Masculine Subject Positions Research Articles

Female desire in phallocentric industries: A duo-ethnographic interrogation

The persistence of workplace inequality requires female subjects to examine their place in exploitative systems of production and consumption, and to identify means for emancipation beyond masculine dominant orders. In this paper we examine our past experiences as young women in the finance and oil industries, the phallocentric and extractive engines of global capitalism. We do this by employing a duo-ethnographic approach and a feminist reading of Jacques Lacan’s ideas on sexual difference, aiming to contribute to the literature on female identification in phallocentric organizations. Our analysis reveals how we oscillated between accepting subordinate feminine subject positions linked to emotional work and striving to access ‘universal’ masculine subject positions linked to success and achievement. At the same time, we both engaged with imaginaries of uniqueness and critique, control and success in order to keep functioning in our roles. Both our stories feature moments of rupture experienced as affective embodied responses, when our organizations placed ourselves or others at risk. We analyse these as moments when cracks were exposed in our fantasmatic survival strategies, leading to our eventual exit from these industries. We conclude that while a feminist Lacanian framework provides a useful lens for understanding processes of female identification in phallocentric organizations, the quest for female desire and subjectivity outside the masculine dominant order requires other (feminist) frameworks.

Of men and markets: Hayek, masculinity and neoliberalism

A key aspect of Friedrich von Hayek’s thought is the importance he places on the concept of complexity and the way that it limits human capacities for knowledge and control. Interrogating the intersection of complexity, neoliberal theory and systems of gender relations, this paper examines the place of masculinity in Hayek’s work. Reading against the grain of Hayek’s texts, I draw out the gendered assumptions that are embedded in them to consider how hegemonic masculinities may provide sustenance to neoliberalism. Focusing on The road to serfdom and The fatal conceit, the paper argues that Hayek ultimately fails to fully embrace complexity because his texts enact and rely upon a masculine subject position that limits awareness of human embeddedness in social and natural systems.

‘Ρε, έσ̆ει καλαμαράες που εν μιλούν έτσι καλά ούτε στα ελληνικά’: Negotiating Masculinities and Intersubjectivities in English Language Learning

Abstract Post-structuralist theories of language and gender have become increasingly attractive to language learning researchers. However, masculinity, as part of a socially and culturally constructed system, in relation to English language learning has rarely been investigated. The current study examines how male English language learners negotiate their masculine subject positions in an English language classroom in Cyprus and how they negotiate masculine intersubjectivities with the researcher apropos of English. Semi-structured interviews, enriched with descriptions of attitudes, feelings, and incidents, were carried out with five male adolescent Greek Cypriot English language learners. Through Frame Analysis, the findings evince how these language learners challenge their usual linguistic and masculine habitus and how they achieve interesubjectivities through the symbolic powers of English, Cypriot Greek, and Standard Greek.

That Line in the Day: The Perceived Effect of Required Work From Home on Male Managers' Sense of Self and Wellbeing

Experiences of required work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the sense of self and wellbeing of men, especially managers, potentially shaped by positions that men take up within discourses of masculinity. Thematic decomposition applied to verbatim transcripts of semi-structured interviews with seven white collar managers living in Australia who identified as men revealed a challenge to the participants’ productivity and subscription to the traditional masculine subject position of the “ideal worker”; and dissolution of boundaries between home and work that prevented some participants from privileging their “breadwinner” subject position. The liminal space of the Home-Office needs to be negotiated to alleviate impacts on self, anxiety, and stress resulting from conflicting work and domestic roles.

Forging a more masculine self online: demonstrating skill and sovereignty in the playing of first-person shooter games

ABSTRACT This paper explores how and why first-person shooter games can enable players to forge a more masculine sense of self. In doing so, it advances an understanding of the interconnected nature of players’ online and offline worlds, and their “actual” and “ideal” selves. Whilst existing masculinities research has explored how technological mastery can lead to expressions of “geek” masculinity, it does not consider the beneficial effects of online competition and collaboration. Similarly, whilst research has considered the triggers and effects of toxic playing behaviors within online gamespaces, lacking is an understanding of how these behaviors intersect with the formation of more masculine subject positions. Addressing these lacunae, this paper draws on in-depth interviews conducted amongst male players of first-person shooters to explore how the hyper competitive, skill-based, and team-oriented characteristics of online gamespaces provide opportunities for them to experiment with, and develop, a more integrated sense of the masculine self.

“I Get Fire Inside Me That Tells Me I’m Going to Defy.”: The Discursive Construction of Trans Masculinity in Cape Town, South Africa

This research extends our understanding of trans masculinity in South Africa. Drawing on in-depth interviews with seven trans masculine-identified individuals, we analyze the discourses that trans masculine individuals draw on to make sense of their experiences of gender and their embodiment and performance of masculinity. There are three key findings. First, we found that trans masculine people deploy competing discourses of gender to make sense of their gender performativity. Second, participants drew on discourses of sexism, genderism, and transphobia to illustrate the complexity of constructing counter-normative masculine subject positions. Finally, while trans masculine individuals discursively positioned their masculinities as caring, their constructions of masculinity simultaneously contained complicity with dominant discourses about hegemonic masculinity. The findings highlight the diversity and complexity of masculine subject positions taken up by trans masculine individuals.

Gendered Globality as a Cold War Framework

Originally penned by Mao Zedong in 1961 as an inscription on a photograph of female militia, “Bu ai hongzhuang, ai wuzhuang” 不爱红妆爱武 装 (“They love their battle array, not silks and satins”) for many sums up a presumed erasure of femininity in favor of a universalized masculine subject position within socialist China. This article reconsiders the discursive work done by militarized female bodies—physically and representationally—focusing on alternative international and internationalist futures following the Sino-Soviet split of 1960. The article critically engages state-to-state relations and internationally circulating PRC-produced cultural material that articulated feminist ideals as part of Afro-Asian-Latin American solidarity. This article returns to well-known texts of Maoist China to rethink state-produced Chinese feminism as a Cold War framework and gendered globality. It shifts the analytic from Cold War dichotomies that legitimate what most scholars misrepresent as an insular Chinese socialist female subjectivity of the 1960s to focus on the complex global dimensions of Cold War socialist feminism.

FEMINISTING FREE IMPROVISATION

AbstractThe idea and meaning of ‘freedom’ in free improvisation has largely been determined by a masculine subject position. This paper proposes a thinking of free improvisation from a feminist perspective, drawing upon the writings of Donna Haraway, Sara Ahmed and Anna Löwenhaupt Tsing, and on our own practices as improvising musicians. Reflecting on our own experiences in music and life, we ask: What does it mean to be a feminist free improviser? What inspires us to seek freedom through our improvisation practices? Can thinking improvisation through the lens of feminist theory inform our improvisational practices? We seek to think improvisation from a collective, inclusive origin. We posit that improvising is always, as Donna Haraway has suggested, ‘making-with’: creating, moment-to-moment, requiring interaction with the environment and its inhabitants. Free improvisation is not free if its practice is delimited by an exclusive world view. ‘Feministing’ free improvisation can challenge assumptions that undermine free improvisation's claim to freedom.

Responsibilising the next generation: Fostering the enterprising self through de-mobilising gender

In this article, our interest is in what subjectivities are fostered among schoolchildren through the recent introduction of entrepreneurship initiatives in primary and secondary school. The educational terrain is but one example where entrepreneurship has been discursively transformed during recent decades from the notion of starting businesses into a general approach to life itself in the advancement of neoliberal societies. The inherently elitist and excluding position of the entrepreneurial subject is now offered to all and sundry. While entrepreneurship pedagogy is explicitly intended to be gender neutral and inclusive of all such identities traditionally suppressed in the entrepreneurship discourse, we ask what kind of enterprising selves are mobilised and de-mobilised here. Second, in what way are these seemingly ‘gender-neutral’ enterprising selves gendered? Our analysis of three recent and dominating entrepreneurial initiatives in the Swedish school system emphasises the need for activation, performativity and responsibility. The analysis also shows that gender is indeed silenced in these initiatives but is at the same time productive through being subtly present in the promotion of a ‘neo-masculine’, active, technology-oriented and responsible subject. Entrepreneurship is presented as being equally available for all and something everyone should aspire to, yet the initiatives still sustain the suppression and marginalisation of women and femininities. The initiatives specifically promote a responsible and adaptive masculine subject position while notions of rebellious entrepreneurship and non-entrepreneurial domestic positions are mobilised out of the picture.

‘Skateboarding is like dancing’: Masculinity as a performative visual culture in art education

Abstract This article analyses the construction of skateboard masculinity as a performative visual culture, related to the conditions for masculine subject positions in upper secondary school visual art and media education. The empirical material comes from visual ethnographic research in classroom and discourse analysis of one pupil’s skateboarding video and an interview with the same pupil. The results show that the masculinity performed in both the visual art classroom and in pupil’s skate video is complex and moves between homosocial expressions and intimacy, risk-taking and visual culture enacted as being cool and an outsider. The analysis implies a linkage to a neo-liberal ideal in which the values of play and pleasure as a crucial aspect of counterculture are connected to entrepreneurial individualism, consumer creativity and market trends.

"Surprised into Gender? Moving Into, Out Of, and Beyond the Male/Female Binary"

One of the most significant changes in contemporary organizations concerns the position of women who increasingly share as equals with men organizational spaces that were previously male dominated. This signals potential for changes in organizational ‘modes of existence’ and, especially, new possibilities for gendered identities. This paper explores some of the forms these new gendered identities might take. Using bricolage as its methodology, it highlights that organisational subjects now, firstly, move between gendered subject positions, so that (in our example) female subjects occupy masculine subject positions. More radically, perhaps, we argue that we can lapse out of awareness of gendered subjectivities. However, the male/female binary persists and this surprises us, sometimes painfully, back into gender. The paper argues the importance of the visual as well as the discursive in being surprised into gender.

Toys for the Boys? Drones, Pleasure and Popular Culture in the Militarisation of Policing

This paper argues that the various and contradictory rationales offered for law enforcement drones are symptomatic of a ‘weapons fetish’ evident in popular culture. This fetishisation imbues military technology such as the drone with masculine fantasies of control and domination that obscure the practical limitations and ethical implications of drones for crime control and prevention. By linking the pleasures of militarism to crucial shifts in the social and economic order, the paper argues that counter-terrorism discourse functions to legitimate the militarised masculine subject positions of paramilitary policing specifically and the neoliberal state generally. In such a context, the drone features as a regressive ‘weapon-toy’ that fuses state control with technological transcendence.

Tender like marrow: A gender-based reading of <i>Boom van my lewe</i> [Tree of my life] and <i>Ad hominem</i>

This article presents a reading of two artist’s books by male artists who participated in the practice-based research project Transgressions and boundaries of the page. The selected artists specifically address the notion of masculine vulnerability and injury, and in the process, they utilise a number of signifying strategies conventionally associated with masculine as well as feminine gender divisions. Schutte’s Boom van my lewe [Tree of my life] and Strydom and Burger’s Ad hominem were investigated. I argue that the use of media with a conventional feminine character together with themes associated with both masculine and feminine aspects assisted towards expressing the experience of masculine vulnerability and injury in such a manner that an unusual masculine subject position was suggested. This subject position offered a more nuanced view of masculinity that departs from masculinities proposed in discourses of conventional (heteronormative) or even so-called ‘new’ or alternative masculinities (transgender, homosexual and the like).

‘Proper masculinities’ and the fear of feminisation in modern Cyprus: university students talk about homosexuality and gendered subjectivities

The present article attempts to pay attention to the ways in which a group of young Cypriot students engage in the construction of conventional notions of masculinities through the negation and the fear of homosexual desire. Drawing on interviews with 12 male and female university students, I argue that many young men go through complicated processes of anxiety and fear in order to achieve a masculine heterosexual career and to prove that they are ‘real men’. In that way the male participants I interviewed expressed the idea that in the cultural space of Cyprus masculine subject positions are the most powerful ones. The participants commented on the unthinkable sexual choice of loving someone from the same sex and concluded that choosing to stay in Cyprus and live a gay life would be very painful if not unthinkable. The article concludes that gender anxiety in Cyprus is expressed through the abjection of homosexuality.

Viagra Selfhood: Pharmaceutical Advertising and the Visual Formation of Swedish Masculinity

Using material from the Pfizer sponsored website providing health information on erectile dysfunction to potential Swedish Viagra customers (www.potenslinjen.se), this article explores the public image of masculinity in relation to sexual health and the cultural techniques for creating pharmaceutical appeal. We zoom in on the targeted ideal users of Viagra, and the nationalized, racialized and sexualized identities they are assigned. As part of Pfizer's marketing strategy of adjustments to fit the local consumer base, the ways in which Viagra is promoted for the Swedish setting is telling of what concepts of masculinity are so stable and unassailable that they can withstand the association with a drug that is, in essence, an acknowledgement of 'failed' masculinity and 'dysfunctional' sexuality. With comparative national examples, this study presents an interdisciplinary take on the 'glocalized' cultural imaginary of Viagra, and the masculine subject positions it engenders.

Exploring Identity Issues in British Men’s Magazines’ Problem Pages: A Cultural Studies Perspective

Focusing on problem pages as a genre, this paper casts light on the varied subject positions or images of masculinity constructed in British men’s magazines (FHM, GQ, Later, Maxim, Men’s Health, Sky Magazine and ZM) at the end of the nineties. After theorizing the notion of ‘identity’ from a cultural studies perspective, and exploring men’s magazines as an arena for the articulation of masculinities in contemporary UK, men’s lifestyle magazines’ problem columns are examined in relation to the enduring presence of so-called ‘newmannism’ and ‘laddishness’ as major masculine subject positions made available to the magazines’ consumers. Rather than attempting to demonstrate any new changes in men’s subjectivities at the end of the twentieth century, the emphasis of this study is on showing how, contrary to a widely held view among men’s magazines analysts, newmannism did not fade away with the emergence of laddishness in the early nineties, but both subject positions were still very much alive at the end of the nineties. Through an analysis of illustrative examples, this contribution substantiates how the act of reading such a cultural artefact as men’s magazines’ problem pages provides male readers with access to masculine subject positions, no matter whether they are subsequently taken up or resisted.

Feen-Mährchen: Zur Unterhaltung für Freunde und Freundinnen der Feenwelt (review)

Goethe Yearbook 237 After establishing these and other frameworks for her study, ter Horst discusses Miss Sara Sampson and Minna von Barnhelm, particularly women who exhibit masculine traits. When she continues with WUhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, she is careful to explain her choice of genre, since this is the only novel she considers.There is a wealth of material for the exploration of gender identities in Goethe's inexhaustible book and the other works of Goethe, primarily dramas, which it suggests. Notable among the female figures ter Horst considers is, of course, Mignon. Thérèse and Natalie also figure prominently along with others, and many of their male counterparts as weU. It is a strength of this book that ter Horst continues to compare and contrast the characters from these authors in every part of the book and also provides a strong concluding chapter. Ter Horst's treatment of Kleist, particularly the Amazons in Penthesilea, incorporates relatively recent Uterary criticism and more classical material than is cited for the other authors, although there is adequate annotation and bibliographical information throughout. One of her general conclusions for the Kleist chapter reads: "In the works of Goethe and Lessing, the one-sex, theatrical model vies with the two-sex model. In Kleist's Penthesilea, however, the contradictions inherent in the ideology of the two-sex model are revealed through the use of a classical intertext, Homer's Iliad, in particular the combat between Hector and AchiUes. In Penthesilea, both the eponymous heroine and Achules identify, alternately, with Homer's defeated Hector and [. . . the] victorious AchiUes. Thus, a conventionally masculine subject position is not always associated with a biological male, nor is a conventionally feminine subject position always occupied by a biological female" (177). This is but one of the multiple permutations of gender identification discussed in ter Horst's analyses.To summarize her position,"Gender is not something that an individual possesses, nor is it simply imposed by the immediate culture; gender is established relationally, in an exchange with others as well as in dialogue with historical and literary models" (178). Ustfig contemporary gender theory, close reading and historical insights, ter Horst shows that longfamUiar texts can reveal new perspectives for readers with an interest in comparative gender analysis. Villanova University Erlis Wickersham Ulrich Marzolph, ed., Feen-Mährchen: Zur Unterhaltung für Freunde und Freundinnen der Feenwelt. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2000. 331 PPUlrich Marzolph edits this reprint of an 1801 edition of fairy tales foUowing in the French tradition of contes de fees, and in doing so, he makes available to us a type of text that once was very popular but is now typically difficult to obtain.The Feen-Mährchen stand between the more Uterary and courtly texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and the tales taken (as claimed by the Brothers Grimm) "directly" from the oral traditions of the "folk" that follow Ui the nineteenth century. As such, it is an intriguing document of tales published in German before the famous 1812 Grimms' Hausmärchen, and a useful guide for anyone interested in the traditions and developments of folk and fairy tales. (I use the Jack Zipes definition of "fairy tales" as those stories in written form that are "inspired by" folk tales, an open-ended understanding 238 Book Reviews that allows for inclusion of the transcription of seemingly "pure" oral traditions as well as the Uterary renditions of well-known tales.) These particular Feen-Mährchen reflect a wide variety of influences including some direct translations from the French, but above aU, they are characterized by a heavy-handed moral tone stressing virtue and patience, and describing Ui graphic detail the torture of those who must be put to the test but also of those who must be punished for their bad behavior. Certainly that also characterizes many of the famous versions of fairy tales from Charles Perrault and the Grimms, but these Feen tales tend to be longer, even more attentive to detaUed descriptions of the young girls' adventures and their horrors , and even plumper with "happy-ever-after" endings resulting from longwinded stories fuU of "einnehmendes Betragen" and "Sittsamkeit." The first tale, "Die...

Death and football: an analysis of men's talk about emotions.

This study is concerned with men's talk about emotions and with how emotion discourses function in the construction and negotiation of masculine ways of doing emotions and of consonant masculine subject positions. A sample group of 16 men, who were recruited from two social contexts in England, participated in focus groups on 'men and emotions'. Group discussions were transcribed and analysed using discourse analysis. Participants drew upon a range of discursive resources in constructing masculine emotional behaviour and negotiating masculine subject positions. They constructed men as emotional beings, but only within specific, rule-governed contexts, and cited death, a football match and a nightclub scenario as prototypical contexts for the permissible/understandable expression of grief, joy and anger, respectively. However, in the nightclub scenario, the men distanced themselves from the expression of anger as violence, whilst maintaining a masculine subject position. These discursive practices are discussed in terms of the possibilities for effecting change in men's emotional lives.

Producing Contradictory Masculine Subject Positions: Narratives of Threat, Homophobia and Bullying in 11–14 Year Old Boys

This paper reports a qualitative analysis of data from a study of masculinity in 11–14 year old boys attending twelve London schools. Forty‐five group discussions (N= 245) and two individual interviews (N= 78) were conducted. The findings indicate that boys’ experiences of school led them to assume that interviews would expose them to ridicule and so threaten their masculinity. Boys were generally more serious and willing to reveal emotions in individual than in group interviews. A key theme in boys’ accounts was the importance of being able to present themselves as properly masculine in order to avoid being bullied by other boys by being labeled “gay.” The ways in which boys were racialized affected their experiences of school.

Gender (and) Imperialism

The seamless continuity between colonialism, racism, and patriarchy makes it imperative for postcolonial criticism to question the foundational category of gender. As Judith Butler argues, gender postulates a normative masculinity poised against a femininity construed as lack or deviation. This normative masculinity asserts itself in colonial discourse, which, as Edward Said observes, represents a masculine Europe dominating a feminized Orient. At the same time, racial discourse represents African men as hypermasculine, as Frantz Fanon and Cornel West, among others, have observed. Thus, the African man occupies at once masculine and feminine subject positions and, likewise, the European women figures ambivalently as both masculine and feminine. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North depicts such ambivalent spaces that enable a critique of colonial and patriarchal notions of gender.