Masculine Violence Research Articles

Hope for Change in the Post-Apocalypse

This paper explores the portrayal of gender in the post-apocalypse by looking at the postapocalyptic video game The Last of Us. The paper uses scholarship on apocalypse, videogames, and gender to show that while the game adheres to some gender stereotypes it ultimately represents progress in its representation of gender roles. The paper uses examples of the game’s portrayal of its characters and its depiction of the consequences of violent masculinity in a zombie apocalypse to illustrate how a post-apocalyptic video game can take steps towards imagining new gender roles in the post-apocalypse.

What is there to learn about violence and masculinity from a genderqueer man?

ABSTRACTBackground: In light of the global health burden of violence, which is predominantly perpetrated by men, studies have explored the relationship between masculinities and violence. However, there is a relative lack of work focusing on non-hegemonic men and masculinities in relation to violence. Such work has the potential to advance violence prevention work.Objective: This article aims to show the shifting relationship between constructions of violent and non-violent masculinity in the talk of a genderqueer man. The article also aims to demonstrate how qualitative approaches are able to reveal the complexity and contradiction in accounts of masculine identities as these are negotiated within the context of the research interview.Methods: The article is based on a case study of Adam, a middle-class, ‘white’, ‘genderqueer’ man who participated in a larger study which explored the ways in which gender is constructed within 18 South African families. Adam’s interview is analysed using a Foucauldian discourse analysis.Results: The analysis demonstrates the complex and contradictory process involved in negotiating and resisting a violent version of masculinity. Constructing male violence as rooted in particular psychosocial and cultural assumptions, rather than as an automatic biological response, enables Adam to resist this violence. This deconstruction of violent masculinity is linked to Adam’s ‘genderqueer’ identity or ‘in-betweenness’, which facilitates a critical consciousness in relation to notions of gender. The analysis also demonstrates how notions of masculinity are deliberated and co-constructed within the relational context of the interview.Conclusions: This article shows that resisting and reformulating masculinity in non-violent ways is a complex process. This suggests that violence prevention efforts need to focus on the creation of spaces for ongoing dialogues about non-violence. As demonstrated by the context of the interview, relational, conversational spaces have the potential to facilitate the co-construction of non-violent masculinities.

The Maiden and the Wolf: Law, Gender, and Sexual Violence in Imperial Russia

This article is a close reading of an 1859 court case from Moscow, in which a young orphaned noblewoman accused a much older, wealthier, and better-connected man. It situates the case in its cultural context among the striving middling classes of Moscow on the eve of the Great Reforms, revealing deeply fractured understandings of respectability, civic versus private spaces, masculine violence, and personal safety that permeated Russia's urban classes. Legally, the trial's outcome is not as surprising as the sharply conflicted reasoning of pre-reform judges. Each of the three tiers in the court system produced a radically different decision, pitching the obvious facts of the case against the state's pressure to convict the rapist and pre-reform Russia's supposedly archaic—but actually quite flexible—evidence law. Ultimately, the article argues that this noblewoman was able to use notions of female honor and domesticity in her favor, while the accused's status did not entirely serve to protect him where the need to protect male status conflicted with concerns over the dangers of westernization and modernization.

Masculinity, aggrieved entitlement, and violence: considering the Isla Vista mass shooting

ABSTRACTMass shootings have become an important topic of scholarly research; however, few studies examine the relationship between masculinity and violence. This study investigates how masculinities are constructed using a thematic content analysis of the Isla Vista mass shooter's manifesto, My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger. Our analyses reveal how the shooter constructs and ‘does’ masculinity in adherence to masculine cultural ideals. Rodger reproduces hegemonic gender ideologies through his construction of masculinity in relation to physical embodiment and sexual prowess. Those who displayed these traits are constructed as superior men, characterizing men who lacked them as inferior. Interestingly, Rodger presents himself as lacking in these areas. As such, he draws on alternative masculine presentations to illustrate his manhood. When he does not receive societal confirmation of his masculinity, he experiences a crisis of masculinity and feelings of aggrieved entitlement wherein he directs his anger at racial minorities and women. He eventually adopts a violent masculinity and executes a violent retribution when his experiences do not live up to culturally defined gender expectations. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Écrire la (non-)violence : le cas de Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes d’Ivan Jablonka

This article analyses Ivan Jablonka’s Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes, which garnered three major prizes in the fall of 2016 (Le Prix Littéraire du Monde, Le Médicis et Le Prix des Prix) while also receiving quasi-unanimous acclaim from French press and media. My purpose is to explain how Jablonka’s writing contributes to exposing, denouncing and even, as far as possible ex post facto and by means of a text, undertaking a kind of reparation of the masculine violence inflicted on the 18-year-old young woman not only at the end, but throughout her entire life. To this end, the paradigm of violence laid out by Lévinas and Derrida will allow us to explore the ethics and poetics of non-violence. If on the one hand Jablonka’s text reveals the subjective involvement of the researcher and writer, we will see on the other hand that his project carries social, political and human stakes: his writing of a ‘crime story’ constitutes a manner of understanding the tragedy in the context of French society, with its social, judiciary and political institutions.

Addressing gender violence among children in the early years of schooling: insights from teachers in a South African primary school

This paper explores how teachers in a poor township primary school in South Africa construct meaning regarding gender violence among children, and how they talk about addressing that violence. The paper argues that major influences on the endemic violence include complex societal structures that are inscribed with cultures of violent masculinities, extreme socio-economic conditions and gender inequality. It shows how primary school teachers recognise violent masculinities and gender power imbalances but simultaneously uphold the notion of children’s innocence as a rationale for refuting the primary school as a site of violence. The paper explores contradictions embedded in some of the solutions which the teachers suggest as a way of addressing violence. For example, while they highlight the importance of teaching peace, respect and equality, they also advocate the use of corporal punishment as an effective means of dealing with violent conduct among school children.

Deconstructing Criminology’s Origin Stories

The global production of knowledge is grossly skewed to the northern Anglophone world (Hogg et al. in International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 6(1), 1–7, 2017; Connell 2007). It should be no surprise therefore that criminology’s origin stories are derivative of northern experiences, yet generalised as universal theories of crime causation. In this article, we argue that the origin stories of criminological theory translated the ‘darker’, ‘hairier’ and ‘muscular’ masculinities of the global south into prototypes of dangerousness. These prototypes were first articulated as scientific claims in the nineteenth century works of Lombroso, but have been refined and embedded in mainstream criminological discourses well into the present, mainly through the quantitative study of social disorganisation, ‘race’ and racialised masculinities as variables in crime causation. The paper concedes that while deeply troubling expressions of violent masculinity exist now and in the past in the global south, it is mistaken to conceive this violence simply as expressions of atavism or social disorganisation associated with a less civilised world. On the contrary, this paper argues that the violence of colonality itself has had, and continues to have, a criminogenic impact on the present.

Hegemonic Masculinity, Violence, and Gender Equality

Messerschmidt and colleagues have pioneered work in criminology using masculinities theory, yet many researchers in the field have not engaged with the possibility that the different patterning of correlated violent, sexually risky, and antisocial behaviors may reflect a disaggregation of the category of men into multiple masculinities. This lens can help understand men’s violence and enable intervention targeting. We analyzed household survey data and identified three classes of men according to their use of violence and correlated behavior. Associations between masculinity categories and other acts of violence (against women), gender attitudes, and sexually transmitted diseases showed a dose–response relationship across the masculinity categories. Structural equation modeling showed how the psychological variables mediated pathways between exposure to trauma and teasing in childhood and the more violent masculinity categories. Our analysis provides a bridge between gender analysis (with intersectionality) and the psychoanalytic in understanding men’s violence. This is important for interventions to prevent men’s violence against women and other men and support arguments for targeting violence prevention interventions.

BATTERER RISK ASSESSMENT: THE MISSING LINK IN BREAKING THE CYCLE OF INTERPERSONAL VIOLENCE

Batterers exposed to childhood violence, with a history of violent behaviour, are impulsive, have poor anger management skills, will use intimate violence in their relationships and ignore/violate protection orders. In this study, 53 male and 47 female respondents were selected using purposive sampling. The outcome highlighted the need for treatment providers to assess ‘risk factors’ of batterers prior to any intervention. The results showed that batterers presenting with specific risk factors, posed significant risks to their intimate partners. Risk assessment and risk markers could therefore contribute to highlighting and addressing violent masculinity aspects, responsive to intervention. This approach could protect partners and encourage batterers to take responsibility for changing their abusive responses in intimate relationships. The methodological framework of this research project was informed by the Intervention Research: Design and Development. The author used a Canadian Risk Assessment Tool, the Spousal Assault Risk Assessment guide (SARA), a 20 item data collecting instrument used to ‘assess risk’ and ‘predict dangerousness’ of continued violence in men with a history of domestic/intimate violence.

Bråkstakar och retstickor

The present study explores how schools define situations where students have been exposed to violence at school. The study is designed as case studies at nine secondary schools. The results indicate that gender influence how professionals categorize violence. The analyze reveals that physical violence is considered as masculine and relational violence as feminine. This has the effect that boys are perceived as less active when there is involved relational violence, and that girls physical violence is not always taken serious. However, gender seems to have less importance for the professional’s perception when students are involved as a group.

‘And So I Bust Back’ Violence, Race, and Disability in Hip Hop

290 CLA JOURNAL “‘And So I Bust Back:’Violence, Race, and Disability in Hip Hop” Anna Hinton During the internet show, Everyday Struggle, co-host and rapper, Joe Budden revealed that he has depression. He came to the following conclusion during his tearful response to Styles P’s August 2017 revelations about his step-daughter’s suicide on The Breakfast Club radio show: This [mental illness and suicide in the hip hop community] is something that probably will not ever be addressed, so you need people like Styles to speak out…I would love to see more people speak out on mental health issues the way that Styles is…I would like to see hip hop address it more…. Enough of us have died from mental health issues for us to look into it. Most of our favorite artists suffer from mental illness. . .. “Most of these niggas are telling us how sick they are and what they’re going through, so I try to listen for it” (Joe Budden Breaks Down”) This essay, much like Budden’s heightened awareness, probes various implications of mental illness and disability among men in hip hop—particularly in gangsta culture—and examines what lies behind widespread denial of these conditions. 1 More specifically, I analyze how this discourse is paradoxically ubiquitous even as it is suppressed or ignored. Moreover, I am concerned with how artists evoke, then erase disability. I argue that all too often, vulnerability and disability go undetected in black men and in black people more generally, and racist and ableist stereotypes bolster and reproduce this erasure. When black men reclaim/appropriate/signify on these types through rhetorical performances of violent masculinity, I argue that they reproduce this erasure. The potentiality for black male existence is divided into a binary of hyper-embodied, though shortlived life on one end and, on the other, death. Paradoxically, in what emerges in this genre is a narrative of black life with (and often because of) a disability. While themes of disability proliferate within the hip hop cultural products I analyze, disability fails to emerge as a facet of black men’s lives worthy of critical and political attention. 1 Though, as Tricia Rose has clarified in hip hop studies classic, Black Noise (1994), hip hop culture is typically used to reference rap music, break dancing, and graffiti art that black and Latino inner-city youth created, from this point forward I will use “hip hop culture” interchangeably and, most often, as metonym, for inner-city black (male) culture from which it spawned, including the gang memoirs I will later analyze. I recognize that contemporary rap music and hip hop has transcended these origins; however, this article is concerned with hip hop in this context. CLA JOURNAL 291 “And So I Bust Back”: Violence, Race, and Disability in Hip Ho For instance, in 2005, rumors circulated that hip hop artist Houston Summers IV, known for the hit “I Like That,” allegedly attempted suicide by gouging out his eye. According to Capital Records representatives and Houston’s managers, “the singer had been under psychiatric care…for manic depression” and “struggled with PCP” (Rashaun-Hall). However, Houston and his family denied that he was in mental distress or attempted suicide. When an interviewer for Hood News, for example, asked Houston what happened to his eye, Houston replied, “I got an eye injury,” took off his sunglasses to show his disfigured eye to the camera and continued,“I’m from the hood, so where I come from it’s a whole ‘nother element. Where I’m from different from the Hollywood scene, which is why I stay in the background…’cause it’s too many fruitloops loose…” (“Houston Summers”). Houston does not answer the interviewer’s question. Instead, he focuses on his incompatibility with a Hollywood with too many LBGTQ people—whom he refers to as “fruitloops”. In this instance, he uses his urban background and apparent homophobia to avoid discussing how he injured his eye. The interviewer, however, pushes the subject and follows up by pointedly asking Houston if the rumors about his drug use and suicide attempt are true, to which Houston responds, and I quote at...

Violence narratives of Mexican women treated in mutual-aid residential centers for addiction treatment.

BackgroundViolence against women is a social and public health issue in Mexico. The aim of this article is to explore violence among an understudied group of women, who attended Mutual-Aid Residential Centers for Addiction Treatment and experienced stigma both as women and addicts. These centers are particular kind of addiction treatment services that stem from 12-step philosophy, but that have been found to manipulate said philosophy and exercise extreme forms of psychological and physical violence.MethodsThirteen semi-structured interviews were carried in 2014 and 2015 out with women who resided in at least one of these centers to understand their experiences of violence prior and during their rehabilitation process. The interview guide covered questions regarding substance use initiations, family violence and dynamics, and rehabilitation experiences. Qualitative data was analyzed using interpretative-phenomenological analysis.ResultsTwo categories emerged: violence and substance use and abuse, and violence against women in recovery. Results show that all participants experienced violence in their family since childhood, particularly sexual and physical violence. As a result, participants experienced guilt, sadness and shame, which led them to contexts of consumption. Violence continued as they explored alcohol and drug use, even though women felt empowered.ConclusionsTreatment reproduced masculine violence constantly, but women felt that they were in a context that helped them understand their addiction. Even though women felt these centers played a crucial role in their recovery, women’s particular needs and experiences are not considered in the treatment program.

Reparation for a violent boyhood: pedagogies of mourning in Shane Meadow’s This is England

This article turns to Shane Meadow’s film This is England (2006) to describe the impact that losing a parent can have on a child’s development. In doing so it also, more broadly, makes a case for creative fiction as a resource for teaching about children’s mourning. The film’s protagonist is a boy named Shaun Fields whose father has recently been killed in the 1982 Falkland’s war. With reference to Melanie Klein’s theory of reparation and a Winnicottian framework of film as potential space, the author uses psychoanalytic theories of aesthetics to consider the value of mourning to the child’s development. In considering what inhibits the child’s mourning, attention is paid to the psycho-social conditions that produce violent masculinities.

Transitional encounters: practices of queer futurity in K. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents

This article argues that the narrative structure of K. Sello Duiker’s novels highlights a disjunction between the temporality of history’s promise and that of the encounter. In contrast to a temporality of the promise or a messianic nation “to come,” Duiker’s novels render visible those who are deemed outside of the time of nation and history, those who are considered to be the by-products of modernity: the destitute, the sick, the jobless, the homeless, the queer. In doing so, Duiker’s work dramatizes a time of encounter, or what Samuel Delany has called “contact situations,” those brief, surprising, interracial and interclass exchanges that momentarily bring about new and unscripted relationality. Focusing on the young Azure in Thirteen Cents, this article argues that for Duiker, the encounter is fragile and evanescent compared with relations defined in received networks of power, networks organized by rigid fantasies of homophobic, violent masculinities and entrenched racial and economic privilege. Even so, Duiker’s work suggests that tracing itineraries of contact situations might index the potentiality of a longing in contemporary South Africa, if not for the nation as a whole, for what José Esteban Muñoz has called queer futurity: practices that suspend telos, aim and utility in order to cultivate spaces of restructured sociality outside rigid networks profit or power, even in the context of everyday gender and sexuality-based violence within South Africa’s global present.

The reintegration of former combatants in Colombia: addressing violent masculinities in a fragile context

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on peace-building processes in fragile societies traumatised by violence and conflict. It argues that disarmament, demobilisation, and reintegration (DDR) programmes largely overlook the relationship between violent ‘militarised’ male identities and behaviour, and risks to women’s security. DDR programmes need to work with men to support them to evolve non-violent ways of ‘being a man’. The article draws on research from Colombia to illustrate its argument and show the negative consequences of combatants’ reintegration on women’s lives in that context. It suggests key steps to challenge wartime masculinities that should be included in DDR and peace-building programmes, and considers wider implications for development and humanitarian work in fragile contexts.

Masculine Sexuality, Violence and Sexual Exploitation in Micronesia

This article concerns aspects of masculine sexuality, violence and sexual exploitation in Micronesia, with particular attention to Chuukese and Pohnpeian gender ideology and gender relations. Above all, masculine sexuality and sexual exploitation is discussed in the context of Micronesian concepts of ownership and exchange, reciprocity (‘sharing’) and power differences between men, women, kin and non-kin. Despite the presence of alternate and, in some areas, competing value systems stemming from Christianity, or an Americanised constitution and legal system, core traditional values related to male sexuality from the pre-Christian, pre-colonial times still show their presence in masculine (and feminine) thought and practice more than one might expect.

Study on homophobic bullying in Portugal using Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA)

Educational institutions, as well as political, social and scientific discourses, have contributed towards discrimination and violence against people with non-normative sexual orientations. Acts of violence among peers (bullying) motivated by homophobia occur on a frequent basis in school contexts. This study aims to identify the patterns in which homophobic bullying (victim identified) takes place in Portuguese schools using Multiple Correspondence Analysis. This study involved the application of a questionnaire to people of both sexes before obtaining a total of 171 participants reporting themselves as victims of homophobic bullying in schools. Following the identification of eight indicators and the selection of two dimensions, while also structuring the axes in accordance with the representation space, four patterns of homophobic bullying could be identified: masculine violence, feminine violence, violence with less perceived impact, and violence with greater perceived impact. These different patterns have allowed us to learn about the different ways in which peer violence takes place in schools and its possible effects. Among the main study conclusions, it is highlighted how male participants were victims of violence at an earlier age than female participant victims. Another key finding is the complete lack of cases in which the aggressors were only female. Finally, a common conclusion to all participants, encapsulates how none of the victims reported the violence to their families for fear of losing family support by revealing a non-heterosexual orientation.

Adventures in El Norte

Research on migration typically focuses on adults; yet, each year, thousands of children and adolescents immigrate to the United States independently. The experiences and identities of these young immigrants are complicated by a myriad of social locations, not least of all their gender identity. Based on sixteen qualitative interviews with men who immigrated to the United States as unaccompanied minors in the 1990s and 2000s, this article provides an intersectional understanding of the dynamic relationship between masculine identity and migration experience for adolescent men who migrate by themselves. In particular, this work explores how migration can serve as a “male quest story,” allows young men to take economic responsibility for their families, and provides the opportunity for men to escape local forms of violent masculinities.

Putting the Fun Back into Funerals: Dealing/Dallying With Death in Romeo and Juliet

For last fifteen years or so, I have been teaching a university course at Lund University, Sweden, which combines academic study of one of Shakespeare's plays (through lectures, submission of essays, and so on), with a more practical approach: students are cast in, rehearse (with me as their director), and finally perform a slightly abridged version of play, in English, in full period costume, before an audience. The performance constitutes students' oral exam although grading is based on their written work. This hands-on approach is engrossing, exhausting, and enjoyable in equal measure, and surprisingly often it yields substantial food for thought. As anyone who works on Shakespeare from a practical angle knows, seeing a play through fresh young eyes almost invariably proves to be a way of discovering brave new worlds within it. Recently, after two productions of The Winter's Tale--surely saddest of Shakespeare's comedies--I felt that logical next step had to be exploring Romeo and Juliet, funniest and most farcical of his tragedies. Not that there is anything essentially new or original in regarding Romeo and Juliet as a play that thinks it is a comedy, of course; it is an idea that has been exploited by many directors and thoroughly analyzed by academics. But as my students studied, rehearsed, and ultimately performed Romeo and Juliet (or Four Funerals and a Wedding as it was occasionally referred to in group), comedy element spontaneously came to be a core part of our stage work, and on whole, this approach originated with them (although I was very willing to go along with it). Thus, in our work, one of main concerns somehow became how to confound audience expectations and avoid playing tragedy before it actually happens, and how to achieve an encounter with it as unprepared, perhaps, as that of a sixteenth-century penny-stinkard sneaking into playhouse late and missing Prologue. As a consequence, we wanted our Verona to be a comfortably ordinary place for as long as possible, and for as many sublunary citizens as possible--a place full of people busy playing leads in their own lives rather than attendant lords in someone else's, intent on their own joys and cares, most of time treating Montague/Capulet brawls as so much white noise. In rehearsals, discussions, and analyses, we repeatedly found ourselves exploring boundary between comedy and tragedy, our question being this: exactly when, and how, are we allowed, or even encouraged, to laugh at tragedy and death in Shakespeare's plays--and are we able to laugh at dead bodies onstage today? I have no definite answers to offer, only solutions we found for ourselves in our staging; and in this paper, I want to discuss them further. Most people--be they scholars, spectators, or those involved in performance--would probably agree that transition from comedy to tragedy happens in 3.1: bewildering reversal comes with almost accidental, almost incidental, stabbing of Mercutio. (1) This is where Mercutio finally (in Robert Maslen's words) attests to the proximity between rapier wit and violence with rapiers. (2) Following Coppelia Kahn, Maslen sees tragedy as a result of clash between violent masculinity and heterosexual desire and claims that the lightness with which he undertakes quarrel stakes Mercutio's claim to manhood. (3) There is no question that there is plenty of testosterone in this scene, of course, but to me, it seems that main reason that Mercutio undertakes quarrel so lightly is that it is at that point a light, almost playful fight, reminiscent of wrestling and biting of young puppies, which nobody, least of all Mercutio, expects will have a fatal outcome--and that this is also what makes reversal so shocking. Even Romeo, who tries to stop fight, does so invoking not physical danger but law (the Prince expressly hath/Forbid this bandying in Verona streets). …

War-image as affect, war-image as spectacle in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood: how are violent masculinities expressed?

Through a theoretical engagement with the emergence of a new war film cycle in the 1990s, this paper asks: how are violent masculinities experienced and perceived? Specifically, I point to three distinct directorial approaches to the Hollywood war film – The thin red line, Saving Private Ryan, and Pearl Harbor – in order to analyze how films use war-images for affect or spectacle. This cinematic investigation aims to uncover the visual relations between masculine subjectivities and violence in the war film. Through a theoretical encounter with earlier work, this paper aims to increase the theoretical tools and concepts for understanding and thinking about the intersections of cinema, violence, war, and masculinities. By referencing the war films of Malick, Spielberg, and Bay, I argue that this category of genre film, in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood, can use affective force to open up possibilities for critiquing and re-thinking masculinities, rather than merely contributing to American myth and nationalism through the use of spectacle.