Masculinity

Why is it so hard to define gender? Is it because gender is hammered into us from such an early age that it becomes impossible to view critically? Here is what I have on masculinity: it has something to do with the "positive Oedipal complex," whereby, presumably, a boy rejects maternal "jouissance"--the pleasurable, unstructured, sense of oneness with the mother--in order to enter language, and in so doing, accept the Law of the Father and by implication, the chance to be the Father--to possess the phallic authority invested in the patriarch. This is how Catano describes the process, roughly, and he follows Silverman in her articulation of the dominant fiction, the ideological story that secures the functioning of this identification. (Both draw on Lacanian theory; neither markstheir reading as deviating from Lacan on this count.) That said, one should pay attention to the fictional aspect of the dominant fiction--that this is a story told, which circulates widely but which is not carved in stone. It is, as Connell describes it in a different context, hegemonic--subject to struggle and redefinition. This structure is also subject to being subverted, evaded, sidestepped. Here is where Butler's critique in Gender Trouble comes in handy: she effectively describes an Oedipal complex that doesn't quite take, or that itself is ideological. For Butler, every assumption of a gendered identity is uncertain and needing continual reinforcement. Masculinity critics also recognize this imperfectly assumed identity; Kimmel, like others, quotes the sixties sociologist Erving Guffman to the effect that

“There is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and recent record in sports. Every American male tends to look out upon the world from this perspective… Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself … as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior” (128; quoted in Kimmel 2001 271)

This means, in short, that for the majority of men, a masculine identity will be imperfectly assumed: that most men will blush, will feel uncertain that they conform to this standard. Of course, for Butler, the problem goes beyond a simple feeling of not living up to one's gender: "[T]he ‘coherence’ and ‘continuity’ of ‘the person’ are not logical or analytical features of personhood, but, rather, socially instituted and maintained norms of intelligibility. Inasmuch as ‘identity’ is assured through the stabilizing concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality, the very notion of ‘the person’ is called into question by the cultural emergence of those ‘incoherent’ or ‘discontinuous’ gendered beings who appear to be persons but who fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility by which persons are defined” (17). For Butler, gender is not, nor was it ever, a quality of the subject that comes from within; gender is a scam, a "regulatory fiction" that tells us which kinds of people deserve subjectivity and which do not. If gender is undercut by persons who do not clearly conform to either gender--hermaphrodites, homosexuals--than so is identity.

Of course, as Butler points out, none of this means that men are not in a privileged position in relation to the regulatory fiction of gender: “The univocity of sex, the internal coherence of gender, and the binary framework for both sex and gender are considered throughout as regulatory fictions that consolidate and naturalize the convergent power regimes of masculine and heterosexist oppression” (33). Gender itself works like a conspiracy, serving to consolidate and regulate the distribution of power, primarily in the direction of heterosexual men.

Where, then, does this leave men? And how does one avoid, as Judith Halberstam warns, "detailing the forms and expressions of white male dominance" (3), which, as she rightly notes, have been documented "ad nauseum," not just by critics of masculinity, but by large swaths of the culture bent on reifying and reinforcing white men. In part, this leaves men, like everyone else who has not explicitly been cast out of a gender regime, struggling to maintain their coherent subjectivity. As countless examples show, from Nazi Germany to abusive husbands, subjects that are insecure about their identity are dangerous. In their everyday behaviors, men are apt to behave in ways that reinforce their sense of dominance and control, whether this means limiting women, fighting other men, owning guns, struggling with their fathers, joining men's organizations, playing sports competitively, and other embodied activities. David Savran describes white males' "precarious" hold on gender identity as something that must be "fought for again and again and again" (38). While, of course, in Butler's view, struggle and gender identity go hand and hand, Savran's particular choice of words--fight--point to something more troubling about the white male's ill-assumed gender identity. It's the problem a number of masculinity critics point out--that uncertainty about one's identity has terrible consequences if one has been convinced that one's identity should be 1) more secure than others' and 2) more powerful and controlling than others. The violence to which Savran points--"fighting" is different than "struggle," and while Savran doesn't cover Palinhauk, Fight Club seems to bear out his argument well--results from the dissonance of a supposedly powerful white man realizing that his identity is an illusion. Arguably, other subjects--women, minorities, homosexuals--feel this dissonance less violently, because they've been less subject to the illusion of power and control. (Drawing in broad strokes here, but still, this argument seems worth spelling out.)

But in my reading, men also seek out narratives that reinforce their sense of the world, narratives that themselves work a kind of rhetorical violence, or at least exclusion. As critics from Charles Taylor to Linda Hutcheon have asserted, identity is bound up in telling a story. The stories that men tell are likely, then, to seek out sources of phallic authority and dominance. Such stories, then, are apt to be replicated and telegraphed by men, particularly in historical moments where masculine authority is perceived to be under challenge. Part of my argument here, then, involves why conspiracy-theory-like stories have such wide appeal (at least in the versions propagated by Glenn Beck) at this historical moment. Yes, as Peter Knight and Fredric Jameson argue, conspiracy theories work to acknowledge the complexity of an ever-more complex world, or seek to "shrink down" this world for all subjects. But conspiracy theories also hone down those aspects of contemporary life that seem most disruptive to the male subject.

It's a long road, figuring out how to articulate my version of how masculinity works, and then how masculinity works in relation to conspiracy theory. The psychoanalytic model seems most compelling and, among literary critics, the most widely used (though it's also the one with which I'm most familiar, and I may be selecting those studies that seem compelling based on their adherence to Lacanian thought). But still, masculinity studies is a huge field, and I'm going to have to keep hammering on it to get it right.