensions of this dynamic can manifest diverse forms within cultural behavior, but Spenser signals them, according to Campana, through the Legend of Holiness. Una, the figurehead of Protestant veracity, sets...

The pain of Reformation: Spenser, vulnerability, and the ethics of masculinity

The Pain of Reformation argues that Edmund Spenser's 1590 Faerie Queene represents an extended meditation on emerging notions of physical, social, and affective vulnerability in Renaissance England. Histories of violence, trauma, and injury have dominated literary studies, often obscuring vulnerability, or an openness to sensation, affect, and aesthetics that includes a wide range of pleasures and pains. This book approaches early modern sensations through the rubric of the vulnerable body, explores the emergence of notions of shared vulnerability, and illuminates a larger constellation of masculinity and ethics in post-Reformation England. Spenser's era grappled with England's precarious political position in a world tense with religious strife and fundamentally transformed by the doctrinal and cultural sea changes of the Reformation, which had serious implications for how masculinity, affect, and corporeality would be experienced and represented. Intimations of vulnerability often collided with the tropes of heroic poetry, producing a combination of defensiveness, anxiety, and shame. It has been easy to identify predictably violent formations of early modern masculinity but more difficult to see Renaissance literature as an exploration of vulnerability. The underside of representations of violence in Spenser's poetry was a contemplation of the precarious lives of subjects in post-Reformation England. Spenser's adoption of the allegory of Venus disarming Mars, understood in Renaissance Europe as an allegory of peace, indicates that The Faerie Queene is a heroic poem that militates against forms of violence and war that threatened to engulf Europe and devastate an England eager to militarize in response to perceived threats from within and without. In pursuing an analysis, disarmament, and redefinition of masculinity in response to a sense of shared vulnerability, Spenser's poem reveals itself to be a vital archive of the way gender, violence, pleasure, and pain were understood.

Joseph Campana. The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. x + 286 pp. $55. ISBN: 978–0–82323910–8.

Joseph Campana. The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. x + 286 pp. $55. ISBN: 978–0–82323910–8.

Twenty-Nine Post-Its Because I Couldn’t Talk To You

Twenty-Nine Post-Its Because I Couldn’t Talk To You Keith M. Harris (bio) This pack of post-its was all I had to write on. So you know you’re wrong. You could have at least let me in. I know you were home because I saw the back of your head when you turned and dropped the curtain. This is how you wanted it to go down, with me walking around your building, shouting. But I am not going out like that. And you know this. We could have talked it through. Instead, you won’t take a phone call won’t answer the door, and what’s more you have made me the fool who you have to treat this way. Do you understand me? Do you understand I am ashamed of myself and angry at you. I don’t understand how I let this happen to me. And where are you? Now I don’t even care. When the sun comes up tomorrow, you will find these post-its, which could have been cute under different circumstances. Under these they make me look bad, so I’ll leave them and not look back. I won’t come back either, won’t call won’t answer my door. Just like you have done to me. I hope you feel foolish. But there is a good chance you won’t feel anything. There is a a good chance these post-its will mean nothing to you. If so, throw them to the wind. [End Page 883] Keith M. Harris Keith M. Harris is an associate professor of English and Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside. He has published poems in Corpus, Queen: A Journal of Power and Rhetoric, Road Before Us, and My Brother’s Keeper. His essays have appeared in Wide Angle, The Spike Lee Reader, Richard Pryor: The Life and Legacy of a “Crazy” Black Man, and War Diaries. He is also author of Boys, Boyz, Bois: An Ethics of Masculinity in Popular Film, Television and Video, published by Routlege in 2006. Copyright © 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

To Live Like Fighting Cocks: Fight Club and the Ethics of Masculinity

David Fincher's 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club has prompted many academics to write about this film and has captivated many of their students. As Warren Rosenberg, chair of E...

Gender Work in a Feminized Profession

Veterinary medicine has undergone dramatic, rapid feminization while in many ways remaining gendered masculine. With women constituting approximately half of its practitioners and nearly 80 percent of students, veterinary medicine is the most feminized of the comparable health professions. Nevertheless, the culture of veterinary medicine glorifies stereotypically masculine actions and attitudes. This article examines how women veterinarians understand the gender dynamics within the profession. Our analysis reveals that the discursive strategies available to women sustain and justify the status quo, and thus preserve hegemonic masculinity. Women use strategies previously used toward female tokens in nontraditional jobs, such as role encapsulation, and strategies previously used by male tokens in traditionally female jobs, such as distancing from the feminine. Through this discursive “gender work,” women help to maintain the institutionalized inequality and the masculine ethic of the profession. Veterinary medicine illustrates the importance of considering organizational context in studies of feminization.

The 1984 vice‐presidential debate: A case study of female and male framing in political campaigns

This essay analyzes the performances of Geraldine Ferraro and George Bush in the nationally televised vice‐presidential debate in 1984. An exploration of these performances serves as a case study of differences in female and male patterns of communication in political campaigns. Ferraro and Bush revealed fundamental differences in their approaches to issues and decision‐making. The findings in this case study suggest that rhetorical critics should examine their assumptions concerning political discourse, and ask whether a masculine ethic has framed their analyses.