Performance Of Masculinity Research Articles

Challenging hegemonic masculinity by performance of ethnic habitus

The aim of this article is to examine the effect of ethnic habitus, in a specific setting, on the construction of alternative dominant masculinity and the challenge of hegemonic masculinity. Based on Bourdieu's notion of habitus, the article will show that in a specific ethno‐cultural setting, characterized by ethnic habitus, marginalized groups construct and perform situated dominant masculinity. The study is based on the military, which is a central organization for the construction of masculine identities, and will focus specifically on combat soldiers, who constitute the most significant model of idealized masculinity. Based on semi‐structured interviews, this micro‐level study demonstrates the part of self‐performance in the construction of masculinity and the challenge of hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, illustrating the performance of worthy dominant masculinity by inferior ethnic groups in effect exposes the separation between the social status and the masculine status. Separation between social status and masculine status gives emphasis to masculinity as relational and contextual social practice and enables alternative dominant masculinities to be detected that challenge hegemonic masculinity within different settings.

Sex offenders, sex and thesub rosaprison economy

A wealth of literature exists detailing the nature and extent of sexual activity in the US penal estate while little attention has been paid to the subject in English prisons. The purpose of this article is to explore the nature of sexual activity occurring in a medium security sex offender only prison in England. Based on a six-month prison ethnography including 30 semi-structured interviews, it will be shown that sex offenders engage in sexual activity whilst in prison despite the prohibition on sexual activity. For sex offenders, prison sex is not solely about the performance of masculinities, power and dominance, but was instead used for sexual gratification and the sexual exploitation of others. The exploitative nature of the sexual activity was inextricably linked to the sub rosa economy of the prison. As such, prison sex for sex offenders is qualitatively different to previous depictions of prison sex among mainstream offenders.

From the Editors

From the Editors

The “Ambiguous Sex”: Cross-dressing heroines in Sensation and New Woman fiction

As exemplified by Louisa May Alcott’s “Behind a Mask” (1866), Sensation fiction is a genre preoccupied with questioning notions of Victorian femininity. However, while heroines like Jean Muir have the power to use their feminine identity to suit their own intentions, other Sensation novels, including Albert Eubule Evans’ Revealed at Last (1873), challenge assumptions regarding the inherent binary of gender through their use of cross-dressing heroines. Anticipated by Evans’ portrayal of his cross-dressing heroine, New Woman novels such as Lady Florence Dixie’s Gloriana; or, the Revolution of 1900 (1890) and George Moore’s “Albert Nobbs” (1927) also contested the contemporary conviction that gender was inseparable from anatomical sex, and that masculinity and femininity were two distinct categories. However, unlike Evans’ novel where the ability to alter one’s gender is based on a performance of masculinity, Dixie and Moore suggest that masculinity is biologically inherent in women. By focusing on the figure of the cross-dresser in Florence Marryat’s Her Father’s Name (1876) and Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893), this essay challenges twentieth-century mis-readings of nineteenth-century gender theory, specifically the two-sex model Thomas Laqueur in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990) identifies as holding precedence in the Victorian period. This essay argues that Laqueur disregards the forward-thinking narratives of Sensation and New Woman fiction in which ideas about women and gender are radically challenged.

National populism and gendered vigilantism: The case of the Soldiers of Odin in Finland

Based on a discursive analysis of various media reports published in 2015–2018 by and about the Finnish right-wing street patrolling organization Soldiers of Odin (SOO), we explore the gendered dimension of contemporary vigilantism. We find that street patrolling as a practice of vigilantism, is justified in this case by using representations of the cityspace as a place of friction between locals and newcomers and of the street as a locus for enacting gendered and racial/ethnic identities. Our findings suggest that SOO’s vigilant practices exhibit a mixture of traditional and new features of masculinity. We argue that the activities of anti-immigration groups such as the SOO in Finland demonstrate a feminist security dilemma concerning the way securitization of public gender-based violence is used to enhance militarized performance of white masculinity. We identify four recurring themes that are used by group members to portray themselves as part of a legitimate social movement: protective masculinity, militarized masculinity, supplement of the state, and indigenous masculinity.

“To me what’s important is to give respect. There is no respect in cheating”: Masculinity and Monogamy in Latino Men

Twenty Hispanic-/Latino-identifying men participated in a qualitative–quantitative mixed design study centrally focused on the melding of masculinity, masculine performances, and sexuality. Participants completed an in-depth, biographic interview and a questionnaire packet which included standard sexuality-based survey measures and other items assessing sexual attitudes and sexual history. Interviews explored men’s perceptions of masculinity, extracted meanings of romantic relationships, and attitudes about infidelity. Interpretive analyses from interview data revealed that two core traits, responsibility and respect, were central both to men’s conceptualization of masculinity and how they demonstrated intimacy in long-term relationships. Men believed their attitudes and values about relational monogamy and sexual infidelity were based foundationally on their efforts to personify responsibility and respect. Men rejected the social stereotype of the philandering Latino male. Men preferred and sought monogamous romantic and sexual relationships and characterized cheating as a demonstrable failure to honor the values of respect and responsibility.

A Series of Staggering Heartbreaks

Typically, the narrative surrounding intimate partner violence (IPV) involves men as perpetrators not victims. This is in part due to both low reporting from men and heteronormative expectations of masculinity. Furthermore, gay male victims are even less frequently discussed. In this autoethnographic article, I reflect on the power structure within violent same-sex relationships and the resulting loss of agency, self-worth, and personal identity victims experience. Because the conversation regarding IPV is often focused on the perpetrator rather than the victim, I intentionally leave the perpetrators anonymous and these experiences vague to instead focus attention on the trauma experienced by gay men. It is my hope this approach will render more intelligible the negotiations of agency, silence, and the performance of queer masculinity that victims experience. This article is neither about the act nor the perpetrator; rather it is about the response by and to the victim.

Code of the Tweet: Urban Gang Violence in the Social Media Age

AbstractAcademics, criminal justice professionals, and news outlets have warned that gang-associated youth use social media to taunt rivals and trade insults in ways that cause offline retaliation. But there is surprisingly little empirical research investigating how gang-associated youth deploy social media in gang conflicts. Criminal justice professionals routinely overstate the violent effects of social media challenges, which further exacerbates criminalization, racial stereotyping, and social inequality. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork on Chicago’s South Side, this study asks how gang-associated black youth use social media to challenge rivals. Bridging traditional theories of urban violence with emerging media scholarship, I argue that social media disrupt the key impression management practices associated with the “code of the street.” Specifically, gang-associated youth exploit social media to publicly invalidate the authenticity of their rivals’ performances of toughness, strength, and street masculinity. Challengers do so through “cross referencing,” “calling bluffs,” and “catching lacking.” Each strategy differs in its likelihood to catalyze physical retaliation, which is a function of the amount and depth of counter-evidence necessary to refute a given challenge. These findings carry important implications for addressing urban violence, gangs, and inequality in the social media age.

Masculinities and hydropower in India: A feminist political ecology perspective

Mainstreaming gender in water governance through “how to do gender” toolkits has long been a development focus. It has been widely argued that such toolkits simplify the complex, nuanced realities of inequalities by gender in relation to water and fail to pay attention to the fact that the proposed users of such gender-water toolkits, i.e. mostly male water sector professionals, lack the skills, motivation and/or incentives to apply these toolkits in their everyday work. We adopt a feminist political ecology lens to analyse some of the barriers to reduce social inequalities in the management of global commons such as international rivers. Our findings highlight the leap of faith made in the belief that gender toolkits, as they exist, will filter through layers of a predominantly masculine institutional culture to enable change in ground realities of complex inequalities by gender. Analysing the everyday workings of two hydropower development organisations in India, we show how organisational structures demonstrate a blatant culture of masculinity. These two organisations, like many others, are sites where hierarchies and inequalities based on gender are produced, performed and reproduced. This performance of masculinity promotes and rewards a culture of technical pride in re-shaping nature, abiding by and maintaining hierarchy and demonstrating physical strength and emotional hardiness. In such a setting, paying attention to vulnerabilities, inequalities and disparities are incompatible objectives.

’Is it okay to go out on the pull without it being nasty?’: lads’ performance of lad culture

ABSTRACT Lad culture is pervasive in UK higher education, fuelling misogyny and violence towards women. Lad culture is commonly described as mix of boorish socialising, drinking, sport and pack behaviour. This study reports on the attitudes and experiences of laddish students from a UK university. Laddish behaviours were ubiquitous in their university lives. They were well aware of the harm lad culture causes but struggled to manage their behaviour. Being a lad is an important part of their identity. With their lad friends they relaxed their performance of assertive masculinity. Interviewees identified banter within their friendship group as an essential social currency but were explicit that banter aimed at other people was bullying. Academic success was important and was gained in part by making a distinct break from anti-academic lads. Their self-awareness and willingness to engage with the issue offers opportunities for more effective interventions to combat misogyny.

“We are women and men now”: Intimate spaces and coping labour for Syrian women refugees in Jordan

War affects women from the bedroom to the battlefield, but for most women war is experienced within intimate spaces. Intimate spaces are rarely the focus of mainstream academic research or media reporting; thus women's experiences with war and displacement are often concealed. Building from literature in feminist geopolitics that helps focus our attention toward everyday and intimate geopolitics, I conducted in‐depth interviews with Syrian women refugees in Jordan in order to examine how they are coping. Of the many ways that they've learned to cope, these women asserted that earning an income and adjusting to altered gender performances and relations have been both dire and formative. Many Syrian women refugees have become income providers for the first time in their lives. Some women have become their families’ sole providers, and other women are now heads of households as well. Bringing literature from feminist geography, transnational and migration studies, and critical home studies together with feminist geopolitics, I offer the ideas of coping and coping labour as a framework to examine the intimate spaces of displacement. I highlight that paid work is understudied within feminist geopolitics, but such a focus renders important insights into how gender shapes experiences of displacement and how displacement is reshaping gendered relations. In this paper, I show that in the intimate spaces of displacement women have taken on traditionally masculine practices, but while their gendered performances shift, they are simultaneously entrenched as the ideals of appropriate feminine and masculine performances are recreated. Though these multiple gendered performances are creating numerous demands and challenges for Syrian women refugees, these women are also experiencing an increased sense of strength, confidence and respect as a result of their shifting performances.

Masculinities in the Middle: Policing of Masculinity, and the Central and Marginal Roles of Adolescent Boys in Adult Martial Art Groups

The present study explores recent changes in performances of masculinity in the West, through an exploration of the status of adolescent boys participating in mostly adult martial arts groups. Drawing on a qualitative methodology of ethnographic participation and in-depth interviews, I argue that adolescent boys simultaneously occupy positions of centrality and marginality. Hierarchies of age and seniority place the boys as inferior, to both men and women. But at the same time, adolescent boys occupy the center in at least three aspects: their status as “becoming men”; their potential to demonstrate the method’s effectiveness; and the social inclusiveness of the group. These findings demonstrate how supposedly progressive changes in performances of masculinity may lead to the fortification, rather than relaxation, of gender policing

Saint Brother André of Montréal and the Performance of Catholic Masculinity

Saint Brother André (1845–1937), the founder of St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montréal, remains one of the most popular religious figures in Québec. Much of his reputation as a saint rests upon the ways in which he is depicted in devotional texts and in Catholic religious imagery: humble, simple, silent and self-effacing. These are often the same characteristics attributed to St. Joseph. This article attempts to question such a facile and limited caricature of Brother André. While he certainly displayed forms of what I call a Catholic subordinate Josephite masculinity, one that was characteristic of some French Canadian men of that era, Brother André was also able to move beyond such stereotypes in both his religious and public lives, thereby performing a less restrictive and more audacious form of masculinity.

Abimelech the manly man? Judges 9.1-57 and the performance of hegemonic masculinity

Feminist readings have long noted the gender anxiety present in the closing portion of Judges 9.1-57 where, in his last moments, Abimelech implores his armor bearer to cut him down lest he be remembered as a man killed by a woman. Utilizing Abimelech’s dying, gendered fear as a point of departure, the present study undertakes a ‘masculinist’ reading of Judges 9.1-57, exploring the ways in which Abimelech’s anxiety regarding his status as a ‘true man’ are present in the narrative. Adopting a model of idealized Hebrew masculinity derived from David Clines’ seminal work on David and augmented by recent scholarship on masculinity readings and the Hebrew Bible, the analysis demonstrates that Abimelech is a ‘subordinate’ male desperately seeking to act as a ‘hegemonic’ male. Ultimately, however, Abimelech’s performance of idealized masculinity falls short as he fails in the categories of martial prowess, wise and persuasive speech, and peer to peer bonding.

'Winning Bigly': Sporting Fantasties of White Male Omnipotence in the Rise of Trump and Alt Right White Supremacy

In this article, the author offers a critical contextual analysis that seeks to answer Giroux’s (2015) call for scholars to map and critically examine the “cultural circuits, points of connection, internalized values, discourses and pedagogies. . . responsible for both promoting and legitimating the likes of Donald Trump” (Don’t Get Distracted by the Buffoonery section, para. 1). To this end, this essay explores how the Trump candidacy and presidency, the rise of the Alt Right, and the appeal of New England Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady, to his fans who have nicknamed him as the ‘Greatest Of All Time’ (i.e. The G.O.A.T.), are all linked by 1) the lionization of a particular performance of white masculinity as omnipotent, and 2) a desire to unapologetically revitalize white male privilege and prerogative as the unquestioned norm across American culture. The author articulates these three cultural sites together—Trump’s racial and gender performance as a politician, the alt-right’s visions of white national manhood, and cultural representations of Brady as the embodiment of white male omnipotence—to emphasize the point that the white supremacist and anti-feminist ideas expressed by Trump, his administration, and the alt-right are not just beliefs held just by a handful of white racists with ‘hate in their hearts.’Instead, these retrogressive and anti-democratic ideas about race and gender have been circulating and cross-pollinating across American film, television, and sport media (among other cultural sites) over the past decade and have primed anxious white men to perceive the Alt Right and Trump’s efforts to revitalize white male prerogative in American civic life as reasonable.

Fighting Gender Stereotypes: Women’s Participation in the Martial Arts, Physical Feminism and Social Change

In the past, some scholars have assumed that women’s empowerment through participation in sports, particularly male-identified sports, would result in a decrease in gender differences and performances of femininity. Recently, however, scholars have suggested that performances of femininity are not necessarily detrimental to gender empowerment, and furthermore that strategic use of them may be subversive. On the basis of my auto-ethnography and interviews with men and women who practice martial arts, I explicate the unique social conditions that make full-contact martial arts a fertile ground for gender subversive appropriation in terms of: 1. close and reciprocal bodily contact between men and women, 2. the need to learn new regimes of embodiment, and 3. the paradoxical effects of male dominance in the field. I then describe two specific mechanisms through which subversive appropriation takes place: formation of queer identities and male embodied nurturance. While the first mechanism relies on women’s appropriation of performances of masculinity, the second relies on men’s appropriation of performances of femininity.

Citations of Norms and Lines of Flight in One Immigrant Boy's Performances of Masculinities and Reading Identities

AbstractIn this ethnographic case study, the author examined one immigrant adolescent's performances of masculinities through reading practices. The author analyzed how Omar (pseudonym), a Muslim boy from Libya, used reading practices to produce himself as a boy in one U.S. multilingual classroom. Extending the anti‐essentialist scholarship on gender and reading, the author brought together Butler's queer feminism and Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy of becoming to further trouble gender and analyze the instability of Omar's masculinity performances in relation to reading practice. Through analyses of field notes, classroom interactions, and artifacts, this study showed that Omar discursively performed and negotiated multiple and seemingly conflicting reading identities across time and space. Although he was discursively positioned as a nonreader in classroom interactions, he also performed disengagement with reading to display a cool, nonschoolish masculinity aligned to the normative discourses of Arab masculinity to which he was subject. However, he also enacted reader identity and behaviors not traditionally associated with masculinity. Omar's identity negotiation, interactionally and socially situated, demonstrated the instability of masculinity performances, featuring repeated citation of gender norms fissured with lines of flight breaking away from normative ways of being. This analysis contributes to the anti‐essentialist research on boys and literacies by shedding light on the regulations and ruptures in masculinity performances of a gendered subject. The study highlights the importance of situating analysis of gender and reading practices within the social and power relations in the discursive and interactional space. Addressing space allows a close reading of how gender hegemonies operate and fracture in micro movements of identity performance and how space can be shaped to open up opportunities for becoming‐other.

Notes on the uses of sport in Trump’s white nationalist assemblage

Abstract Using conjunctural analysis and informed by insights drawn from critical whiteness studies, sport studies, and masculinity studies, I offer some developing interpretations on two inter-related questions. First, how sport has been used to cultivate and popularize the proto-fascist white nationalist project(s) currently gripping the United States. And second, how sport facilitates the production and popularization of the unapologetic and omnipotent performance of white masculinity that seems central to the popular appeal of this contemporary American white nationalist assemblage. To address these questions, I critically examine the patterned ways Donald Trump, first as candidate and then as President, has used sport to promote his white nationalist project. Additionally, I critically unpack the writings and performances of two white male cultural figures who are key figures within Trump nationalist assemblage. The first, Richard Spencer, coined the label ‘alternative right’. The second, National Football League superstar, Tom Brady, is a man who Trump loves to call a ‘good friend’. I contend that, like Trump, they venerate (in Spencer’s case) and normalize (in Brady’s case) an idealized performance of white masculinity I call white male omnipotence, that is central to explaining the appeal of Trump’s nationalist project to “Make America Great Again” for many anxious white Americans.

Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Robert Tuck

Reviewed by: Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan by Robert Tuck Satoko Shimazaki (bio) Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in NineteenthCentury Japan. By Robert Tuck. Columbia University Press, New York, 2018. xxxvi, 280 pages. $65.00, cloth; $64.99, E-book. Robert Tuck's Idly Scribbling Rhymers: Poetry, Print, and Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan is a well-researched exploration of the modern reformation, during the period from 1870 to 1900, of traditional poetic forms including kanshi (Sinitic poetry), haiku, and waka (classical Japanese [End Page 427] poetry) and of the notion of what Tuck calls the "national-poetic community" these forms' practitioners envisioned. In contrast to the conventional understanding of haiku as an inclusive "commoner literature" (heimin bungaku), or waka as a national form that could and indeed should be composed by all Japanese subjects, Tuck sets out a provocative view of Meiji poetic communities characterized by instability and exclusionism—the rejection of universal, national participation. Two key actors that figure in Tuck's discussion of each form are the newspaper Nippon, an important venue for composition and exchange, and Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), whose legacy and authority take shape, in Tuck's telling, not in his advocacy of shasei, or "sketching from life," for which he is most often credited in Meiji literary history, but through his active participation in all areas of Meiji poetic sociality. Idly Scribbling Rhymers approaches its subject matter in a roughly chronological order. The first chapter traces the development of kanshi in the nineteenth century by focusing primarily on lexicons in kanshi compositional manuals. Toward the end of the early modern period, kanshi composition spread dramatically owing to the development of a "textual infrastructure" for beginners. Tuck argues, however, that new lexicons in Meiji-period manuals targeted a much more limited social group: "the social parameters of kanshi practice become increasingly narrower, focused on and constructed around the concerns of those in Japan who belonged to the social, cultural, and economic stratum that could realistically aspire to a career in government" (p. 32). The world of Meiji kanshi was peopled both by long-term practitioners and by new poets drawn to its potential as an "aspirational genre," making it difficult to posit a national imaginary broadly shared by the form's adherents. Chapter 2 delves deeper into the elitism of Meiji kanshi as it is manifested in a hypermasculine discourse that made the poem an index of the character of the man who wrote it and of his purposefulness as a national subject. Tuck shows how a series of attacks by poets active in Nippon on the "fragrant-style" poem (Ch. xianglian ti, J. kōrentai)—a popular genre featuring images of sexualized female figures—engendered a new emphasis on kanshi as a performance of masculinity. Blending images of the scholar official (shidafu) and gender ideals of the warrior class, poets created a vigorous, masculine ideal best exemplified, perhaps, by poems Kokubu Seigai published in Nippon with public responses by the politician Soejima Taneomi. In the early modern period, kanshi had been oriented more toward the educated class than haiku and waka, but Idly Scribbling Rhymers reveals that the Meiji period witnessed a similar tendency toward segregation based in politics, gender, and class in these latter genres, as well. Chapters 3 and 4 examine the politically charged haiku reform movement of the [End Page 428] 1890s. Chapter 3 explores the openly partisan "topical haiku" (jiji haiku), published for the most part in Nippon and other newspapers, which helped transform haiku into a serious literary genre. Tuck suggests that the emphasis on haiku's "ideologically neutral focus on the natural world" (p. xxxiv) emerged only retrospectively, after Shiki had succeeded in solidifying the prestige of the form. Chapter 4 introduces discourse produced by Shiki and the Nippon Group as well as two competing poetic groups directly contesting the notion that haiku constituted a "commoner literature." This chapter offers a revisionist view of the haiku reform movement as a process and rhetoric centered more on elite identity and social distinction than on aesthetic questions. Finally, chapter 5 leads the reader through a careful reconsideration of modern waka and...

Passing to América: Antonio (Née María) Yta's Transgressive, Transatlantic Life in the Twilight of the Spanish Empire by Thomas A. Abercrombie

Reviewed by: Passing to América: Antonio (Née María) Yta's Transgressive, Transatlantic Life in the Twilight of the Spanish Empire by Thomas A. Abercrombie Babak Rahimi (bio) Review of Thomas A. Abercrombie. Passing to América: Antonio (Née María) Yta's Transgressive, Transatlantic Life in the Twilight of the Spanish Empire. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018, 296 pages. $89.95 hardcover. $29.95 paperback. How can we think of the body beyond the conventional norms of gender? Can the body be performed in a manner similar to the way gender is instituted through the stylization of the body? In broad terms, how might we understand the body in connection with complex forms of social performance beyond, if any, functional materiality and shifting temporal contexts? The above questions tend to defy simplistic responses when we consider changing discourses and practices of bodily sex in situated and varying heteronormative institutional-historical contexts. They also tend to hinge on the now-accepted categorical distinction between gender, as performative experience, and sex/body. Since second-wave feminism and the emergence of queer studies as an academic discipline in the 1970s, categories such as "gay" and "transgender," both first appearing in the twentieth century, have attained residual currency in what Michel Foucault described as categorical distinctions in a world of discourse. Similar to terms such as "society," "religion," or "race," analytic categories have temporal lives, and their conceptual limitations underline their constructed reality with material implications tied to institutional practices and everyday lives of historical subjects, sexed, intersexed, or otherwise. Passing to América: Antonio (Née María) Yta's Transgressive, Transatlantic Life in the Twilight of the Spanish Empire by Thomas A. Abercrombie is one of the most theoretically sophisticated works known to me that successfully troubles the contemporary naturalized distinction between sex and gender. It is exemplary of a historical study that rethinks passing or blending in reference to transgender self-representations in complex heteronormative contexts. [End Page 299] In theoretical terms, Abercrombie breaks new ground by bringing to light the intricacies of the body in terms of the materiality of clothing or social skin as forms of action that help individuated bodies negotiate alternative identities that are inextricable from gender as a performative practice. The case of Don Antonio Yta, whose birth and assigned female name, María Yta, was exposed by his wife after years of marriage is an intriguing tale of transgender identity in the era of colonial America. It is also a tale that defies our contemporary understanding based on sex/gender complex that would assign the category of lesbianism on a historical subject defined by a presumed deceptive motivation to hide the experience of an inner self marked by same-sex desires in heteronormative strictures. The notion of "passing" that Abercrombie advances in this study is not only explained in terms of Don Antonio Yta's attempt to be taken for an identity that previously he was not perceived to be—as a woman in her youth residing at her familial home and later in convents, and as a traveler in southern Europe; "passing" is also the very experience of travel from Spain to Bolivia that enabled him to leave behind, to pass along a bodily sexed and gendered past within multiple and changing social circumstances from the colonial to Enlightenment revolutionary eras. Similarly, Don Antonio Yta's success in attaining the status of a colonial administrator in the city of La Plata was not limited to social class but was also the embodiment of a male persona through masculine performativity. The truth about "passing," Abercrombie argues, is the transformative ability to enact gender and to transform the body in its habituated and more importantly situated ways. Similar to gender, the body is a social construct with historical-material implications. In the case of Don Antonio Yta, in his self-conception and through the ways others viewed him who also shared the same social world, he becomes the male person he attempts to be in both body and gender. Here, self-narrative plays a key role. Don Antonio Yta's unfolding story, primarily described through the "confession" narrative...