Masculine Subject Research Articles

Chafing masculinity: Heterosexual violence and young men's shame

The role of shame in feminist activism has been debated lately, where scholars particularly have discussed whether shame could enable individuals with privileged positions, such as heterosexual men, to align with vulnerable groups or prevent them from political action. Drawing on written stories submitted to a feminist anti-violence campaign, this paper explores young men's shame of having been sexist or sexually violent. Through displaying shame, they distance themselves from problematic past violent or sexist actions, producing or reconstructing a respectable masculine subjectivity. In their narratives, the young men at times embrace and adopt a “chafing masculinity”, that is, an uncomfortable and troubling heteromasculine position. Drawing on these narratives, the paper discusses how shame – by exposing heterosexual men's uncontrolled discomfort and helping men to unlearn privilege – may be a politically progressive emotion and contribute to pro-feminist politics.

Cycling Assemblages, Self-Tracking Digital Technologies and Negotiating Gendered Subjectivities of Road Cyclists On-the-Move

Self-tracking technologies are now a taken-for-granted part of the road cyclist’s kit. We are interested in the gendered dynamics of one particular self-tracking platform: Strava. This article offers the concept of the cycling assemblage to explore how gendered subjectivities are felt and gain legitimacy on-the-move through the ongoing negotiated relationship between cycling bodies and technology. Our account draws on a cycling ethnography conducted with 27 Australian participants. Four vignettes demonstrate how Strava’s incorporation within road cycling assemblages functions as a mechanism of gendered inclusion and exclusion. We point toward the tensions of Strava as site of excess, where the pleasures and pains of the “quantified cycling self” may reinforce or challenge bodily and spatial boundaries associated with sporting masculine subjectivities and alternative femininities. A focus on cycling assemblages enhances our understanding of the spatiality, fragility, vitality, and multiplicity of gender-on-the-move.

Islamic masculinities in action: the construction of masculinity in Russian visual culture about the Chechen wars

ABSTRACTAlthough it lasted until as recently as 2009, before an official end was put to the Second Chechen War, famously branded as an anti-terrorist campaign, the process of reintegrating Chechnya in the realm of the Russian Federation started earlier. Politically, the so-called Chechenisation has played a central role in this process. Symbolically, however, popular culture and Russian visual culture about the conflict in particular contributed to the renegotiating process of Chechen and Russian post-Soviet identities and their interrelationship in the aftermath of the conflict. An analysis of the symbolic representation of masculine subjectivities in such cultural productions offers an insight into how popular culture functioned as a means to rehabilitate formerly demonised Chechen masculine subjectivity. It also points to the process of remasculinisation which went along with the introduction of Putin’s neo-traditionalist policy in Russian society.

Culinary Entertainment, Creative Labor, and the Reterritorialization of White Masculinity

This article explores popular cultural themes of masculinity and mobility in the context of post-race and end of men discourses. Our attention is focused on sites of everyday culture, taking note of the tropes by which white male authority is fantastically recuperated through culinary entertainment. We read films such as Chef and television reality series such as Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives as sites of a re-terrorialization of white masculinity, exploring the nostalgic resonance of the road-trip and fantasies of mobility and plenty in a social/cultural context of privation and inequality.

The trouble of gender sin in post-Yugoslav film – in the name of the father

Post-Yugoslav film art is, similarly to Yugoslav cinema, exemplary of masculine cultural domination, approaching socio-national themes in a highly gendered mode and reflecting a return to patriarchy, more brutal than that during the existence of Yugoslavia. A new generation of cinéasts explores, with a backlash mixture of contempt and compassion, the themes of violence, displaying a new assault on female emancipation, which seemed to be in line with the socio-political context of rising nationalist movements that led to the bloody events of the Yugoslav war in 1991. The female character is re-located to a place traditionally assigned to women not as the subject of narrative or discourse, but as the object of love and/or hatred by a masculine subject. The films chosen to be analysed here are full-length auteur feature films – Virgina, Grbavica, Djeca, Bure baruta, with a specific focus on the work by Danis Tanović – are not representative of post-Yugoslav cinema, but as rare exceptions demonstrate that, contrary to the dominant post-Yugoslav public opinion, both the Yugoslav wars and post-war traumatic realities remain cinematically unexplored.

Alpine Masculinity: A Gendered Figuration of Capital in the Patagonian Andes

This article investigates the Patagonian ecotourism industry and the spatial production of gender privilege. The analysis attends to how the spatial practices of park rangers, tourism guides and climbers create a gendered space of capital accumulation that devalues and marginalises othered subjects – such as women and non‐alpine men – within specific domains of nature. Developing the concept of a figuration of capital, this article argues that the ecotourism industry has facilitated the rise of an alpine masculine subject based upon key bodily values: robust physicality, a conservationist ethic and heroic narration about engaging wilderness.

Literatura femenina de viajes: aproximación a la visión de España en los relatos de seis escritoras foráneas

La literatura de viajes es un género bastante conocido por la historiografía, en ella se han analizado desde los viajes de la Antigüedad hasta la Contemporaneidad. Sin embargo, tradicionalmente, se había mostrado un especial interés por la literatura de viajes producida por sujetos masculinos, mientras que la procedente de viajeras-escritoras había sido tratada en menor medida, hecho que se ha visto corregido en los últimos tiempos gracias a la labor de algunos autores que han intentado analizar y visibilizar a la viajera-escritora. Por ello, dentro de la última línea apuntada, en este trabajo nos proponemos dar a conocer una serie de autoras, algunas de ellas muy conocidas ya, pero otras prácticamente desconocidas en nuestro país. Estas mujeres, viajeras intrépidas y atrevidas, viajaron a España a lo largo de los siglos de la modernidad ampliando la horquilla cronológica hasta el siglo decimonónico. Se trata de seis mujeres escritoras cuya producción literaria, en la mayoría de los casos, no ha sido traducida al castellano; por este motivo, intentaremos mostrar a través de la traducción de algunos pasajes de sus obras, del análisis de la producción literaria de cada una de estas seis mujeres y de la bibliografía científica consultada cuál fue la visión que estas viajeras-escritoras tuvieron y ofrecieron de España a través de su producción escrituraria. Esto nos va a permitir acercarnos a sus biografías, a sus trayectorias literarias y profesionales y a sus relatos sobre España. Además, las presentamos según un criterio cronológico, para así poder examinar de manera más cómoda la evolución a lo largo de varios siglos de esta literatura viajera femenina.

Literatura femenina de viajes: aproximación a la visión de España en los relatos de seis escritoras foráneas

La literatura de viajes es un genero bastante conocido por la historiografia, en ella se han analizado desde los viajes de la Antiguedad hasta la Contemporaneidad. Sin embargo, tradicionalmente, se habia mostrado un especial interes por la literatura de viajes producida por sujetos masculinos, mientras que la procedente de viajeras-escritoras habia sido tratada en menor medida, hecho que se ha visto corregido en los ultimos tiempos gracias a la labor de algunos autores que han intentado analizar y visibilizar a la viajera-escritora. Por ello, dentro de la ultima linea apuntada, en este trabajo nos proponemos dar a conocer una serie de autoras, algunas de ellas muy conocidas ya, pero otras practicamente desconocidas en nuestro pais. Estas mujeres, viajeras intrepidas y atrevidas, viajaron a Espana a lo largo de los siglos de la modernidad ampliando la horquilla cronologica hasta el siglo decimononico. Se trata de seis mujeres escritoras cuya produccion literaria, en la mayoria de los casos, no ha sido traducida al castellano; por este motivo, intentaremos mostrar a traves de la traduccion de algunos pasajes de sus obras, del analisis de la produccion literaria de cada una de estas seis mujeres y de la bibliografia cientifica consultada cual fue la vision que estas viajeras-escritoras tuvieron y ofrecieron de Espana a traves de su produccion escrituraria. Esto nos va a permitir acercarnos a sus biografias, a sus trayectorias literarias y profesionales y a sus relatos sobre Espana. Ademas, las presentamos segun un criterio cronologico, para asi poder examinar de manera mas comoda la evolucion a lo largo de varios siglos de esta literatura viajera femenina.

Martyr to Masculinity: Patriarchal Violence and Female Masculinity in “The Lady of Shalott”

Recent criticism has viewed the female protagonist in Alfred Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott” as an avatar of the male Romantic artist, who displaces his anxieties about his socially liminal position as an artist onto the tragic feminine figure. Instead of analyzing masculinity exclusively in relation to the male artist, this article situates “The Lady of Shalott” more broadly within the field of Victorian masculinity studies and considers the problematic of masculine self-fashioning in the poem in relation to Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, analyzing the relationship between the labor of weaving and the dandiacal body. Laboring under a mysterious “curse,” the Lady’s life at Shalott represents not only a critique of the effects of domestic ideology on the lives of women but, moreover, a reflection on the toxic expectations internalized within Victorian masculine subjects. The Lady’s death at the end of the poem reflects a double sense of martyrdom, suggesting both the ideological violence placed on female subjects by patriarchy and the pathological nature of masculine self-fashioning itself.

Networked texts: discourse, power and gender neutrality in Ugandan physics textbooks

ABSTRACTResearch within science textbooks has dominantly focused on examining explicit representations of women and men using quantitative methodology. The assumption that gendered arrangements are necessarily explicit and therefore visible and countable, overlooks how power works explicitly and implicitly through discourse to produce specific gendered subjectivities. In taking up feminist post-structuralisms, this study contributes to textbook studies within sciences by illuminating both explicit and implicit representations of gender. Using discourse analysis, ‘gender-neutral’ and/or disembodied subjects and objects were ‘unmasked,’ revealing a generic male and/or masculine subject. Gender-neutrality, which is pervasive within the physics textbooks, was thus exposed as a mask for generic maleness/masculinity. I argue that this objectivist science, which remains compatible with a narrow range of student gendered identities, forecloses possibilities for a wide range of scientist subjectivities, to produce a more inclusive physics curriculum, with a greater possibility of developing physics using diverse subjectivities.

Filicide, journalism and the ‘disempowered man’ in three Australian cases 2010–2016

How can journalism about parents killing their children improve public understanding of the factors influencing these filicide perpetrators? Three Australian cases occurring between 2010 and 2016 focus this question on stepfathers and foster fathers; a group recognised by international filicide research as of high risk for filicide. I consider questions of gender and masculine subjectivity in relation to Australian media coverage of filicide that involves these father figures so that a ‘disempowered man’, a figure introduced in previous work by Little and Tyson, is seen at the centre of journalism about filicide. The purpose of this study is to highlight the need to differentiate between this representational subject as an ideological construct of journalism about lethal family violence, and the perpetrators’ more fragmented and complex lives and social circumstances. It asks how the presence of a ‘disempowered man’ in media representation of filicide signals wider assumptions about appropriate gender role performance that need to be more fully accounted for and addressed as part of improving public understanding of the crime.

‘She don’t need no help’

New Orleans bounce music is a dance-oriented hip-hop form that has emerged as a notably non-normative genre, in which queer Black bounce artists destabilise binary cultural paradigms and emphasise queerness as inclusive and relational. We explore how five artists' lyrics and public personae actively refute the consolidated, naturalised nexus of gender, sex, and sexuality by disentangling each of the three strands from one another. In order to explore how this is accomplished, we created a corpus of bounce lyrics. We analysed lexical indices of gender; self-positioning as feminine subjects; sexual subject-object positioning; normalisation of sex between men; retention of masculine subjectivities; and rejection of gender binarism. Further, the artists repeatedly expose the ubiquitous nature of sex between men in their lyrics, working to assert its existence and normalcy in the popular imagination. The bounce artists we analyse expose and articulate forms of deviance, expressing a blackness and queerness that insists on making visible the humanity and sexuality of Black people and queer people. Bounce music, made by queer people of colour, for an audience of predominantly poor, heterosexual women of colour, is a communitarian cultural labour.

MASCULINE BODIES, SEXUALITIES AND SUBJECTIVITIES

The increase in social inequality, which the author attributes to the spread of neoliberalism around the world, complicates the system of power relations between men, their bodies and sexualities. This leads to a differentiation of masculinities. Forty-three biographical interviews are applied to a critical rethinking of the configuration of power relations among male blue-collar and white-collar workers. The author concludes that work guides emotional relationships and consequently regulates the sexual life of men from both social environments. In addition, the regimes of industrial and office work generate different logical manipulations of male corporeality, which are carried over into the private sphere and employed in structuring masculine subjectivity. Physical skills and strength are the main factors on which blue-collar manual workers base their masculinity, while bodily representations and performance serve in that capacity for white-collar workers. This social differentiation in the structure of work results in uneven chances for creating a “successful” masculine subject. Male blue-collar workers call themselves “losers”, while white-collar workers perceive themselves as “successful” even though men from both environments are exploited. The physical labour of a blue-collar worker is alienated by the process of corporeal management on the job, while the body of a white-collar office worker is commoditized and becomes a sign in the system of symbolic exchange. At the same time, the research shows that the boundaries between social environments are becoming blurred and class consciousness is weakening. This allows both blue-collar workers and white-collar workers to follow similar sexual strategies which differ only in form and style. The masculine subjectivities of blue-collar and white-collar workers include the very same structural components derived from the traditional, liberal and new versions of masculinity, which are distinct in the means and forms of their expression.

Disillusioning Gender.

Illusions are not errors but erroneous beliefs motivated by wishful ideas and fantasies. To disillusion gender is to challenge the traditional Freudian construction that splits masculinity and femininity into agency versus passivity, the first with power, the second without. Disillusioning femininity as impotent frees up potency and power as generativity. Disillusioning masculinity as phallic and omnipotent opens the masculine subject to permeability and vulnerability. Illusions regarding the transgender include the idea that there are only two gender categories and the idea that gender identity is generated solely from an internal sense of self. The wish "to be seen as" or "to pass as" one gender or the other shows that social structures exceed the individual. At least for now, the disillusionment of gender with which we are left marks a tension between the internal sense of gender identity and the social structures of gender.

Fatherhood, Gender, and Interventions in the Geopolitical: Analyzing Paternal Peace, Masculinities, and War

War and peace are gendered and gendering geopolitical processes, constituting particular configurations of masculinity and femininity. When men are considered in relation to war and peace the majority of scholarly accounts focus on soldiers and perpetrators, typically observing their place in the gendered geopolitical solely through military/ized masculinities. In contrast, this article examines fatherhood as a masculine subjectivity, interacting in a nexus with other masculinities to produce an intelligible propeace intervention in war, and considers the implications for our understandings of gender and the geopolitical. To analyze this political subjectivity of what I term “paternal peace,” the article considers the case of Bob Bergdahl. Bergdahl’s son was a US soldier held by a Taliban-aligned group for five years until 2014. During this time Bergdahl was publically critical of US foreign policy, presenting his son’s release as part of a peace process that could end violence in Afghanistan. I unpack how Bergdahl’s public political subjectivity was the outcome of a “gender project” drawing on accounts of “valley” fatherhood in combination with particular forms of diplomatic and military masculinity. I consider how Bergdahl’s intervention was publically received, and how the geopolitical reach of it was pacified within gendered and racialized coding.

‘I want that power back’: Discourses of masculinity within an online pornography abstinence forum

This article examines the ways that men actively construct masculinity within an online pornography-abstinence reddit forum, NoFap. Of central interest is how members of NoFap negotiate possible contradictions between abstinence and presenting themselves as masculine subjects. Utilizing discourse analysis, we illustrate the ways in which forum members employ idealized discourses of innate masculinity and the need for ‘real sex’ to justify their resistance to pornography use and masturbation. However, we also highlight the paradox of having to perform ostensibly innate characteristics, and the outright rejection of feminist critiques of pornography use as it pertains to masculine conduct. As such, this article offers an alternative approach to the popular ‘user effects’ paradigm that suggests that users reject pornography because of internal biological drives interfering in their lives. Instead, we suggest that some users reject pornography to reconcile pornography use with particular expectations of normative masculinity.

Walking a Tightrope on (Hetero)Sexuality: Performatively Vigilant Masculine Subjectivity in Response to Sexualized Culture

Although young men’s subjectivity continues to be defined in terms of their heterosexual performance, they feel vulnerable when women increasingly resist submission to men’s desire and control. However, the sexual objectification of women, driven by consumerist urban culture and commercial media, is rapidly pushing the boundaries of men’s (hetero)sexual expression. Men are thus compelled to renegotiate their masculine heterosexual subjectivities in response to women’s resistance and the demands of the moralistic middle-class society. Based on the performativity-performance framework, this article uses focus group data with Hong Kong college men to illustrate the ways that Chinese young men are “performatively vigilant,” resorting to different cultural and discursive resources to construct multiple and diverse subjectivities in defining manhood and responding to their vulnerabilities in different relational contexts. In this process, the hegemony of men as sexually and culturally superior to women and in control of themselves and the situation is propagated.

Sexual dysfunction or sexual discipline? Sexuopharmaceutical use by men as prevention and proficiency

In the first decade following Viagra’s appearance, feminist and critical scholars documented the sexuopharmaceutical expansion of definitions of erectile dysfunction and its target consumer. As we approach Viagra’s 30th anniversary, while feminist scholarship on the medicalization of sexuality flourishes, the impact of erectile medication has received much less attention. This paper (re)casts a critical lens on popularized erectile medication sexual health messages in the context of current pharmaceutical marketing targeting users as neoliberal aspirational sexual subjects. Discourse analysis reveals that online advice about erectile medication use leverages the increased preoccupation with health risk assessment and prevention technologies to normalize erectile dysfunction as a risk for all men, irrespective of age and health status. Erectile dysfunction is presented as inevitable, pathological, and requiring vigilance and expert consultation; penile performance acts as a predictive health gauge. Erectile medication users are situated as model masculine subjects, (medically) augmenting sexual proficiency in romantic or sexually experimental contexts.

The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture: Representing the Black Masculine Subject in Narratives of Mourning and Loss by Arthur F. Saint-Aubin

The Memoirs of Toussaint and Isaac Louverture: Representing the Black Masculine Subject in Narratives of Mourning and Loss by Arthur F. Saint-Aubin

Reading Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity and Politics ed. by Eric D. Barreto, Matthew L. Skinner, and Steve Walton

Reviewed by: Reading Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity and Politics ed. by Eric D. Barreto, Matthew L. Skinner, and Steve Walton Hanna Stenström THS eric d. barreto, matthew l. skinner, and steve walton (eds.), Reading Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity and Politics (LNTS 559; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017). Pp. xvii + 186. $114. “Luke’s second volume tells a story about power.” These are the introductory words of Reading Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity and Politics, which form the point of departure for the book. Acts tells a story about the power of God and stories about political power where Roman officials, and thereby the Roman Empire, play crucial roles (p. xi). In addition, Greco-Roman understanding(s) of masculinity—where power over non-men as well as self-control are fundamental—are operative throughout Acts, for example, in constructions of central characters and in constructions of Christian identity. “Masculinity” and “politics” are therefore suitable foci for reading Acts (p. xii) and are chosen as topics for this volume. The majority of the contributions are edited version of papers and responses presented in the Book of Acts section at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meetings in 2013 and 2014. The volume begins with customary information about abbreviations and contributors [End Page 558] followed by Eric D. Barreto’s “Introduction.” Barreto introduces the essays and the work’s topic and aims. The emphasis is on discourses of masculinity and politics in the text of Acts (pp. xi-xii) and in the context where Acts was written. The aim is not to open totally new ground but to continue work on Acts, politics, and masculinity with new methodological tools (p. xvii). Barreto emphasizes that the story about Acts and power continues. It continues when interpreters of Acts realize that, and how, their understandings of power, politics, and gender influence interpretations and when interpreters reflect on the possible contemporary relevance of Acts’ story of power (p. xii). The following essays are divided in two parts: “Warts and All? Acts in the Discourses of Masculinity” (four essays, no responses) and “Empowering, Engaging or Distancing? Acts in the Discourse of Politics” (three essays, two responses). Part 1 begins with Christina Petterson, “The Language of Gender in Acts.” Petterson explores how grammatical gender and gender as a social construct are interwoven in the narrative of Acts and mutually reinforce each other in the construction of masculine subjects. The theoretical framework of “language ideology” makes it possible to ask for connections between use of language and ideologies (of gender and class). The next three essays relate to earlier studies of Acts and Greco-Roman ideals of elite masculinity: Colleen M. Conway, “Taking the Measure of Masculinity in Acts”; Brittany E. Wilson, “Contextualizing Masculinity in the Book of Acts: Peter and Paul as Test Cases”; Christopher Stroup, “Making Jewish Men in a Greco-Roman World: Masculinity and the Circumcision of Timothy in Acts 16.1–5.” All three want to avoid the choice between alternatives: that Acts either embraces contemporary ideals of masculinity or rejects them in favor of an alternative masculinity. Conway argues that central male characters enact masculinity in spite of violations to their bodies that would normally have deprived them of their masculinity. Wilson claims that Luke formulates a “refiguration” of ancient elite understandings of a real man “in order to further his larger theme of God’s paradoxical power in Jesus” (p. 30). Stroump interprets the circumcision of Timothy in relation to Greco-Roman understandings of Jewish men as feminized through circumcision and to Jewish understandings of circumcision as a non-negotiable element in Jewish masculinity. Thereby, Timothy becomes the example of a new, Christian masculinity. Part 2 begins with Steve Walton, “The State They Were In: Luke’s View of the Roman Empire,” first published in 2002, an overview of scholarly understandings of the Roman Empire in Acts. Matthew L. Skinner (“Who Speaks for [or Against] Rome? Acts in Relation to the Empire”) offers an overview of scholarly understandings of the Roman Empire in Acts after 2002. The overviews are followed by a case study, Bruce W. Winter “Paul and Roman Law: ‘The Luck of the Draw...