Dislocating Masculinity:
Comparative Ethnographies
DRAFT
Edited by
Andrea Cornwall & Nancy Lindisfarne
Cover blurb:
Much recent writing on and by men suggests that male prerogatives are being
sustained and lent authority by the new discipline of ‘men’s studies’. Dislocating
Masculinity is an original and ambitious anthropological collection that raises
important new questions about the study of men and masculinities. In a sustained
cross-cultural enquiry, local experiences of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ are
deconstructed to reveal the complexities of gendering and gendered difference. The
familiar oppositions are analysed—male/female, man/woman and masculinity/
femininity—as are the other apparent certainties—that ‘a man is a man’ everywhere
and that everywhere this means the same thing.
Contributors present a multiplicity of representations of manliness in settings that
range from Imperial India to rural Zimbabwe to the gay community in London.
Notions of masculinity define many different male and female identities; through
idioms of masculinized power, they are often potent ways of expressing inequality.
The complex relations between desire, sexual orientation, potency, fertility and sexual
experience are considered in different social settings, as is the relation between
gender and race, class and age. In both the theoretical and ethnographic chapters,
essentialist ideologies of masculinity are challenged via a focus on embodiment and
agency and subordinate masculinities. By dislocating a singular notion of
masculinity, we expose particular versions of masculinity that disempower both men
and women.
Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and International Development in the
School of Global Studies, University of Sussex and Nancy Lindisfarne long taught
Anthropology at SOAS, University of London and is now a visual artist and blogger
on sexism, class and violence.
Contents
Preface to the Second Edition
v
Notes on Contributors
xi
Acknowledgements
xiii
1. Introduction
Andrea Cornwall & Nancy Lindisfarne
1
2
Dislocating masculinity: gender, power and anthropology
Andrea Cornwall & Nancy Lindisfarne
11
2
Missing masculinity? Prostitutes’ clients in Alicante, Spain
Angie Hart
48
3
A broken mirror: masculine sexuality in Greek ethnography
Peter Loizos
66
4
Variant masculinities, variant virginities: rethinking ‘honour
and shame’
Nancy Lindisfarne
82
5 ‘We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going shopping’:
changing gay male identities in contemporary Britain
David Forrest
97
6 Gendered identities and gender ambiguity among travestis in
Salvador, Brazil
Andrea Cornwall
111
7 Pandora unbound: a feminist critique of Foucault’s History of
Sexuality
Lin Foxhall
133
8 Men don’t go to the moon: language, space and masculinities
in Zimbabwe
Chenjerai Shire
146
9 An economy of affect: objectivity, masculinity and the
gendering of police work
Bonnie McElhinny
158
10 The ‘White Negro’ revisited: race and masculinities in south
London
Les Back
171
11 ‘Real true boys’: moulding the cadets of imperialism
Helen Kanitkar
183
12 The paradoxes of masculinity: some thoughts on segregated
societies
Deniz Kandiyoti
196
References
213
Name index
231
Subject index
234
Preface to the Second Edition
Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies was one of the first feminist
contributions to the emerging field of the study of men and masculinities that had
begun to take shape in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It came at the tail end of a
hugely productive period for feminist anthropology, as the concept of gender came to
be established in the social sciences. Sherry Ortner’s (1974) ‘Is female to male as
nature is to culture?’, Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere’s (1974) Women,
Culture and Society, Rayna Rapp Reiter’s Towards an Anthropology of Women, and
Carol and Marilyn Strathern’s (1981) Nature, Culture and Gender had marked out
the field. Amongst this body of work, Gayle Rubin’s (1975) ‘The Traffic in Women:
Notes on the Politics Economy of Sex’ was a landmark, anticipating debates that
were to shape social science thinking on gender decades later, and Marilyn
Strathern’s (1990) complex and brilliant The Gender of the Gift took the discipline
into new places, inspiring a decade of ethnographic enquiry into what Rubin had
so memorably termed ‘the endless diversity and monotonous specificity of
women’s oppression’ (1975: 158).
For the editors and contributors to Dislocating Masculinity, the unfolding
interest in the study of men and masculinities was welcomed for bringing into view
the gendered nature of the unmarked male subject of conventional social science. We
were struck by a number of aspects of the “New Men’s Studies” (Brod and Kimmel
1987), as it styled itself at the time. It was a debate that was strikingly ethnocentric,
revolving around a particular constituency of straight, white, middle-class American
and British men. In a review of a number of books that were to define the emergence
of this field - Brod’s (1987) The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies,
Kimmel’s (1987) Changing Men: New Directions in Research on Men and Masculinity and
Connell’s (1987) Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics - Christine
Griffin describes The New Men’s Studies (“TNMS”) as ‘part of a contemporary crisis
of hegemonic masculinity’, noting that
So far, 'TNMS' is shaping up to be very like the old Men's Studies: the
academic malestream which bears minimal resemblance to the transformatory
(and threatening) capacity of feminist/Women's Studies. (1989: 103)
As Tim Carrigan, R.W. Connell and John Lee were to comment in their landmark
1985 article ‘Towards a new sociology of masculinity’, what they called the “Books
About Men” genre
…is not, fundamentally about uprooting sexism or transforming patriarchy, or
even understanding masculinity in its various forms. When it comes to the
crunch, what it is about is modernizing hegemonic masculinity. It is
concerned with finding ways in which the dominant group – the white,
educated, heterosexual, affluent males we know and love so well – can adapt
to new circumstances without breaking down the social-structural
arrangements that actually give them their power. (1985: 577)
At the time we first worked on this book in the late 1989s and early 1990s, what there
was of a social science literature on men barely filled a bookcase. It was curiously
insular: at times, almost self-indulgent. There was little dialogue with feminist theory,
or indeed with the conceptual contributions that feminist theorists had made to
understandings of gender and society. We were particularly struck by how little in
this canon appeared to address some of the pressing structural inequalities that were
so evident to us as feminists and as anthropologists – with the notable, and indeed
enduring, exception of the work of R.W. Connell and colleagues like Carrigan and
Lee.
Predominant themes in the men and masculinities literature of this period
addressed the personal, but often in ways that were limply associated with the
political, if at all. Much was written – then as now - of transformations that would
permit men to embrace a more caring, emotional side to their personalities (see
Seidler 1987) and play roles as fathers and lovers that would be more equitable. But
those working in this emerging field seemed to have far less to say about issues that
had so ignited the women’s movement and informed the engagement of socialist and
Marxist feminisms through the 1970s and 1980s.
There was, or so it seemed, not much ink spilled on reflecting on the
implications for men and masculinities of the gross disparity in pay between women
and men. Nor did male bias and sexism in the workplace make much of an
appearance amongst the preoccupations of those populating the men’s studies canon.
Likewise, men’s gendered engagements in the arena of politics and public life seemed
to be a largely neglected topic – whether in terms of the pervasiveness of sexual
harassment of women in all arenas of public life, the lack of women in political office
and other positions of power, the restrictions on women’s reproductive and sexual
rights or the inequitable care burdens that so limited women’s opportunities in the
public sphere. Studies explored fatherhood, intimacy, men’s hetero/homosexualities
and homosocialities and sports. Interventions in policy and practice grew primarily
out of a concern with interpersonal and domestic rather than structural violence.
‘These aren’t our issues’, one men’s movement activist once retorted when
challenged as to why so much of the interest in men was in their domestic and leisure
activities and so little concern was given to structural inequities in labour markets
and the public sphere. In her 1990 piece ‘Men, Power and the Exploitation of
Women’, published as we began thinking about this book, Jalna Hanmer gave name
to some of these discontents
‘The personal is political’, the rallying cry of the Women’s Liberation
Movement, is an epistemological stance on how the world is to be understood
and changed. This stance is not simply concerned with individual experience
of femininity and masculinity in interpersonal relationships, but with a
broader canvas, that of social structure. Through experience women found
social structure, for example, while a rapist is an individual man, the state is
composed largely of men, particularly at the top, operating a criminal justice
system that does not protect women. (Hanmer, 1990: 23-24)
Hanmer goes on to provide a staunch critique of the emerging ‘Men’s Studies’ canon.
She describes as ‘grossly inadequate’, for example, Harry Brod’s account of men’s
studies complementing the efforts of women’s studies to ‘establish the objectivity of
women’s experiences and thereby validate the legitimacy of women’s experiences as
women’ with men’s studies’ ‘struggles to establish the subjectivity of men’s
experiences and thereby validate the legitimacy of men’s experiences as men’ (Brod
1987: cited in Hamner, 1990: 24).
Part of the problem was the tired old binaries that many feminist and social
theorists of the times were busy deconstructing. But it was also an issue that was only
to become more marked - and Hanmer puts her finger on this - is the simple
equivalences that masked far more complex configurations of power and privilege.
These silences about the structural nature of male power were to persist in the
decades that followed, for all that Carrigan et al. (1985) and R.W. Connell’s (1987)
subsequent book Gender and Power provided us with a powerful conceptual
intervention in the form of the concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, a concept that has
come to dominate the field of men and masculinities (Connell and Messerschmidt
2005).
Returning to Dislocating Masculinity twenty years later, we were struck by
how much of what the book sought to map out conceptually retained its salience. In
this revised edition, we re-present the original chapters and the conceptual
introduction that sets out a process for thinking about men, masculinities and power.
We suggest that these contributions continue to provide useful markers for a field
that has evolved and grown beyond what we might ever have imagined back in 1994.
There are now hundreds of books on men and masculinities, with entire sub-fields
within the literature. There are dozens of journals. Anthologies, bibliographies and
blogs abound. The field now spans the gamut of disciplines, going well beyond
sociology and psychology, in which the majority of works we encountered in the
early 1990s were located. Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) identify, a decade ago,
more than 200 papers that use the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’. The number could
well stretch by now into the thousands.
Growing out of a literature primarily focused on heterosexual white men in
the global north we now hear increasingly voices from the global south, activists as
well as academics. This includes exciting new work on resistance, violence, profeminism, sexuality, gay fathering and changing masculinities from across the global
South by writers such as Mbuyiselo Botha and Kopano Ratele (Ratele and Botha,
2013; Ratele 2015), Chima Izugbara (Izugbara 2015), Lahoucine Ouzgane and Robert
Morrell (Ouzgane and Morrell 2005; Morrell 2001), Egodi Uchendu (2009), Marcos
Nascimento (2015), Benedito Medrado and Jorge Lyra (Medrado and Lyra 2008),
Rahul Roy (2007), Sanjay Srivastava (2004), Radhika Chopra (2007, 2011) and others.
What we see in this burgeoning field is a continued focus on the pivotal
themes that characterized the initial interventions in the sociology of masculinity in
the early 1990s: a preoccupation with men’s personal and interpersonal lives, often at
the cost of closer inspection of the structural dimensions of patriarchal privilege; a
keen interest in men’s homosociality and, with it, in the domains of association that
bring men together as men; work on men’s sexualities that has expanded with the
growth of sexuality studies and the trajectory taken by the Aids epidemic in the
intervening two decades. Scant remain the studies of the exercise of male privilege in
the political arena, or of masculinities in sites like trades unions, parliaments, factory
shop floors, or indeed amongst academics working in higher education institutions.
Equally, the literature has far less to say about men’s economic lives than
about their personal and interpersonal relationships and experiences. Often the focus
is on men living in poverty and the relative disempowerment of poor men (see, for
example, Silberschmidt 2001, 2011; Jackson 2001). Raewyn Connell’s (2011) work on
corporate masculinities, Caroline and Filippo Osella’s (2006) beautifully nuanced
account of Keralan working men’s lives and Alan Greig’s (2011) exploration of men’s
‘anxious states’ in a context of neoliberal structural violence are notable exceptions.
These tendencies within the field are reflected to some extent in Dislocating
Masculinity. A number of the chapters address issues of sexuality – queer sexualities,
transgender, sex workers and their clients, marriages, romances and the historical
dimensions of men loving men. In common with much of the literature on men and
masculinities we also had little to say about men in public life and in private sector
corporations – a focus most recently for Raewyn Connell (2011), whose work has
made such important contributions to shaping research and thinking on questions of
masculinity for more than thirty years. We also had little to say about the
materialities of masculinity – beyond David Forrest’s excellent ‘We’re Here, We’re
Queer and We’re Not Going Shopping’ – or about the powerful reshaping of
everyday lives in the wake of neoliberal economic and institutional reforms. While
our focus in Dislocating Masculinity was historical, we spent little time exploring a
history of the present that might have elucidated these underpinning structural
dynamics. Our latest book, Masculinities under Neoliberalism (Cornwall, Karioris and
Lindisfarne 2016) seeks to do precisely this.
There are other absences. For all that anthropologists were active in applied
anthropological work at that time, Dislocating Masculinity reflected little of the
institutionalized and policy-focused work that was beginning to emerge around
‘engagement’ of men with gender equality. It was, arguably, not until around the
time of its publication that we see some of the earliest contributions to what has
become quite a substantial sub-field. Sarah White was amongst the first, with her
1994 piece ‘Gender planning for the “other half”’. Other contributors to the early
debates about men and masculinities in Gender and Development include White
(1997), Cornwall (1997); Cornwall and White (2000), Chant (2000), Chant and
Gutmann (2000), Jackson (2001) and Cleaver (2002).
Similarly, men and violence – especially intimate partner violence against
women – has been the focus for substantial scholarly and activist work over the last
two decades. Especially influential have been the work of Jeff Hearn, Michael Flood
and Bob Pease in the academy and Gary Barker and Dean Peacock in the world of
policy and practice, along with the organisations that they have played such a
powerful role in leading, Promundo and Sonke Gender Justice. From this comes a
strong emphasis in practical interventions on encouraging men to take up alternative
masculinities, and in scholarship on documenting these alternatives (see, for example,
Barker 2005; Groes-Green 2012). More recently, these debates have taken a more
structural turn (see, for example, Cornwall, Edström and Greig, 2011; Greig, 2011;
Edström 2014).
Of course, Dislocating Masculinity has its shortcomings. But it continues to
offer a rare, valuable, carefully articulated, systematic approach to gender relations
and the making of masculinities. It is for this reason that in this second edition we
have made minimal changes to the collection, both to preserve the strength and
clarity of the original text and to retain its location in a period in which the disciplines
from which it drew – anthropology, sociology and history – were encountering the
study of men and masculinity. We hope that readers will enjoy this collection and the
critical questions it raises about men and masculinities, gender and power.
Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne
Contributors
Les Back is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is
the author of the The Art of Listening (2007), ''Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and
Culture (2003 with Vron Ware), The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and
Multicuture in the English Game (2001) with T Crabbe and J. Solomos, New Ethnicities
and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives (1996), Racism and Society
(1996 with John Solomos) and Race, Politics and Social Change (1995 with John
Solomos). His work focuses on race, racism, popular culture and belonging.
Andrea Cornwall is Professor of Anthropology and International Development in the
School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. Her publications include Men and
Development: Politicising Masculinity (edited with Jerker Edström and Alan Greig, Zed
Books 2011), Women, Sexuality and the Political Power of Pleasure (edited with Susie Jolly
and Kate Hawkins, Zed Books, 2013) and Readings in Gender in Africa (James Currey,
2005). She works on sexualities, Gender and Development, and participatory
democracy.
David Forrest is a former anthropologist, practicing landscape architect, writer and
social commentator, currently researching the topic of the death of the public space,
and the uneasy marriage of cultural relativism and the critical voice within
contemporary liberal capitalist society.
Lin Foxhall is Professor of Greek Archaeology and History at the University of
Leicester, and Head of School of Archaeology and History. She specializes in the
anthropology and history of Greece and has taught both anthropology and ancient
history in the US and UK. She has published widely and is author of Olive Cultivation
in Ancient Greece: Seeking the Ancient Economy (2010, OUP), Justifications not Justice: the
Political Context of Law in Ancient Greece (1996, OUP), Thinking Men: Masculinity and its
Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition (1998, Routledge) and When Men were Men:
Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity (1998, Routledge).
Angie Hart is Professor of Child, Family and Community Health at the University of
Brighton. Together with students, practitioners and community members, Angie has
published widely on resilience-based approaches to supporting children and families
in schools and beyond. She co-founded Boingboing, a not-for-profit organization that
suppors resilience-based practice (www.boingboing.org.uk). Her resilience research
profile is underpinned by professional and personal experience.
Deniz Kandiyoti is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the School of
Oriental and African Studies, founding Chair of the Centre of Contemporary Central
Asia and the Caucasus (2001-2004) and editor-in-chief of Central Asian Survey. She is
the author of Concubines, Sisters and Citizens: Identities and Social Transformation (in
Turkish), the editor of Fragments of Culture: The Everyday of Modern Turkey (2002),
Gendering the Middle East (1996), Women, Islam and the State (1991) and numerous articles
on gender, Islam, post-coloniality, post-Soviet transition in Central Asia and gender and
conflict in Afghanistan.
Helen Kanitkar, who died in 2001, was Lector in the Department of Anthropology,
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her main research
interests were Hindu communities in Britain and the Indo-Anglian novel. She was the
editor of the Anthropological Bibliography of South Asia and the Bulletin of the Vrindaban
Research Institute; her publications include Hindus in Britain (1982), co-edited with
R.Jackson.
Nancy Lindisfarne taught social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African
Studies, University of London for many years. She took early retirement to go to art
school, and presently works as a painter and printmaker, and blogs
at https://sexismclassviolence.wordpress.com/. She has done anthropological
fieldwork in Iran, Afghanistan, in a Turkish town, and among the urban bourgeoisie
in Syria. Her publications include Bartered Brides: Politics, Gender and Marriage in an
Afghan Tribal Society (Cambridge, 1991), Languages of Dress in the Middle East (with
Bruce Ingham, Curzon, 1997), Thank God, We’re Secular: Gender, Islam and Turkish
Republicanism (İletişm, 2001) and a book of short stories, Dancing in Damascus (SUNY,
2000), which also appeared in Arabic and Turkish.
Peter Loizos, who died in 2012, was an Emeritus Professor in Social Anthropology at
the London School of Economics, University of London. His first career was as a
documentary filmmaker and included From Innocence to Self-consciousness: Innovation
in Ethnographic Films, 1955–1985. His anthropological fieldwork has been done in
Cyprus and in northern Sudan and he was author of The Greek Gift: Politics in a Cypriot
Village (1975) and The Heart Grown Bitter: A Chronicle of Cypriot War Refugees (1981),
and co-editor, with E.Papataxiarchis, of Contested Identities: Gender and Kinship in
Modern Greece (1991).
Bonnie McElhinny is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and Women and
Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Her current work includes an
investigation into early 20th century attempts to address high infant mortality rates in
the Philippines during the American colonial occupation, as a case study in imperial
attempts to restructure affect and intimacy, and the ways debates about children were
used as a terrain for imperial and nationalist arguments. McElhinny is the former
director of the Women and Gender Studies Institute. She is founding co-editor of the
journal Gender and Language, and Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociolinguistics.
Chenjerai Shire is a researcher and linguist who has taught ChiShona language and
culture for over thirty years and is currently teaching in the Department of the
Languages and Cultures of Africa at SOAS, University of London. He has a particular
interest in language pedagogy, the development and construction of ChiShona as a
standard language, the translation of southern African Bantu languages and language
and gender in southern Africa.
Acknowledgements
The immediate origins of Dislocating Masculinity lie in a series of meetings of the
London University Gender Research Group at University College in 1990 when the
topic chosen for discussion was ‘masculinity’. Behind this choice lay a number of
pertinent questions. Why had the study of men, as men, been the object of so little
anthropological attention? Why, when men’s groups had become salient by the late
1970s (Seidler 1991a), did men’s studies, as a discipline, take so long to emerge—
particularly when it appears to depend so heavily, and anachronistically, on earlier
women’s studies approaches? In short, why had ‘masculinity’ suddenly become so
fashionable?
The following year, Nancy Lindisfarne organized a seminar series in the
anthropology department of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London. The brief of the seminar series was to seek, through ethnographic materials,
ways of thinking anthropologically about ‘masculinity’ and to consider what
contributions anthropologists could make to current debates. The popular reception
of the series and the dearth of anthropological texts investigating different
masculinities encouraged thoughts of publication. Several of the papers from that
series are included in the volume and Andrea Cornwall became intimately involved
in its realization.
Our contributors have been enthusiastic, patient and unfailing in their
support. All have responded graciously to our often heavy-handed editing, while
Dave Forrest, Angie Hart and Deniz Kandiyoti have also played key parts in the
ongoing dialogue about masculinities that sustained us. Heartfelt thanks are also due
to other friends and colleagues whose curiousity, criticism, various kinds of expertise
and unstinting goodwill have spurred us on: Eduardo Archetti, Clare Baker, Janice
Baker, Vie Conran, Lisa Croll, Kit Davis, Dale Eickelman, Mary Hegland, Mark
Hobart, Diana Jeater, Sharon Lewis, David Parkin, John Peel, Mario Sarris, lan
Scoones, Jeff Roberts and Stuart Thompson. We would particularly like to thank
Ruard Absaroka, Colin Perrin, Veronica Doubleday and Sue Wright, all of whom
meticulously read earlier versions of the introduction and offered us invaluable
editorial and other advice; if our efforts fail to meet their high standards, the fault is
only our own. Finally, very special thanks are due to Huw Davies and Edward
Lindisfarne, whose editorial skills, wisdom and companionship helped magick the
final manuscript into being.
Andrea Cornwall & Nancy Lindisfarne
Introduction: Dislocating Masculinity
Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne
Over the last few years there has been a surge of interest in the study of men and
masculinity. We are told that on both sides of the Atlantic men are starting to respond
to the challenges of feminism. Women and gay men are no longer the ‘problem’ to be
unravelled. Now the spotlight is on the heterosexual male. Fresh definitions of
‘masculinity’ abound, affirming old myths in attempts to create new males. From the
‘wounded male’ to the ‘new man’, images of reconstructed men appear on
advertising billboards and television and in magazines and newspapers. These
responses to feminism not only attempt to ‘unwrap masculinity’ (Chapman and
Rutherford 1988; Polan 1988), but also to reassert male prerogatives (Faludi 1992):
perhaps as Brittan suggests, ‘what has changed is not male power as such, but its
form, the presentation and the packaging’ (1989:2).
Now, as in the past, the term ‘men’ is used as an unmarked universal category
to stand for humanity in general. Over the last two decades, feminists have
challenged the ideological and material entailments of such implicit male bias. It is
ironic that the logic of feminism as a political position has often required the notion of
‘men’ as a single, oppositional category. Founding their position on the assertion that
‘the personal is the political’, feminists have consistently raised awkward questions
about the status quo in both the community and the academy (cf. Caplan 1987a).
More recently, however, the feminist political project has faced a number of
theoretical and methodological challenges from within. Several of these challenges
have had a direct bearing on the genesis of this volume.
Like feminism, anthropology can be described as an inquisitive and
uncomfortable discipline that offers theories and methods for investigating a
multiplicity of interested perspectives. Yet anthropologists have been curiously silent
in the recent wide-ranging debates on masculinity. In Dislocating Masculinity, our
aim is not simply to fill a descriptive void, but to demonstrate why the premises and
methods of social anthropology are important to the study of men and masculinities.
The ethnographic studies we present reveal the richness of an anthropological
approach to questions of gender; they raise important theoretical questions and
suggest further areas for research.
In our introduction, we examine the wider academic background to our study
and draw on the new ethnographies of our authors to address anthropologically
some of the intellectual and political issues raised by feminist and postmodern
theory. In this respect, our positions as gendered participants in current debates
about masculinity are significant. We want to disrupt the premises that underlie
much recent writing on and by men, whether it belongs to the canon of men’s studies
(cf. Brod 1987; Kimmel 1987) or is the work of anthropologists such as Gilmore (1990).
In so doing, we offer a new perspective for viewing gendered identities and
subverting dominant chauvinisms on which gender, class, race and other hierarchies
depend.
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF MASCULINITY
A basic precept of anthropological studies is that new insights into social relations
follow the investigation of cultural categories that have previously been taken for
granted. This process is interactive and comparative and, of course, it can only ever
be partial. Such investigations depend on anthropologists finding ways of learning
how others see the world. New, and often very different, vantage points offer
anthropologists opportunities to gain a greater understanding of their own cultural
biases and how these are often imposed on others. Three basic steps are intrinsic to
anthropological strategies to view the world more reflexively.
The first is to try to dismantle the conventional categories that dominate
thinking on a particular subject. Thus anthropologists may ask themselves what they
mean by their use of the terms ‘man’ or ‘woman’ and to what extent their own
notions of gender are likely to intrude in their attempts to understand gender
relations among others. Or they may start with a notion such as ‘masculinity’ on
which everyone seems to agree. By looking in detail at everyday usage and the
contexts in which people talk of masculinity, its complexity soon becomes apparent.
The second step is comparative. Comparative enquiries rely on detailed
descriptions of social interactions and how social labels are used in different social
contexts. By examining the difficulties of translating particular meanings of
masculinity from one social setting to another, anthropologists challenge the existence
of any apparently straightforward universal category and raise questions about the
social contexts in which such categories are used.
The third step occurs when anthropologists draw on the insights of
ethnographic studies to examine their own preconceptions. Here, through
ethnography, we ask to what extent the familiar oppositions—male/female,
man/woman and masculinity/femininity—are everywhere belied by a much more
complex social reality.
Much of this complexity hinges on the way people understand the relation
between gender and power. One aim of Dislocating Masculinity is to offer an
approach that responds to the problems posed by the use of western gender
categories and addresses people’s experiences of inequality. In this respect, our focus
on masculinity is deliberate. Though it is obvious that all men are not equally
powerful, in the west, being male is often associated with the power to dominate
others. As anthropologists we want to investigate this association. Just how
accurately does it describe people’s everyday social lives? How are ideas of power
connected with maleness? Or, conversely, what attributes of maleness are seen as
empowering? What happens, for instance, when a man perceives himself as weaker
than others?
If unquestioned, a cultural premise that associates men with power amounts
to a mystification, benefiting some people and disadvantaging most others. Following
Carrigan et al. (1985), it is useful to think of those ideologies that privilege some men
(and women) by associating them with particular forms of power as ‘hegemonic
masculinities’. Hegemonic masculinities define successful ways of ‘being a man’; in
so doing, they define other masculine styles as inadequate or inferior. These related
masculinities we call ‘subordinate variants’. As we shall see, one reason the rhetoric
of hegemonic versions of masculinity is so compelling is that it rests on an apparent
certainty: that ‘a man is a man’ everywhere, and everywhere this means the same
thing.
Essentialist interpretations of the male/female dichotomy are a major problem
in comparative studies of gender. In any given setting, gender differences are often
presented and perceived as absolute and dichotomous. Moreover, such gender
differences, when viewed from an historical or cross-cultural perspective, often
appear stable or repeat themselves as variations on a single theme. However,
essentialist explanations cannot explain variation and the fact that cultural forms are
never replicated exactly. An essentialist male/female dichotomy cannot account for
the ways people are gendered in different places at different times. Once comparative
studies expose a diversity of meanings, the idea of ‘being a man’ can no longer be
treated as fixed or universal.
If notions of masculinity, like the notion of gender itself, are fluid and
situational, we must consider the various ways people understand masculinity in any
particular setting. And we must explore how various masculinities are defined and
redefined in social interaction. How do individuals present and negotiate a gendered
identity? How and why are particular images and behaviours given gender labels?
Who benefits from such labelling? And how do such labels change before different
audiences and in different settings? Examining how notions of masculinity are
created and presented through interaction reveals clearly the relation between a
multiplicity of gendered identities and power. While ideas of ‘male dominance’ and
‘patriarchy’ are neither sensitive nor appropriate tools for analysis, we argue that
relations of power are an aspect of every social interaction. By dislocating any single
notion of masculinity, we see that particular versions of masculinity emerge in
tandem with particular perceptions of equality or inequality. This means that
people’s experiences of the intersecting relation between gender and power are
socially constructed and historically located.
The first chapter of Dislocating Masculinity is an extended introduction to an
anthropological investigation of masculinity. The assumptions English speakers often
make when they talk about masculinity are explored through the multiple identities
conjured up by the notion of the ‘macho man’. We then examine the assumptions that
link attributions of masculinity with power. The links between gendered power and
social and material privilege often appear compelling and ‘natural’. We suggest that
this persuasive rhetoric can be dismantled, first, by treating power as immanent in all
social interactions and, second, by viewing inequalities from the point of view of
subordinates. From this vantage point we offer a brief outline of the history of gender
studies in anthropology and relate this history to themes that reappear
anachronistically in the new discipline of ‘men’s studies’. We suggest that an
emphasis on the social construction of sex and gender has now become a stumbling
block to new approaches to gender studies and masculinity in particular. However,
feminist interpretations of postmodernism seem to offer a productive way forward.
They focus on the fluidity of processes of gendering and, when they are linked to the
new feminist politics of location, they offer ways of using comparative insights to
combat inequality. This chapter ends with the suggestion that if we locate and
describe the multiplicity of competing masculine identities in any given setting we
automatically begin to dislocate the hegemonic versions of masculinity that privilege
some people over others.
COMPARATIVE ETHNOGRAPHIES OF MASCULINITY
Anthropologists can make a major contribution to the study of masculinity by asking
new questions. Here, in a preview of the ethnographies collected in Dislocating
Masculinity, we suggest how the variety of comparative issues they raise illuminate
wider theoretical debates and the relation between gender and power in specific
cases.
The first three case studies, all of which have a Mediterranean focus, raise
important methodological issues through the new ethnographic materials they
present. Each illustrates how theoretical positions with their attendant western forms
of male bias reproduce the illusory unity of dominant versions of masculinity. In
Chapter 2, Angie Hart notes the considerable semantic difficulties that are raised by
treating ‘masculinity’ as an analytic term and then importing it into other settings.
Her study of the male clients of female prostitutes in Alicante makes clear how and
why most of the few ethnographies of ‘masculinity’ (of which a disproportionate
number seem to have been done in Spain) reproduce the preconceptions of the
anthropologist. Most studies of prostitution have focused on the sex-workers
themselves, while, typically, their clients have been ignored or treated as ‘everyman’.
Hart’s study of how these clients/men define themselves and are identified by others
introduces us to the many ways maleness and personhood may be construed in
everyday life.
In Chapter 3, Peter Loizos examines the considerable ethnographic literature
on Greece and describes a fundamental problem with much of this ethnography: the
tendency to generalize and write of ‘Greek society’ or ‘Greek men’ as if such labels
refer to homogeneous groups and are meaningful categories for analysis. Loizos’ rereading produces a far more interesting picture. He describes how a range of
hegemonic masculinities (and their subordinate variants) is produced when various
national institutions (such as the army and the Greek Orthodox church) intersect with
regional differences (concerning, for instance, inheritance rules and attitudes to
authority) at different stages of men’s lives. The matrix of variant masculinities is
further complicated by the other attributes of hegemonic masculinities, such as taking
the ‘active’ role in sexual encounters.
Nancy Lindisfarne (Chapter 4) also treats theory and ethnography in tandem.
She challenges the homogeneity of what have been called ‘honour and shame’
societies, arguing that such apparent unity is the product of a bias towards the
rhetoric of male ‘honour’ and the hegemonic masculinities this rhetoric supports. She
reverses this bias: by problematizing gender, it becomes possible to ask how people
make gender known to themselves and how gendered identities may then be reified
to sustain inequalities. Drawing on Strathern’s work in The Gender of the Gift (1988),
she considers how people are gendered through interaction: that is, how anatomical
and physiological notions of difference are construed, literally embodied and
transformed through sexual intercourse and/or parenthood. A range of ethnographic
and other materials from the Middle East illustrates how ideas about female vi
virginity and defloration create and confirm a variety of masculine identities.
Hegemonic versions of masculinity frame relations of inequality. However,
hegemonic forms are never totally comprehensive, nor do they ever completely
control subordinates. That is, there is always some space for subordinate versions of
masculinity—as alternative gendered identities that validate self-worth and
encourage resistance. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the ways dominant forms may
‘emasculate’, ‘femininize’ or otherwise diminish subordinate men, and their
responses to domination. David Forrest (Chapter 5) examines in detail the social
entailments of what has been called the ‘butch-shift’ (Segal 1990)—the emergence of a
particular accentuated form of masculinity among gay men who choose to present
themselves in terms of body images, sporting activities and clothing which in earlier
stereotypes were associated only with straight men. In effect, the butch-shift has
dislodged the association between macho masculinity and heterosexual men. Forrest
offers an explanation for the changing images of gay men in terms of the wider
political economy. Those with commercial interests have benefited from the
commoditization of men’s bodies generally and encouraged the emergence of the gay
community in particular: ‘A buck is a buck. Who the hell cares if the wrist holding it
is limp?’ (Altman 1982:18, quoted in Forrest, here).
Masculinities vary not only over time but also according to setting. Andrea
Cornwall (Chapter 6) describes how the identities of travesties in Salvador, Brazil, are
multifaceted, emerging through their activities as prostitutes and through their
participation in religious cults known as Candomblé. Looking at the ways in which
travestis are gendered within these different domains. Cornwall raises a number of
questions about ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that challenge taken-for-granted ideas about what
it is to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’. Travestis, she argues, have both a ‘male’ and a
‘female’ body depending on which parts of the body are considered significant in
determining ‘sex’ at any particular moment. That is, they can be ‘women’ or ‘men’
according to the setting and the activities in which they take part.
Cornwall’s detailed and subtle ethnography locates processes of gendering in
the interactions between actors in particular situations. These interactions establish
the gender of the actors within different domains of discourse. Within Candomblé,
alternative versions of both gender and agency provide different ways of thinking
about masculinity and femininity. These are not, however, independent from
hegemonic versions of masculinity and femininity, which continue to impinge both
within and outside Candomblé.
Though women as both authors and subjects are virtually absent from the
historical sources on ancient Greece, in Chapter 7, Lin Foxhall takes women as her
point of departure for rethinking masculinity. She describes the hegemonic
masculinities that are documented in terms of ‘monumentality’, a strategy by which
adult male citizens publicly associate themselves with immortality. Other data
suggest not only that men were dependent on women in the domestic terrain, but
that their location in the kinship system and their experience of genealogical
continuity were far more precarious than those of women. By focusing on what has
been omitted from previous accounts of ancient Greek masculinities, Foxhall
challenges classicist stereotypes that have been reproduced by Foucault (1978–86),
among others.
Chenjerai Shire (Chapter 8), like Foxhall, considers how different masculine
identities are constructed through time in different social spaces. Shire writes
autobiographically of his childhood in rural Zimbabwe. He describes how boys were
gendered in different settings: they were taught to be fluent in a men’s language in
the male meeting place of the dare, tips for successful love-making were imparted by
senior kinswomen in the women’s space of the kitchen and other aspects of sexuality
were learned through play. Shire draws attention not only to the situated
masculinities of young boys, but to how these are related to the repertoire of adult
male identities defined in terms of heterosexuality and fertility. Shire’s chapter also
has an historical dimension. He describes how the ‘tribal’ and ‘national’ identities of
the people who now know themselves as the Shona of Zimbabwe were created
through colonialism, which also transformed idioms of hegemonic masculinity in
radical ways. Earlier versions that depended on totemic kinship relations lost ground
as senior men adopted the militaristic styles of their tribal neighbours, yet
simultaneously the exodus of young men to the mines and cities eroded other
attributes of rural patriarchy.
Shire links specific masculinities to particular places and shows how activities
and occupations can be gendered. This theme continues in Chapter 9. Bonnie
McElhinny, writing of female police officers in the United States, shows how in some
situations work identities may take priority over gender in defining personhood.
Thus, the female police officers describe themselves as learning ‘to be hard’ and
‘unemotional’ as part of ‘doing their job’. To understand why impassivity is seen as
an aspect of the masculinity of male police officers, but transforms women into police
professionals, McElhinny distinguishes between referential (that is, direct) and
indexical (that is, contingent) associations. She shows that masculinity is contingently
associated with emotional distance. This allows female police officers to intrepret
behaviour that is normally and frequently understood as masculine (such as a lack of
emotionality or displays of physical violence) as occupational.
The distinction between direct (referential) and contingent (indexical) markers
is a useful one for exploring the complexities of gendering. Direct markers of gender
are unequivocal and unambiguous: the categorical symbols of gender, such as the
gendered pronouns ‘he’ or ‘she’, or abbreviations like ‘Mr’ or ‘Ms’. By contrast,
contingent markers are non-exclusive, and are linked to other ideas in a probabilistic
rather than determinate way. So, for instance, baldness or aggressive behaviour are
often seen as masculine attributes, but both may also be associated in quite different
ways with attributions of age, health and personality that are not necessarily
gendered at all. Or, as Cornwall (Chapter 6) shows in the case of travestis, there is
only a contingent link between the penis and maleness.
Les Back (Chapter 10), like McElhinny, provides examples of the gendering of
occupations. From his study of white working-class youth in south London, we learn
how the masculine identities of apprentices are mocked by senior workmen:
apprentices may learn a trade but they also have to ‘qualify as men’. He shows how
various forms of aggressive play are used to negotiate relative status, while words
such as ‘wanker’ and ‘poofter’ can emasculate, imply homosexuality and/or feminize
those who are deemed losers in any particular interaction. Elsewhere, elements of
exaggerated macho sexuality, such as those associated with black (heterosexual)
masculinities, are adopted by working-class white youth. As Back shows, the
appropriation of these images can produce new, popular, anti-racist masculinities, yet
simultaneously reinforces racist stereotypes in the wider society.
The greater the disparity between superiors and subordinates in any
particular setting, the more ritualized and masked are relations between them. Social
boundaries that protect material and other privileges of superiors are often defined
by gender markers. The effects of colonialism have often been described in gendered
terms; those who are ruled are feminized and portrayed as ‘of inferior vigour’ in
relation to the dominant masculinities asserted by the colonizers (Stoler 1991; see also
Kandiyoti, Chapter 12 in this volume). However, the rhetoric of the dominant culture
hides the complex processes of negotiation and multiple, contested gendered
identities within the spheres of both colonizers and
colonized.
Helen Kanitkar (Chapter 11) describes how the ‘ripping yarns’ of the British
Empire introduced boys to an idealized, hegemonic masculinity associated with
white racism, muscular Christianity and colonial power. The audience for these
stories were young boys and youths whose masculine identities outside the fictional
setting were defined by their subordination to adult men with whom they shared
identities defined in terms of class, nation and race. Dependants are often
characterized as childlike and immature sexually and socially. While idioms of
childhood defined the relation between the schoolboys and adult British men, these
same idioms also defined the far greater subordination of adult ‘native’ men —
‘boys’—whom the British boys saw as their inferiors and had no hesitation in
dominating.
Kanitkar draws attention to the ways in which masculinities produced within
colonial discourses impinged on relations between colonizer and colonized and
within each category. In this way, her account complements that of Shire (Chapter 8
). Thus we learn how the hegemonic masculine styles of the British, regarding
sportsmanship or Christianity for example, were reworked by colonized men to
characterize and control their fellows. To regard the colonized as simply the passive
victims of colonialism would obscure processes of resistance among men and women
as well as the active redeployment of hegemonic colonial masculinities.
The salience of representations of black male (hetero)sexualities was a
dimension of race relations in colonial settings (see also Back’s account of
contemporary race relations, Chapter 10 ). Indeed, images of rampant black male
sexuality, of the rape of white women, and of black women’s sexual availability to
white men are used by dominant groups to maintain ‘racial’ differences. However,
such themes may coexist with quite different discourses on racism and sexuality. For
instance, in the Boys’ Annual stories the sexuality of ‘native’ men is never mentioned,
‘native’ women rarely make any appearance and ‘white’ women are present only in
supporting roles. Though adult colonial men are portrayed as heterosexual, the
‘imperial cadets’ were the chaste inhabitants of a homosocial world where
homosexual desire was unacknowledged and heterosexual desire was
stigmatized as belonging to the kind of youth that can be seen, with pale and
pimply face, sucking cigarette or cane-top, loafing around and ogling the girls,
instead of joining in the sports of their more manly fellows. (Mee 1913a:293,
our emphasis; cited by Kanitkar, Chapter 11 in this volume)
Notions of difference operate in many dimensions and produce complex identities. In
the last of our ethnographic chapters (Chapter 12 ), Deniz Kandiyoti touches on
virtually all the major themes that run through Dislocating Masculinity. Kandiyoti
has already explored what she has called ‘the patriarchal bargain’ (1988a; 1991),
suggesting that an important but neglected point of entry for the identification of
different forms of patriarchy was through analyses of women’s strategies of
accommodation and resistance. As she shows here, her argument is widely applicable
to all kinds of gendered subordination, including those associated with childhood,
social class or single-sex institutions such as the army. She also writes of the
dependency created by desire in the extraordinary homosocial and sometimes
homosexual environment of the Ottoman fire department in Istanbul. Drawing on
historical sources, ethnography, biography and fiction, she discusses the limitations
of psychoanalytic explanations of the dynamics of family relations. Her starting
point—her disquietude with the ostensible motivations of the ‘enlightened, profeminist’ male reformers in the Middle East—is not dissimilar to the contemporary
feminist unease at the profeminist stance of ‘new men’ and many men who are
writing within the genre of men’s studies.
TOWARDS DISLOCATING MASCULINITY
The many themes that link the ethnographic chapters anticipate directions that
anthropological studies of masculinity may take in the future: these include a focus
on the processes of gendering, the metaphors of gendered power, and the relation
between dominant and subordinate masculinities and other gendered identities in
any given setting.
In Dislocating Masculinity, our argument rests on five premises. First, we
argue that the male/female dichotomy has no intrinsic biological or other essential
reality. Rather, this dichotomy is a potent metaphor for difference in western cultures
whose import must be understood in terms of historical and ethnographic
specificities. This is not to say that dichotomous gender attributions are not available
elsewhere, perhaps even as near-universal metaphors for aspects of human sociality.
However, there are no fixed ways these metaphors are grounded or employed in
social life. They are only one among many other sets of metaphors used in the
construction of human identities.
Secondly, we suggest that the oft-used analytic categories ‘gender role’,
‘sexual orientation’ and ‘biological sex’ have little explanatory value, since they too
imply a false dichotomy between the sexed body and the gendered individual.
Though this biological/social opposition has been the basis of most studies of gender,
we insist that both the sexed body and the gendered individual are culturally
constructed and that biology is no more primary or ‘real’ than any other aspect of
lived experience.
Thirdly, we argue that the conflation of the notions male/men/masculinity and
female/women/femininity in western constructions of difference must be investigated
and documented historically and ethnographically. We suggest that the three terms
do not necessarily overlap and that each term of the two triads has multiple referents
that blur, qualify, and create the possibility of ambiguous interpretations in any
particular setting. Thus notions of maleness, designations of manhood and
attributions of masculinity have no essential referent, nor even a finite range of
referents. Rather, each of the three terms can be used to describe a wide variety of
different and even flatly contradictory aspects of human bodies and human
behaviour.
Fourth, we argue that interpretations of maleness, manhood or masculinity
are not neutral, but rather all such attributions and labels have political entailments.
In any given situation they may align men against women, some men against other
men, some women against other women, or some men and women against others. In
short, the processes of gendering produce difference and inequality: and nowhere
more obviously than in the versions of masculinity associated with (masculinized)
notions of power.
Finally, we suggest that ethnographic studies of the production of gendered
difference offer new ways of looking at ‘masculinity’ that take us beyond the
strictures imposed by continued use of a single category, ‘men’, on the one hand, and
the endless play of fragmented identities on the other. In its hegemonic forms,
masculinity privileges some people and dislocates and disadvantages others.
However, such hegemonic discourses may themselves be dislodged over time. The
shifting and contingent relation between ‘masculinity’ and ‘men’ and power becomes
clear when we examine the enactment of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities in
a single setting.
Our aim in Dislocating Masculinity is to pose a series of open-ended questions
in a cogent and radical way. Our explicit focus is on the negotiation and plurality of
masculinities, while our theoretical premises are processual. We argue that
indigenous notions of gendered difference are constantly created and transformed in
everyday interactions. Relations of power are constituent parts of these interactions.
The experience of hegemony lies in the repetition of similar, but never identical,
interactions. This experience is never comprehensive; it changes over time and space.
Multiple gendered (and other) identities, each of which depends on context and the
specific and immediate relations between actors and audience, are fluid and they are
often subversive of dominant forms.
Chapter 1
Dislocating masculinity
Gender, power and anthropology
Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne
In this chapter we locate our studies of masculinity. Our perspective draws
extensively on anthropological accounts of gender and feminist theory, and our
ambition is to establish a framework for comparative analyses in general and for our
ethnographic chapters in particular. Indeed, one of our introductory obligations is to
present important aspects of this work in a manner that is both accessible and
intellectually challenging.
We begin with a paradox that is at the heart of all anthropological analyses.
Though we seek to question taken-for-granted social categories, we can only do so in
terms of our own experience. Imprisoned as we are in the strictures of our language,
it is difficult to escape using the terms ‘men’, ‘male’ or ‘masculinity’, and ‘women’,
‘female’ or ‘femininity’, without implying a binary notion of gender (cf. Threadgold
1990). To use complex circumlocutions instead merely side-steps the problem,
providing no adequate solution. Accordingly, we use these terms reservedly.
A preliminary step to ethnographic comparison, then, is to examine the
categories of our language more closely and to sharpen our critical awareness of ideas
about ‘men’, ‘maleness’ and ‘masculinity’. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
(1973) offers definitions of the adjective ‘masculine’ as ‘having the appropriate
excellence of the male sex; virile, vigorous and powerful’. ‘Masculine’ may describe
attributes, actions and productions as well as certain inanimate objects that are
connected with the male sex because of some essential quality, such as relative
superiority or strength (1973:1284). The primary definition of ‘male’ is simpler: ‘of or
belonging to the sex which begets offspring, or performs the fecundating function’
(1973: 1265). Yet the apparent certainties of such definitions are themselves
contradicted: ‘masculine’, when used of a woman, suggests that ‘she has the qualities
proper to a man’ (1973: 1284).
Conventional usage depends on a series of explicit and implicit premises.
First, masculinity and maleness are defined oppositionally as what is not feminine or
female. Second, gendered identities implicitly depend on the social acquisition of
appropriate attributes. Third, anatomy, learned behaviour and desire are conflated so
that ‘normal’ sexual orientation and identity are heterosexual. And, lastly, through
biological, sexual and social connotations, the idea of masculinity is reified and
universalized. Masculinity appears as an essence or commodity that can be
measured, possessed or lost.
However, masculinity is neither tangible nor an abstraction whose meaning is
everywhere the same. In practice, people operate according to many different notions
of masculinity; closer inspection reveals a cluster of wide-ranging notions with
certain ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein 1963). Masculinity draws and impinges
on a number of different elements, domains, identities, behaviours and even objects,
such as cars and clothing. The notion of masculinity and what are described as
masculine attributes can be used to celebrate and enhance normative maleness.
However, such ideas can also unseat any straightforward relation between
masculinity and men. Accordingly, we ask questions that aim to disrupt conventional
understandings. How and when do ‘boys’ become ‘men’? What makes someone a
‘man’ in some settings and a ‘client’, ‘pimp’ or ‘person’ in others? Is a man only, or
always, a ‘man’? Are only men ‘masculine’? When a man is exhorted to ‘be a man’,
what does this entail? Is a man always the same kind of ‘man’? If so, what do men
have in common? How and where are these commonalities constructed and used?
And, if a man fails to do ‘what a man’s gotta do’, does he cease to be a man?
The many different images and behaviours contained in the notion of
masculinity are not always coherent: they may be competing, contradictory and
mutually undermining. Moreover, completely variant notions of masculinity can
refer simultaneously or sequentially to the same individual. Meaning depends on
who is speaking and who is being described in what setting. Masculinity has multiple
and ambiguous meanings that alter according to context and over time. Meanings of
masculinity also vary across cultures and admit to cultural borrowing; masculinities
imported from elsewhere are conflated with local ideas to produce new
configurations. The popular notion of ‘the macho man’ provides us with a vivid
example of the complexity of notions of masculinity and their intimate connection
with particular social settings.
MASCULINITIES AND ‘THE MACHO MAN’
The term ‘macho’ is a fairly recent importation into colloquial English, from Mexico
via North America. It is used widely, in very different ways, to present multiple
masculinities. Though macho derives from the Latin masculas and the Spanish term
macho, both of which denote the ‘male sex’, Chambers’ Dictionary has recently
defined macho as ‘ostentatiously virile’ (1986:578). In Britain, the macho man is not
everyman; he is less a stereotype than a caricature in which distinctive attributes are
selectively presented. Some aspects of usage carry with them accretions from their
etymological source, echoing essentialized images of the Latin male as vigorous and
often violent. However, in Britain, Latin men are also portrayed as romantic and
emotional, although such expressiveness (and perhaps dependence) is deeply at
variance with popular images of the macho man: thus, images of the ‘soft’ Latin
appeared in the racism directed at Argentinian soldiers during the Falklands War. In
short, there is no singular notion of macho masculinity, but a cluster of elements that
may be contradictory or oppositional according to context.
Consider, for example, two settings in which the macho man may be found. In
a rugby club, men who present themselves as macho may be valorized for displaying
physical prowess and unflinching toughness, as well as a virility that is always
heterosexual. The macho man should be successful at ‘scoring’ women and tries,
though the epithet ‘rugger-bugger’ does suggest further questions. Thus, a British
women’s rugby song ridicules yet reinforces the theme of heterosexuality: the
couplets of the children’s song ‘Knick-Knack Paddy Wack’ run: ‘they can’t get a good
hard-on;…they can’t get it up to screw;…they can’t have it off with me;…they can’t
get it up to score;…they are lacking in sex drive;…little boys with little dicks;…
masturbation is their heaven’, etc. Yet, as an American men’s rugby song has it:
‘when I was young and in my prime, I used to butt-fuck all the time. Now I’m old
and turning gray. I only butt-fuck once a day’. In another all-male setting, that of a
gay bar, the archetype of the macho man is of the physical body moulded to
perfection, but has little to do with other conventional ‘masculine’ attributes. Indeed,
a markedly different macho masculinity emerges. As Forrest (Chapter 6 in this
volume) suggests,
Inside some pubs or clubs the gay ‘macho man’ might be seen holding a
bottle of mineral water, rather than a pint of strong lager; his perfectly
sculptured chest may be meticulously shaven and well oiled; his hair gelled;
he might own the most fabulously camp flat off the King’s Road, complete
with a designer multi-gym.
To the rugby players the gay macho man may be a target for heterosexist abuse
because of his presumed lack of masculinity.
To talk, as Blanchford (1981) does, of the ‘masculinization of the gay man’
implies that there are uncertainties about the relation between ‘masculinity’, ‘men’
and ‘gay men’, and that masculine identities are changing in complicated ways. The
message of a 1979 Gay Pride poster that announced that ‘Not all boys dream of being
a marine’ (Pollak 1985:40) is not necessarily contradicted by the recent changes
implicit in the ‘butch-shift’ (see Segal 1990), while macho identities in general have
been sent up by Julian Clary in a camp version of How to be a Real Man (1992). Such
a repertoire of masculinities clearly dislocates familiar assumptions.
Conventional notions of the macho man conflate (hetero)sexual orientation
and ‘masculine’ identity, physical appearance, attributes of personality and
behaviour. The macho gay man challenges this problematic conflation. The
heterosexual desires and orientation of the stereotyped macho man with his bulging
muscles can no longer be presumed. Macho gay men have become more explicitly
objects of homoerotic desire, but so too have popular figures like the Chippendales,
who have marketed an exaggerated macho image for both homoerotic and
heterosexual titillation. In both cases there is an increasing focus on the objectification
of the male body, a focus that is also evident in the increasing use of silicone to
augment the ‘maleness’ of calf and pectoral muscles and the penis (cf. Bowen-Jones
1992). Forrest argues the new emphasis on macho styles is associated with changes in
women’s identities and behaviour and the fact that all men—gay, straight and
bisexual—continue to benefit from sexist bias. As Forrest points out, homophobia is a
construction that effectively distinguishes a ‘man’s man’ from a man who is
‘interested in men’ (Sedgwick 1985:89, quoted in Segal 1990:143). However, because
heterosexist prejudice also exists in most social settings, the fact that today’s ‘muscle
queens’ are indistinguishable from their heterosexual companions at the gym must
alter the ways in which macho identities are presented in the future.
Let us examine two other aspects of the macho stereotype: the use of physical
force and the concealment of ‘soft’ emotions. For our caricatured rugby player (whom
we need not assume is straight), idioms such as ‘to fight like a man’ or ‘to take it like a
man’ are likely to imply specific kinds of behaviour whose absence ‘emasculates’ or
‘feminizes’ a man. Such idioms are often used metaphorically by both men and
women and vary in their meaning. So, for instance, some elite masculine styles in
Britain require that violent personal confrontation be avoided (except on the rugby
pitch), but favour professional coups and financial killings.
Idioms like ‘to fight like a man’ can also refer to the literal use of physical
force. Consider one such instance: a punch on the jaw. Clearly, attributions of
masculinity depend on who throws the punch, who receives it and who is watching.
Displays of violence may serve as markers of masculinity in distinctly different ways.
Even in a boxing ring, things are not necessarily straightforward: a victory may be
explained by a boxer’s sexual abstinence as well as by his speed and strength.
Physical assault may be a response to a personal insult. An able-bodied man
who throws a punch may be seen as affirming his masculinity, particularly if the
recipient is also an able-bodied male of a similar age. In this situation, however, the
masculinity of the victim is also being negotiated. He may fight back, run away or
break down in tears. Or he might fight back and lose, or simply stand, with his arms
folded, and refuse to fight. Any one of these responses may be interpreted as
enhancing or diminishing the masculinity of either or both parties. Or as Kanitkar
points out (Chapter 11 in this volume), attributions of masculinity may hinge not on
the act of violence itself, but on the style of the confrontation. As Back’s discussion of
the ‘wind-up’ illustrates (Chapter 10 in this volume), every interaction allows for a
variety of interpretations. How people explain what has happened depends on the
circumstances, which means that no single episode is ever judged in isolation. Rather,
each episode is part of a continuing process whereby people negotiate relative
positions of power as individuals and as representatives of social categories such as
those based on gender, age, class or ethnicity. Interpretations of violence—in racist
attacks, domestic battering, child abuse or queer-bashing— depend on preceptions of
legitimacy and provocation. Not only will some people applaud a violent response
that others deplore, but an individual’s reactions are not necessarily constant. At
different stages in the process of negotiating masculinities, and according to the
different perspectives of the actors and their audiences, attributions of masculinity
can and do change radically.
Resorting to physical violence can be interpreted as potency, brute ignorance
or a pathetic fragility, depending on the perspective. As McElhinny describes
(Chapter 9), the relation between force and emotion is contingent. Refusing to fight
can be regarded as ‘cowardly’ or as a demonstration of qualities of selfcontrol or
‘reason’, of not ‘giving in’ to emotion. Taking up the challenge and fighting may be
considered ‘manly’ and as an appropriate expression of ‘macho emotions’ (cf.
Skynner 1992:14), yet losing a fight may be more diminishing than not having become
involved in the first place. Of these possible outcomes, conventionally only one seems
clear-cut and direct: bursting into tears. In physical confrontations such behaviour is
likely to be unacceptable in a ‘real man’. A man who cries may be called a ‘poofter’ or
a ‘big girl’s blouse’, or accused of ‘crying like a baby’.
Nothing should be prejudged. Being masculine can involve a range of
behaviour that elsewhere would be termed feminine or not considered relevant in
gendered terms at all. While some people ridiculed the well-known footballer Paul
Gascoigne (Gazza) when he wept publicly after having been barred from
competition, others understood his tears as evidence of deeply felt, and acceptable,
emotion. And when the tennis star André Agassi ‘wept tears of delight’ after winning
the Wimbledon tournament, some people denounced his behaviour as ‘all that could
be expected’ of someone who ‘wore an earring and a necklace and had a pony-tail’,
yet others found Agassi’s tears ‘very sexy’.
Being masculine need not be an exclusive identity. It can involve self
presentations that include behaviour conventionally associated with both masculinity
and femininity. Such, of course, is the case with the so-called ‘butch’, as opposed to
‘femme’, lesbian (cf. Wieringa 1989). There are male and female versions of
masculinity and, equally, female and male versions of femininity.
While his gay counterpart has been and is maligned for being effeminate, the
sensitive and caring heterosexual male has recently been celebrated as a ‘new man’.
Indeed, some heterosexual men have confessed to feelings of inadequacy before the
models of macho masculinity that have been thrust at them since the late 1970s (cf.
Seidler 1991a). They have rejected the macho image and appropriated attributes
conventionally associated with femininity. This new man is often associated with an
inverted stereotype of the macho man: he has a puny frame (though perhaps he is not
quite a ‘seven-stone weakling’), an unassertive manner, a desire for nurturant
activities and a wish to express emotion. However, the limits of ‘feminized’ selfrepresentations are seemingly defined by the new man’s perception of the
‘emasculating potential’ of the new woman.
In Britain both macho and new-men stereotypes are now prominent in the
media, and are part of a repertoire from which masculine identities can be assembled.
Bly’s popular book Iron John (1991) seems to resonate with the fashionable angst of
the new man, while simultaneously celebrating a version of macho masculinity. Bly
offers a recipe for ‘recovering’ the ability to express those softer emotions that he
claims have been ‘lost’ by men over the course of human history. Seen in this light,
our stereotyped macho man, who is often presented as the quintessence of
masculinity, is clearly judged not nearly ‘man enough’. Many current advertisements
play with new combinations of machismo and sensitivity; yet elsewhere the tensions
between the two images are an endless source of jokes and heart-searching feature
articles. Arguably these competing representations have less to do with redefining
masculinity than with realigning the general association of maleness with power.
In English, the adjective ‘macho’ is one of a large number of idioms used to
attribute masculinity, and it is the nuanced differences between alternative
attributions that impart meaning to the idiom ‘macho’ in any given setting. When we
attempt to compare the ways ‘macho’ is used cross-culturally, its meanings multiply
exponentially. For instance, in Spanish- and Portuguese speaking settings, the noun
macho is often used as a term for ‘man’ that expresses something fundamental about
‘being a man’. Thus, in Alicante, the term macho refers specifically to an ‘instinctive’,
animal-like quality of male sexuality rather than to the Anglo-American family of
resemblances described above. However, as Hart (Chapter 2 in this volume) shows,
macho acquires meaning through its contrast with other terms that in English would
also be translated as ‘man’.
Eduardo Archetti has described the complex use of the term macho in
Argentina. It includes images of virility and force, but a macho can also be generous,
be controlled and use seduction, rather than violence, as a tool for domination. And,
though a macho should be heterosexual, he will not lose his masculinity if he is the
‘active’ partner in homosexual relations. Viewed by other Latin American males,
Argentinian football stars are among the most envied of machos, but in general
Argentinian men are not associated with a particularly macho national stereotype.
Conversely, Argentinian men regard the Mexican macho, for instance, as exaggerated
in his swagger and bravado. Finally, the term macho is also used as a form of address,
in such expressions as ‘que cuentas, macho’ (‘tell me about it, macho’) where it
establishes an opening and interest between two male speakers (personal
communication; cf. Archetti 1991, 1992). The term macho is exclusive to men, while
the term hombre may be used as much between women as between men: only
compare the ungendered use of ‘guys’ in American English.
Yet elsewhere the idea of the macho can involve deliberate artifice and parody
conventional sexual imagery through both exaggeration and inversion. Cornwall
(Chapter 6 in this volume) considers how, in Salvador, Brazil, bofes present a highly
sexualized masculinity for sale to male clients, while the travestis attract male clients
by adorning themselves with the physical trappings of ‘femininity’. Yet, in the context
of the sexual services they offer, and their sometimes violent behaviour, both bofes
and travestis may be termed macho. As Cornwall demonstrates, attributes and
behaviour conventionally associated with ‘masculinity’ or ‘femininity’ can be
selectively asserted to mark a single individual as both ‘male’ and ‘female’, while the
boundaries between the two are constantly renegotiated and redrawn in each
encounter.
Hautzinger (1991) provides a very different example of the same process in
the same cultural context. She relates how the notion of the macho—in the form of
machismo, behaving as if male—is used to describe some of the ways in which female
police officers are seen as ‘doing men’s work’. However, the female police officers’
machismo differs in crucial respects from that of male police officers. Female police
officers, like male ones, are located as agents of state ‘masculinity’; however, they
repeatedly engage in both stereotypically ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ activities
(personal communication; cf. McElhinny, Chapter 9 in this volume, who describes
how female police officers in the United States systematically resist attributions of
masculinity). In both cases, because of the ‘feminine’ elements in female police
officers’ ‘masculinity’, it takes on a qualitatively distinct, problematic cast—as do the
‘feminine’ elements of the travestis’ identity, as Cornwall describes.
Though the uses of the word ‘macho’ documented here are linked
etymologically, the social history that connects them is impenetrable. There are of
course broad family resemblances, but everyday usage stretches and transforms
meaning. So, for instance, Shire (Chapter 8 in this volume) finds ‘macho’ an apt
adjective to describe particular versions of Zimbabwean masculinity. Viewed crossculturally, the uses of ‘macho’ may be seen as a range of variations within a repertoire
of cultural themes, yet such ‘variations’ and ‘cultural themes’ can only be discerned
retrospectively. As an exploratory device, our excursion with the macho man has
exposed the differences among his fellows. However as a general methodology,
tracing the multiple uses of a single term is not the best way of understanding
gendered identities cross-culturally and trans-historically.
COMPETING MASCULINITIES
What, then, do we mean by ‘masculinity’? Masculinity and femininity have often
been portrayed as polarized opposites that only change in relation to each other. Thus
Kimmel, writing from within the genre of men’s studies, informs us,
Masculinity and femininity are relational constructs…. One cannot
understand the social construction of either masculinity or femininity
without reference to the other. (1987:12)
Behind this popular idea lurks a number of questionable assumptions, among them
the idea that these qualities cannot be ascribed to a single individual at the same time.
Indeed, Kimmel’s proposition suggests that there is only one vantage point from
which gendered identities can be judged, thus ignoring both the ambiguities and
contradictions involved in gendering human beings and the multiple perspectives
from which this is done.
Certainly, an important aspect of many hegemonic discourses is their focus on
an absolute, naturalized and, typically, hierarchicized male/female dichotomy
whereby men and women are defined in terms of the differences between them.
However, to adopt such a perspective to the exclusion of others is to ignore, first, how
any hegemonic discourse produces subordinate and subversive variants and, second,
the existence of multiple and competing hegemonic masculinities within any
particular setting.
Recognising
the
relational
character
of
masculine/male/man
and
feminine/female/woman raises intriguing questions. Thus, Shire (Chapter 8 in this
volume) and Kandiyoti (Chapter 12 in this volume) consider aspects of
intergenerational relations, while Loizos (Chapter 3) and Foxhall (Chapter 7) look at
the different ways in which men and women can be persons, householders and
citizens. Or Rousseau’s observation that ‘The male is only a male at certain times, the
female is a female all her life’ (quoted in Seidler 1987: 88) can usefully be compared
with Forrest’s account of a comprehensive gay identity (Chapter 5 in this volume).
By attending to the relation between maleness and femaleness, we may also
consider how hierarchical relations between men and women reproduce differences
within those categories. A striking example of this process is when men, shell-
shocked during World War I, were feminized as ‘hysterical men’:‘having
travelled…through “No Man’s Land” all have become not just NOT men, nobodies,
but not men, unmen’ (Gilbert 1983:423, quoted in Showalter 1985:173).
The same process occurs in other hierarchical discourses on ‘class’ or ‘race’,
where subordination may be represented as weakness or effeminacy (cf., for example,
Jeater 1993). However, the process is never simple. As Back shows is the case in south
London, racism does not create a monolithic racialized persona: black macho styles of
dress, music and language may be adopted by white youths to shore up their images.
Conversely, Shire (Chapter 8 in this volume) and Kanitkar (Chapter 11) both note
how in racial hierarchies some blacks may adopt idioms of white masculinity to gain
prestige and control over other blacks. And, from another point of view, it is notable
that both these chapters show how subordination, however it is construed in
gendered terms, is frequently associated with childlike immaturity.
Most importantly, a focus on the rhetorical relation between male and female
encourages us to consider where, how and by whom boundaries between ‘men’ and
‘women’ are imposed, as well as the criteria by which ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ are defined in
different settings (cf. Lindisfarne, Chapter 4 in this volume; Cornwall, Chapter 6; and
Kandiyoti, Chapter 12). For these reasons, it is appropriate to ask why Kimmel
chooses to emphasize the male/ female opposition to the exclusion of other, often
more interesting, issues.
As our brief investigation of the macho man has already suggested, the ways
in which men distinguish themselves and are distinguished from other men must be
an important aspect of any study of masculinity. As Segal points out in her exemplary
study of British masculinities in the post-war period, an understanding of the
differences between men is as important to understanding the little-explored riddles of
“masculinity” [as] its relation to, and dependence on, “femininity”’ (1990:ix, x). The
contexts and criteria in terms of which men are differentiated from each other is an
area that has been neglected in anthropology. It has also been neglected in much of
the men’s studies literature, where further simplistic discriminations generate
categories such as ‘gay men’ and ‘black men’ that mask more complex relations of
inequality and identity (cf. Forrest, Chapter 5 in this volume; Back, Chapter 10).
The definition of ‘masculinity’ offered by the Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary is not neutral. Yet it is authoritatively presented as if it is the only correct
form of masculinity. When such an idea is used to establish and enhance the relative
power of some people to the detriment of others, it obviously has wider political
implications. Carrigan et al. describe such authoritative forms of masculinity as
hegemonic.
Hegemonic masculinity is far more complex than the accounts of essences
in the masculinity books would suggest…. It is, rather, a question of how
particular groups of men inhabit positions of power and wealth and how
they legitimate and reproduce the social relationships that generate their
dominance.
An immediate consequence of this is that the culturally exalted form of
masculinity, the hegemonic model, so to speak, may only correspond to the
actual characters of a small number of men. Yet very large numbers of men
are complicit in sustaining the hegemonic model. (1985:92)
Following Carrigan et al., we will call privileged forms of masculinity that
masquerade as being unitary ‘hegemonic masculinities’. Such dominant constructions
determine the standards against which other masculinities are defined. We will refer
to these latter, contingent masculinities as ‘subordinate variants’. However, as our
discussion of the contemporary popularity of both macho men and new men shows,
various hegemonic models can coexist. Rarely, if ever, will there be only one
hegemonic masculinity operating in any cultural setting. Rather, in different contexts,
different hegemonic masculinities are imposed by emphasizing certain attributes,
such as physical prowess or emotionality, over others. And, of course, different
hegemonic masculinities produce different subordinate variants: as we know from
the feminist concern with women’s ‘invisibility’, powerlessness in one arena does not
preclude having considerable influence elsewhere.
In our borrowed use of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, our interest is in
understanding how relations of power and powerlessness are gendered, and how, in
any particular setting, attributions of masculinity are assumed or imposed. However,
we suggest that such attributions are neither exclusive, nor permanent. Nowhere is
there ever only a single system that defines people’s success and failure as gendered
subjects in absolute or enduring terms. The idea of hegemonic masculinity
encourages a consideration of how power is related to attributions of masculinity.
However, Carrigan et al. do not problematize the notion of masculinity itself. By
eliding the terms man/ male/ masculinity, they ignore the fact that it is not
masculinity but male masculinity they are describing. To continue the above citation,
they argue,
The overwhelmingly important reason is that most men benefit from the
subordination of women and hegemonic masculinity is centrally connected
with the institutionalisation of men’s dominance over women. It would
hardly be an exaggeration to say that hegemonic masculinity is hegemonic so
far as it embodies a successful strategy in relation to women.
(1985:92)
Implicit in their argument is a contingent connection, yet the relation between men
and masculinity is made to seem incontrovertible. Ironically, such a slippage is a
fundamental characteristic of hegemonic masculinities?
Three kinds of mystification work to create this sleight of mind and disguise
the implicit masculization of power. First, an association between ‘men’ and ‘power’
is made to seem ‘natural’. Feminists use the term ‘male bias’, or describe as ‘sexist’,
just such associations. This process is enacted through the elaborate etiquette of social
relations in any particular setting. Such associations are also made verbally. This can
be done through assertion: boys will be boys’, or ‘men are [naturally!] more
aggressive than women’: or through metaphors such as those which refer to ‘real
men’. But, in effect, all language is metaphorical: consider how the word ‘male’ is
both naturalized and lent authority through its association with biology, or how the
abstract connotations of ‘manhood’ are linked with a physical referent, the penis. Or
how the emphatic use of ‘man’ as either a noun or verb often carries with it inclusive,
positive images of possession and control, as in Kipling’s ‘If-’ (cf. Kanitkar, Chapter
11 in this volume).
In this way, virile male bodies are often seen to be at one with the body politic
and, in the monotheistic religions at least, even the deity is seen as stridently male.
Another device which links men with power and control is metonymy, associating
men with images or instruments of power—whether Popeye’s spinach, a
Lamborghini Diablo or military hardware: as men in both the US and British armies
put it, ‘I’ve got a rifle, I’ve got a gun; my rifle’s for killing, my gun’s for fun!’. Such
associations are naturalized by being linked to aspects of the body, and they may be
transformed or inverted to produce a wide range of meanings. The gun/penis
association is only one possibility. The same soldiers also link the penis with
bestiality, as in the endless jokes told about ‘sheepshagging’ during training exercises
in the UK. Or they may ridicule inappropriate aggression by calling a man a ‘penis’ or
a ‘cock’, while a martinet may be dismissed as a ‘dick-head’ or a ‘prick’. Metonymic
associations often reveal the kind of ‘commodity logic’ that typifies capitalist
formations (cf.Strathern 1988; and below). Thus, masculine identities may be located
in possessions that can be acquired or lost. Such are the implications of the aphorism,
‘Clothes do make the man’ or the Texas wisdom that ‘a man is no better than his
horse, and a man without a horse, ain’t no man at all’.
Secondly, (masculinized) power is consistently associated with those who
have control over resources and who have an interest in naturalizing and
perpetuating that control. This means that in gender, class and race hierarchies, men
and women who are pre-eminent may be included in particular gendered
constructions of power that simultaneously disempower subordinate men and
women. In Britain, elite public culture valorizes both emotional distance—‘the stiff
upper lip’—and physical toughness (cf. McElhinny, Chapter 9 in this volume). The
contingent link with an elite masculine style is evident in, for instance, one of the
Queen’s Christmas broadcasts in Britain, in which she lauded a terminally ill man’s
‘military bearing and silence on the subject of pain and dying’ (Stevens 1992). This
style is reproduced in many other contexts. Thus in a single-sex school, it is likely to
be a sporty ‘lad’, rather than a studious, unathletic ‘spod’, who is a popular leader,
popular with girls and a school prefect (cf. Kanitkar, Chapter 11 in this volume). And,
of course, the link between elite masculinity and racism may be explicit: in the
clubhouse our rugby player may be chided to be fair or generous with the phrase,
‘Play the white man.’
In many cases, the ‘feminization’ of subordinates is marked. For instance,
patronage is often associated with sexual favours (cf. Loizos, Chapter 3 in this
volume; Foxhall, Chapter 7); or it is the case that men are often brutalized by their
military experience, which renders them anonymous and punishes failure by
labelling men ‘wimps’, ‘women’, ‘pussies’, ‘poofters’, ‘wankers’ or ‘homos’. Often
men get by ‘by making themselves liked’, while brutalizing others weaker than
themselves (Kandiyoti, Chapter 12 in this volume). It is notable that in victory
soldiers (and football fans, cf. Archetti 1992) are often extremely vicious towards the
vanquished. And the gendering of inequality is rarely clearer than in the wartime
rape of women by ‘normal men’ (cf. Brownmiller 1975; Bennett 1993) whose actions
assert their (hetero)sexual male identity while imposing anonymity and a ‘weaker’
sexuality on their female victims and vanquishing the enemy by sullying ‘his
property’.
Cartoons are often particularly revealing of the gendering of political
relations. Cartoons are surprising precisely when they play effectively on hegemonic
idioms. Thus, during the Gulf War Saddam Hussein, the Iraqis and the allies (Arab
and non-Arab) were all mocked in gendered terms. For instance, Bush’s infamous
‘kick-ass’ comment was turned into an obscene image suggesting the rape/buggery of
Saddam (Heath 1991:18). Elsewhere, Saudi men were ‘moustaches’ hiding behind the
bare shoulders of the American women soldiers (Trudeau 1991:30), while a group of
‘new men’ earnestly discussed ‘the sexual associations evoked by recent war pictures
from the gulf (Peattie and Taylor 1991:30). Cartoonists ridicule dominant idioms, but
usually remain within the limits of political expression allowed by those who
dominate. However, revolutionary actions may also be constructed in terms of
gendered metaphors of power: one aspect of Gandhi’s protest against the hypermasculine world view of the Raj explicitly associated non-violence with celibacy and
the spiritual elevation of androgynous forms of being (cf. Caplan 1987b).
Thirdly, images, attributions and metaphors of (masculinized) power are so
pervasive that they are frequently used to signify power in settings that have little to
do with men. Martin’s work on biological idioms—of active sperm and passive egg in
conception, and the masculinized Killer T virus cells and the feminized macropages
of HIV virology—provides two stunning examples of how ideas of masculinized
power insinuate themselves into supposedly ‘objective’ research (1987, 1992a, 1992b).
A more immediate example of this process can be found in Lakoff and Johnson’s
discussion of the ways in which we talk about argument in the language of war:
Your claims are indefensible…. His criticisms were right on target. I demolished
his argument…. It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments
in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we
are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and we defend our
own…the ARGUMENT IS WAR metaphor is one that we live by in this
culture; it structures the actions we perform in arguing. (1980:4)
Winning arguments, winning wars: both define versions of hegemonic masculinity.
Consider only the number of peers in the House of Lords who owe their titles to their
bellicose ancestors. More generally, an understanding of how arguments—and more
violent altercations—are implicitly gendered is of direct relevance to the negotiation
of masculine identities.
DISEMPOWERING MASCULINITY
In social theory and everyday usage, power has been treated as if it were both an
abstraction located in concepts, beliefs and ideologies ‘out there’ and also a
substantive property that can be won, exchanged or lost. Such a concept of power
focuses attention on institutions, on formal relations between the powerful and the
weak, and on men. It also leads to an emphasis on social stability, consensus and the
intentionality of leaders, while the compliance of subordinates is dismissed as ‘false
consciousness’ and their agency and interests remain more or less invisible. In short,
conventional perspectives on power are male-biased, riven with functionalism and
unable to account for social change (Davis et al. 1991).
If ‘sexuality is the dominant discourse of power in the west’ (Braidotti
1992:185), then to dislocate hegemonic masculinities, we must find another way of
thinking of power and attend to the experience of gendered subordination. Foucault’s
approach to power is strictly relational. Power is treated as an elusive, negotiated
aspect of all social transactions, whose existence depends on a ‘multiplicity of points
of resistance’ (1981:95). His broad understanding of power dislocates it from its
association with social pre-eminence. Rather, power is implicated in all aspects of
social life, thus focusing attention on social process, change and the ways in which
people experience autonomy and efficacy.
Foucault’s approach to power is compelling, yet it is not without its problems.
Several related issues concern us here. The first is the implicit male bias that
permeates both Foucault’s notion of power and his perspective as author.(1) While
Foucault’s analysis can be used to disrupt the conventional hegemonic association of
men and power, this association is, in fact, naturalized in much of his own work.
Second, power per se is not dissected, nor are its gendered attributes or the
implications of representations of sexual difference explored. Third, in spite of his
central concern with the surveillance of desire and the sexed body as an object of
power, Foucault barely considers how the body is gendered —a topic that we address
below. A fourth problem lies in his lack of interest in questions of agency and
autonomy in the way power is enacted between people. Foxhall (Chapter 7 in this
volume) in her critique of Foucault’s historical study of sexuality in ancient Greece
reveals the importance of the discourses on masculinity Foucault missed.
Though resistance is central to Foucault’s discussion of power, he has been
rightly criticized for not adequately considering the extent to which control is
exercised in particular settings, how it constrains those who are controlled, how
metaphors of control are gendered and, above all, how they change (Turner 1985).
Feminists and anthropologists studying gender have long been concerned with the
muting of women’s voices (cf. Spender 1980; Ardener 1975). Here too, our interest is
in disempowerment: the association between men and power is most clearly revealed
in studies that focus on the experience of subordination in hegemonic formations. In
this respect, Scott’s argument in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) is directly
applicable to studies of gender and masculinity. (2)
James Scott follows Foucault, treating power as elusive and relational; he
writes of his own project that he seeks to ‘outline a technology and practice of
resistance analogous to Michel Foucault’s analysis of the technology of domination’
(1990: 20). Scott’s interest is in everyday forms of resistance—the ‘weapons of the
weak’: in the mundane, informal, diffuse and often individualistic activities through
which the relatively weak can influence and frame their responses to dominant
ideologies, and perhaps benefit materially from resources that they feel have been
withheld from them by those who dominate.
Scott argues that all relations of power are characterized by dual transcripts.
The ‘official transcript’ articulates, legitimizes and constrains the position of superiors
and simultaneously reinforces the mechanisms (such as imposition of a gendered or
class identity) by which subordinates are controlled. It is enacted in face-to-face
encounters between superiors and their subordinates. However, all official transcripts
have their counterparts in what he calls ‘hidden transcripts’ which are created offstage, where dissent from dominant norms can be safely expressed. Only in
desperation do the weak resort to open rebellion or revolutionary activity; far more
often, and far less visibly, the weak aim to restore their own sense of worth and to
maximize their advantage within the system that disempowers them (cf. Kandiyoti,
Chapter 12 in this volume).
Hegemonic and subordinate discourses are mutually constructed. Those who
dominate in any particular setting are constrained by the hidden transcripts of their
subordinates, while the subordinates are neither passive nor mystified, but actively
negotiate their position vis-à-vis those who are more powerful. An understanding of
relations of power depends on contextualization, in terms of both the wider political
economy and the immediate issues at stake. Most importantly, Scott argues that no
situation of domination is ever static; external changes and the negotiations involved
in any social interaction alter both official and hidden transcripts.
Both men and women can refer to the official transcripts of masculinity to
legitimize their control of others, while subordinates respond by creating variant
masculinities and other gendered identities. McElhinny (Chapter 9 in this volume)
shows how male and female police officers use the images and professional tools of a
hegemonic masculinity to empower themselves. And other examples of women
associating themselves with masculinized power are numerous: the Queen and
Princess Anne command regiments of the British army; political leaders everywhere
(including women) don flak jackets to associate themselves with military might;
many men and some women simply ‘power dress’.
By
comparison,
the
hidden
transcripts
of
subordinates
are
poorly
documented. Women accidentally-on-purpose burn toast to express their displeasure
with their spouses; or they have headaches to resist sexual demands. More
dramatically, they may chose to engage in sexual liaisons that may diminish publicly
men’s masculine credentials (cf. Lindisfarne, Chapter 4 in this volume; Foxhall,
Chapter 7).
Subordinate men too engage in gendered behaviours that restore self-esteem:
thus, Shire, like Forrest (Chapter 5 in this volume) and Back (Chapter 10), describes
another macho style—that adopted by Shona men living in towns, who with flipflops and a pair of jeans were like kings (cf. Moodie 1988). Elsewhere, as we have
noted above, the military may dominate young men’s experience and define
acceptable sexualities. President Clinton’s ambition to allow gays into the US armed
forces has been strongly resisted. ‘Homosexuality as contagion is the model here,
though the anxiety it causes the toughest marines makes you realize just how fragile
the institution of heterosexuality must be’; yet for the gay man sitting in a gay bar
near a military base, ‘it is as easy to have sex with a marine as it is to get bashed by
one for being a fag’ (Moore 1993:15). In the Barrack-room Ballads Kipling also offers
many striking examples of the interplay of hegemonic masculinities and subordinate
variants.
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, go away’;
But it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins,’ when the band begins to play—…
For it’s Tommy this an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’
But it’s ‘Saviour of’ is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool—you bet that Tommy sees! (1990:322)
If hidden transcripts validate integrity and reputation (Scott 1990:7), this raises
further important questions about how human worth and dignity are related to
gendered identities. Or more fundamentally, with Strathern (1987), we must ask how
are difference and inequality gendered, and how then do we account for unequal
experiences of violence and the frequent association of violence with men. Strathern
argues that every action is inherently forceful because it is inherently transformative
(see below). As a general position, this makes sense, but it cannot account for the
ways force is defined, enacted and experienced by others. Rather, as our discussion of
the macho man and numerous examples from our ethnographies show, the puzzle
lies in how local definitions and judgements about violence are linked to local
attributions of masculinity.
Moore (1994) argues from ethnographic examples that gendered violence is a
consequence of people’s inability to control their presentation of themselves or how
they are represented by others. Such a general argument, like Arendt’s conviction
that ‘violence appears when power is in jeopardy’ (quoted in Morgan 1989:84),
account for differential experiences of gendered violence only when four other
conditions are met. First, the interaction must be framed in terms of a direct
(relational) discourse of male/ female difference (cf. McElhinny, Chapter 9 in this
volume); second, the discourse must strongly masculinize a hierarchical idea of
power; third, physical violence, as opposed to other reactions, must be plausible
and/or acceptable; and fourth, a (violent) action must be interpreted, by some people
at least, as illicit or unacceptable. With these premises in mind, consider Moore’s
example of men who
cannot control their lovers as they would wish, they cannot control other men’s
access to these women, and therefore they cannot control the definition of their
own masculinity because they cannot control the definition of or the social
practices surrounding the femininity of their lovers. The only women they can
control are their wives, and it is they who confirm their husband’s masculinity,
by their proper adoption of the opposite feminine subject position, and so their
husbands hit them. (1994:69)
As we discuss below, Strathern (1988) considers that cross-gendered interaction can
momentarily make partial identities appear coherent and whole (cf. below). Just as
strong drink can ‘put hair on a chest’, so too can violence sometimes be seen to
enhance masculinity: the man who beats his wife (Loizos, Chapter 3 in this volume),
or the groom who deflowers his virgin bride (Lindisfarne, Chapter 4), may—for that
moment at least—feel himself to be a ‘real man’.
That impotence leads to violence is familiar, but the further steps to
understanding what Morgan has called ‘ejaculatory politics’ (1989:84) are instructive.
By identifying the particular idioms whereby masculinity is associated with power,
the ways violence may be gendered and sexualized (in wife-battering as opposed to
marital rape or queer-bashing, for instance) can be explored. So too we can consider
the parallels between interpersonal violence, the impersonal violence of terrorism and
warfare, and that of gendered states. Thus, we may ask what the relation was
between the rhetoric of male heroism, the feminization of the state as both sister and
whore, and the reintroduction of Koranic punishments for fornication and adultery
during the early days of the Islamic revolution in Iran (cf. Thaiss 1978; Najmabadi
1991). Such complex questions require subtle answers. To study structures of
inequality that include both hegemonic and subordinate masculinities, it is helpful to
reconsider anthropological approaches to gender and to place men’s studies in this
context.
STUDYING MEN: OLD ANTHROPOLOGY BUT NEW
MEN’S STUDIES?
Malinowski, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of social anthropology, defined
anthropology as ‘the study of men embracing woman’ (cited in Moore 1988: 1). Taken
at face value, this observation is apposite. Mainstream anthropology has tended to
consider women only in the situations in which they are literally embraced by men.
As Moore has pointed out, studies of kinship and marriage have been central to
definitions of the discipline and have ensured the inclusion of women in
ethnographies, albeit as mothers and wives rather than as social agents in themselves
(1988:1; cf. Ortner and Whitehead 1981:10). Men, on the other hand, have been
described as social actors in all manner of different locations and positions, yet their
gendered identities have usually been taken completely for granted.
Gilmore, whose Manhood in the Making (1990) is one of the few crosscultural
studies
of
masculinity,
anachronistically
cites
Shapiro’s
criticism
that
in
anthropologies of gender,
The focus is on women; the social and cultural dimensions of maleness are
often dealt with implicitly rather than explicitly. Much of the recent
crosscultural research is not only about women, but by women, and in some
sense, for women. (Shapiro 1979:269, quoted in Gilmore 1990:1)
Gilmore attempts to make good this imbalance by providing a cross-cultural survey
of how ‘people in different cultures conceive and experience manhood… as the
approved ways of being an adult male in any given society’ (1990:1). Yet Gilmore’s
project is fundamentally flawed by the very presumptions we seek to challenge here.
He assumes that maleness is unitary, grounded in evolution and innate psychological
and biological dispositions, and categorically opposed to that which is female.
Moreover, he does not enquire how apparently unitary ‘persons’ are constituted and
assumes that there is, in any setting, a single way of ‘being a man’. Gilmore’s focus is
on versions of hegemonic masculinity and he tacitly accepts the mystifications these
entail: that the abstraction ‘masculinity’ is something generic and ubiquitous if not
universal and that ‘men’ exist as a natural, unmediated category. In effect, Gilmore is
a positivist; for him, both masculinity and men are ‘real’, ‘out there’ and amenable to
‘scientific’ study (cf. Hart’s comments, Chapter 2 in this volume).
Most tellingly, and in spite of the illogic involved, Gilmore dismisses
confounding ethnography ‘where manhood is of minimal interest to men or where
the subject is entirely elided as a symbolic category among members of both sexes’ as
‘exceptional’ or ‘anomalous’ (1990:4). We suggest that it is just such cases that should
arouse anthropological interest. Indeed, it is by attending to ethnographic details and
cultural forms that may at first appear exceptional, ambiguous or anomalous that
new areas for enquiry arise.
Malinowski’s designation of anthropology as the study of ‘men embracing
women’ has other resonances for Dislocating Masculinity. We argue that the scrutiny
of men, as men, must also embrace prior studies of women and femaleness and locate
discussions of masculinity in the history of gender studies. The appropriation of this
earlier work under the rubric of men’s studies has been discussed by Canaan and
Griffin (1990). With them, we would urge a critical awareness of such retrogressive
tendencies in the new studies of men;(3) equally, when work in gender studies is
ignored, it is fair to wonder if unscholarly interests are being served.
With the emergence of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and early
1970s an anthropology of women also began. An initial aim was to analyse the place
of women in the ethnographic literature. Several sources of male bias were identified,
among them the way male and female anthropologists incorporated Eurocentric ideas
of male dominance into their fieldwork, with a consequent emphasis on the beliefs
and activities of men in the community under study. As with the early women’s
movement generally, the ‘problem’ was to put women back into the picture. The aim
was to ask questions and describe the world from a woman’s viewpoint and, in the
case of applied anthropology, to find strategies whereby women could articulate and
remedy their subordinate position vis-à-vis men (cf. Rogers 1980). However, the
categories ‘women’ and ‘men’ were not only accepted as universals, but defined the
new area of study.
This first wave of ‘feminist anthropology’ provided the impetus for a wide
variety of detailed ethnographies whose focus was on women. Many of these
uncritically used notions such as ‘women’s status’, ‘role’ or ‘position’ vis-à-vis men to
document hitherto undescribed lives. More challenging works described the marginal
character of discussions of women in earlier ethnographic accounts (cf. Goodale 1971;
Singer 1973; Weiner 1976). They, and others such as Strathern (1972), were part of a
new generation of ethnographies that asked basic questions about the relationship
between women and men. This was a critical step. Even at this early stage, feminist
anthropologists were moving away from the static dichotomies associated with the
apparently ‘natural’ categories, ‘men’ and ‘women’.
The analytical notions that had perhaps the greatest influence on early
women’s studies in anthropology were closely related to other contemporary
theoretical interests in psychoanalysis, structuralism and Marxist or Weberian social
theory. Rosaldo and Lamphere’s (1974) edited volume Women, Culture and Society
introduced four influential papers—by Sacks, Ortner, Rosaldo and Chodorow—
which set the scene for an anthropology of gender. Each of these papers had a
formative influence, inspiring ethnographies and extending theoretical debate. A
second edited volume, Reiter’s (1975) Toward an Anthropology of Women, was a further
important source of ethnographic studies of women; it included an ovarian paper by
Rubin that anticipated many current themes in gender studies. As we describe below,
the arguments put forward by these five writers continue to reverberate today and
have recently reappeared, anachronistically and in simplified forms, in the context of
men’s studies.
The male writers who have contributed to the men’s studies canon seem to
agree in one avowed aim—to redefine masculinity, whether in academic, popular or
therapy-oriented terms. To be fair, the burgeoning literature on men and masculinity
derives less from anthropology than from sociology and psychology. However,
whatever their point of departure, many of these writers are extremely naive
anthropologically, while others have taken up theoretical positions which ignore
important recent work on gender. As we shall see, the men’s studies literature and its
concern with the so-called ‘crisis in masculinity’ does not yet provide much help on
theoretical issues, but is perhaps in itself a promising area for ethnographic
investigation.
MOTIVATED MASCULINITIES?
Many writing in men’s studies claim to share a common goal with feminist scholars.
Thus, Brod, an important figure in men’s studies in North America, has paid effusive
lip service to feminism. However, as Hanmer (1990) points out, Brod’s actual citations
of feminist work are few and self-serving. The extent to which he has failed to take
account of the methodological and epistemological issues raised by various
feminisms is apparent in his statement that:
In inverse fashion to the struggle in women’s studies to establish the objectivity
of women’s experiences and thereby validate the legitimacy of women’s
experiences as women, much of men’s studies struggles to establish the
subjectivity of men’s experiences and thereby validate the legitimacy of men’s
experiences as men. (1987:6)
Even in the early 1970s, when the emphasis was on defining a female Self and
consciousness-raising, women’s studies was never only about women. Feminists have
always been concerned with fundamental issues relating to questions of power. Brod
emphasizes the personal at the expense of the political. His unmarked use of the
subjective/objective
dichotomy
reproduces the
positivist dualisms (such
as
passive/active, body/mind and reason/emotion) that are deeply implicated in
gendered inequalities in the west. He seems to be unaware that anthropologists have
convincingly described the conceptual difficulties in generalizing from western
dichotomies (MacCormack and Strathern 1980) or how they are problematized in
current work in feminist theory (see below).
Such ‘common-sense’ dichotomies, derived from western psychoanalytic and
structuralist assumptions about ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, were initially borrowed
uncritically by anthropologists. In 1974, Ortner revealed some of the political
implications of such dualisms. Her analysis, a direct extension of Lévi- Straussian
structuralism, focused on procreation to locate women within the nature/culture
dichotomy. Women were identified with ‘nature’ and consigned to the ‘cultural’
control of men. By investigating the asymmetry of these dichotomies, Ortner drew
attention to the ‘naturalization’ of dominance. Since then, anthropological studies of
gender have moved on; as we shall see, much writing in the genre of men’s studies
has not.
On another tack, Brod announces that he ‘would like to begin a sketch of a
distinctive men’s studies socialist feminist analysis of capitalist masculinity’ (1987:13).
Again, his very statement reveals the anachronism of his position. In anthropological
studies of gender, Sacks’ return to Engel’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State (1974) marked the beginning of sophisticated materialist analyses. In
this work, the origins of sexual asymmetry, patriarchy and the objectification of
women were associated with the emergence of social hierarchies based on the control
of private property (cf. Etienne and Leacock 1980). Subsequent neo-Marxian and
socialist feminist studies have ranged from those about domestic labour (cf.
Molyneux 1979) through production and reproduction (cf. Edholm et al. 1977; Young
et al. 1981) to gendered aspects of the international economy (cf. Elson and Pearson
1981; Mies et al. 1988).
What is Brod offering us? Two things stand out. First, he is asking questions
as a male, a fact he celebrates. Secondly, he implies that only what he terms ‘New
Men’s Studies’ can offer a necessary corrective to the ‘female bias’ in work on
feminist-inspired topics, such as violence, parenting, health and sexuality. We might
be forgiven for wondering about the nature of this ‘corrective’ when Brod, writing
about male violence, emphasizes militarism rather than rape or battery; or when he
discusses the subject of pornography, we hear virtually nothing about the multiple
forms of violence this entails: Dworkin’s work (1981) is not mentioned, yet we learn
of pornography’s toll on men. For Brod, redressing the female bias in gender studies
requires a new discipline. He writes, ‘Only men’s studies can provide the requisite
systematically focused study of masculinities’ (Brod 1987:275). In effect, Brod is
arguing that ‘it takes one to know one’. We would ask how such privileged exclusion
can be justified as social science.
Ortner’s (1974) use of the nature/culture dichotomy in anthropology
prefigured a number of later developments within feminism, such as the move to
reclaim and revalue the essential ‘feminine’. The latter involves a shift from the
politics of equality to a variant of the politics of difference that focused on women’s
‘irrationalism’ and ‘naturalness’. Within men’s studies (and in popular books such as
that by Bly), there has been a similar move to reclaim the ‘natural’, from which, it is
argued, men have excluded themselves.
Seidler, a sociologist and prolific contributor to the debates in men’s studies in
Britain, is far more sensitive to the issues of power than is Brod. Seidler (1991a) has
described the objectives of the men’s groups of the 1970s as being less concerned with
validating the legitimacy of men’s experiences than with addressing gendered
inequalities by finding new, ‘non-sexist’ models of behaviour. Certainly, there can be
no doubt about the relief some men feel at now being able to participate in feminist
debates (cf. Hearn 1992). Elsewhere (e.g. 1991b), Seidler draws on feminist work to
situate the nature/ culture dichotomy within the rationalist tradition of the
Enlightenment and argues that masculinity came to be associated with reason and the
mastery of both the ‘natural’ and the emotional. Yet, rather than dispense with these
dichotomies as fundamentally flawed, Seidler, like Brod, seeks to redeploy them in
reverse. Thus men are urged to engage with their emotions and somatic selves and to
come to terms with their feelings and desires. There is, sadly, a misplaced optimism
in Seidler’s position: he seems to presume that by revaluing the personal, political
change will follow.
The nature/culture dichotomy which Ortner used to explain the subordination
of women was complemented by Rosaldo’s discussion of another dichotomy, that
between the private or domestic and public domains (1974). Women were located in
domestic settings, while the association with men and public culture was also seen to
define ‘society’ generally as masculine. This presumed division became influential in
studies that sought to compare men’s and women’s differential scope for controlling
resources. Rosaldo’s work was an important stimulus for further ethnographic
studies because it required that all social arenas be investigated for their political
entailments. From her work, and that of others (e.g. Nelson 1974), came the insight
that informal political and economic processes can remain invisible in accounts that
examine the public or formal sites of resource allocation.
The narrow association of women with domestic and men with public spheres
was soon discarded by anthropologists because of its misleading simplifications
about the nature of gendered power and the household as gendered space (cf. Harris
1981; La Fontaine 1981). However, the private/ public dichotomy, like that of
nature/culture, has recently been reinstated in reverse within men’s studies. For
instance, there are now many accounts that conflate ‘the domestic’ with men’s
involvement in parenting (see, for example, the section on ‘Men in Domestic Settings’
in Kimmel’s edited volume, Changing Men, 1987). These fail to explore the
interesting questions which are raised by locating men from the perspective of the
household (Foxhall, Chapter 7 in this volume), considering the specific masculinities
which are discursively aligned with domestic domains (Loizos, Chapter 3 in this
volume; Shire, Chapter 8), or examining how masculinities change over the life
course of an individual (a topic treated in various ways by all our ethnographies). But
perhaps the reduction of ‘the domestic’ to parenting is not accidental. In the men’s
studies literature, there is some discussion of gay men as parents, most of which is
heterosexist in its assumptions.
More often, however, reproduction is presented as a curiously sexless activity.
This literature tends to take for granted the association between active (heterosexuality (versus celibacy), potency (versus impotence) and virility (versus sterility);
here as in popular formulations, a macho man is also one with a high sperm count (cf.
Highfield 1992)! So, for example, Brod criticizes studies of parenting for not
examining how men’s public roles affect their private fathering activities (1987:42),
but his emphasis hides other considerations. As Segal puts it, men have been allowed
to ‘retain power in the public sphere while having access to the satisfactions (often
without the frustrations) of family life’ (1990:1; cf. 46–9).
The experiential and psychological aspects of male parenthood loom large in
popular and academic discussions of masculinity. It is notable that feminist rhetoric is
used to secure ‘fair play’ for men while patently disregarding wider questions of
power. Brod calls attention to the female biases in research on reproductive health,
but he fails to mention other relevant issues: for example, the fact that various
attempts at developing a ‘male pill’ were arrested at early stages when men began to
display symptoms, such as depression or loss of libido, which are accepted as
‘normal’ for female users of oral contraceptives. Or, in a similar vein, ‘Motivations of
abortion clinic waiting room males: “bottled-up” roles and unmet needs’ by Shostak
(1987) presents a ‘male partner’s bill of rights’ based on Ms magazine’s (1984)
‘pregnant woman’s bill of rights’. Yet, unsurprisingly, Shostak fails to report on the
‘expectant fathers’ who have no contact with the abortion clinic and perhaps deny all
responsibility for the pregnancy in the first place. However, the domain of pregnancy
and birth, already controlled and made an object of specialist knowledge by
maledominated obstetrics (Martin 1987), is another recent enthusiasm among ‘new
men’ and in the men’s studies literature. As Stolcke has remarked, it may be a case of
‘new reproductive technologies, same old fatherhood’ (1986).
In the men’s studies literature, the interest in male parenting is paralleled by a
focus on the acquisition of ‘sex roles’. Again, the theories that find favour are those
that were prominent in the early days of women’s studies. Chodorow’s neo-Freudian
work (1974) on the origins of female subordination depends on a universalized
assumption that female and male children experience fundamentally different
relations of mothering, related to the psychological dispositions of women as carers
and men as controllers. As Kandiyoti writes (4):
Object-relations theories express a serious preoccupation with the preOedipal process of separation of the psychically undifferentiated child from
the primary caretaker, who is usually the mother. They argue that gender
differences are created relationally in the process of this separation. This opens
up the possibility of discussing how gender differences are produced in
different relational contexts and are thus amenable to transformation and
historical change. However, the question of difference within the same gender
category is dismissed as less problematic than those between gender
categories (see, for example, Chodorow 1978:4). One cannot escape the
conclusion that differences based on class, race, sexual preferences and so on
are somehow less constitutive of the human subject than gender difference
and are somehow ‘added on’ to the psychological bedrock represented by the
latter. So despite the implicit recognition that different organizations of the
family and society should yield different patternings of the psyche, the fear of
falling into ‘sociologism’ prevents most theorists from stating more the
potential of their theory to integrate the social.
For these reasons Chodorow’s approach has been widely criticized within
anthropology as reductionist and Eurocentric. It posits fixed notions of identity and,
more crucially, it cannot account for what has been called ‘structural disadvantage’
(cf. Kandiyoti, Chapter 12 in this volume). However, it has gained considerable
currency in the popular literature. Chodorow has the distinction of being cited as one
of the major feminist sources in men’s studies in the USA (Brod 1987:13) and has been
cited in Britain by Seidler (1987), among others, while the anthropologists Herdt
(1981, 1984), Brandes (1980) and Gilmore (1990) adopt neo-Freudian approaches to
explain the development of masculine identities.
The recent US literature on men by men also draws on social and
developmental psychology. The emphasis is placed on men as individuals, on their
‘roles’ and on ‘male identity’. Rather than subjecting the notion of ‘sex roles’ to the
thoroughgoing critique current social theory would demand, the quest, as Pleck puts
it, seems to be for ‘new paradigms in the study of sex roles that are more relevant to
the need of contemporary society’ (1987:38). Reformulations of role theory, far from
undermining hegemonic forms of masculinity, merely recast them in another guise.
The expansive literature on therapy is instrumental in this process, presenting the
‘wounded male’ who needs to be ‘healed’ and bemoaning the ‘hazards’ of male
privilege. Indeed, interest seems to be less in men’s studies than in ‘new men’.
In his later work, Seidler (1991b) argues for the urgent need to consider issues
of agency. His critique of the dominant paradigms within men’s studies reveals their
repeated failure to engage with questions raised by feminists. Like Seidler, others in
Britain, such as Hearn and Morgan (1990a) and Porter (1992), also make deliberate
efforts to include feminist precedents—and feminist voices—in their overview of
possible directions for men’s studies. And, as we have seen, Connell (1987) and
Brittan (1989) have offered critical insights and made substantive contributions to the
sociology of masculinity. Yet these studies too fail to raise some of the most basic
questions anthropologists would ask about masculinity.
In appropriating the personal, there has been a tendency to forget the political
and ignore the vested interest many men have in resisting change. It is ominous that
in much of the men’s studies literature the category ‘men’ continues to be treated in
an essentialist manner. Consider, for example, Kimmel writing of ‘nonsexist sex’:
‘safer-sex programmes encourage men to stop having sex like men… [others] are men
who, like all real men, have taken risks…sex is about danger, risk and excitement’
(1990:107–8). Note how Kimmel both celebrates that spurious category, ‘real men’,
and insinuates a version of macho masculinity into his outrageous statement.
Kimmel’s presentation of a hegemonic masculinity in a scholarly guise should be a
matter of concern. Elsewhere he has written,
Inspired by the academic breakthroughs of women’s studies, men’s studies
addresses similar questions to the study of men and masculinity. Men’s
studies seeks neither to replace or supplant women’s studies; quite the
contrary. Men’s studies seeks to buttress, to augment women’s studies, to
complete the radically redrawn portrait of gender that women’s studies has
begun. (1987:10, our emphasis)
It is impossible to resist asking: what portrait of gender is men’s studies creating? As
Canaan and Griffin make clear, the issues at stake in the development of men’s
studies as a discipline go beyond the question of theory to address those of academic
privilege. Kimmel’s telling choice of metaphors supports their contention that men’s
studies may be ‘part of the problem rather than part of the solution’ (1990:214).
GENDERING THE BODY
The pervasive use of paired oppositions within the anthropology of women of the
1970s derived in large part from the influence of structuralism. Such usage privileged
idealized versions of gendered difference and implied that ‘men’ and ‘women’ are
natural objects rather than cultural constructions. Even more fundamentally, it
begged awkward questions about the presumed dichotomy ‘male’ and ‘female’. An
alternative perspective seems far more appropriate: that biology itself is a cultural
construction and that the link between a sexed body and a gendered individual is not
necessary but contingent.
Rubin’s (1975) contribution to the nascent anthropology of gender attempted to
dislodge the ‘naturalized’ biological notions embedded in western discourses on
sexual difference. In a devastating critique of psychoanalysis and structuralism —two
major theoretical strands running through mainstream anthropology— Rubin
demonstrated their congruence as ‘in one sense the most sophisticated ideologies of
sexism around’ (1975:200). Focusing on what she termed the ‘sex— gender system’,
Rubin brought the term ‘gender’ into contemporary use, arguing that,
gender is a socially imposed division of the sexes [which transforms] males and
females into ‘men’ and ‘women’, each an incomplete half which can only find
wholeness when united with each other…from the standpoint of nature, men
and women are closer to each other than either to it or to anything else. The
idea that men and women are two mutually exclusive categories must arise out
of something other than a nonexistent ‘natural’ opposition. Far from this being
an expression of natural differences, exclusive gender identity is the
suppression of natural similarities. (1975:80)
The theoretical eclecticism of Rubin’s important early article anticipated many of the
questions raised by recent work in the anthropology of gender (such as Strathern
1988) and the wider debates surrounding postmodernism. But Rubin was, in a sense,
writing before her time.
In the decade after Rubin’s comments, constructionist theories of gender
found favour with anthropologists. Once gender came to signify the socially
‘constructed’ parts played by men and women, another version of the nature/ culture
dichotomy took centre stage, yet its antecedents were already well rehearsed. Ideas
about the socialization of the individual had been prominent in the psychological and
sociological literature since the 1930s, and equally, crosscultural applications of such
universalist theories have had a long history in anthropology and, even now, retain
their hold on men’s studies.
In both socialization and constructionist theories, there is a paradox. While the
social construction of gender categories is carefully described in terms of
particularities, the very notion of ‘gender categories’ usually presupposes an
incontrovertable gender dichotomy, which in turn rests on notions of essential
biological difference. So, we are left with the cultural construct ‘gender’ and the
notion of biological ‘sex’. Thus, while the nature/culture dichotomy has been shown
to be culturally specific, the dichotomy itself has, in effect, merely been restated in a
different form. Cultural and historical specificity has been laid on to presupposed
biological universals—male and female bodies. There are five basic problems with the
constructionist position. The first is that these arguments leave us with the
dichotomous categories ‘men’ and ‘women’. Secondly, they assume that there are
unitary, but unformed, individuals. Once children are given a gender label as either
‘male’ or ‘female’, it is presumed that this monolithic identity adheres throughout
their lives. In such arguments, people are socialized into sex/gender roles and they
play them more or less well thereafter.
Thirdly, though the constructionist position explicitly seeks to distance itself
from considering the sexing of the body (on the grounds that this will inevitably lapse
into a form of biological essentialism), this discourages investigations of how the
body itself is socially constructed. Fourthly, by locating gender constructs in terms of
the unitary person, constructionism affirms deeply embedded western biases in
favour of the individual and the ‘commodity logic’ that implies: that in some contexts
people are understood and treated as if they are things (cf. Strathern 1988; and see
below). Fifthly, relations between men and women are seen in terms of the interaction
of fixed, polarized entities. This obscures the extent to which attributes associated
with men and women in any particular setting overlap and are mutually constructed.
Many of the more important recent anthropological studies of gender are
constructionist in their emphases, and several of the five basic issues mentioned
above are never seriously addressed. ‘Sex’, in the physiological sense, is distinguished
from ‘gender’, which is seen as cultural and learned in a specific setting. However, to
cast the construction of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ in these terms is, as Gatens notes, both
confused and confusing. Gatens challenges the constructionist position and its
association with the politics of gender equality, and shows that ‘the apparent
simplicity of the ahistorical and theoretically naïve solution’ (1983:144) of
constructionism is a further variant of western dualisms.
In some cases the constructionism is crude, as when Shore distinguishes: (1)
‘reproductive sexuality’, which he limits to the ‘biological and reproductive aspects of
sexual dimorphism’, from (2) ‘psychological sexuality’, by which he means the
‘psychological and subjective aspects of sexual identity’, and (3) the domain of
‘gender’, which includes the whole range of cultural experience (1981: 194). In other
cases the constructionism is less apparent. The following comment by Geertz is
challenging and it is not immediately evident that his use of the word ‘intersexuality’
(that is, implicitly between two sexes) subverts his intention:
Gender in human beings is not a purely dichotomous variable. It is not an
evenly continuous one either, of course, or our love life would be even more
complicated than it already is. [This raises] certain problems for common
sense, for the network of practical and moral conceptions woven about those
supposedly most rooted of root realities: maleness and femaleness.
Intersexuality is more than an empirical surprise; it is a cultural challenge….
If received ideas of ‘the normal and natural’ are to be kept intact, something
must be said about [the] rather spectacular disaccordances with them.
(1983:81)
So pervasive is the dichotomy between ‘male’ and ‘female’ in western discourse that
anthropological attempts to describe the complexities of certain gendered behaviours
have foundered on measures which re-create the dichotomy in an intermediate form.
Thus, for example, the proposal by Wikan (1977) that Omani transvestites be
regarded as a ‘third’, intermediate, gender occludes many of the most interesting
issues (cf. Cornwall, Chapter 6 in this volume).
As Kaplan and Rogers (1990) note, there is today much evidence of how
biological research has focused on sexual diamorphism in response to the cultural
importance of this dichotomy. New research points away from the polarization of
‘male’ and ‘female’ whether in terms of anatomy, hormonal physiology or sexual
attraction. As Cornwall reports (Chapter 6 in this volume), Kessler and McKenna’s
study (1978) suggests the extent to which western distinctions privilege the presence
of male genitalia in categorizing the two ‘sexes’ on which two ‘genders’ are culturally
elaborated. The definition of what is ‘male’ by the possession or absence of the penis
is, they argue, no cultural universal. However, in the west the rhetoric of hegemonic
masculinity, and its association with male privilege, often makes the link appear
direct (that is, referential); cf. Sanders’ excellent study (1991) of a similar process
revealed in the gendering of hermaphrodites by medieval Islamic jurists. As
Cornwall’s work (Chapter 6) illustrates, the possession of an (anatomical) penis may
only be contingently linked with attributions of maleness. Not only ‘being a man’ but
‘being male’ can be interpreted differently in different situations.
Though Foucault’s theories are in essence constructionalist—he describes the
different ways in which gender is attributed to human beings in specific historical
and cultural contexts—he makes clear in Discipline and Punish (1977) that the body is
not a biological given. For Foucault, bodies are the sites of resistance and of power
over others. He notes that the inscription of power on bodies is a direct, material
process that functions through the disciplinary procedures and self-regulation of
everyday life: work and rest, diet, dress and sexual mores. Such processes make
bodies into particular kinds of body. They are rendered social through ethnic or other
markers, physiological through surface and metabolic transformations, and psychical
through moral dispositions and experiences of pain and pleasure.
There are no neutral or ‘natural’ anatomical bodies. Rather, historical and
cultural specificity is incarnated through individual, embodied agents who construct
social narratives by acting on and reacting to others. In Stoller’s words, ‘anatomy is
not really destiny; destiny comes from what people make of anatomy’ (1976: 293).
And of course anatomy tells us little about sexual practice; and it tells us less about
desire or the ways sexual fantasies or cultural styles may be construed within a single
setting or cross-culturally.
We argue that there is no ‘natural’, nor necessary, connection between men
and masculinity. However, this does not mean that this relationship is completely
arbitrary. In any particular context, cultural idioms and history define the categories
through which gender is embodied. As Grosz has written,
Masculine and feminine are necessarily related to the structure of lived
experience and meaning of bodies. As Gatens argues in her critique of the
sex/gender distinction (1983), masculinity and femininity mean different
things according to whether they are lived out in and experienced by
male or female bodies. Gender is an effect of the body’s social
morphology. What is mapped onto the body is not unaffected by the
body onto which it is projected. (Grosz 1990:73–4; cf. Butler 1990)
Conversely, the body itself may be affected by what is mapped on it: thus, for
instance, the ascription of masculine traits to female sexed bodies may have a variety
of implications. However, these implications cannot be assumed. It is wiser to
consider gendered styles and manners, desire and sexual behaviour as separate
issues. Then what becomes instructive is the way different kinds of body are valued:
as Forrest’s ‘muscle queens’ (Chapter 5 in this volume) and Shire’s account of young
boys’ operations on their penises (Chapter 8) show, different styles of maleness can be
made through deliberately altering the body. And, as Kandiyoti discusses with
respect to the fireman of Ottoman Istanbul (Chapter 12 in this volume), a particular
masculine style may be admired in quite different ways by younger or older men or
by women. And we must also remember that masculinities are performed or enacted
in specific settings: in the gymnasia of ancient Greece (Foxhall, Chapter 7 in this
volume), or contemporary gyms (Forrest, Chapter 5), playing scoccer at a mission
school (Kanitkar, Chapter 11) or playing basketball at a youth club in south London
(Back, Chapter 10).
There are two important points here: first, sex cannot be accorded any direct
(referential) character; and, second, though in any particular setting there would seem
to be a contingent (indexical) relationship between the gendering of individuals and
the sexing of bodies, this relationship is in no sense fixed. In short, we would
emphasize the importance of Gatens’ insistence on taking a critical view of the alleged
neutrality of the body, ‘the postulated arbitrary connection between femininity and the
female body, masculinity and the male body’ (1983:144). Compare Zita (1992) on
‘male lesbians’ with Clements’ remarks on the butch’s masculinity ‘which within a
lesbian relationship is actually contextualized and resignified in a butch identity by
the fact that this particular “masculinity” is juxtaposed against a culturally intelligible
female body. The lesbian butch’s sexual identity represents not just a superimposed
masculine identity or merely a decontextualized female body but the destabilization
of both terms as they come into erotic interplay’ (1993:26).
In The Gender of the Gift (1988) Strathern offers a theory of embodiment that
unseats conventional definitional certainties and tackles the problem of how
gendered difference is produced and experienced in social transactions and
discourse. Not only does she offer many new insights into how such processes may
occur, but she reinforces ethnographically the feminist philosophers’ insistence that
there can be no simple correspondence between sexed bodies and male and female
perspectives. We discuss some of Strathern’s arguments in greater detail below.
However, the breadth and coherence of her position is such that her arguments must
be understood within the wider context of postmodernism.
POSTMODERNISM AND THE POLITICS OF GENDER
By exposing the partial perspective of every commentator, postmodernist writing
unseats both the certainties of feminism as a political project and the notional
objectivity, and authority, of the anthropological observer. The move to recognize the
existence of multiple perspectives and their political and material implications
resonated with feminist critiques of male bias within western social and natural
science (5). More recently, however, the politics of difference within feminism have
led to the rejection of the category ‘women’ as untenably essentialist, and feminist
political positions have tended to come unstuck (cf. McElhinny, Chapter 9 in this
volume).
For anthropology, recent postmodernist critiques have also had far-reaching
and often uncomfortable consequences. They have forced anthropologists to
reexamine their basic premises, to focus on the experience of the ethnographer and
the implications of descriptions of the ‘other’ in ethnographic writing. This has raised
a number of awkward political questions. Ethnography has served the interests of
colonialism and created unequal ‘others’. The language that anthropologists have
used to construct their ‘other worlds’ has lent a distinctive western flavour to their
accounts. It has also imposed anthropologists’ ‘ways of reasoning’ and created a
standard against which others have often been judged and found lacking. (6)
A further, and more unsettling, thrust of the postmodernist challenge has
been to dismantle the certainties upon which western theory has rested. Notions of
Truth, Reason and, indeed, Philosophy (Rorty 1979) have been shown to be products
of a particular phase in western thought. Lyotard, a principal commentator on what
he terms The Postmodern Condition (1984), describes largescale theories which purport
to provide general explanations of social relations as grand narratives of
legitimation’. Such theories, he argues, have been put forward as if they existed
outside the specific historical and social contexts in which they were formulated.
They purport to generate ‘truths’ about the human condition, but in fact they fail to
embrace the complexity of local conditions. Lyotard’s argument echoes recent
challenges that have been posed within feminism. Earlier feminism had a very
singular and exclusive focus on the oppression of women by men. The white, middleclass voices that were raised in protest spoke for ‘everywoman’. This effectively
silenced marginal and/or dissenting voices, denying different sexual orientations and
identities as well as the experience of other forms of oppression.(7) As with
anthropology, early feminist writings were criticized for replicating colonial
discourses. There has been a move from a singular notion of ‘feminism’ to an
understanding that we need to talk of multiple, situated ‘feminisms’ (deLauretis
1986). This shift has led to an appreciation of identities as multiple, contested, and at
times contradictory.
Postmodernism has the effect of making all explanations relative. Everything
becomes a matter of perspective; and perspectives change with scale and context
(Strathern 1991). Thus, theories that rely on notions such as ‘culture’, ‘class’, ‘race’
and ‘gender’ become problematic because they depend on ascribing essences, or
essential attributes, to members of the categories they create. Category creation itself
is an act of power. We have seen how oppositions like ‘men’ and ‘women’ are such
essentialist categories, while assertions of gender difference tie us to particular
political positions (di Stefano 1990). Butler (1990), taking a radical stance on this issue,
argues that the very notions of ‘men’ and ‘women’, as one of many oppressive
binaries, are regulative ideals that produce inequalities. She argues, following
Foucault, that we must transcend the notion of a gender difference itself. Butler
contends,
Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from
which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted
in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylized repetition of acts.
(1990:140)
However, Butler is neither very curious about the possible cross-cultural applications
of her proposal, nor greatly concerned about the processes whereby hegemonic
masculinities such as we have described naturalize inequality.
TAKING APART MASCULINITY
Foucault’s situational understanding of power, coupled with Scott’s methods for
exploring resistance, open up new possibilities for understanding of masculinities.
Strathern’s radical critique of western analyses of gender in The Gender of the Gift
(1988) dislocates further the male bias and Euro-centrisms that are inevitably present
in anthropological discussions. For Strathern, gender is an open-ended category, one
based on Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘family resemblances’. Gender is understood as the
‘categorization of persons, artifacts, events [and] sequences…which draw upon
sexual imagery [and] make concrete people’s ideas about the nature of social
relationships’ (1988:ix). While it seems that the use of sexual imagery is common to
human beings everywhere, as we have seen, neither the character of such images nor
their relation to social experience are fixed or universal. Within any local setting,
sexual images are only one among many sets of metaphors of identity and their use is
both unpredictable a priori and ever-changing from the point of view of those who
use them.
Strathern’s argument focuses on how gender difference itself is constructed by
considering local discourses of agency, causation, personhood and identity. From this
perspective, ‘idealized masculinity is not necessarily just about men; it is not
necessarily just about relations between the sexes either’ (Strathern 1988: 65). Rather,
it is part of a system for producing difference. Strathern argues that a corollary of the
historical ambition of anthropologists to study bounded coummunities is their focus
on the bounded person who is socialized to play particular ‘roles’ in adulthood.
Strathern offers a far more interesting approach. She argues that agents are differently
constructed in different cultural settings and uses Marriott’s notion of the ‘dividual’
to ask new questions about how human beings are gendered.
To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They
must also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances
—essences, residues, or other active influences—that may then reproduce in
others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated.
(Marriott 1976:111, quoted in Strathern 1988:348)
How are people understood to be internally differentiated? What are the qualities
that may be attached to, or incorporated by, persons and which may be exchanged
with others? How do people dispose of parts of themselves in relation to other
people?
The idea of ‘dividual’ people treats human beings as having permeable,
changing boundaries and experiencing constant movement between different aspects
of social life. Strathern argues that gender is one way such movement, and the plural,
divisible and ever-changing elements on which it depends, is conceptualized. In so
doing, she points to a far more subtle idea of personhood than most western theories
allow and provides a way of thinking about difference that does not immediately
collapse into dualism. She argues, ‘Being “male” or being “female” emerges as a
holistic unitary state only in particular circumstances…each male or female form may
be regarded as containing within it a suppressed, composite identity’ (1988:14–15).
There are many ways in which persons experience themselves and others as
‘dividuals’, but these remain largely unmarked because of the western emphasis on
the unitary person and propensity for ‘commodity logic’.
Strathern argues that it is commodity logic that disposes us to be fascinated by
the attributes of things and to locate possession, ownership, control and ideas of
power in a one-to-one relation between discrete attributes and the unitary individual
(1988:338).(8) In terms of the relation between attributes and persons, we are
sometimes explicitly aware of the extent to which people become part-objects in
social exchanges. The anthropological literature on brideprice and dowries, or on
institutions
such
as
slavery,
addresses
such
questions
directly.
However,
commodification is only one logic of partibility and exchange.
To take a few simple examples, consider the ‘dividuals’ described in the lyrics
of the following popular songs. The title ‘My heart belongs to Daddy’ is an example
of commodity logic and a predilection for construing possession through metonymy,
while ‘Take another little piece of my heart, baby’ depends on a notion of partibility.
Other song titles suggest quite other ways personhood can be experienced and
transformed through interactions with others: thus, ‘I’ve left my heart in San
Francisco’, ‘I’ve got you under my skin’ and ‘I’m gonna wash that man right out of
my hair’. However, the emphasis on bounded individuals is so strong that the
alternative images of personhood such lyrics imply are usually ignored.
Of course some radical images of gendering are meant not to be ignored: as in
‘Man enough to be a woman’! Among these examples perhaps the most interesting
are the following soul titles. ‘Your love has made me a man’ carries western notions
of love as a thing to be possessed and exchanged, but the mechanics of the
transformative properties of love invite new questions about partibility and agency.
In the title, ‘That man has made a woman out of me’, the man who makes a woman—
who is a producer of gendered difference—does so in terms of particular idioms,
which also define his masculinity and the inferior masculinities of men who are
unable to effect such an apparently magical feat.
Strathern offers insights into just such transformative aspects of gendering
and uses the notion of ‘impingement’ to discuss the effects people may have on each
other. This broad notion has much to recommend it: it is descriptive and, unlike
‘power’, is automatically associated neither with men nor with social dominance.
Moreover, it can be used to describe aspects of any social transaction; it is a subtle
way of talking about social efficacy. Strathern focuses on agency and on the
revelation of potentials, enablement and knowledges. Her use of the idea of the
divisible person and her related theory of interaction are compelling: they raise many
new questions that can be asked ethnographically.
By emphasizing local understandings of gendered essences and the partible
bits of people (scents, tastes, touch, thoughts, emotions; substances such as breastmilk and semen; and psychic, somatic and material conditions of wellbeing and
misfortune) that may transform and be transformed through interaction, Strathern
addresses directly questions of the production of representations of gendered
difference (cf. Braidotti 1992:187ff.). This opens up an investigation of ‘the respective
powers or influence that each sex possesses’ (Strathern 1988:68). Three brief examples
from our ethnographies illustrate cases that can usefully be described in terms of
impingement and the mutual construction of gendered identities. Thus, Shire
(Chapter 8 in this volume) describes how boys fear they may grow breasts if they
spend too much time in the female terrain of the kitchen, and he explains why men
‘can’t go to the moon’. The female sex-workers in Alicante consider that by helping
men to lose their virginity in ‘an appropriate manner’, it is they who teach men ‘to be
men’ (Hart, Chapter 2 in this volume).
Elsewhere, as Lindisfarne describes (Chapter 4 in this volume), the idea of a
female virgin’s defloration by penetrative sex is so crucial to ‘being a man’ that the
illusion of virginity is often maintained by trickery. Impingement is a useful idea
because it does not prejudge relations of power in any particular case. However,
questions of hegemonic masculinity and masculized power cannot simply be
dismissed. As Overing (1986) and others have written, westerners find it virtually
impossible not to regard the sexes in a permanent relation of asymmetry. Combined
with perceptions of coercion and collective action, gender asymmetry can create a
potent image of domination (Strathern 1988:330). However, such an image is less
compelling if it is located in the political economy that produces it. Moreover,
assumptions of difference or symmetry are never simple: an overt ideology of
inequality between the sexes, or between class or racial groups, will necessarily
conceal the combination of their labours. In such cases, structures of mutual
dependence are likely to be at odds with hegemonic ideals.
The stereotypes of subordinates as dangerous or loathsome— as in the case of
the alleged chaotic and voracious sexuality of Middle Eastern women (Lindisfarne,
Chapter 4 in this volume) or in the ‘fear and desire’ couplet associated with racism
(Back, Chapter 10 in this volume)—help to naturalize ‘inferiority’ and may in part be
internalized by the subordinates themselves. Yet the opposite can also hold true: from
images of gender equality, concepts of inequality can be fashioned (Strathern
1988:143), as in the case of institutions that distinguish people as ‘separate but equal’:
compare, for example, Forrest’s discussion of the gay community (Chapter 5 in this
volume) with Kandiyoti’s description of aspects of sexual segregation in the Middle
East (Chapter 12 in this volume).
Strathern uses the notion of ‘replication’ to talk about the collective character
of relationships among people of the same sex. In experiences of replication, she
insists that the excluded sex is always there by implication. Thus, if activities are
locally interpreted as the arena of one sex, the other sex is there as cause. Otherwise, it
is present in artifacts (as Shire shows in terms of weaponry and paraphernalia,
Chapter 8 in this volume) or even in those parts of the body that embody the other
sex (Strathern 1988:121), as in the case of the travesties (Cornwall, Chapter 6 in this
volume), or that only exist to be transformed by the other sex, as is the case of the
virgin’s hymen (Lindisfarne, Chapter 4). In short, gendered identities are necessarily
constructed with reference to others who are represented as different and/or
dominated. Equally clearly, agents do not create asymmetry, but enact it by adopting
relative, momentary and provisional positions (Strathern 1988:333–4). But, if this is
the case, how then can we understand those situations that are experienced and
described in terms of domination? (9)
As we have mentioned above, Strathern argues that every action is inherently
forceful—an act of domination (1988:327). We know too that the meaning of specific
interactions must be located in the interpretations of the actors, subjects and their
audiences. We have argued that hegemonic ideologies frame experiences of
subordination, but they do not completely define them. Rather, gendered difference
and inequality are negotiated and recreated more or less in repeated interactions, but
no interaction is identical. Investigations that focus on embodied interaction and
impingement can also allow for explanations in terms of negotiation of
interpretations. And it is also possible to investigate how the accumulation of
experience can introduce new social forms and meanings into apparently
conventional situations: hegemonic ideologies and their subordinate variants change
over time. We return to our conviction that ethnographic descriptions of masculinity
need to be located squarely with respect to contested interpretations of power.
LOCATING MASCULINITIES
The relativism of postmodern thinking, which precludes the possibility of a centred
position from which to articulate moral judgements, can be as apolitical as early
feminism was politically extreme in its ideas of male domination. For anthropologists
and others whose aim is to describe the complexity of people’s everyday lives, the
contemporary problem is to discover a convincing theoretical basis for addressing the
relation between the two positions.
In one sense, this is easy, because the contrast between the two positions has
been overdrawn, not least because their respective proponents have often themselves
seemed disembodied and their social backgrounds and political interests ignored.
Thus, contrary to what McNay, writing on Foucault, suggests,(10) the problem is not
about establishing ‘basic norms, which serve as a safeguard against the abuse of
power and the domination of weaker individuals’ (1992:8). Rather, the problem lies in
not being sufficiently alert to the fact that ethical positions are always enunciated by
individuals with particular social identities and material interests. And it is about
being willing to engage with the consequent political entailments.
As we have suggested, the political questions about representation—who
speaks for whom in what contexts—have been central to recent debates in both
feminism and anthropology. In this respect, it is crucial to be aware that difference ‘is
not simply difference as distinction but rather that difference is infused with
hierarchies of power’ (MacKey 1991:2). MacKey’s ‘revised politics of location’ offers a
way out of the ethnical impasse of post-modernism. Following Mohanty, a first step
is for each individual to define ‘the historical, geographic, cultural, psychic and
imaginative boundaries that provide the ground for political definition and selfdefinition’ (Mohanty 1987:31, cited in MacKey 1991:6). The second is to become
critically aware of the relation between experience, identity and political perspective
(MacKey 1991:12).
Clearly, this relation is redrawn and emerges afresh through every social
interaction. Such awareness allows each person to explore complex, overlapping, and
intersecting encounters and relations of difference, and ‘it avoids and transcends the
easy and destructive polarization of victims and perpetrators’ (MacKey 1991:14).
MacKey ends her excellent paper by asking ‘whether or not some of these insights
can be applied directly to anthropology’ (1991:15). Our answer is ‘yes’, and we would
argue that it is directly relevant to the study of masculinity.
Three further steps are needed to link a feminist politics of location and
anthropological studies of masculinity (cf. Lindisfarne-Tapper 1991). First, it is
important to accept the postmodern challenge and relinquish any remaining pretext
to objectivity and its attendant, and static, essentialisms.
Secondly, if the distinguishing feature of anthropological method is
participant observation, then this must play an explicit part in the formation of a
political voice. If we think of our everyday lives as a kind of fieldwork experience, the
lesson is clear. Just as all anthropologists are gendered in the field, so too are they
politicized: who talks to the anthropologist, and whose points of view does the
anthropologist learn to share? Through the process of fieldwork itself, gendered
political identities from ‘home’ are relocated through interaction in the field. And,
after fieldwork, that process of politicization continues. We contend that by attending
to this process, a responsible anthropological voice is created. Of course, it is a
subjective, personal voice, but it is a voice through which individual anthropologists
can describe the intersection of their past positions as gendered political agents, their
gendered socialization in the field, and the ways they reposition themselves in later
academic and other debates.
The third and most problematic step is producing knowledge about others. If
anthropologists dare to speak personally, and thus automatically to speak for others
whose points of view they have in part assimilated, it is crucial to ask who will listen
and why. A critical understanding of the relation between the anthropologist’s
shifting gendered political identity and those of the audience is essential.
One aim of this volume is to disrupt hegemonic notions of gendered
difference that are used in ways that disempower. People’s everyday experiences of
inequality, and differential access to resources, can be located politically without
reintroducing ideas of essentialized, gendered ‘whole persons’. Individuals embody
many different subjectivities. Though hegemonic discourses of masculinity may
suppress, they never totally censor, contradictory subjectivities. In focusing on the
subordinate variants of hegemonic masculinities, we challenge the authority of
hegemonic formations. Thus, we argue that a postmodern position—that there can be
no single account of social life, only a multiplicity of interested perspectives—does
not preclude moral judgements. We do not hope to provide definite answers to
questions of gendering (there can be none), but to raise further questions and suggest
new strategies for locating masculinities.
NOTES
1. As Braidotti, among others, has argued, Foucault’s social philosophy as a whole is
dominated by
sexual-specific premises…which posit the primacy of masculine sexuality as a site of
social and political power…[in his later work, he assigns] the sexes to precise roles, poles
and functions, to the detriment of the feminine. (1990:22)
See also Braidotti 1992; McNay 1992.
2. Scott’s aim is to explore the character of resistance in extreme social settings: slave
societies and concentration camps among others, though he acknowledges that
the literature on gender-based domination and on working-class culture and ideology
has proven insightful at many points. They share enough similarites to the cases I rely
most heavily on to be suggestive. At the same time the differences limit the analogies
that can be drawn. (1990:22)
Scott seems to discount gender because of mistaken premises. First, he treats gender as if it has
to do with women only, and, secondly, as if women’s subordination is defined by experiences
that are ‘personal and intimate’ (1990: 22). A third mistake seems to stem from his concern that
women’s lives are not sufficiently separate from those of men to allow them to develop forms
of resistance, and, finally, he argues that it is too difficult to identify structures of resistance in
situations where civil and political rights blur the picture (1990:22). Scott’s own reluctance to
engage with questions of gender does not preclude others taking his argument in that
direction.
3. There have, of course, been notable exceptions: see, for example, Brandes 1980; Herdt 1981,
1984; Herzfeld 1985; Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991; and the excellent bibliography in
Gilmore 1990.
4. The passages from Kandiyoti that we quote here, we have with her permission, pirated
from her Chapter 12 in this volume. While Lacanian theories have had a considerable impact
particularly among French feminists, they have received little attention in the men’s studies
canon (cf. Seidler 1991b). Again, in Kandiyoti’s words,
The Lacanian approach claims to provide an account of the constitution of the
human subject and uses the Oedipal conflict and castration complex as a metaphor
for the child’s entry into human culture. This approach ultimately makes a
preoccupation with concrete mothers and fathers seem rather trivial and irrelevant.
Yet, even though all subjects are constituted through sexual difference, gender
remains both totally fundamental and totally elusive (see, for example, Mitchell
and Rose 1982:2). Accounts of how exactly subjects are formed through their
sexuality differ, while feminist positions on Lacan have ranged from endorsement
to outright rejection. Whatever the position adopted, to the extent that Lacan posits
a historically invariant concept of human nature, he invites charges of essentialism.
5. See, for example Harding and Hintikka 1983; di Stefano 1990. Recent work in feminist
theory has explored in detail some of the entailments of a radical postmodernist stance: see,
for example, Butler 1990; Fraser and Nicholson 1988; Hodge 1989; Mascia-Lees et al. 1989;
Nicholson 1990; Scott 1989: Weedon 1987.
6. On the implications of postmodernism for anthropology, see Clifford and Marcus 1986;
Fardon 1990; Strathern 1992. Many anthropologists and others have written about
anthropology’s association with colonialism: see, for example, Asad 1975: Said 1978. On
epistemologies, see, for example, Salmond 1982: Wolfram 1982; Hacking 1983.
7. See, for example, hooks 1982; Moraga and Anzaldua 1981; Mohanty 1991. Feminism has
also been associated with colonialism: see Spivak 1981; Mohanty 1987b. Ramazano lu (1989)
provides a useful introduction to the issues involved.
8. Strathern is happy to import Marriott’s notion of the ‘dividual’ from India into her
discussion of Melanesia. It is notable that Beteille has remarked that a notion of biological
substantialism is not peculiar to traditional Hindu culture, but is even more in tune with
modern capitalism (1990:498, 450).
9 . Strathern’s move from the general notion of impingement to domination is a more
difficult and problematic part of her argument. She writes that men have the advantage over
women because ‘a man sees his acts replicated and multiplied in the acts of like others’: but
then the consequences of this ‘apparent’ male domination of women must be tackled
(1988:327). It may well be that in Melanesia such domination does not stand for anything but
repeated ‘small personal encounters’ through which a man manifests his strength by
demonstrating a woman’s weakness (1988:327–8). However, if male dependence on a female
‘other’ is a ‘precondition for acts of male excess’ (1988:336), much more needs to be said about
the rhetoric of such excesses, their incidence and the compliance, or resistance, of women and
other men who are thus forced into subordinate positions. Given the great detail of her work,
it is somewhat paradoxical that one of the difficulties with Strathern’s immensely innovative
and instructive analysis of gender is that she leaves too little space for discussions of the
negotiation of interpretations and explanations of historical change.
10. Thus, in Foucault and Feminism (1992) McNay writes of the problems of reconciling
postmodernism with an ethnical position, noting that Foucault refused ‘to outline the
normative assumptions upon which [emancipatory social] change should be based’ (1992:8).
But she herself seems to imply that such norms would be enunciated by individuals who were
somehow free of particular social identities and interests.
Chapter 2
Missing masculinity?
Prostitutes’ clients in Alicante, Spain
Angie Hart
In this chapter I explore the meanings that different actors, in a particular
ethnographic setting, attach to the notion of an individual who is at once a man and a
prostitute’s client. I consider the interdependency of the two terms, and how their
relationship often verges on the parasitic, while each simultaneously pushes the
boundaries of meaning of the other. This contested space for meaning relates to the
potency of both concepts. Historically in western thought, the hegemony of
discourses of men/‘maleness’ and of men/ ‘clientness’ are such that they are both
often taken for granted and treated as synonymous rather than being openly
articulated as men/maleness and men/ clientness.
Maleness often hijacks personhood, thereby precluding the latter as a shared
space for women and children. With clientness, the reverse process occurs. Textual
and popular discourses of prostitution are generally negative discourses; not
surprisingly, they are mostly discourses about women prostitutes. Precisely because
of the hegemony of male/maleness discourses, (male) clientness is often given a
privileged back seat, leaving women prostitutes up front with only the faintest whiff
of an idea that clients exist as well.
Slowly, this situation is beginning to change. The occasional feminist voice
speaks out, exposing clients (for example, McCleod 1982), or deconstructing
‘masculinity’, as in this volume. However, the general outlook is bleak.
Anthropological and sociological studies of ‘masculinity’ bring the concept of
‘maleness’ to the fore; the paradox is that male discourses occupy a privileged status
and ‘masculinity’ studies go some way towards reinforcing this. Some of them are
critical, but many are not. And most texts on prostitution, when they mention clients,
present them en masse, precluding a contextualized analysis of who these men are
and where their responsibilities lie.
My chapter aims to redress this situation and examine men and/as clients in
one particular setting. It points to the plurality of discourses regarding the notions
‘man’ and ‘client’. Male selves are messier than many studies of ‘masculinity’ would
like to acknowledge, and so too are client selves, often stereotyped and essentialized
in texts on prostitution. There are, of course, no observable hegemonic discourses in
this ethnographic setting. Patterns do emerge, but they are at once informed by
powerful counter-patterns—hence discourses conflict.
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC CONTEXT
My ethnographic material was collected during 1990 and 1991 in a central
neighbourhood in Alicante, a port on the east coast of Spain. Historically the area had
been Alicante’s main heterosexual prostitution site, although at the time of the
fieldwork the numbers of male clients and female prostitutes going there were on the
decline. The identity of the neighbourhood continued to be linked with people who,
for parts of their lives, assumed the role of, and were categorized in, countless
popular and professional discourses as marginal persons: clients of prostitutes,
prostitutes, alcoholics, drug addicts and dealers, criminals, black Africans and
gypsies among them.
Some of these people lived and worked in the area, whilst others came during
the day to frequent the many bars or to hang around in the streets. Alicante’s plainclothes drug squad had a strong presence on foot in the neighbourhood, as did the
local police, who regularly patrolled the area by car. Although soliciting, running a
brothel and living off immoral earnings are technically illegal in Spain, the police
turned a blind eye to all of these activities. Prostitution in the neighbourhood was
characterized by a low level of education amongst the clients and workers, poor
health and living conditions, low attendance at STD clinics, unsafe sex and infrequent
condom usage, alcoholism and drug use. Although Spain is now a democratic
country, most of the clients and prostitutes had spent thirty-six years of their lives
under a dictatorship. Prostitution as an institution had undergone significant changes
within their lifetimes, with the influence of the church decreasing and the tolerance of
sexual expression increasing. This complex historical background cannot be explored
in this chapter, but its salience must be emphasized (Capel Martinez 1986).
Male clients were mostly over the age of 45 and many were pensioners. The
ages of the prostitutes working in the neighbourhood ranged from 30 to 62. Low
prices attracted men from low socioeconomic groups, living in a variety of household
arrangements, generally outside the neighbourhood. Some clients lived alone, others
with a female partner (mostly within a marriage), whilst a number of widowed
clients lived with family members. Most of the clientele were regulars. There was no
coherent pattern to the frequency of their visits and many regulars had a sexual
relationship with more than one prostitute. I came to know clients and prostitutes
through my collaboration with a Catholic charity centre in the neighbourhood run by
Cáritas, the main Christian aid organization in Spain. After working from this centre
for a few months, I was in a position to undertake ‘participant observation’ on the
streets and in the bars.
MISSING MASCULINITY?
Anthropologists of Spain have produced a considerable literature concerning local
conceptions of what it means to be a man. Most of this literature has concentrated on
Andalusia and has been written by male anthropologists: see, for example, Brandes
1980; Driessen 1983: Gilmore 1987b; Gilmore and Gilmore 1979; Marvin 1984; Murphy
1983.
While they use the terms ‘masculinity’, ‘maleness’ and ‘men’, none of these
authors critically examines these terms and all appear to have been writing in
ignorance of intellectual debates about ‘masculinity’ that began in the 1970s and were
grounded in feminist theory (e.g. Dubbert 1979; Friedman and Sarah 1982; Jackson
1990). Grappling with discussions of ‘masculinity’ by ethnographers of Spain renders
the reader exasperated and bewildered, for they muddle up indigenous uses of the
related terms macho, machista, hombre, hombria and masculino (for a critique, see
Corbin and Corbin 1987:167; de Piña Cabral 1989: 402). There are of course some
regional differences in the use of lexical terms about men. However, if ethnographers
are to discuss Spanish concepts using English words, some clarification is necessary.
Elsewhere, in sociology, some authors have attempted to ground their
analyses in a rigorous consideration of this fundamental terminology (Brittan 1989;
Chapman and Rutherford 1988; Segal 1990). That much of this writing is largely
theoretical and could greatly benefit from anthropological input is a tragic irony.
Anthropologists are beginning to realize only now that anthropology has a great deal
to say about ‘masculinity’. But can we absorb the wealth of literature on ‘masculinity’
and add something meaningful to it? Or is it too late? At a semantic level, I think that
it is too late: throughout this chapter I avoid using the buzz-word ‘masculinity’
because it has been scarred with too many meanings to be of analytical use in a short
paper. However, at a more general level it is not too late: indeed, anthropologists
should have a lot to say about men. I explore the notion of ‘being a man’ through an
examination of particular discourses of clientness, yet even the phrase ‘being a man’
has some unhelpful connotations. If we concentrate on ‘being a man’, we may become
side-tracked into considering only ideals of male behaviour. Here ‘being a man’ is to
be taken in terms of the Spanish ser hombre, to mean ‘being a man’ in a general sense,
rather than in terms of ideals. In the neighbourhood there were many different ways
of being a man, not just in relation to achieved status.
One of the most recent anthropological volumes dealing with what it takes to
be a man is Gilmore’s Manhood in the Making (1990). His quest is to find out how
different cultures ‘conceive and experience manhood, which I will define here simply
as the approved way of being an adult male in a given society’ (1990:1). Gilmore
travels on an ethnographic space and time machine from India to Ethiopia, Spain to
Sri Lanka, in pursuit of his ideal men. Whilst commending Gilmore for undertaking
such a hazardous and difficult mission, I am uneasy about the manner in which he
accepts ethnographic accounts as ‘the truth’, as media for the voices of ‘the people’ of
whichever particular culture he happens to be passing through. I also take issue with
the manner in which he uncritically writes of what ‘the people of x think about men’,
with little or no distinction between who these particular people are. Gilmore’s
mission led him in pursuit of harmonic integration. I suggest that no such telos exists,
that Gilmore was chasing an illusion. Societies are messy; people are often
contradictory and fragmented. Hegemonic discourses are teased and contested by
wilful counterdiscourses.
A further problem with Gilmore’s work and with that of other ethnographers
writing on ‘manhood’ concerns their focus on those aspects of ‘manhood’ that are
supposedly perceived by ‘the culture’ to be positive and acceptable. This is an
important point with regard to the politics of gender relations. If we are to
concentrate on the positive and acceptable, there is little room even for indigenous
criticisms of male behaviours. Such indigenous criticisms are often likely to be found
in women’s and children’s discourses, and authors’ ignorance of such counterpatterns continues the tendency in anthropology of privileging male experiences.
Furthermore, authors who have concentrated on ‘ideal images of manhood’ have not
acknowledged the manner in which such discourses of male selves have often, in a
complex way, subsumed a discussion of female selves. Thus ‘ideals’ of manhood
somehow become ideals of personhood—and nobody appears to have noticed.
I suggested above that the term ‘masculinity’ has suffered from overkill in
Anglo-American sociological literature. In Spanish sociological literature, on the other
hand, the term masculinidad has not been hijacked by ‘progressive’ gender theorists.
Consequently the two terms cannot be directly translated; the one does not share the
intellectual genealogy of the other. Furthermore, in the area where I conducted
research, actors did not use the word masculinidad. It is a formal word, one that
informants in Alicante would have been unfamiliar with. For me, it has specifically
Anglo-American connotations, and has no place in this chapter. In my fieldsite,
informants used many different words to talk about men. In general they used the
word hombre (man) and other ‘synonyms’ such as tio (bloke), varón (man/bloke) or,
somewhat tongue in cheek, chico (boy/lad). Macho referred to an instinctive, animal
aspect of male sexuality, rather than to the contrived image of strength to which it
refers in British English. However, just as frequently, synonyms of ‘person’ were used
to talk specifically about men. Moreover, notions of maleness were frequently tied up
with notions of clientness. Before I consider their relationship, I locate the shaping of
discourses of clientness in the relevant literature on prostitution.
GROSS GENERALIZATIONS?
Anglo-American sociologists writing on ‘masculinity’ insist on dragging ‘men’, warts
and all, onto centre stage. Meanwhile, in studies of prostitution, the male central
actors lurk timidly in the wings. Most Spanish and Anglo-American works—
including popular film and fiction, theological ‘family’ guidance texts and ‘deviance’
studies, charity reports, and academic sociological studies— concentrate resolutely on
female prostitutes, and refer to male clients rarely, and mainly to illustrate a point
about a woman prostitute. Even when they do mention clients, their impressions of
clients generally come from having spoken to prostitutes in one-off interviews. Some
authors rely on stereotypical notions of clients recorded in earlier works by similarly
uninformed authors, thereby reinforcing earlier stereotypes and misconceptions.
Much of this literature has had considerable influence on health policy and social
policy, and has contributed to a stereotyped image of clients among laypeople and
professionals alike.
‘Clients’ are assumed by much of the literature to be an unproblematic
category. Throughout the Spanish and Anglo-American literature on prostitution, the
term ‘prostitute’s client’ is generally taken to refer to an adult male. Conversely, the
idea that clients are men is somehow ‘built into’ the popular ‘common-sense’ notion
of a prostitute’s client. But not all men are ‘literally’ clients; they do not all pay
women for sex. Statistical studies suggest that, in countries where client-prostitute
relations obviously exist, men who are clients only ever constitute a certain
percentage of a given population.
Answers to questions such as ‘Are all men clients?’ depend on where one
looks for meaning. Often authors submerge them into the whole of which they are
undoubtedly a part, and discussions of clients thus becomes a kind of metonymnic
discourse on men. Anglo-American authors often write as though they were speaking
of all the men in the world, totally ignoring cultural differences. Spanish authors then
use the work of Anglo-American writers and apply it to Spain with no discussion of
how Spanish experiences might be different (e.g. Acosta Patiño 1979). There is, then,
little recognition of social, political, economic and historical factors affecting a
Spanish man’s ‘clientness’. He is everyman.
Certain Spanish authors of theological and medical texts appeal to the ‘fact’
that men have greater sex drives than women, thereby explaining men’s greater need
for sex and hence their visits to prostitutes (e.g. Cañas 1974). Other authors, while not
accepting that men have greater sex drives than woman, nevertheless believe that
there is ‘something’ in men that ‘drives’ them to prostitutes. In this regard, many
feminist and traditional Catholic theologian writers certainly agree that prostitution is
bad for society. Some feminists may point to men’s conditioning by society (e.g.
Vindicación Feminista 1979), whilst theologians may be at a loss to point to precisely
what it is in men that ‘makes’ them do this. However, both camps, feminists and
theologians, seem to feel that there is something in all men that produces clients.
Feminists relying on a theoretical framework based on the notion of
patriarchy may well see either all men as prostitutes’ clients or prostitutes’ clients as
somehow standing for/being symbolic of men in general. Those who see all men as
clients do so because they see any woman who marries as an inevitable prostitute
who exchanges sexual services for material gain (e.g. Jeffreys 1984). However,
because those who see the institution of marriage in terms of clientprostitute
relationships concentrate on women, it is difficult to say how they perceive men as
clients. Thus although these feminist writers must, on some level, ‘see’ men in
marriage as clients, they do not discuss husband-wife relationships in terms of clientprostitute relationships.
Such arguments, feminist and theological, concerning the omnipotence (for
whatever reason) of men as clients, are reductive and allow no theoretical space for
the notions of agency and change. They preclude a political consideration of the ways
in which particular individuals affect the lives of others.
Another prominent discourse articulated by many writers on the subject is
psychologically based, stressing that clients are very definitely not ordinary men.
There is something particular about them that is most often expressed in negative
terms. For example, Cañas (1974:8) sees clients as shy, neurotic, unbalanced or
sexually and emotionally hypodeveloped. One dominant discourse goes so far as to
say that they are psychologically abnormal (e.g. Jiménez de Asúa 1929). This mental
condition may range from mild shyness to dramatic perversions or the inability to
have a relationship with a woman that successfully unites physical and spiritual
‘love’. Others suggest that there is something compulsive about the behaviour of a
client. He goes to a prostitute because he is addicted; he is not a free man. Another
textual discourse to be found in the Spanish and Anglo- American literature that
seeks to explain why certain men go to female prostitutes looks to the basic physical
abnormalities of prostitutes’ clients. They are old and infirm, severely disabled, or
simply hideously unattractive. They exist in contradiction to an abstract body
definable as ‘normal’ men (e.g. Draper Miralles 1982). Such authors stress the comfort
that ‘abnormal men’ find in prostitution.
DOUBLE PERSONALITIES
Prostitution has always been a tricky subject for feminists, with most of them seeing
prostitutes as victims and clients as the guilty party. However, in common with most
authors on prostitution, feminists concentrate their discussions on prostitutes rather
than on clients. A few, though, do have a little to say about clients, and one
prominent discourse is that of clients represented as hypocritical men—even with
split personalities. These hypocrites then collaborate with a hypocritical society that
upholds virginity, and subsequent marriage and motherhood, as ideals for women
(e.g. Falcón 1967:57). What such feminists seem to be saying is not that clients are
abnormal men, but rather that they are typical actors in a collaborative double act
between ‘society’ (which is also made up of women—a fact often overlooked) in
general and men in particular. A contemporary Spanish sociologist of deviancy,
Lamo de Espinosa, writes sympathetically of men’s dilemma that ‘forces’ them to
take on this double role in life:
A man who does not have legitimate access to a woman finds himself in a
dilemma. A man who does not ‘do it’ [ejercer] is not a man, and yet at the
same time he cannot ‘do it’ legitimately…the strength of culture is so strong
that actors comply with both demands by looking for an alternative conduct
that resolves the dilemma, albeit by way of fluctuating behaviour. (1989:148)
(All translations are my own.)
Lamo de Espinosa seems to be referring to unmarried clients, rather than married
ones. He offers no reasons as to why married clients should go to prostitutes. This is
unusual, because most commentators concentrate on married clients. Theories
concerning why men go to prostitutes have often discussed how lack of
communication between husbands and wives lead to this (Draper Miralles 1982;
Falcón 1967). However, they are less concerned with why single men, or men in other
types of relationship, go to prostitutes.
Extrapolating textual discourses of clientness here may give the reader the
misguided impression that such texts have considered clients at length. Discussions
of clients generally appear only as counter-patterns, in brief discussions of male
responsibility. Depending on the context, clients’ actions are either condemned or
excused, but then all authors I have come across in relation to prostitution return to
the ‘main’ issue: whether to condemn or to excuse prostitutes.
THE ETHNOGRAPHIC CONTEXT
Discourses of clientness were given much more of a free rein in my fieldsite than in
the literature on prostitution. In Alicante, the phrases I translate as ‘prostitute’s client’
(see below) were generally taken to refer to adult males. However, men who had
sexual relations with prostitutes rarely referred to themselves as ‘client’, although
they were inclined to talk about other men as such. I quickly realized that clients
responded to me better if I did not call them clients. Using this term often caused
offence, and some men would deny that they were clients, even if it was obvious that
they paid for sex with a prostitute.
Thus I referred to them as men (hombres) or friends (amigos). In general, they
referred to themselves as people (gente) or, less frequently (when they wanted to
directly emphasize a gender difference), as men (hombres/varones) or blokes (tios).
Note the difference in terminology in the following generalizations from two regular
clients, both of whom had a low socioeconomic status, were able-bodied and were
married.
Jaime, 80 years old: ‘I’ve been to prostitutes all my life. A man likes a change
and needs a lot of sex. Women don’t need so much.’ Juan, 65 years old:
‘People like me need to go to prostitutes, we need a lot of sex.’
When specifically discussing their positive relationships with particular prostitutes, a
recurrent pattern was for regular clients to articulate these relationships as a
discourse of friendship. Clients referred to themselves and to prostitutes with whom
they enjoyed good relations as friends (amigos). Victor, a retired, able-bodied man in
his seventies, described his relationship with a prostitute in her twenties as a familial
relationship. He referred to himself as uncle and to the prostitute as his niece. This
couple was referred to in these terms by many neighbourhood people.
A significant pattern with regard to women prostitute informants in the
neighbourhood was their use of the word clientes to refer to male clients when they
were talking about them in a formal manner. However, the term that most prostitutes
used for clients, certainly when talking to them, was amigos. Particular clients were
further distinguished. For example, Encarna, a 46-yearold single prostitute, often
referred to one of her (supposedly unmarried) clients as her boyfriend/fiancé (novio).
They appeared to have a very close relationship, and he called her his close friend
(amiga intima), although, significantly, not his girlfriend. Other prostitutes sometimes
called clients novio as a term of affection, or at other times as an ironic slant on their
relationship. A number of prostitutes called elderly clients ‘grandads’ (abuelos or,
more friendly or patronizing, abuelitos). However, unless they were displaying anger
towards them, these terms were not used in front of such men.
When a clear euphemistic choice of vocabulary was deemed appropriate, as in
the case of the nuns discussing clients with prostitutes, the term ‘men’ (hombres/
varones) was often employed. Prostitutes also used the term if a man’s client status
was unclear. Informants with negative opinions of clients referred to them
euphemistically as ‘men who go with these women’ (hombres que van con estas
mujeres).
There was also another type of ‘client’ who did not generally go with prostitutes,
but who simply stood and stared at them. These men were known by prostitutes as
‘mirones’ or ‘curiosos’ (literally ‘watchers/voyeurs’ or curious people). If they ever had
sex with prostitutes, they usually paid very little, and were generally held in
contempt by prostitutes and some other men. Men never referred to themselves as
mirones within my hearing, although one did inform me, laughing, after I asked if he
was a ‘curioso’:
‘[The prostitutes] call me a mirón, not a curioso.’ ‘Is there a difference?’ I
asked. ‘No’ he replied, ‘I don’t think so’. Antonia, the prostitute with whom I
was talking, agreed (also laughing) that there was not.
Whenever I spoke to mirones, they stressed their lack of ability to pay. One pensioner
informed me that his wife took charge of their money, he was given only ‘pocket
money’; hence he had to save up to go with a prostitute. Coming to look was better
than nothing, and it passed the time.
DISSECTING CLIENTS: HIERARCHIES OF
‘MANHOOD’/PERSONHOOD
An important idea often articulated to me in the field was that the type of client a
man was said something about the type of a man/person he was. This is something
barely discussed in the literature on prostitution. As outlined above, such texts treat
clients as a mass of cardboard cut-outs and therefore are not sensitive to the way in
which men within the category of client are perceived differently in different
contexts. In the neighbourhood, ideas about what sort of men individuals were were
tied up not so much with the kind of sex that they wanted, but rather with the status
of the prostitutes with whom they were seen to have sex (cf. Cornwall, Chapter 6 in
this volume). This was also connected with local conceptions of the clients’ own
status.
High-status clients
Certain men who came to socialize in the neighbourhood were considered by
themselves and by others to have a high status. These were generally men who
owned a car, had what was considered to be a decent job (as a mechanic, for
example), and who had—or could successfully convince people that they had—a
large, comfortable flat or two. Wealthy northern European men who had settled in
the area also had high status, whereas poorer North Africans did not. These
particular men often insisted that they did not go with the neighbourhood prostitutes,
but that they went to clubs, where there were ‘decent’ prostitutes. A retired
Dutchman in his early sixties, who had settled in Spain with his wife, explained:
I never go to prostitutes in Alicante because everyone knows me here, I work
here… I go to Benidorm, but don’t tell anybody. In Alicante I just chat to
prostitutes. The prostitutes in this neighbourhood are tramps. They are very
low. I like to go to clubs where I am made to feel good.
This man was obviously trying to impress me, the anthropologist, although it is
interesting that he did not try to deny going to prostitutes. This illustrates how going
to prostitutes was not usually seen to be a problem. The issue was the particular type
of prostitute with which this man was associated. In this particular instance, I knew
the man to be lying. He did go with one of the neighbourhood prostitutes—I had
regularly seen him paying to go into the brothel. He lied presumably because he did
not want me to think that a ‘highstatus’ man such as himself went with ‘low’
prostitutes.
Another client, Joaquín, was a divorced plumber in his forties who also had
considerable status in the neighbourhood. He told me that although he went with one
of the neighbourhood prostitutes, he would not want anybody there to know about it.
She came to his house in another part of town.
I’m telling you because I don’t mind telling you, but I don’t want you to tell
other people we know mutually, that I’ve told you I go with Antonia…. If I go
with a woman, I don’t need to go and do it in the neighbourhood and let
tongues wag. I prefer to do things privately. People love to talk although it
doesn’t bother me, I’ve got my business and am doing well. But I’ve got my
status to think about and I don’t want tongues wagging about me.
Thus for a man/client to define himself as or be defined as one with high status, he
had to be at the very least a ‘high-class’ man/client. I expect that many people in the
neighbourhood were aware, or at least suspected, that Joaquín went to prostitutes.
However, the very fact that Antonia went to him (that is, to his house) put him above
the other clients in his own eyes as well as in the eyes of other clients and prostitutes.
This was quite typical of such socioeconomically advantaged clients, although
it was not invariably the case. Another ‘high-status’ client, Arturo, a local man who
owned a bar and a bakery, insisted that prostitutes went to his house. He frequently
boasted to me about his ‘education’, ‘profession’ and ‘wealth’. However, Arturo did
not enjoy consistent high status in the eyes of prostitutes, clients and other
neighbourhood people because he was an alcoholic who was frequently seen
inebriated in the neighbourhood. Whilst he was able to persuade two prostitutes to
have sex with him in his own home, he was often laughed at and taken advantage of
financially by prostitutes when he was drunk. One day he came into the bar. Lolita,
one of the prostitutes who had sex with him at his house, ordered a drink and
sandwiches for herself, me and two prostitutes. She helped herself to the money for
these items from Arturo’s pocket without his knowledge. Finally, ‘high-class’ clients
could not persuade all prostitutes to go to their houses for sex. Rita and Maria, the
oldest and most affluent prostitutes in the neighbourhood, rarely went to clients’
homes. If they did, it was because they were particularly good friends with the client,
or received high remuneration.
Low-status clients
Clients in the neighbourhood were often described as low-class people by informants
in a variety of contexts outside it. Men who expressed negative views on clients in the
neighbourhood had no difficulty in distancing themselves from them. Those who did
not go with neighbourhood prostitutes often made derogatory remarks about men
who did, although they were generally focused on the prostitutes’ status rather than
that of the clients.
One evening in a neighbourhood bar, I was introduced to a lawyer in his early
thirties. My friend Maria (also a lawyer) introduced me to him as an anthropologist
studying prostitution in the neighbourhood:
He said, laughing, ‘How hilarious. They really are a freak show, aren’t they?
The greatest one in Alicante. I know a lot about this. It’s incredible how
anyone would go with those fucked women [tiradas]. They’re old and
ugly…’. Maria asked me who the clients were. He answered ‘Old idiots’. He
then immediately returned to giving us the benefits of his ‘insights’. ‘Most of
the prostitutes, 90 per cent of the ones in Alicante, are drug addicts.’
I did not know whether this man was a prostitute’s client in another context. What he
had in common with other informants (with the exception of certain prostitutes) was
his interest in dismissing clients and concentrating on a discussion of prostitutes. On
another occasion, a client of a high-class brothel remarked:
Prostitution in the neighbourhood and the other street place makes me very
sad…. They’re fucked, not hygienic, will do anything they’re asked…. And
the clients need them because they’re just like the prostitutes. In a normal
place nobody would think of sleeping with a woman like that, someone
who’s been with Moors, Moroccans, ill people, and so on. It’s the cheapest,
the dirtiest, the lowest in every sense.
Once again, the male clients were not given centre stage. Indeed in this and in the
former statements from men, clients as men were not specifically mentioned. Rather
they became ‘old idiots’ (not idiot men), ‘anyone’ (not any man), ‘nobody’ (not no
man), and ‘somebody’ (not some man).
When acting as a group, neighbourhood prostitutes generally assigned the
lowest status of client to the mirón, with his lack of worth as a man judged by his lack
of a relationship with a prostitute. To them, he often represented a kind of
personification of impotence (economic, sexual and social). One day I was standing
around with a group of prostitutes. A mirón came up to listen, and the two
prostitutes whom I was with became very angry. One screamed at him: ‘Piss off, stop
getting free excitement. Stop giving yourself a wank for free. You should pay for it
like any decent man’ (her emphasis).
This attitude to mirones was not always consistent. Sometimes, when there
were few conversation partners in circulation, and a prostitute was alone, she might
concede to converse with a mirón. I witnessed a number of such conversations. The
man’s status of mirón was temporarily suspended and they had animated
conversations. During one such conversation, Rita and Lolita expressed sympathy
when the pensioner mirón told us that he was very poor. However, the same man
could be communicated with in terms of his negative mirón status on other occasions
depending on the mood of a prostitute and/or whether or not she was in the company
of colleagues and/or other clients.
MARITAL POTENCY
Married clients who went to prostitutes never directly expressed to me any feelings of
guilt, nor articulated substantial moral qualms about their actions. A general pattern
was that they either hid their married status from me, or, once their married status
was discovered by me or disclosed by them, justified their reasons for going to
prostitutes. Miguel, a 59-year-old plumber, revealed:
Trouble is my body asks me to come here and have sex. I need it a lot. If I
didn’t get it I’d feel physically ill, I’d go mad and would hardly be able to see
straight.
His justifications for going to prostitutes imply that he was addicted to going to them.
If he had stopped, he would have had withdrawal symptoms, rather like those a drug
addict might have if s/he could not get her/his ‘fix’. And yet, he also acknowledged
that he went voluntarily: ‘I only do it because I can afford it. If my wife or children
wanted for anything I’d buy it them rather than go to a prostitute.’ This client
suggested that he was psychologically addicted to prostitutes as long as he could
afford to be. In some senses his abdication of responsibility for his actions concurs
with those textual discourses, discussed earlier in this chapter, that see clients as
psychologically ill. However, his psychological illness conveniently allowed him to
acknowledge his responsibilities as a husband and father first.
Clients’ justifications most frequently took the form of appeals to their need
for sex and/or sexual problems in their marriage. A significant number of clients
informed me that they were ‘impotent’. However, sexual problems in their marriage
were always blamed on their wives. Such ‘problems’ included wives allegedly not
wanting or needing sex, or being old, ill or menopausal.
A minority of married clients expressed concern about the potential effects on
their marriages of their liaisons with prostitutes. For example, one client told me that
he was worried about AIDS because of his wife. A small number of clients also
expressed concern that their wives might divorce them if they discovered that they
went to prostitutes. Jaime, a salesman in his fifties, told me:
My wife thinks I’m in Albacete. My wife doesn’t know I go to prostitutes. If
she found out or if any of my four kids found out, I’d die. I love my wife
more than anybody else in the world. I just come to prostitutes because my
body asks for it. I’m happily married.
The general visible lack of a consideration of responsibility on the part of married
clients illustrates some of the ideas expressed in feminist texts, discussed earlier in
this chapter. Those that did reveal slight moral qualms were able to fall back on the
potent discourse that it is natural for men to need sex, thus responsibility is not an
issue (for a discussion of clients’ responsibility in relation to HIV transmission, see
Hart 1992). However, it is clear that their actions were not tolerated (even by
themselves) and encouraged in any simple way. The very fact that some clients did
not want to reveal to people in the neighbourhood, often including the
anthropologist, that they were married suggests that their liaisons with prostitutes
were not unproblematic. This was perhaps a status protection mechanism, because
clients knew that their worth in a number of contexts as a client/man/person was
calculated on the basis of whether or not they were married.
The perceived double personality/hypocrisy of clients caused tension between
some of them and prostitutes when they were outside the neighbourhood. Most
clients and many prostitutes were anxious to separate their identities inside and
outside the neighbourhood. Some prostitutes complained that clients ignored them
outside the neighbourhood if the clients were with their families. However, if the
prostitutes were with their families, the clients might, out of spite, greet them.
Hypocrisy on the part of clients (especially married ones) was a frequent topic of
conversation amongst neighbourhood people. Actors notably missing from such
conversations were clients. The manner in which ‘they’ came to prostitutes, but
outside joined in the public’s condemnation of them, seemed to be particularly
annoying. However, a number of prostitutes also remarked to me that they
themselves condemned prostitutes when they were not in the neighbourhood. Yet
many prostitutes (often the same ones who expressed anger at ‘clients” hypocrisy)
enjoyed a rather different relationship with unmarried clients, many of whom were
retired and had considerable free time outside the neighbourhood. For example,
Venture, an elderly widowed client who lived with his son and his family, was
friendly with Antonia. He walked around town with her, they went shopping
together, and she phoned him at home. Some unmarried clients accompanied
prostitutes on neighbourhood excursions. Though men were often concerned about
what their families might think, they did not have wives to consider.
Some prostitutes knew how to manipulate the shock value of a client’s marital
status if they wanted to make a non-prostitute think negatively about ‘clients’. The
nuns in the Cáritas centre seemed particularly sporting targets in this regard. The
older ones especially were suitably impressed and horrified by the knowledge that
‘most’ clients were married. They did not seem to understand why men with wives
went to prostitutes. One 59-year-old nun asserted: ‘Their wives should have sex with
them even if they don’t want to. Just to keep the marriage together.’ It was not only
nuns who articulated such beliefs about sex and marriage. For example, a divorced
client in his forties denied that married men went to prostitutes:
These women have got too many problems: diseases, they’re drug addicts,
thieves. Nobody wants that, except men who can’t get any other woman. But
for somebody who wants status and a family it’s no good…. If a wife knows
her husband wants things it’s only logical that she gives them to him …Men
who go to prostitutes go to fulfil biological necessities because they haven’t
got a wife.
In both of the above excerpts from fieldnotes, both nun and client informants fell back
on apportioning blame to wives rather than to husbands. It was assumed that
marriage was a sexual contract, and that wives should keep their side of the bargain.
The husbands’ side of the bargain was not discussed. However, one might assume
that, in accordance with hegemonic neighbourhood discourses on marital relations, it
was implicitly accepted to be economic provision for their families.
I spent some of my fieldwork time with two male volunteers who helped at the
Cáritas centre in the neighbourhood. One was an unmarried bank clerk in his late
twenties; the other was a widower in his seventies who ran his own finance business.
Although both were devout Catholics, their personal opinions differed somewhat on
this subject. Jaime—the younger, unmarried informant—seemed somewhat confused:
True that men need sex. Prostitution is necessary but lots of men who come
here are married, got wives and everything… I don’t think it’s good for single
men to go to prostitutes either, although I know it’s a physiological need. I can
understand it more in a single man than a married one, but it’s still not good.
Antonio, the widower, appeared to be considerably firmer in his beliefs, although he
revealed them only when pressed by me.
I definitely do not accept men going to prostitutes. I am totally against it, they
are vice-ridden people [gente viciosa]. My religion doesn’t accept them…. It’s a
sin, you can’t play with a woman’s body and, moreover, pay her for it. It’s not
at all honourable [nada honoroso]…. If a Catholic sells himself to buy a woman
he’s not very Catholic at that moment. He loses control, goes out of his mind
[perde razón].
Antonio, then, appeared to subscribe to the view that prostitutes’ clients—if they
were Catholic—were unbalanced and had ‘gone off the rails’. His interpretation was
that clients were not normal. They were mad ‘at that moment’ when they were
clients. However, he appeared to be saying that this was only a temporary state.
Once a client ‘came back to his senses’, he could presumably be a good Catholic man
again. His views endorsed textual discourses of clientness that emphasize abdication
of responsibility, discussed earlier in this chapter.
GROSS GENERALIZATIONS REVISITED
As discussed above, the notion ‘client’ was frequently an unstable category and was
often deconstructed by different informants. However, there were many occasions
when the reverse was the case, and clients were discussed as a coherent group. This
coherent group was often articulated as being more than the sum of its parts. Thus
the notion that clients and men were one and the same thing was often articulated to
me in the field. Indeed, while indexing my notes it was often difficult to know where
to put things—in the category ‘men’ or the category ‘clients’. Clients and prostitutes
alike often spoke as if the two terms were synonymous. Some clients had ways of
defining what they as clients were by appealing to what men were. Their ideas
coincided with discourses prevalent in some of the literature on prostitution. For
example, many clients spoke as though all men were potential clients by appealing to
the ‘fundamental’ male sex drive to justify their clientness: ‘Men are different to
women, they need more sex’ was a typical comment from a variety of clients. This
group persona appealed to by many clients comes back to the issue of responsibility.
It may be seen as a kind of diffusion of responsibility, or at least as a mechanism for
sharing it. However, some clients appeared to be so confident of the male natural
instinct to have sex (with a prostitute) that it is fair to say that responsibility was
never revealed by them to be an issue. I would also suggest that this was probably
not something that many of them thought about.
It was significant that although many clients appealed to the symbiotic
relationship between man and client, they rarely manifested physically as a (male)
group. Most of them circulated alone; one group of men (some of whom were clients)
who played cards together in the bar on a regular basis was an exception to this
pattern. This was quite different to other prostitution areas that I visited. I
accompanied two neighbourhood prostitutes on a working holiday to a streetprostitution area in Valencia, where I observed the considerable social contact of
clients with other clients. The clubs that I visited revealed a similar pattern. Men often
frequented them in groups. The lack of a coherent, physical, client-group identity in
the neighbourhood appeared to be a recent phenomenon and was said by a number
of elderly clients (who had known the ‘good old days’) to be a sign of the decay of
prostitution in the neighbourhood. The fragmented nature of the client group can be
contrasted with the frequent presentation of the prostitutes’ group identity.
Discourses of clientness that emerged from prostitutes often constructed
clients as a uniform group, despite their patchy presence in the neighbourhood, and
despite concurrent local discourses that fragmented them. Sometimes prostitutes
expressed ideas about how the male sex drive makes men become clients; a popular
expression was ‘Most men come because they need to.’ Antonia, a 40-year-old
prostitute, said, ‘Men definitely have more of a sexual appetite than women.’
Prostitutes often expressed opinions about what certain academic feminists
might call patriarchy. They did this by stating that all men are prostitutes’ clients;
they are prostitutes’ clients because that is the manner in which men choose to
oppress women. Fundamentally they all hate women and so they come to humiliate
prostitutes in order to punish women. Somehow, ‘clientness’ is the manner in which
this desire manifests itself. Sometimes prostitutes seemed distressed by the notion
that men try to get whatever they can out of women. One day, Rita was in a terrible
state:
I can hardly face my clients today. I hate them all and I vow I’ll get back at
men if it’s the last thing I do. What I want to do before I retire is lead men on,
making out I’d go with them for free. But then, at the last minute, turn away
and say ‘Do you really think I’d go with you sons of bitches [hijos de putas,
literally sons of whores!] for nothing?’. They’re enough to make you hate
them. All they do is take advantage.
On another occasion I was discussing a client with the same prostitute. He was very
abusive to her and we agreed that he was ‘a horrible egotistical bastard’. Rita
continued in a very angry tone:
All men are, I hate them all. They’re worthless and so I just use them for
what I can get. That’s why I never have sex with men for free, I want to get
as much out of them as I can, rather than the other way round.
Although the prostitutes often saw clients in terms of men oppressing women, some
of them—exemplified by Rita’s comment above—ironically saw their own roles in
prostitution as empowering. Thus in a roundabout way, client-prostitute relations
were constructed as the only non-exploitative man-woman relationship.
context, the discourse of clientness was one that empowered women.
In this
Some
prostitutes often used examples of certain clients’ behaviour to illustrate negative
ideas about men in general. These were frequently expressed through folk statistics.
While in a group of prostitutes discussing clients, one 64-year-old woman, Maria,
stated:
Ninety per cent of men are animals. They don’t mind who they fuck as
long as it’s a woman. And they might be nice to you outside [on the
street], but once inside [the brothel] they abuse you. They all want you to
suck their pricks and they never want to suck your pussy…educated men
are the exception to this. They know how to treat a woman well and are
more sincere. Most men don’t care who they fuck, most of them would
even fuck drug addicts.
Maria’s statement was immediately challenged by two colleagues (both of whom, on
other occasions, had expressed opinions similar to Maria’s). Rita said: ‘This is what
they pay for, it’s obvious. If they pay for something they obviously want to get the
maximum: maximum service, maximum time.’ It was only when she was challenged
that Maria attempted to back up her argument by talking about men who belonged to
the non-client category.
I’ve lived with four men and they were all the same. They said nice things
to you, said they loved you, were really loving, but then they would fuck
any other woman around. I had to keep changing because each one was a
deceiver [enganador] and I wanted to find one that wasn’t. If I had my time
again I would never have a relationship with a man, never.
It seemed that prostitutes were trying to work out what connection there was
between the two concepts of clients and men. Was ‘client’ simply a subcategory of the
generic term ‘man’, or was there more to the taxonomy than this? Of course their
views on this depended on the particular idea of men or of clients that they chose to
articulate at the time. Sometimes prostitutes suggested that they knew all about men
because they had relationships with clients; they knew men better than anybody else.
Indeed, some expressed the idea that it was they who taught men to be ‘men’ through
losing their virginity for them in an ‘appropriate’ manner (cf. Lindisfarne, Chapter 4
in this volume). Of course it should be remembered that many prostitutes had
relationships with men in their ‘private’ lives, not only in their work. In many cases
this understandably produced tension; the public and the private were not as easily
delineated by prostitutes in the neighbourhood as reported in some studies of
prostitution.
WHERE NOW?
Many of the discourses that are recurrent in textual accounts of clientness emerged in
neighbourhood
discourses
constructed
by
clients,
prostitutes
and
other
neighbourhood people. Some were seen as mentally ill, some as disabled; some were
excused because of their natural sex drive, some were seen as addicted to sex; most
married clients were seen to lead ‘double lives’. One hegemonic discourse concerned
ideas about the natural male sex drive. With the growing deconstruction of this
discourse, some feminist authors have called on clients to take responsibility for their
actions. In the neighbourhood, although prostitutes sometimes discussed issues of
responsibility in relation to clients, they rarely did so when clients were present.
Another pattern which emerged was that male informants (clients and nonclients)
avoided facing up to the issue of responsibility. When my questions homed in on this,
men frequently blamed the actions of clients on women, or steered the conversation
back to women. Thus wives were blamed for a lack of sex within marriage, and
prostitutes were blamed for prostitution. This complements a historical tradition with
regard to textual discourses of prostitution; women are put centre-stage.
However,
beyond
the
issues
of
responsibility,
local
discourses
of
deconstructed clients contrast sharply with discourses prevalent in textual accounts.
Locally clients became human beings; they were often not seen as a cohesive group,
and their identities were not uniformly negative as is suggested in most of the
literature. They were seen as men/people/clients. Some enjoyed friendships with
prostitutes, some were liked and respected in the neighbourhood at certain times,
others were not. Some could afford to buy sex, others contented themselves with
looking. To examine ‘male clients’ as a faceless group is too simplistic. All had other
identities and responsiblities and were judged according to variety of standards of
behaviour.
In terms of men’s studies, I have highlighted some of the dangers of
concentrating on ideal types and have chosen to consider variant discourses on men
in a particular setting. Placing the notion of being a man/person/client in an adequate
historical, political, cultural and sociological context is complex, yet I trust that 1 have
shown the value of working towards this end.
NOTES
I would like to thank Andrea Cornwall, Judith Ennew, Alison Field, Nancy
Lindisfarne and Peter Rivière for their helpful comments on early drafts of this paper;
and the Economic and Social Research Council for financially supporting this
research.
A broken mirror
Masculine sexuality in Greek ethnography
Peter Loizos
David Gilmore, an anthropologist who has written on Mediterranean culture,
recently published one of the few comparative studies of masculinity. He suggests
that in many cultures manhood involves three major demands—to procreate, to
protect and to provision. His argument is about systemic necessities, and how these
shape the challenges which mould both individual males and men-in-groups.
Gilmore concludes that: ‘Manhood is the social barrier that societies must erect
against entropy, human enemies, the process of nature, time and all the human
weaknesses that endanger group life’ (1990:226). In this chapter, gender ideas are
approached rather closer to the ground, in specific discourses, contexts and
institutional domains, and without any assumptions of functional necessities. I am
not happy with statements about ‘masculinity’ in Greek culture as substantive
generalizations, even though it is easy to concede that some clustering of related
concepts exists when terms like andras (a man, a husband), pateras (a father) and
pallikari (an upstanding unmarried youth) are employed throughout Greece.
Greece as a state is highly centralized, with the Ministry of Education
imposing one kind of uniformity and the mass media contributing skeins of
contrasting and contradictory uniformities. ‘Greek culture’ is, therefore, an idea of
some specific and limited value. Greece is characterized by distinctive regions,
contrasting production regimes and differing rates of social change; these features are
cross-cut by cities, classes, the church and the army, each a producer of contrasting
discourses and assertions about gender.
I wish to explore a handful of linked themes which suggest a sense of the
varied contexts in which masculinities can be understood. These include marriage,
procreation and householding as hegemonic gender values; the ways that different
types of post-marital residence seem to relate to different emphases in maleness and
femaleness; sexuality, and expressions of personhood which are not part of the
conjugal householding package; celibacy as a domain for difference; male friendship
and its contextual variations; and lastly, local ideas of an independent, autonomous
masculinity, and contrasting ideas of a domesticated maleness.
My own field data were collected from 1968 onwards. I was guided by
Durkheimian assumptions and had undoubtedly assumed that maleness and
femaleness would be the subjects of widespread cultural consensus and
standardization. While this framework may have been valid for some preliterate
cultures, I now feel that it cannot accommodate the organization of gender concepts
in complex states in which region, class and institutional differences are important.
New fieldwork should explore the full range of gender identities in a discrete
research area. However, here, I am only able to proceed by juxtaposing fragments of
material from various Greek ethnographies. I do not recommend this approach—I
simply offer a suggestive bricolage faute de mieux. This volume proposes a
theoretical emphasis in which male identities are asserted in specific acts or contexts.
The editors argue that masculinity is not a stable essence, present throughout a
lifetime or a stage of life, but a series of negotiated identities, acts of will, assertions,
performances, fragments of a person who at other times and in other contexts may
have other gender attributes. I am largely sympathetic with these emphases, but
suggest at the end of this chapter that they leave us with a fresh set of difficulties.
RESIDENCE RULES AND GENDERED CONTEXTS
The ethnography of Greece has with a few exceptions concentrated largely on
marriage, procreation and householding (usually as an integrated package), and this
has marginalized much else. One aim of this chapter is to redress the balance
somewhat. In study after study we are told that full adult status for both men and
women requires an indissoluble marriage, blessed with children. In order to carry this
off, a household must be set up and maintained. The tasks of husband and wife are
only at an end when they have seen all the children of their marriage themselves
married off, and when a number of grandchildren have been produced. In some
communities these grandchildren are named after their varied grandparents and are
held to be in some sense continuations of them, both through the general kinship
medium of ‘shared blood’ and through the more specific fact of the re-creation of a
dead ancestor in a living descendant. At specific stages in the development cycle, the
expectations for men and women are specific, and different, as Campbell noted when
he wrote that ‘This opposition of the sexes provides the frame for contrasted ideal
types of social personality for men and women at each of the three stages of adult life’
(1964: 278).
Campbell’s emphasis on the importance of position in the developmental
cycle —the young unmarried, the married and mature, and the elderly being the
three distinctive stages—should have been a very important entry-point into the
analysis of gender concepts, but it has not had a sufficiently strong impact on
subsequent thinking (Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991:3–25). Approaches which
favour an emphasis on continuous negotiation and renegotiation are only now
beginning. The mature married householders have made the ethnographic running,
to the neglect of the other two age categories.
In modern Greece, young unmarried males have been, until the last twenty
years, usually expected to control their sexuality as best they could; young unmarried
women were not thought to experience the need for sexual expression in the same
way as men (Hirschon 1978), and part of the adult parental ‘game’ was controlling
the access of young men to young women. Early marriage was something the
economically viable could bestow on their children as a gift, and the poor had to wait
and to save. Divorce was a tragedy and a scandal, and in any case very hard to obtain
from the church.
The relational character of maleness and femaleness seems to have a
somewhat different character in each of three post-marital residence configurations,
which I shall sketch in now, and return to later. The most marked picture of
dominant, controlling males and subordinated women was described for pastoral
communities, for some fishing communities, and associated with agnatic kinship
(Campbell 1964; Herzfeld 1985; Friedl 1962; du Boulay 1974). A woman moved to her
husband’s group at marriage and, as a junior person, entered the household which
might have included her senior affines. Where there was marked agnation, the
discourses tended to bond male corporations—brothers, fathers, cousins—and to
overvalue men, as opposed to women. Campbell’s account of the Sarakatsani
contains many of these elements, even though the kinship system, as he presented it,
was formally bilateral. In his chapter on ‘Honour and Shame’, he describes how
sexuality is seen as sinful, polluting, secret and shameful, and how women are held to
be the ‘weak vessels’ in all matters sexual.
In some agricultural communities there was a more even-handed pattern of
gender relations. Kinship might be more bilateral in emphasis, post-marital residence
was often neo-local, and relations between husband and wife suggested ideas of
complementarity, balance, perhaps a tug-of-war, but one between opponents of equal
size (Loizos 1975a, 1975b).
A third type of complex has been described in which the kinship system
emphasizes lines of women, there is uxorilocal post-marital residence, and
neighbours tend to be matrikin (Dubisch 1976, 1986; Kenna 1976; Bernard 1976;
Vernier 1984; Beopoulou 1987; Papataxiarchis 1988). These communities have been
described by Papataxiarchis as ‘matrifocal’ in precisely the way such a term has been
used to describe Caribbean households, with the exception that marriages are always
formalized—consensual unions are not tolerated. There are few signs of ‘male
domination’ in these communities. It is the woman of the house who offers the visitor
hospitality, and discourses within the household do not systematically downgrade or
undervalue women. Indeed the moral community can be understood as composed of
competing matriarchs sitting in judgement over each other’s daughters and
granddaughters, while assessing the adequacy or inadequacy of the in-married
husbands.
One of the funnier moments in Papataxiarchis’ ethnography involved the
attempt by some local men to open a night-club within the space of the village, in
which women from outside might have danced—and more—for the entertainment of
local men. This attempt was seen off by the community’s 68 A BROKEN MIRROR
women in short order. In my own fieldwork, I can still remember the sheepish
embarrassment of one of the supposedly tougher and more confident men of the
village, when his wife said to me in front of him: ‘Mr Peter, you won’t believe this,
but my husband actually goes to Nicosia and wastes good money on the tarts in the
bouzouki-joints. Now, what does an educated man like you think about that?’.
I was to hear from other village men about powerful political figures and
merchants who as a gesture of friendship to their friends and clients ‘closed the
cabaret for the evening’. This meant that they paid the owner of a night-club to keep
the general public out, and allow only the host’s personal friends in, while paying in
advance for expensive prostitutes to entertain them sexually. For some village men,
this represented an impressive act of generosity, but there were other men in the
village, and virtually all the women, who would not have been impressed. It is this
pluralism which is at the heart of my disagreements with Gilmore.
I have reached my main theme, sexuality, and have already pointed to one of
the significant differences: in many communities, there seems to be a fairly concerted
effort to ‘capture’ sexuality for the household, for procreation and, obviously, for
heterosexuality. That, at least, is the official version, but all kinds of other things can
and do go on and they are phenomenologically, and in human terms, just as
important as the official discourses. Here, I shall have to skip about a bit
ethnographically.
MEN AND THEIR SEXUALITIES
Campbell writes of how the northern Greek, patrilocal shepherds he studied used the
standard Greek word pallikari to mean a young adult, but still unmarried, man.
Consider some of the rich description provided:
Women walk behind their men when they are together in public and show
them respect. In church the women huddle at the back or line the left-hand
wall. Women agree that they are inferior to men in every way, and they
continually bemoan their fate that they were not born into the other sex …
This opposition of the sexes provides the frame for contrasted ideal types of
social personality for men and women at each of the three stages of adult
life. For the unmarried but adult shepherds, the boys [ta paidia], the
pallikaria, physical perfection is an important ideal attribute. A youth ought
to be tall, slim, agile and tough. Ideally, at least, a pallikari is never short in
stature. A certain regularity and openness of feature is desirable but
without any hint of effeminate fineness… But moral qualities are also
demanded of the young shepherd, especially courage and strength of
purpose. If in addition to these qualities he also possesses the necessary
physical attributes, a young Sarakatsanos can fairly claim to be levendis kai
pallikari. The first of these terms is perhaps the more composite, describing
a youth who is handsome, manly, narrowhipped, and nimble; such a youth
will distinguish himself at a wedding by his upright carriage, restrained
manner towards his elders, and his agility in the dance. Pallikari is rather
the hero warrior with physical strength and assertive courage who is
prepared to die, if necessary, for the honour of his family or his country.
Caution must always be foreign to his nature… Such young men,
Demetrios added, since they do not know women, are pastriki, that is, clean
and pure. Male virginity is the ideal. And continence is thought to confer a
certain invulnerability on those who face dangers, especially the danger of
bullets in war or brigandage. Of sex relations in marriage, Aristoteles, a
young man of 28, who in every way conforms in conduct and person to the
ideal pallikari, was able to say before other men that he was ashamed to
think of them. Sex, sin, and death are related; similarly virginity,
continence, and life. The Sarakatsani anticipate marriage with joy, but also
with regret. The founding of a family is wholly good, yet marriage, sex
relations, and children, inevitably foreshadow death. The pallikari, not the
head of family, is the ideal of manhood.
(Campbell 1964:278–80; words in the Greek alphabet have been
transliterated)
Campbell also gave highly pertinent material about attitudes to male homosexuality
and made clear both the generally negative character attributed to it, and the
ambiguity that only the passive partner was stigmatized. However, that was an
account of shepherds in northern Greece in the early 1950s.
Elsewhere things are or have become somewhat different. Papataxiarchis
notes that one of the commonest terms of address between young rural men in
Lesbos (and my own Cypriot village in the late 1960s and early 1970s conforms with
this) was the term malaka, which means masturbator.(1) It can be said insultingly, but
it is very often to be heard affectionately. The suggestion here is that young men see
themselves facing a common predicament, with a common low-cost solution. Dr
Sheena Crawford, when teasing young men in the Cypriot village of Kalavassos
about the ironies of a world in which brothers insist on their sisters remaining virgins
while attempting unsuccessfully to seduce other men’s sisters, was told: ‘Fortunately,
God gave us hands.’ The implication, the gesture, implied ‘self-expression’.(2)
At this point it is worth mentioning three aspects of sexuality as seen from the
point of view of the Greek army. First, the regulations in the Greek army permitted
periods of leave for ‘natural reasons of bodily health’. This was understood to mean
heterosexual contacts which, until the last twenty years, usually involved prostitutes
since young Greek males typically do not get engaged until after completing military
service. The modern army is no longer seeking to operate with the ideal of the
virginal, continent pallikari, familiar from the epics, and from the Sarakatsani.
Secondly, part of the induction process into the Greek army involves a physical
inspection to ascertain that a man is not homosexual. All modern armies carry out
physical inspections, and whatever the military and medical rationales for these, they
can be interpreted (following Goffman 1961) as one useful degradation ritual which
gets the conscript off balance and suggests that he is subject to the total power of the
institution, down to and including control and surveillance of his body and its
functions. But the concern with sexual preferences is quite explicit in the Greek
case.(3) And since part of the army’s mission is to turn ‘boys’ into ‘men’, when
conscripts do not perform well, their instructors humiliate them with remarks about
how they resemble women.(4) A tacit censorship has operated with respect to
homosexuality in western European armies, and still operates in the British armed
services.(5) In this respect the Greek case is not unusual.
Lastly, during the reign of the Greek military Junta, 1967–74, there was a
considerable fuss made by the regime on the subject of homosexuality in classical
Greece. Its existence in classical times was explicitly denied by the state, and all
references to its legitimacy then were censored from newspapers and other
publications which could be controlled. Colonel Ioannis Ladas in 1968, while
Secretary-General at the Ministry of Public Order (sic), physically assaulted a
journalist and his editor on the weekly Eikones because they had produced an article
on homosexuality which noted that many distinguished men in ancient Greece had
had this orientation. Clogg (1972:41) suggests that this incident did not destroy Ladas’
career, but simply led to him being placed under the closer surveillance of one of the
regime’s triumvirs, Pattakos(.6) The official construction of Greek conservative,
nationalist, military masculinity was, it appears from this, neither chaste nor virginal,
but very squarely heterosexual.
HOMOSEXUALITIES
There is much more to understanding masculinities than the army attitudes or
regulations. It is widely remarked, by Campbell and others, that the word poushtis in
demotic Greek signifies a man who receives another man sexually, who solicits to be
penetrated, or accepts and enjoys it. This role is strongly stigmatized and poushtis is a
common term of abuse, much harder to use affectionately than malaka.
A man who takes what is termed the ‘active’ role, that of penetrating the
poushtis, may sometimes be referred to by the rarely used word kolombaras, ‘arsetaker’, but he is not singled out and stigmatized. His activities seem to be ignored and
‘unstressed’ in linguistic terms. This is difficult ground, and my information is thin. I
do not suggest that such a practice is widely approved or publicly admissible, but
rather that it has a twilight status. In some parts of Greece, a man who acts as the
active partner in homosexual intercourse can still retain his sense of self-respect as
conventionally male, according to my informants.
My reading of this is that men fuck (i andres gamoun) and that this is a
masculine and dominant thing to do, and that whomsoever or whatever is so used is
the subordinated and therefore inferior party. In discourses about homosexuality
there are also hints that it is a ‘bad habit’ which was somehow acquired during the
Ottoman period from the Turks.(7)
A digression on violation
Penetration can be as much about power, then, as intimacy. Let me give a brief
illustration from my own field data. The leader of the Greek nationalist anti-British
underground in my village rejoiced in the nickname ‘Yeros’, the Old Man. Two of his
younger adjutants later, after independence, stopped following his political lead, and
were known to support a different leader from his own favourite. This was related to
tensions at the national level, which were only with difficulty contained in the village.
Someone said something witty about this and it was repeated for days afterwards in
the coffee-shops: ‘The Old Man should have fucked his two lads, and then they
would have listened to him.’
At first I thought this was some veiled hint about the Old Man having
homosexual preferences, but men explained patiently that this was not the point at
all: men have sex with (gamoun) their wives, and wives obey them. So, had he treated
them like wives, he would not have had disciplinary problems. In their own words
my informants were implying that Yeros would have been a supermale, which has
echoes of Lacan’s notion of the ‘Phallocrat’. It appears from this that to discipline is to
feminize; to have penetrative sex with someone is to discipline him, and thus to
feminize him.
Here, I must again return to contemporary British society, to preserve a
reasonable relationship between Greek ethnography and my maternal culture. Under
the sub-heading ‘Prisoner’s inquest told of sex attack’, there was a report of the
suicide of an 18-year-old man at Feltham Remand Centre, a ‘Young Offenders’
institution currently notorious in Britain because of the frequent suicides there:
On the evening before he died Mr Waite was sexually assaulted with a
snooker cue and was forced to give two inmates his watch and trainers. A
Feltham inmate told the court that it was common for other inmates to insert
objects into the anus of a new prisoner, ‘It is all part of the welcoming
committee. Each wing has somebody who thinks they run it and they do all
sorts of things.’ (Independent, 10 March 1992)
A society that cannot stop things like this happening in its prisons has no grounds for
smugness about its civilized institutions. But the other matter to be noted in the
context of this chapter is that such assaults are described as ‘sexual’.
They are
degrading and humiliating and involve the use of force; it would be slightly less
confusing, perhaps, if they were called something else. The incident does, however,
suggest a similar equation of penetration with power.
There was a belief among some village men in Cyprus that a woman would
always find the first man to take her virginity irresistible and, significantly, able to
command her for the rest of her life, even if she married another man. Small wonder,
then, that the men wanted to marry virgins, and small wonder, too, that I heard men
discussing striking their wives occasionally, as if it were a routine matter of imposing
a husband’s authority, and nothing remarkable.
On one occasion, such a discussion concerned whether or not it was
reasonable for a man who came home late to wake up his sleeping wife and insist on
having sex with her whether she wanted to or not. Opinions differed. One man felt it
was somewhat unreasonable, and if the woman was not willing, she had a right to be
allowed to sleep. Another man said, with a laugh, that, if he found himself in this
situation and his wife refused, he would be inclined to fetch her a couple of blows (na
tis doko ena-thkio mbattsous). ‘But not heavy ones’, he added, and he laughed, and
the other two men laughed.
In the context of interpersonal relations, to be a dominant man can imply the
use of force to subdue or discipline someone else, and neither the other person’s
gender, nor the physical weapon (a penis, a fist) need be distinguished.(8)
Definitions that control and diminish
I was made personally aware of various lines of demarcation for masculinities
during my fieldwork. First, there was the question of the long sideburns which I have
worn since the middle 1950s. They gradually stopped signifying rock-and roll
rebellion and became part of my persona. But to my male village friends and relatives
they were problematic:
‘Peter, when you shave, just raise your sideburns an inch or so!’, said a
couple of close friends over drinks one evening.
‘Why?’
‘Mirizoun poushlikia (they imply you are passively homosexual).’
‘But I’m not.’
‘Then don’t go around looking as if you are. People are malevolent.’(9)
Then there was the whispered explanation for how one of the rich but uneducated
men in another village had made his fortune as a salesman. The man who had given
him his start was a ‘known’ homosexual, and the villager when young had been
good-looking: ‘So possibly the wholesaler fucked him.’ The suggestion of economic
patronage power leading to sexual exploitation was not particularly homophobic,
because several merchants in the region were said to have used their position as
employers of female labour to attempt seductions. It can be inferred, as in the case of
the EOKA leader and his unruly adjutants, that the village salesman as subordinated
party was seen as feminized.
Although villagers have well-defined notions of non-sexual love (agapi)
between men, village definitions of homosexuality reduce it to very specific sexual
practices. Moreover, they allow no space for companionate relationships or
friendships of any morally elevated order, if there is a current of sexuality within
them. To put this another way, there is a huge conceptual space—a negative
polarity—between friendship between men and sexuality between men.
I heard
nothing to suggest that people saw areas of ambiguity, or offered elusive
interpretations of when a handclasp, an embrace, an arm around the shoulders
should be interpreted as ‘sexual’ and when ‘merely’ as a gesture of asexual
friendship.
These attitudes are a far cry from Plato’s Symposium. If there were an ecology
of social relations, then village views on homosexuality would celebrate a loss of
variation, an overvaluing of a few high-yielding strains of manhood and a reduction
of everything to very clear-cut definitions.
PHALLIC POWER AND ITS LIMITATIONS
I have been talking of phallic sexuality as a practice and metaphor of domination. The
use of sexuality by men as a weapon in a kind of Kulturkampf is reported by Sofka
Zinovieff (1991), who studied the phenomenon known in Greece as ‘spear-fishing’
(kamaki). This is the male pursuit of tourist women for sexual conquest, the business
of which is elaborately socially organized. First, the men tend to be lower-class;
secondly, they often hunt in pairs; and thirdly, kamaki is a competitive game being
played among men and to impress men. To illustrate some of the more poignant but
aggressive features, some now-departed tourist has written a love letter to Andreas,
who has little to do over the winter but sit with other men in the coffee-shop. He may
read the letter out to a chorus of comments, but his final act is one of rejection: to
dismiss the woman by tearing up the letter with a suitably derogatory gesture.
Zinovieff suggests that in these encounters and their sequels, not only is a
particular woman conquered and later, symbolically, humiliated in absentia, but
there is also a sense of peripheral Greece getting its own back at the expense of
wealthy and powerful northern Europe. The thought which does not apparently
occur to the spear-fishermen is that they may be the hunted just as much as they are
the hunters; sought by ‘getaway people’ for ‘a holiday fling’.(10)
It has to be said that spear-fishing preoccupies only a minority of the eligible
men in the town Zinovieff describes. It is considered disreputable by local women,
and men known to indulge lose out in the marriage market, for they will not be
readily accepted as grooms. So, we once again have the evidence of several different
constructions of acceptable masculinities within the same ethnographic community.
In rural Cyprus, I noted in 1968 ambiguities and ambivalences about how far a
mature man needed to express himself through sexual conquest or sexual encounter.
One informant, a prominent communist leader, told me with some pride that he had
been married for more than twenty years and during that time he had never had sex
with a woman other than his wife. ‘And not for lack of opportunities’, he said,
‘opportunities’ meaning travel outside the village, and particularly foreign travel. In a
similar way to that taken by the Greek army regulation which allows men leave from
the army ‘for reasons of health’, certain young married men in the village treated
themselves to a prostitute if their foreign travel required them to ‘cross water’.
Conversations in the coffee-shop included such questions to the traveller as,
‘Did she put her legs in the air?’, and when in a spirit of teasing enquiry I asked if
being married to an attractive young wife ought not to have precluded the ‘need’ for
such escapades, the riposte, issued with a smirk or a stare, would be, ‘What? Must we
eat louvia-beans every day?’. And when I suggested that wives might be encouraged
to ‘put their legs in the air’, I was told that local women did not behave like that, nor
would their husbands want them to! For some married men, it was not necessary
even to cross water—the twenty-six miles to Nicosia gave them the licence they
needed.
To return to the communist who had remained faithful: he was among the
more respected and physically tough men of the village. He had carried a pistol,
frequenting gambling cliques and bars when young. But he explained to me that his
communism included a belief in the equality of men and women, and if he were to
have had an extra-marital liaison, it would have meant he granted his wife the right
to do the same, ‘And you know I couldn’t accept that; it is my duty as a husband to
satisfy her’, he said with a large grin. Clearly this adherence to a principle was
important to him, because during a row with another man, who had (although
married) been attempting to seduce an unmarried girl, my informant got angry and
shouted out in public, ‘Do you suppose just because I do not chase after the
daughters of Alpha or Vita, my cock doesn’t stand up?’. My informant was proud to
be a sexually active man, but felt he was no less a man for confining his sexuality to
his wife. Indeed, in his own eyes, he was more of a man (parapano antras).(11)
MONASTIC CELIBACY
Having looked at several varieties of male sexuality, it is perhaps time to remind
ourselves that Greece has had the Orthodox church at its cultural centre for two
thousand years, and that this church, in its early, formative period, took the position
that the higher form of spiritual life for Christians was not the married, procreative
state, but celibacy. There is an immediate sociological paradox to be noted, since the
communities of monks and nuns, however economically self sustaining they may be,
are dependent for their biological continuity on the very activities of the secular,
married laity which they hold theologically to be inferior. To put it simply:
monasteries and convents cannot legitimately reproduce their memberships
physically, only spiritually. So, spirituality in this world is inevitably a condition
dependent upon the very flesh it seeks to transcend.
Marina lossifides (1991), in her account of Greek nuns, has shown how they
resolve this paradox by various methods: one is to create rules which separate food
preparation from any taint of sexuality, so that bread must be made by a woman who
no longer menstruates; another is to consume food which is plain, and to the
accompaniment of readings from the scriptures; and a third is by declarations of their
wish to leave this life sooner rather than later, in order to be united with Christ.
Where the secular laity seek long life and many children, the nuns enter the convent
through a tonsure ceremony which symbolically breaks their relationship with the
world of their biological kin, and they learn to decry the value of earthly life in favour
of life everlasting.
A number of anthropological studies of Orthodox male monasticism are
currently under way, and it is too early to report on their findings on the theme of
masculinities. But it is a definitional truism that Orthodox monasticism involves a
celibate masculinity in which sexuality is highly controlled and a community of
spiritual brothers is created under the authority of a spiritual father. There are many
interesting questions, including the extent to which there is a clear and contrasting
boundary between the world of secular householding, biological procreation, and the
desire for long life in a healthy body, and how far doctrines of world and bodily
renunciation lead to a system of values which parallels the account of nuns just
discussed. Because there are marked differences in how men and women relate to the
secular world, it is unlikely that monks in their interpretation of their lives as
masculine beings will simply prove to be the mirror images of nuns, and on Mount
Athos, to take a single example only, there is a range of monasteries representing
varieties of Orthodoxy. In some, the physical regime for the subjugation of the body
is much stricter, and the degree of opposition to the secular world much sharper. So
we may expect to find that even among monks, masculinities are plural rather than
singular, divergent rather than convergent.
OF ‘FREE SPIRITS’ AND ‘DOMESTICATED MEN’
The theme I finish on is that of two opposed ways of being masculine, drawing on
Akis Papataxiarchis’ Lesbos data, Herzfeld’s Cretan material and my own Cypriot
fieldwork. Papataxiarchis noted that Lesbos villages have matrifocal kinship as the
organizing principle of neighbourhoods and the house is a female domain; a
woman’s status, power, property are located in her house and householding. Men
appear in these houses only by virtue of their relationship to women, and they are not
particularly at home in them.
Where casual observers and early feminists perceived Greek men in
coffeeshops as enjoying some kind of patriarchal privilege, it is clear in Lesbos (and in
Argaki, Cyprus) that men are in the coffee-shops because they would be out of place
in their wives’ houses, except to eat and sleep, and sometimes to entertain. Men are
to be thought of as extruded into a public male space, in which they find little else to
do except perform, compete and act as spectators, judges, critics and chorus to those
who strive to stand out (Herzfeld 1985).
Papataxiarchis sees the coffee-shop as a ‘domain’ (Collier and Yanagisako
1987), and I follow him, noting that it is a more informally and weakly instituted
domain than those created by the church and the military. In the coffee-shop domain,
we can see a form of masculinity being enacted by those I shall term ‘men of spirit’, in
which those who play the game at all seek to stand out, to dominate, to excel, by
drinking deeply and paying handsomely, by dancing with style and distinction, and
by gambling. In their discourses on being male, they emphasize the notion of the
autonomous man, who does not spend his spirit in calculation. He may be married,
or he may have chosen to remain unmarried, but if married, he is certainly not
domesticated (cf. Kandiyoti, Chapter 12 in this volume). Papataxiarchis describes
how these men can also imagine a life in which men and women can enjoy each
other’s company without the fetters of marriage, householding and procreation. They
can imagine themselves as free spirits. They could cheerfully ‘live in sin’ with a
woman of equally free spirit.
Such women are not normally to be found in any Greek village known to me.
If they ever exist outside of male imaginations—another debating point—they tend to
migrate to the towns and live in the fringe world of night-clubs, performers and
entertainers of various kinds.12 It was such free-spirited men who, as I reported
earlier, tried unsuccessfully to bring a night-club to the village. It is also this style of
man who tends to have a male ‘friend of the heart’, a very special and greatly valued
male friend, who is not a kinsman, and with whom a man should spend his leisure
hours, drinking with him every evening if possible.
The other kind of man, whom I term ‘domesticated men’, do not imitate the
‘men of spirit’ in these matters. They cannot stay at home, but their participation in
coffee-shop and tavern is a much more measured affair. They do not emphasize their
autonomy, but stress their constrained condition as responsible householders with
obligations to support women and children. In Cyprus, they might describe
themselves as pantremenoi anthropoi, married male persons, to emphasize their lack of
freedom and the relative sobriety (in both senses) of their spirits. (13)
The two versions of masculinity in Lesbos are more or less reproduced in the
Cyprus village I studied. At the time of my fieldwork, I tended to see them as
psychological types, rather than alternative styles of masculinity, and I have never
managed to give a sociological explanation for why some men went one way and
some another—another debating point, perhaps. Herzfeld’s Cretan material describes
the ‘real men’, the ones who steal each other’s sheep, carry guns, and conduct feuds,
as if they were simply the pinnacle of male aspirations in the community. But he has
given us, I suspect, a single point of view.
I would not be at all surprised if the men who do not steal sheep, who either
drop out of shepherding after being leaned upon by the harder men and go into
agriculture (an activity dismissed by the shepherds as ‘effeminate’), have a wellarticulated discourse in which other concepts are foregrounded. The quality known
as anthropia—that is, feeling for one’s fellow-humans—might be emphasized instead
of being good at being a man, kal’antras; as might respect for the person and property
of others, rather than the virtues of violence and theft.
The word politismenos,
civilized, might even be used. It is notable that Herzfeld cites examples of fathers
being ambivalent towards their son’s sheep-stealing, whereas mothers can sometimes
be decidedly hostile, refusing to eat stolen meat and ordering it to be removed from
the house (1985:168–9). This implies that there is neither a simple value consensus
nor, perhaps, an unchallenged hierarchy of achievements.
CONCLUSION
In this chapter I have raided Greek ethnography opportunistically, highlighting a
range of cultural practices and contrasts. The idea has been to suggest that not only is
there no single sense of masculinity in that abstraction called ‘Greek culture’, but that
from one local context, institution, domain or discourse to another we can easily find
contrasting ways of being masculine. Obviously, this is all relational, and we have
had to think in passing about constructions of femaleness as well. I think the
implications of this approach are quite far-reaching: they take us away from any kind
of whole-system modelling of society, culture, or general ideology of the Bloch and
Parry (1982) variety, which is analytically stimulating, but which, in an ethnographic
field as varied and dynamic as that of contemporary Greece, suggests many pitfalls.
How far can one abstract a ‘gender ideology’ from such complexities? One of
the best known papers on gender in the Christian Mediterranean is Brandes’ (1981)
fascinating paper about masculinity in Andalusia, in which men appear to be fearful
of and hostile to women, and to believe that sexual intercourse is likely to drain and
destroy them. The information seems very striking, almost surprising, when you read
it as an account of a stable, comprehensive, across-the board view of ‘how men see
women’.
But in a later paper, Brandes (1992) describes the fieldwork in Andalusia. It
turns out that he spent his first months making contacts and fieldwork friendships by
going almost every day to an all-male bar. Only later did this situation stop, and
Brandes started to see men in contexts where women were also present, and indeed,
to have much conversation with women. How far did those early bar-room
conversations produce a peculiarly intense and specialized masculine discourse about
women, which he reported in his 1981 paper?
Brandes’ decision to write about that fieldwork in the way he has done
suggests he has had significant ‘second thoughts’ about the original article. If the
arguments of my chapter and this volume are accepted, then it would be a mistake to
allow Brandes’ earlier paper to have the last word on how men think about women in
Andalusia (cf. Hart, Chapter 2 in this volume), and, at very least, his later paper needs
to be read as a modifier.
Consider as a thought experiment the kinds of discourse about the other sex
you would expect to get in a refuge for battered women, a brothel after it had closed,
a Jesuit seminary before the Second Vatican Council, an army barracks in
contemporary Greece or Britain, or the all-male bars in many cities where middleaged bachelor men hang out, men who have long since given up trying to get a wife
since they lack the economic drawing power and sobriety to make them attractive.14
In this last context we might hear discourses of compensatory male independence
and the overvaluation of male gender in the teeth of systematic rejections. In none of
these cases should we assume that this was the only way of thinking or speaking
about the other sex which would come to the speaker’s lips: other contexts, other
listeners—other discourses.
It is methodologically unsafe to add up lots of contexts in which gender ideas
are expressed, and construct out of these a ‘Greek view of masculinity’ or ‘a Greek
style of being male’. I regard those particular distorting mirrors as finally broken and
I do not see that they can be put back together again. The challenge for the immediate
future is to make reliable statements which are not about unique constellations of
action and discourse and are therefore more sociologically profound than intelligent
journalism. At the moment, most of us can do nothing more aggregative than point to
ranges of difference, and occasionally regroup a small number of such
characterizations as a ‘logic’, as Collier and Rosaldo (1981) suggest. If this activity is
more descriptive and more minimalist than the whole-system theorizing which
previously prevailed, it is also more modest and more accurate.
NOTES
I am grateful to participants in seminars at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London; Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, King’s
College, London; Department of Anthropology, Durham University; and the Institute
of Anthropology, Oxford, for their comments, and to the editors of this volume for
their more detailed suggestions. Yiannis Papadakis also made some helpful
comments. The errors and omissions are, of course, my own.
1. My own childhood in south London and adulthood in north London bring to mind
numerous memories of young working-class boys and men calling each other
‘wanker’, masturbator. It is used as a term of scorn at soccer matches to imply that
players are performing in a lacklustre fashion, because, by implication, they have
spent their energies masturbating. It can be used affectionately between friends, as a
‘rough’ greeting, much as men friends in the Cypriot village I studied curse each
other vividly.
2. Campbell attended a seminar where I read a version of this paper, and gave me to
understand that his account of sexuality was indeed concerned with official values. I
am less reticent here but will undoubtedly incur criticism from those Greeks who
would have preferred me to follow Campbell’s example.
3. Akis Papataxiarchis, personal communication.
4. Yiannis Papadakis, personal communication.
5.The Independent (11 June 1991), under the sub-heading ‘Victims of sexual prejudice
in uniform’, reported that between 1987 and 1990, 34 men and women were
dismissed with disgrace after court martial, some being given prison sentences of one
to two years. A further 272 men and women were ‘administratively discharged’
because they were homosexuals. Their discharge papers were marked ‘services no
longer required’.
6. The tendency of modern authoritarian-nationalist regimes to be hostile to
homosexuality is noteworthy, Mussolini’s Italy and Castro’s Cuba being two
examples which come readily to mind. Perhaps it is the ‘strength’ of the nation,
conceived of as a heterosexually macho strength, of men as inseminators, warriors
and patriarchs, which is at issue? But here the authoritarians seem unable to group
the notion of homosexual warriors. According to the Oxford Classical Dictionary,
Pelopidas, leader of a band of 300 warriors—the defenders of Thebes—had them
organized as pairs of lovers.
7. I am grateful to Yiannis Papadakis for this point.
8. This was brought home to me when an otherwise thoughtful and progressive
communist described the humiliation of a man in a coffee-shop brawl. The man had
challenged a couple of tough brothers, who had set about him, and started to beat
him to the point that he lost control of his bowels. My informant laughed at the
memory of his enemy’s humiliation in a way which equated him with a baby, or a
very old, infirm person.
9 My masculine status in the village was problematic. When I first arrived in 1966 for
a brief holiday, I was married and was joined by my wife. When I returned to the
village for field work in 1968, I came alone, and explained when questioned that I was
divorced. ‘Who was to blame?’ (poios ftai?), I was invariably asked. I would answer,
‘Neither of us. We separated in a friendly fashion. Our characters did not agree.’ This
was treated with scepticism as it was not grounds for divorce in village eyes. Divorce
was unusual—I did not record more than five informal separations in more than
seven hundred marriages. After a few months in the village, I was asked in an allmale drinking group how I could manage ‘without a wife/woman’. I agreed that as a
formerly married man it was ‘difficult’. In no time at all several of my close relatives
and their friends had bundled me into a car and we were driving towards Nicosia.
The formal object of the evening was to make sure that I should not have to remain
sexually frustrated any longer, but the other agenda was to prove to the rest of the
village that my divorce had not come about through my lack of libido.
10. The recent British film Shirley Valentine played with the theme of a gently
predatory Greek male exploiting a succession of tourist women (cf. Bowman 1989).
11. I must find space for the following point about male potency and its wider
significance. I was comprehensively interviewing 200 male ‘household heads’ (a term
which had not struck me as problematic in 1968). At one phase of the interview I was
asking them about the number of children they had. As part of rny enquiries, I asked
if their wives had ever miscarried, which seemed a common 80 A BROKEN MIRROR
occurrence. The village idiom for talking about miscarriage is to say that a child ‘fell’
(from the womb). I asked one of my friends, a barrel-like fellow rejoicing in the
nickname ‘Wild Man’ for his potential fierceness, if his wife had ever had a child who
‘fell’. He replied, smiting his chest and grinning hugely, ‘When I put ’em in, they
don’t fall out!’.
12. In due course, Diane Mueller, now carrying out field research in Athens, will have
something to tell us about that world.
13. When I say they cannot stay at home, I mean it. A piece of ‘personal ethnography’
here: in London, at certain times when the Cypriot community was in a state of
political ferment, I would be telephoned by members of numerous cultural groups
seeking to recruit activists. In order to have a reasonable excuse to decline, I would
deliberately mention my young family and pressing work burdens, and finish off by
saying I had become anthropos ton spitiou, which is best rendered ‘a man who stays
at home’. My interlocutors never failed to tell me, ‘No—you haven’t’, since the phrase
carries a negative connotation. Men should be out, in public, having opinions, taking
part.
14. I have in mind bars in Finsbury Park and Camden Town, districts of London with
significant numbers of Irish working-class men, who have one of the latest ages of
marriage and highest proportions of bachelors in Europe.
Chapter 4
Variant masculinities, variant virginities
Rethinking ‘honour and shame’
Nancy Lindisfarne
Anthropological descriptions have often emphasized idealized, hegemonic versions
of gendered identities and ignored the shifting reality of people’s experience as
gendered beings. Such an emphasis is particularly evident in the literature on honour
and shame. An ideal of female virginity and versions of hegemonic masculinity have
been much discussed: the radical differentiation of men and women has been taken
for granted and there has been a focus on local idioms that naturalize the privileges of
socially dominant men. I suggest that it is now time to move on: that it is more
instructive, and less circular, to treat gender as a contested discourse. When gender is
problematized, it becomes possible to ask how people make gender known to
themselves and how gendered identities may be reified to express apparently
absolute differences between men and women while simultaneously defining
inequalities within these categories.
The ethnographic literature of the Mediterranean and Middle East is rich and
contains some fine descriptions of hegemonic masculinities (see, for example,
Herzfeld 1985). This literature offers the possibility of reanalysis: how are different
versions of masculinity related to each other in any particular setting? And how are
attributions of masculinity themselves constructed? Fiction can be an even richer
source of ideas about the ways difference and inequality are defined and enacted
through sexual images. In this chapter, the ethnography I present is a deliberate
collage. My aim is to raise new questions concerning, first, the extent to which
abstract notions of female virginity and chastity construct idealized, hegemonic
versions of masculinity and femininity; and second, the plurality of gendered
identities which emerge in practice.
In the anthropological literature, ‘honour and shame’ has been treated as a loose
category around which comparative descriptions can be organized. As Davis has
written,
Among systems of prestige and control…honour systems are distinct [in
that] they generally have as one of their components the control by men of
women’s sexuality, and the resulting combination of sex and self importance
makes a unique contribution to the human comedy in life.
(1969:69)
Glosses on systems of honour and shame are disarmingly consistent in their focus on
competitions between dominant men and the passive subordination of women. The
flavour of conventional analyses is well conveyed in David Gilmore’s account:
Sexuality is a form of social power…women themselves are often
nonproductive materially—ideally they are ‘excluded’ from nondomestic
work…. Rather, they carry an immaterial or conceptual resource, their
chastity, arbitrarily elevated to central position as an exchange value…
female modesty is metamorphosed, almost in the manner of a fetish, into a
pseudocommodity, or more accurately, a capital good…the masculine
experience of sexuality becomes broadened conceptually to encompass a
triad involving two men or groups of men and a woman, who is reduced to
an intermediating object. Female sexuality becomes objectified, not only a
libidinal goal in itself, but a contentious and arbitrating social index for
masculine reputation.
(1987a:4–5)
In a related passage, Gilmore writes that ‘the correlative emphasis on female chastity
and the desirability of premarital virginity remains strong throughout the region
despite modernization’ (1987a:3), yet the considerable variation (past and present)
throughout the region throws doubt on the status of his generalization (cf. Wikan
1984).
Gilmore has described a dominant folk model which couples a rhetoric of
gender with what, following Scott (1990), might be called a ‘euphemism of power’. In
this way Gilmore illustrates how local idioms of honour and shame and
anthropological analyses can underwrite forms of patriarchy. His focus is on men’s
activities and on ideals expressed by dominant men (cf. Lever 1986). Yet, by his own
account, the dynamics of the system depend on the relation between men and
women. Moreover, Gilmore’s description is at a level of abstraction which simplifies
and lends a spurious coherence to a much messier social reality. One consequence of
this descriptive tidying is the way ‘men’ and ‘women’ are presented as radically
different; there is the implication that these gendered identities are biologically given
and remain constant throughout the life of an individual. And, because gender is
presented as unitary, it seems unproblematic that gendered difference is located in a
quasi-physical attribute—female chastity or modesty, the virgin’s unbroken hymen—
which is then treated as a thing and ranked and valued along with other
commodities.(1)
ATTRIBUTES AND THINGS: A VIRGIN’S HYMEN
Malti-Douglas, in her excellent book on gendered discourse in Arabo-Islamic writing,
illustrates how a gendered attribute (such as a virgin’s hymen) can be used to define
all dimensions of personhood. Malti-Douglas examines the rich medieval corpus of
anecdotal prose, the adab literature, in which ‘woman’ becomes a character type
whose voice, wit and survival depend on her duplicity, her physicality and the
manipulation of her body. Thus, in one oft-told story, a slave girl being offered for
sale to a caliph is asked, ‘Are you a virgin or what?’. She replies, ‘Or what, O caliph’.
He laughs and buys her (1991:36). In a second story,
two slave girls were shown to a man, one a virgin and one who had been
deflowered. He inclined to the virgin, so the deflowered one said, ‘Why do
you desire her since there is only one day between her and me?’ But the
virgin replied, ‘And surely a day with thy Lord is as a thousand years of
your counting.’ The two pleased him so he bought them. In a variant ending,
the man buys only the virgin. (1991:36)
Many ethnographies of the Mediterranean and Middle East report on an obsession
with female virginity, which amounts to a kind of fetishism. Such a fixation with
dismembered body parts, Strathern suggests, may be intimately related to ideologies
of private property (1988:133ff., 338, 373). Certainly, virginity is often commodified:
the hymen is a store of value which may be disposed of and exchanged. For instance,
in Zakariyya Tamer’s short story, ‘The Eastern Wedding’, ‘the price of the young girl
is agreed on, so much per kilo, and she is taken to the marketplace and weighed in’
(Tamer 1978: 71–9, quoted in Malti-Douglas 1991:142). Such calculations are by no
means only fictional exaggerations: marriage payments may be calculated in terms of
both the cost of a woman’s upbringing and her purported virginity (cf. Tapper
1991:142ff.).
Treated from this perspective, there are many questions to be asked about
parts or aspects of human beings which can be objectified, owned and alienated, sold
or exchanged. What are the sources of value and how do they produce gendered
difference? What is the commodity logic which allows men to see women as other
men’s property and renders women part-objects through brideprices? Thus, in the
stories retold by Malti-Douglas, how are buyers and sellers, as well as the women for
sale, gendered by such transactions? Or if, as I will argue, protection and predation,
responsible and competitive behavour are intimately related aspects of dominant
versions of masculinity, then how do men protect women? How is male agency
understood and how does it impinge on which parts of those who are being
‘protected’? In short, how are the metaphors of property and protection constituted,
experienced and sustained in everyday life? Put more generally, how do fetishism
and commodification intersect to construe masculinity and femininity in systems
which make use of idioms of honour and shame?
The categorical images of competitive men and passive women that we are
presented with in the summary accounts of honour and shame are often contradicted
in more extended ethnographic descriptions. Other 84 VARIANT MASCULINITIES,
VARIANT VIRGINITIES indigenous notions of honour associate men with
conciliatory, cooperative behaviour and allow women agency in certain contexts as
wives and mothers, on the one hand, and as devilish creatures of voracious sexuality,
on the other (cf. Pitt-Rivers 1965, 1977). As Davis notes, it seems likely that these
apparent contradictions are, in large part, the product of analyses which neglect ‘the
practical consequences for an individual of having more or less honour’ and the ways
in which ‘honour is awarded, or manipulated’ (Davis 1969:69). When attention is paid
to everyday negotiations involving both men and women, a range of variant
masculinities and femininities emerges.
COMPETITIONS AND THE CONTROL OF PEOPLE
In any setting, notions of honour and shame are not separate from the political
economy; rather they are a mode of interpretation through which inequalities are
created and sustained. Thus, the rhetoric of hegemonic masculinity depends heavily
on stereotypes of women: as weak, emotional, both needing support and potentially
treacherous. Female virginity and chastity are both prized and precarious. In practice,
the protection of and predation on men as well as women can be justified in terms of
values derived from the ideology of honour and shame.
Take, for example, the Durrani Pashtuns of Afghanistan. Among the Durrani,
versions of hegemonic masculinity are expressed through a range of idioms which
may be translated in terms of a notion of ‘honour’. These idioms celebrate maleness in
terms of both physical strength and moral strength of character, rationality and
responsibility; honourable men are those who are physically attractive, ‘far sighted’,
‘mature’ and ‘deep’ (Tapper 1991:208ff.). Such men are likely to be those who most
effectively monitor virginity and control the sexual behaviour of ‘their own’ women;
they are also likely to act as oppressors of other men and usurpers of ‘other men’s’
women (1991:239).
Men prey on other men, most often using the idiom of a woman’s reputed
behaviour to explain and justify their actions. Men who demonstrate weakness, by
failing to control either women’s behaviour or their own independence in the
arrangement and completion of marriages, lose credibility and find themselves on a
downward spiral. They become extremely vulnerable to further exploitation. Thus, a
man may be labelled ‘dishonourable’, or femininized as ‘soft’ or ‘weak’, when a
daughter elopes and ‘is stolen’ by another man; when he is forced to arrange a
marriage for a daughter against his wishes; when he is cuckolded; and even when
others, acting on gossip about women’s behaviour, take advantage of his precarious
control of household resources in sheep or land.
In effect, women’s actions, the choices they make with respect to their
sexuality and the consequences of those choices are treated as an index of a man’s
success or failure to provide economically and compete politically. Moreover, in spite
of the severe sanctions associated with women’s sexual misbehaviour, these are not
uniformly applied. Not only does female prostitution exist within the community
(Tapper 1991:236ff.), but men are sometimes judged foolish when, in conformity with
idealized notions of honour, they over-react (sic!) by killing a woman in
circumstances when they can literally ill afford to do so (Tapper 1991:225; cf. Gilsenan
1976). Among men, degrees of affluence, political credibility and control of other
people coincide. Conversely, women often have more personal autonomy (but little
else) when the men of the household with which they are associated are poor and
vulnerable to the machinations of other men.
Some men are more able or willing than others to conform to the ideals of
hegemonic masculinity. Subordinate variants also form a continuum which depends
on interpretation. Men do not act without a cogent explanation of their motives, and
an account of their expectations and various gains. However, they will be believed
only if there is no doubt that they are operating from strength, not weakness. What is
interesting is the extent to which some men can exercise choice and take advantage of
positions of relative dominance, while others opt out or fail to assert their control
over resources of all kinds, including (in hegemonic discourses) a woman’s virginity,
sexuality and fertility.
There is a considerable discrepancy between, on the one hand, men’s and
women’s public agreement with the dominant ideology of gender and, on the other,
the great range of their actions. In competitions for ‘honour’ many nuanced
masculinities are created, yet because the interpretations of dominant men often
frame discourses on gender, an illusion of hegemonic masculinity, the related ideal of
female chastity and the gender hierarchy between men and women remain intact. It is
arguable that this is a measure of the fiercely competitive environment in which the
Durrani live. Men’s everyday lives are riven politically. Their commonality (and
privileges) as men depend almost entirely on the rhetoric of honour and shame and
the collective disparagement of women. In short, the ideal of male domination is
sustained in reiterated statements which put a rhetorical gloss on the cumulative, but
diverse and often ambiguous, episodes during which individual men and women
interact unequally. A patriarchal ideology may be embodied in the lives of socially
dominant men, but this does not mean that all men are successful patriarchs, or that
all women are passive, virginal or chaste.
SUBVERSIVE WOMEN AND SUBORDINATE
MASCULINITIES
The idioms of honour and shame construct various masculinities in terms of the
control of women’s sexual behaviour. These idioms can be used to differentiate men
from each other and to describe a man in terms of different masculine identities in
different contexts. Yusuf Idris’ short story ‘The shame’ (1978) illustrates how the
abstract value of a woman’s chastity may be interpreted in practice and how various
masculinities are created through such interpretations. The story is written from the
point of view of male protagonists whose perceptions are fused with those of their
male author.
‘The shame’ explores the masculinities revealed in the relationship between a
woman’s guardian and the man accused of seducing her. Farag, the brother, uses
bravado to hide his fear of responsibility for his vivacious sister Fatma, who ‘even
aroused the dormant virility in little boys’ (p. 158). Fatma’s imputed lover Gharib, a
rake and bully, is secretly intimidated by Fatma’s beauty, propriety and fear of being
compromised by sexual innuendo—the ‘shame’ of the story’s title. None the less, the
villagers fabricate a relationship between them. Farag’s duty is to kill his sister and
her lover: ‘but, before he made himself guilty of their blood, their own guilt must be
proved’ (p. 165). In this, the village women were bolder than the men, forcing a
physical examination of Fatma’s hymen, while simultaneously heaping curses on her
putative lover Gharib (pp. 166, 167). Two women examine the girl, one an
experienced ‘dresser of brides’ whose home is said to be the site of clandestine
meetings of men and women and who, villagers fear, might lie about what she
discovers, the other a much respected Christian woman whose honesty is not in
question. Meanwhile, the brother, Farag, ‘were he not a man, …could have been
taken for a grief-stricken widow bemoaning a dead husband’ (sic, p. 168).
Fatma’s innocence is proved, yet Farag beats her mercilessly: ‘he felt bound to
perform some spectacular act by which to reply to the people’s gossip’. In his turn,
Gharib’s father abuses his son and threatens to drown him, yet the father is ‘secretly
proud to have sired a seducer no woman could resist, and that his son was accused of
rape’ (p. 174). Both Fatma and Gharib are severely chastened by the episode and wellmeaning friends suggest they should marry to save face all round. In the end Fatma,
who had, in spite of her innocence, lost ‘that thing that gave her purity’ (sic, p. 176),
returns to her ravishing ways with new-found defiance, while Gharib remains the
unreconstructed rake.
The story derives its narrative impetus from notions of hegemonic
masculinity, but it actually describes various and nuanced interpretations of honour.
Thus, the cause of men’s violence toward women (and men) are twofold: a man’s
commitment to ideals of honour as judged by neighbours and others, and his
dishonour, which lies not only in the actions of women but in those of men who have
challenged his authority as a surrogate father, brother and neighbour and rendered
him socially impotent. Local attributions of dishonour suggest ways in which the
rhetoric of honour also inscribes ideas of the unique, bounded and coherent person.
The notion of ‘dishonour’ is one way of describing the discrepancies between
presentations of masculinity before different audiences, while violence may be a
means through which the illusion of wholeness is reasserted.
In this story and others (e.g. Tamer 1985), it is the voices of superiors, men
who control resources, that are most audible. But they are not the only ones.
Dominant or hegemonic versions of masculinity (or femininity) do not exist in
isolation; rather they define a range of appropriate behaviours. What is crucial is that
the limits of control are not fixed, but are repeatedly negotiated in everyday
interactions. And it is through such negotiations that subordinates can modify and
transform dominant idioms and structures.
A VIRGIN, OR WHAT?
Contextualized interpretations of female virginity and chastity play a central role in
the construction of particular versions of masculinity. This relation can be compared
cross-culturally and historically and would ideally also include a consideration of
related themes: among them, notions of male virginity and chastity, as well as the
ways in which myths of seduction and betrayal construct a Don Juan archetype of
masculinity (cf. Miller 1990). (2)
To return specifically to female virginity: in upper Egypt and the Sudan people
explain pharaonic circumcision and the infibulation of girls of 7 and 8 as preventing
‘any suspicion on the bridegroom’s part that the bride is not a virgin’ (Eickelman
1989:193). However, as Boddy’s work attests, virgins are made, not born. A divorced
or widowed woman ‘may undergo reinfibulation in anticipation of remarriage, thus
renewing, like the recently delivered mother, her “virginal” status’ (Boddy 1982:687).
Boddy argues that both operations are less about the control of female sexuality than
about its socialization. She writes,
Through occlusion of the vaginal orifice, her womb, both literally and
figuratively, becomes a social space: enclosed, impervious, virtually
impenetrable. Her social virginity…must periodically be reestablished at
those points in her life (after childbirth and before remarriage) when her
fertility once again is rendered potent. (1982:696)
Though a man’s increased sexual pleasure is sometimes offered as an explanation for
the operation, Boddy dismisses this argument as implausible:
it may take as long as two years of continuous effort before penetration can
occur. For a man it is a point of honor to have a child born within a year of
his marriage, and often, the midwife is summoned in secret, under cover of
darkness, to assist the young couple by surgically enlarging the bride’s
genital orifice. (1982:686; cf. Boddy 1989:53–4)
Virginity in this case is in no sense ‘natural’ but is created by an elaborate operation
insisted upon and performed by women. Nor is sexual intercourse necessarily an
unmediated act between bride and groom. Moreover, virility is reckoned less in terms
of male sexuality than in those of fertility: that is, what men share is the right to
allocate and benefit from a woman’s reproductive potential, but it is women, whose
femininity is enhanced by infibulation, who carry the burden of producing a
masculinity focused on fatherhood (1982:687–8).(3) In the rhetoric of honour and
shame, the hymen is often commodified and female virginity presented as an all-ornothing attribute. Yet nowhere in practice do things seem to be so simple. It is Boddy
who is exceptional when she describes the local understandings of an alternation
between discrete gendered identities and the transformative power of gendered
interaction.(4)
Certainly ‘virginity’ as it is associated with pharaonic circumcision and
infibulation is a specific notion that differs from ‘virginity’ as it is understood
elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Middle East. However, the important question is
this: how are images of an ‘infinitely renewable virgin’ (Carter 1991:153)(5) related to
particular versions of an idealized male sexuality? Not only is the seduction of a
virgin a widespread idiom which conveys a notion of essentialized, almost heroic
virility, but the repetition of such an act sometimes defines the very essence of
maleness. For instance, Boudhiba writes of visions of paradise as an ‘infinite orgasm’
where men experience eternal erections and have repeated intercourse with houris
who, after each penetration, become virginal again (Boudhiba 1985, cited in Delaney
1991:319–20). The practice of hymen repair, like that of reinfibulation, raises questions
about the relation between notions of virginity and the masculinities they construct.
Writing of lower-class Neapolitans, Goddard begs the question which should
be asked wherever there is a sexual double standard: why bother with virginity,
particularly when it is often a charade? Goddard criticizes the literature on honour
and shame for its functionalist circularity, male bias and focus on normative aspects
of the honour code in small-scale communities (1987:168, 171–3). She rightly argues
that the honour code must be understood in terms of its implications for women and
the extent to which they are ‘consenting and active participants in [the] manipulation
of honour’ (p. 179). However, it is not enough to explain the double standard in terms
of women being ‘seen as the boundary markers and the carriers of group identity’ (p.
180). Rather, it seems likely that more basic processes of gendering are at stake.
Goddard writes that virginity ‘is a crucial element in the relationships of men
and women’ (p. 175): ‘men want or even expect to marry virgins’; a woman’s sullied
reputation diminishes her chances of marriage, while after marriage a woman’s
fidelity is assumed (pp. 176–7). Meanwhile, ‘it is expected of a “normal”, “healthy”
man that he will take every opportunity for sex that presents itself and his self-image
will be thereby enhanced’, while women who ‘themselves control their sexuality and
decide whether or not to dispose of their virginity’ (p. 176) realize their ‘potential
corruption’ if they transgress (p. 177). None the less, sexual experimentation both
within and outside the institution of ‘a house engagement’ is not uncommon and
women, who themselves dream of white weddings, are often pregnant when they
marry the man who was their first lover (pp. 175–6). Failing such a marriage, women
have only two options: the streets, or hymen repair, which, in a large city like Naples,
is a relatively anonymous, inexpensive and simple operation (pp. 175–7).
Hymen repair is by no means unique to Naples, or without historical
precedents (cf. Weideger 1986:148). In the central Middle East young, unmarried
women may now even have the operation performed before they go out with each
new boyfriend! And, when the state of a woman’s hymen may be investigated by
either her own or a prospective groom’s family, some Middle Eastern women, during
premarital sexual encounters, will insist on anal, rather than vaginal, intercourse to
avoid trouble and shame.
Herzfeld has also pointed to the puzzles surrounding virginity. He notes that
among Cretans, ‘sex before marriage is tolerated for women, and reference to chastity
has a rhetorical value’ (cited in Loizos and Papataxiarchis 1991:230, n. 22). Herzfeld’s
explanation of the apparent paradox of the idealized virginal woman and everyday
sexual licence is that women creatively deform their submission [to male dominance]’
(1991:80–1); cf. Kandiyoti’s idea of ‘bargaining with patriarchy’ (Chapter 12 in this
volume). Herzfeld is probably right, but he does not go far enough. His argument
does not explain why demonstrations that a bride is virgo intacta are widespread, nor
does it allow for a discussion of the ways in which stereotypes of women structure
inequalities between men. Surely, the unasked questions are why female virginity is
an important ideal in the first place, and why it must be sustained by hypocrisy and
practised subversion. A Spanish saying runs, ‘If all Spanish women are virtuous and
chaste and all Spanish men are great seducers and lovers, someone has to be lying.’
Or, as an Iranian friend put it, why does every middle-class marriage begin with a lie
to which both bride and groom subscribe: that the bride is a virgin on her wedding
night?
THE RHETORIC AND PRACTICE OF WEDDING-NIGHT DEFLORATION
The celebrations that follow the bloodied proof of a bride’s virginity are extensively
documented in the ethnographic literature. Yet as we have seen, female virginity
cannot be treated as a uniform cultural trait. However, within any one setting, the
rituals associated with a bride’s defloration radically differentiate men from women
(as part of a dominant discourse on gender) and also define a range of other gendered
identities (which are normally muted by local and anthropological emphases on
hegemonic masculinity).
The ethnography of wedding-night defloration provides a striking example of
the force of Strathern’s argument about ‘dividual’ persons whose identities depend
on exchanging parts of themselves with other persons (cf. Strathern 1988: 14ff, 348ff.;
cf. Cornwall and Lindisfarne, Chapter 1 in this volume). Thus, the unambiguously
‘female’ and ‘male’ identities of bride and groom depend on intercourse and the
exchange and transformation of essences and separable bits: semen, the penetrated
hymen and hymenal blood among them. Momentarily, an archetypal masculinity and
femininity are created and revealed through interaction. Through the sex act,
gendered identities and an act of domination are temporarily, but literally, embodied.
And the marital state also anticipates further exchanges and transformations: among
them, marital intercourse and the creation of the ungendered child in the female
womb. However, in the return to everyday life, new, ambiguous identities emerge.
Clichés of feminized masculinities and masculinized femininities abound: among
them hen-pecked husbands, cuckolds whose wives have given them ‘horns’,
termagant matrons and ‘big balled women’ (Brandes 1981:229, 231; cf. Blok 1981:429).
Following Strathern, we can begin to ask questions about the ways in which
ideas of gender difference are produced by ‘dividual’ persons. Just as the bride and
groom acquire fleeting but unambiguous gender identities through consummation,
so too do the generic categories ‘men’ and ‘women’ receive confirmation through the
defloration of a bride. Consider how the Algerian men Ghalem describes are, qua
men, united through the orgasmic quality of the public rituals associated with
consummation:
the excitement of the group grew; the women were waiting impatiently for
the consummation of the deflowering ritual. On the men’s side of the house
the anticipation was less visible, but it stirred up the desires and
imagination, and their memories of pleasure of the heart and body…[The
groom] drank his tea gravely, hoping to overcome his anxiety. He was
intimidated by this very young girl; she did not appeal to him; her body
was not open to life, but he had to make a woman of her and quickly, since
they were waiting outside…. The ears glued to the door outside heard the
young woman’s cries…. On the men’s side a few good riflemen fired the
wedding volley. The joy was at its zenith, the party reached paroxysm.
[The groom], hugged and congratuated by the friends around him, had
only one desire, to get out, to get out quickly. [His friends’] bodies stiffened
with desire, and then, relieved by that strange and secret complicity of
men, proud of their virility and in that moment deeply bound together.
(1984:34–5)
Ghalem’s description of the wedding night raises questions about desire which have
hardly been addressed in the literature on honour and shame. How is it constituted—
as an emotion or force, a need, in terms of satisfaction—and where is it located? How
are romance and the active sexuality of men and women understood and in what
ways can jinn spirits, devils, the evil eye and love potions activate and transform
them? Are there other aspects of sexuality which might qualify desire? For instance,
the vagina, hymen and womb, like the penis, often seem to have an active quality, a
quality perhaps most fearsomely expressed in the images of Aisha Kandisha, a
terrifying hag with pendulous breasts and toothed vagina. How might we
understand the polluting effects of semen and hymenal and menstrual blood, as well
as the blood of childbirth?
Notions of contamination, transmitted through genital contact, ingestion or
material objects, certainly hinge on tacit premises about ‘dividual’ persons and the
exchange of essences. In short, it seems certain that the construction of gendered
identities is far more complex in practice than the idealized images of penetrative sex,
or their lewd counterparts, imply.
Westermarck’s extended description of ceremonies of the ‘bride’s drawers’
(1914:228ff., 266ff.) in Morocco offers ethnographic examples of the variant
masculinities and femininities which are a product of an idealized notion of bridal
virginity. Thus, he notes the groom does not necessarily manage intercourse on the
wedding night and the ceremony takes place only after hymenal blood has appeared
(pp. 229, 271). A masculinity which trades on images of male potency must be altered
by such a delay and, in turn, define subordinate masculinities. Westermarck does not
discuss such delays further, yet his account of consummations treated as le droit de
seigneur or performed by a paid proxy (1914:271–2; cf. Giovannini 1987:66) suggests
the range of possibilities which may be practised.
In some places manual defloration rather than lege artis relieves the groom of
worries about his potency, but in general, impotence seems to be hedged round with
taboos. Some of these are local: thus, popular accounts of ‘wedding-night murders’ in
Turkey suggest that brides may be killed merely for being the inadvertent witnesses
of their husbands’ impotence.(6) In the ethnographic literature, impotence is a topic
often mentioned only in passing:7 thus, we learn little of the consequences for a
groom who fails to deflower his bride because he is too old, fat, or terrified. And what
of those who are helped by a friend or proxy, a midwife, their mothers and
sometimes even by their mothers-in-law? One poignant image is of a young boy who
cries out in an Afghan ballad:
Je ne suis qu’un petit garçon, père;
Pourquoi me maries tu?
Ma femme ne me connaît pas;
Elle se fait des rêves d’une mari.
Hai! Hai! Le matin j’ai si froid. (8)
A striking and terrible image comes from Michel Khleifi’s superb feature film, A
Wedding in Galilee. The groom’s impotence is a metaphor for the helplessness of the
Palestinians in the face of their Israeli oppressors; as the wedding guests pound
obscenely on the door, the young bride deflowers herself with a knife and defiantly
displays her own hymenal blood.
Clearly, public recognition of a man’s capacity for penetrative sex with his
virgin bride often defines an adult masculinity and associates this kind of sexuality
with economic privilege and control over others. However, in spite of the importance
of this moment, it is interesting that Westermarck, like most other ethnographers,
jumps from the spectre of impotence to the problem of the non-virgin bride. Both
bride and groom may have a vested interest in covering up not only male impotence
but also the bride’s prior unchastity. As Westermarck notes in passing, a man will
hesitate to accuse his bride of unchasteness because he thus admits that he himself
has slept with a ‘bitch’ (1914:236, 254, 270). Unfortunately, he does not explore further
the perception of interests which may lead to a cover-up, but he does offer some clues
to the fabrication of hegemonic masculinity.
Hymen repair is a strategy for preserving the illusion of virginity, and there are
others. Westermarck writes,
it may also happen that the bride’s parents, in order to avoid a scandal,
bribe the bridegroom to conceal the fact…in which case the blood of a fowl
or pigeon is used as a substitute for the lacking signs of virginity.
(1914:229; cf. 240, 243, 246)
It is worth considering not only the sheer logistics of the chicken-blood solution, but
also the subordinate masculinities which it constructs. In what ways does the groom’s
ignorance of, or acquiescence to, such a strategem qualify his relations with his new
in-laws and his bride? And are they all implicated in a cover-up visà-vis their
neighbours? And there may be quite other dynamics when virginity is irrelevant or
faked in wedding-night encounters. The issue to be documented ethnographically is
who is using the rhetoric and rituals of virginity in political contests with whom.
Thus, Loizos tells of a Cypriot couple who took great glee in telling him how, in the
1940s, they had conspired together to empty a bladder of chicken blood on the
marriage bed and avoid parental knowledge and disapproval of their pre-marital
encounters. Then it was shameful for a bride to be pregnant at her wedding, while
her groom would be mocked as a donkey because of his uncontrolled sexuality.(9) Or
the trickery may only concern the bride and groom: Rifaat’s short story ‘Honour’
(1990) tells of a non-virgin bride who deeply dislikes her new husband. The woman
pays a midwife to help her put ground glass in her vagina to make herself bleed and
to cause her groom excruciating pain.
Indeed, virginity as it is revealed by, and reveals, virility may be ritually marked
in circumstances which completely belie it or make its proof impossible. Jamous
(1981) and Combs-Schilling (1989), both writing of Morocco, argue that the use of
henna in wedding ceremonies actually precludes the need for dissimulation. They
argue that
henna symbolizes blood and blood spilling rather than sexual intercourse
consummates…first marriage ceremonies…sexual intercourse may or may not
have happened before that night and may or may not happen on that night. Yet
as long as the male spills blood and it is publicly exhibited, …the young man
becomes a man and the young woman a woman, each acquiring the rights and
duties associated with the new status. (Combs-Schilling 1989:197)
While such an argument mistakenly renders all ‘young men’ and ‘men’ the same,
there can be no doubt that such circularities protect hegemonic ideals. And there are
others: thus, among some Moroccans, it is common for a man to have intercourse
with his fiancée before the final wedding ceremonies have taken place. Thereafter,
‘the absence of the marks of virginity in a bride is interpreted as an indication that the
bridegroom has previously had intercourse with her… [and] it may happen that she
is already with child or even a mother at the wedding’ (Westermarck 1914:243, 248–9;
cf. Tapper 1991: 77–8).
Rhetorically, the virgin’s unbroken hymen is an attribute that stands for a
unitary individual, and at that moment when chastity is proven, it defines that
individual’s gender as entirely and unambiguously female. Hymenal penetration also
creates an unambiguously gendered male: it is the means by which a man makes
known his virility to himself and others. Finally, hymenal penetration effects a radical
transformation: the womb thus acted upon is transformed and can be made to realize
its fertile potential and, by extension, that of the man.(10)
DIVISIBLE PEOPLE, GENDERED IDENTITIES AND HEGEMONIC IDEALS
Defloration by penetrative sex seems an essential component of the hegemonic
masculinities of the Mediterranean and Middle East. Indeed, female virginity as an
idealized notion is so important that it is often reified through deliberate trickery.
Where there is such a focus on virginity, impotence and delayed consummation, as
well as drugged brides (Dorsky 1986:124–5), wedding-night rape (Hegland 1992;
Westermarck 1914:265) and the absence of proof of a bride’s virginity, all become
pressing if censored concerns. In short, we will greatly mislead ourselves if we
consider that the display of bloodied linen, the cries of joy (by all but the bride), the
gunshots and waving flags have to do only with the abstractions we translate as
‘honour’ and ‘shame’.
Rhetorically, notions of virility which depend on the defloration of a virgin
bride amount to a wholesale, and circular, affirmation of male superiority and control
over women: ‘The concepts of honour and virginity locate the prestige of a man
between the legs of a woman’ (Mernissi 1982:183). Both the groom and other male
wedding guests celebrate their empowerment as actors and audience, and before an
audience of women. Of course, the rhetoric of this empowerment is varied and
specific: thus, in Morocco, male potency is ritually linked with the social power of the
aristocracy and that of the Sultan (Westermarck 1914:233; cf. Jamous 1981:265ff.;
Combs-Schilling 1989:190ff.). But disempowerment is also possibility: both a bride
who proves to have been unchaste, or a groom’s failure to deflower her, call into
question the general and particular associations of men with male dominance and
construct subordinate masculinities.
The category ‘women’ is no more monolithic than that of ‘men’. A hegemonic
femininity (cf. Giovannini 1981) is also produced by the rituals of defloration, and
women, too, are active participants in its construction. ‘Honourable’ women -those
who seem to conform most closely to the ideals of chastity and who are fertile—gain
privileges and social precedence. The bride is certainly an interested party. If she
successfully loses her virginity on her wedding night, she demonstrates her prior
chastity, her husband’s virility and the honour of their respective families; she is
likely to retain both her husband’s and her family’s support later in her marriage.
Moreover, her wedding-night transformation from virgin to non-virgin confirms her
adult status and the possibility of legitimate fertility. The celebrations also associate
all other women with those privileges of marriage which depend on the salience of
gender difference. Whether we consider what Rogers calls ‘myths of male dominance’
(1975), or Kandiyoti’s notion of the ‘patriarchal bargain’ (1988a), it is clear that an
emphasis on the separateness of men and women sustains the rhetoric and practice of
male dominance while simultaneously creating domains in which some successful
women exercise control over both material resources and other people.
There can be no doubt that the rhetoric of honour is politically effective
because it operates at a level of abstraction which hides classificatory ambiguities and
alternative points of view, while empowering some fortunate men and women. A
bride’s defloration by penetrative sex is a ritual moment when, ideally, a ‘real’ man is
potent and a ‘real’ woman is chaste, when gendered difference and hierarchy can be
experienced as quintessentially real. Undoubtedly, this is one aspect of what honour
is ‘for’ (cf. Davis 1969: 79). However, even the quintessential moment of defloration
defines other, subordinate identities. And, of course, everyday interactions produce
an even wider range of ambiguous and ever-changing masculinities and femininities.
NOTES
Many friends helped me write this chapter. I am particularly grateful to Leila Zaki
Chakravaty and Mary Hegland for their lively observations, while special thanks are
due to Andrea Cornwall, Veronica Doubleday, Dale Eickelman, Peter Loizos, Pierre
Centlivres and Sue Wright for their incisive comments on earlier drafts. Fieldwork in
Afghanistan was funded by the SSRC (Project No. HR 1141/ 1). The paper was first
read at the SOAS anthropology department seminar on ‘Com-oddities’ in November
1991.
1. Models that emphasize an extreme dichotomization of gender reinforce
heterosexual biases, and other sexualities are often ignored or inadequately
described. For instance, Wikan’s suggestion that male homosexual prostitutes in
Oman constitute a third sex does not do justice to her own more complex
ethnography (1977; Shepherd 1978, 1987). However, there are some exceptions: cf.
Delaney’s (1991:50) discussion of the relation between body morphology and
gendered identities in the case of male homosexuality and sex-change operations in
Turkey.
2. Another topic that deserves further research concerns the close parallels often
found beween rituals of boys’ circumcision and those of marriage. See e.g. Kennedy
1978:155ff. or Tapper 1979:168–9.
3. We know little of how subordinate and variant masculinities are refracted through
hegemonic notions of fatherhood. Certainly men who have not fathered children are
often deemed less than ‘real men’ and the stigma may be such that sterile men
connive with their wives to gain heirs (cf. Peters 1980:145; Tapper 1991:125). But what
of the masculine identity of those men who never marry or those whose children do
not survive infancy or prove defective in some way?
4. Delaney’s rich ethnography of a Turkish village (1991) offers another detailed
account of how embodied experiences create and sustain gendered difference. See
also Good (1977) on other aspects of embodiment in the Middle East.
5. The recreation of virginal potential may take other, less literal, forms. In
Afghanistan, a man may both address and refer to his wife using the word pegla,
which may be translated as ‘virgin’. Or, in Greece, married women refer to each other
by a term which may be translated ‘daughter/virgin’. Here I wonder if the women are
not referring to the same kind of self-contained, sterile sexuality that Greek men are
marking when they use the term ‘masturbator’ among themselves (Loizos and
Papataxiarchis 1991:227, 229; cf. Loizos, Chapter 3 in this volume).
6. Deniz Kandiyoti, personal communication.
7. There are of course some exceptions: see e.g. Wikan 1977:308–9.
8. My thanks to Pierre Centlivres for bringing this to my attention. The ballad was
translated by Darmesteter (1888–90).
9. Peter Loizos, personal communication.
10. The various contexts in which different, competing and sometimes contradictory
theories of conception are expressed remain largely unexplored. Some theories of
conception reproduce versions of hegemonic masculinity (cf. Delaney 1986, 1991;
Musallam 1983:52ff.), while others, perhaps articulated by the same people to a
different audience, disrupt dominant notions (cf. Musallam 1983:52ff.; Tapper
1991:57, 70).
Chapter 5
‘We’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going
shopping’
Changing gay male identities in contemporary Britain
David Forrest
SETTING THE SCENE
Oh a great deal of pains he’s taken and a pretty price he’s paid
To hide his poll of dye it of a mentionable shade:
But they’ve pulled the beggar’s hat off for the world to see
And stare,
And they’re hailing him to justice for the colour of is hair.
(Housman, ‘O who is that young sinner’ 1988:217)
It is tempting to draw an analogy here between the poet’s young sinner and the
contemporary gay (1) Londoner, assuming that a representative of the latter can in
fact be found. He could be said to have changed the image he projects to the broader
society, as well as his own self-perceptions, to ones that can be seen as more
acceptable. Those aspects of his identity which centre upon his homosexuality—his
same-sex desires and behaviour—may have become more prominent of late, but he
appears to have moved away from seeing himself, and being seen by others, as a
‘gender invert’, a ‘feminine’ soul in a ‘male’ body, and towards seeing himself and
being seen as a complete (that is, ‘real’) man: a union of his biological sex with what
he perceives to be, and what he assumes to be socially accepted as, the natural
mental, physical, individual and social characteristics of men.
In a move variously documented as ‘the butch-shift’ (Segal 1990: Fernbach
1981) or as the ‘masculinization of the gay man’ (Gough 1989; Marshall 1981), the last
three decades have seen the emergence of such ‘macho’ figures as the moustached
‘clone’, the tattooed ‘leatherman’ or ‘biker’, and more recently the all-American ‘jock’,
Gay men, it now seems, are going to the city’s gyms in droves. In virtually all gay
erotica and in the advertisements for gay chat-lines, escorts, and bars and clubs,
macho posturing, bulging biceps, sculpted pectorals and lashings of torn denim,
black leather and sports gear appear to be the norm rather than the exception.
However, when we take a closer look at these representations things appear
much less straightforward. Personal ads in the gay press appeal for ‘similar straightacting’ partners—sexual or otherwise, Gay men still behave in ‘unmanly’ ways. Many
of us frequent ‘drag shows’, applauding and mimicking the artiste who struts around
in his exaggeratedly ‘feminine’ attire. We still hear many gay men referring to others
as ‘she’, and hear talk of ‘drama queens’ (emotionally charged men), ‘size queens’
(men who like big cocks) or ‘muscle queens’ (bodybuilders).The last seems to make
nonsense of the traditional association between muscles and physical (masculine)
toughness, since ‘queens’, enthroned or otherwise, are hardly synonymous with
muscles. In addition many gay men like to be fucked, behaviour, as Pronger points
out, seen by much of mainstream heterosexual society (and some ‘homosexuals’ too)
as ‘the deepest violation of masculinity in our culture’ (1990:135; cf. Loizos and
Cornwall, Chapters 3 and 6 in this volume). Here the recipient is seen as the ‘passive’
(and therefore ‘feminized’?) object of an ‘active’ and penetrating ‘male’.
Inside a typical club our gay macho man might be seen drinking mineral
water rather than strong lager. His perfectly sculpted chest may be shaved and oiled;
his hair neatly gelled. He might own a ‘camp’ flat off the King’s Road. He may be a
stockbroker from middle-class suburbia, but he could just as well be a makeup artist
from an inner-city slum. He may still see himself as a ‘real man’, but in what sense?
Surely, as Quentin Crisp remarked with regard to ‘homosexual’ men desiring ‘real
men’: ‘If they succeed, they fail. A man who “goes with” other men is not what they
would call a real man’ (quoted in Pronger 1990:141). Which of his personal attributes,
then, is our gay man drawing upon in an effort to portray his ‘masculinity’, his
‘manhood’ or his ‘maleness’?
Before pursuing these questions further it might be useful to return to the
analogy with the poet’s young sinner. Our gay (male) Londoner is still able to draw
upon his social status as a man and so reaps the benefits that such subscription can
bring in an unequally gendered society like Britain. In addition, he has recently
received a certain amount of respectability, even legitimacy, with the elevation of his
kind to what I call ‘community’ status. The ‘gay community’ now ‘exists’, at least
within political, academic and liberal discourse, alongside the ‘Afro-Caribbean
community’, ‘the mining community’, ‘the business community’ and so on. Similarly,
businesses owned by heterosexual men or women in those areas with a large,
concentrated and relatively affluent gay population are not averse to appealing to the
‘gay consumer’: ‘A buck is a buck’, writes one contibutor to a Toronto newspaper,
‘Who the hell cares if the wrist holding it is limp?’ (Altman 1982:18).
Yet once again our gay man’s true colours also continue to provide a basis for
his continuing persecution. Either he remains ridiculed by many hetero-sexuals as
‘not quite a man’, a comical type of figure, habitually accustomed to dressing in
‘female’ clothes and typically employed in the more ‘feminine’ professions such as
hairdressing or the fashion industry, and the ‘less serious’ world of the arts in
general; or he is portrayed as some sinister pervert lurking in alleyways, a threat to
‘public morality’, ‘our children’ and ‘traditional family life’. In their unelected and
largely unaccountable role as custodians of public decency, national and local
newspapers are unrelenting in their pursuit of ‘queer’ vicars, ‘perverted’
schoolteachers, ‘kinky’ judges, and gay politicians and celebrities.
Such are the paradoxical and contradictory ‘realities’ of ‘gay life’ in London.
Clearly then, any analysis of the changing nature of gay male identities must be able
to confront, problematize and deconstruct ‘traditional’ key concepts such as ‘identity’,
‘the masculine’ and ‘gay oppression’. Such concepts must never be taken as
undifferentiated and unproblematic wholes, partly because it is bad anthropological
practice to do so, and partly because their hegemonic meanings are often framed in
terms favourable to the dominant powers in society. I therefore have no intention of
inventing some sort of monolithic model or series of models into which all gay men
are to be squeezed. But neither is it my intention to get ‘lost’ within the frenzied
postmodernist pursuit of difference, deconstruction and ambiguity. This chapter
considers the constantly evolving nature of gay male identities, as well as our shifting
interpretations of such phenomena, not in isolation, but as part of developments
occurring within the economic, social and political structures and practices of the
broader society. A look at the complexities of a particular historical trajectory—the
dialectical relationship between the gay man and his environment—ought to be
central to any understanding of this far from straightforward ‘gay present’.
It is within this framework that I take a closer look at what we mean when we
talk in terms of ‘the masculine’ and ‘the feminine’ and at how the apparent
‘masculinization of the gay man’ fits in with such gendered categories. I begin by
looking briefly at the emergence of the gay man, and at the way in which the identity
of this historical figure has moved from that of the ‘effeminate’ and socalled ‘gender
invert’ towards that of the ‘macho man’. I then consider how such a butch-shift has
been enhanced by, and in turn helped to develop, what has become known as the
‘commercial gay scene’ and the gay man’s sense of ‘community’.
IDENTITY, THE INDIVIDUAL, AND THE
EMERGENCE OF THE GAY MAN
All people have a sense of self and their place in a given social order, however
confusing or complex the setting or context. In this sense then, identity may be seen to
be as integral to our psychic being as our capacity to reason. This, of course, says
nothing about its varying content, something to which Jeffrey Weeks is referring
when he writes:
Identity is not inborn, pregiven, or ‘natural’. It is striven for, contested,
regulated, and achieved, often in struggles of the subordinated against the
dominant. Moreover, it is not achieved by an individual act of will, ‘or
discovered hidden in the recesses of the soul. It is put together in
circumstances bequeathed by history as much as by personal destiny.
(1989a:207)
Marx reminds us in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that, ‘Men make their
own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under
circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances given and transmitted
from the past’ (1959:320). In other words, human agency must be placed firmly within
the ideological and material structures and practices of the past and present. Present
gay male identities are social because they emerge and are sustained by a process of
regulation and interaction with others, within a given economic and ideological
environment. For most gay men their identity as gay men hinges on their same-sex
desires and behaviour. In other words, their ‘sexuality’ is the critical factor in the way
they perceive themselves. Any account of the development of a ‘gay identity’ must
therefore include a look at sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular.
Moreover, as Foucault (1984) and Weeks (1977, 1989b) have illustrated, such
phenomena must be historically and culturally situated. Foucault, for instance, posits
the constuction of what became known as ‘the homosexual’ firmly within the legal,
administrative and social changes brought about by the advent of industrial
capitalism; crucially he recognizes the bureaucratic capitalist state’s increasingly
zealous intrusion into the sexual mores of a rapidly expanding, and frequently
discontented, population.
Regulation of sexual behaviour, of course, was nothing new. But as Foucault
points out, prior to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries all
nonreproductive sexual relations were regulated under the prevalent canonical,
pastoral and civil rules. By the Victorian era, monogamous heterosexual marriage
was ‘legitimized’ as ‘natural’ by the powerful medical and psychiatric institutions,
and tended to function as the norm. ‘What (now) came under scrutiny’, Foucault
notes, ‘was the sexuality of children, mad men and women, and criminals; the
sexuality of those who did not like the opposite sex’ (1984: 318). Legal sanctions
against minor perversions multiplied: sexual irregularity was annexed to mental
illness; ‘from childhood to old age, a norm of sexual development was defined and all
possible deviations were carefully described’ (1984:316). Accompanying this
encroachment of powers, scattered sexualities rigidified, became stuck to an age, a
place, a type of practice. Moreover, ‘perversions’ such as homosexuality were
stigmatized not just as a series of sexual acts, but as a state of mind. This, claims
Weeks, was crucial, ‘indicating a massive shift in attitudes giving rise to what is
distinctively new in our culture; the categorization of homosexuality as a separate
condition and the correlative emergence of homosexual identity’ (1977:81).(2)
Most importantly, though, the emergence of ‘the homosexual man’— someone
able and willing to define himself as a distinct type of individual on the basis of his
same-sex desires and behaviour—took place within a largely middle-class,
metropolitan milieu. It was a milieu in which those men who habitually ‘went with’
and desired other men became seen as ‘gender inverts’; they were seen to have the
appropriate social (gendered) qualities of the female sex (qualities which were
themselves based upon an evolving hegemonic bourgeois ideology of womanhood).
Bourgeois women, for example, were expected to be confined to the ‘less serious’ task
of homemaking; the ‘feminine’ becoming synonymous not only with certain ‘weak’
physical appearances, but also with a similar state of mind. And so too the
homosexual man.
Male same-sex behaviour and desires, as both Weeks (1977; 1989b) and Gough
(1989) have noted, were not, however, confined to those who selfidentified as
homosexual. On the contrary, perhaps until as late as the 1950s, ‘the norm’ usually
necessitated the formation of sexual relations with a different type of man—a man
who did not live within, nor identify with, ‘feminized’ homosexual milieu, but who
none the less had sex with other men. Usually he was from the lower classes, was
married and did not see himself as homosexual.
The latter, by forming sexual
relations with ‘effeminate’ homosexuals, whether for economic gain or otherwise,
was able to see his own sexuality as at least quasi-heterosexual, and himself as the
‘man’ in the encounter. Of course it was also true that the ‘visible’ or ‘self-identified’
homosexual would possibly see himself as a real man, in spite of his milieu, if he had
sex with younger/socially inferior men and/or was the penetrator in the encounter.
Nevertheless, many men who self-identified as homosexual also selfidentified,
to some significant degree, with the psychiatric and medical establishment’s notions
of sexual perversion and gender inversion. In other words, the hegemonic model was,
until very recently, that of the gender invert. As we saw at the start of this chapter,
this association has continued through to the present, most overtly within right-wing
heterosexual discourse. But since the 1970s there has occurred a marked shift away
from
the
old
stereotype
towards
a
‘masculine’
one.
The
contemporary
‘masculinization’ of the gay man, then, involved the weakening of the link between
male homosexuality and the female gender. The link between sexuality and gender
has of course remained, but what has obviously changed, as Gough points out, is the
fact that this new ‘masculine’ identity—in style, mannerisms, certain forms of social
behaviour and so on—has become rooted in male physiology rather than a peculiar
‘feminine’ psyche: ‘the social in the biological’ (Gough 1989:120).
In certain respects, as Humphries has noted, this butch-shift is a ‘direct
response to the popular view that homosexuality involves at a very deep level a lack
of masculinity’ (1985:71). But the question remains: can this move be posited solely
within some sort of mythically autonomous free market of ‘good ideas’? If so, how do
we explain the particular timing and rather contradictory outcome of consumer
choice? Essentially, as Gough points out, this ‘idealist’ perspective tends to reverse
the real relation of the social form of sexuality—the ‘masculine’ gay man
(fundamentally the effect)—and the material relations of gender—the unequal
structuring of capitalist society along certain lines (fundamentally the cause)
(1989:133).
Gough (1989) notes how the butch-shift emerged from major social and
economic changes brought about by the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s;
changes which made it easier to drive a wedge between gay male sexuality and
‘effeminacy’. First, there has occurred an erosion and blurring of the sexual division
of labour, whereby women have moved increasingly into the more ‘serious’ male
world of waged work, with demands for equality of opportunity, pay parity and the
like. We now have female judges, astronauts, electricians and so on, despite
enormous discrimination.
Secondly, the increasing use and availability of contraception has tended to
separate heterosex further from reproduction, thus ‘freeing’ female and male
sexualities. It has become acceptable for women to have overt desires themselves. The
‘objectification’ of ‘the woman’, long a legitimate feminist target, has been joined by
the objectification of the male, although the implications are not the same.
Thirdly, this ‘objectification’ of the male body has undoubtedly been given
much greater significance by the ever-increasing commoditization of social relations
typical of late/consumer capitalism (Jameson 1983; Harvey 1989). Athletic-looking
male models are increasingly being used in advertising, and there can be little
argument against the notion that sex/(hetero)sexuality ‘sells’. As Pronger points out,
‘commerce has taken sex not only as a commodity in itself, but also as the enticement
by which it transforms products into objects of desire’ (1990:42). Male nudes appear
in art galleries, on posters, cards, etc.
(notwithstanding continuing official
censorship), while semi-nude male dance troupes and male strippers such as the
Chippendales illustrate that the contours of the male body are now ‘hotter’ property
than ever before: ‘man the hunter’ has now also become ‘man the (“feminized”?)
prey’.
As part of a broader societal trend, Altman points out that, ‘as Western
countries became societies of high consumption, rapid credit, and rapid technological
development, it was not surprising that the dominant sexual ideology of restraint and
repression…came under increasing attack’ (1982:90). The eroticization of a ‘consumer
ethos’ is more pronounced today in the so called conservative 1990s than in the preAIDS, ‘permissive’ 1960s and 1970s. Fourthly, this shift towards the commoditization
and sexualization of social relations in general has been accompanied by a correlative
deepening and widening of heterosexual (as well as homosexual) male identities. One
of the consequences of these changes, as Gough points out, has been that fewer
nominally ‘straight’ men are now perhaps willing to be stigmatized for having
occasional/casual gay sex.
In this sense, over the last twenty or so years homosexuality may be
considered to have become more ‘deviant’, and the sexual pool on which nominally
gay men depended has narrowed. Conversely, the correlative growth of a distinct
‘gay scene’ since the 1960s has probably weakened the view of gay male sexuality as
an obscure and ‘deviant’ entity. At least in large urban areas, London in particular,
gay men have become much more visible and ‘accepted’ as part of a tolerated subculture. This is not to imply, however, that homosexual behaviour is therefore
considered an ‘acceptable’ practice for everyone.
Participants in ‘the scene’ are now able to seek sexual partners amongst other
identified homosexuals. Male homosexuals, in effect, became desired as well as
desirers (Gough 1989:129). Moreover, they become desired as men: as ‘real/ complete’
men. Self-conceptualization as either distinctly ‘masculine’ (and therefore ‘active’ and
not homosexual) or ‘feminine/gender-inverted’ (and therefore ‘passive’ and distinctly
homosexual) appears to have given way to a more uniform, if paradoxical, masculine
identity.3 It has enabled, ‘many men…to come out of the closet by thinking that
(their) homosexuality poses no threat to their masculinity’ (Pronger 1990:76). But this
begs the question of why such ‘masculine’ characteristics (however ambiguous and
contradictory) have been desired, adopted and consciously reinforced by gay men. In
other words, why is there this need to be seen as or feel like ‘real men’, and how
possible is it to meet this need?
HIERARCHY AND GENDER: SUSTAINING AN
IDEOLOGY OF SEXUAL DIFFERENCE
We are all socialized either as men or women. It is very difficult to think ourselves
outside what Pronger calls ‘the filter of gender’ (1990:1). ‘It is gender’ he notes, ‘that
makes physical sex meaningful in social, cultural, and sexual contexts’ (ibid.: 49). This
‘gender myth exaggerates the minor physiological differences between male and
female, transforming them into opposites’ (ibid.: 51), Moreover, it helps to divide
power unequally between men and women, notwithstanding the way gender is
extricably linked with class, race, region, nationality, age, ability, disability and so on.
It is not surprising, therefore, that gay men wish to be seen as ‘real men’. As Segal
points out, in a hierarchically gendered society such as ours, ‘to be masculine is not to
be feminine…or gay; not to be tainted with any marks of “inferiority”—ethnic or
otherwise’ (1990:x). Women’s associated gender characteristics—such as gestures,
concerns, dress, mannerisms, language and the like—are seen as inferior ways of
behaving, regardless of whether they are taken on by a man or a woman, and
regardless of whether they originate within a working-class or middle-class milieu.
This hostility directed towards the ‘feminine’ cannot be overestimated—there
remains this tight connection between misogyny and hatred of homosexuals. As Segal
points out, ‘although the persecution of homosexuals is usually the act of men against
a minority of other men, it is also the forced repression of the “feminine” in all men’
(1990:16). It continues in spite of the significant inroads women have made into the
public (waged) spheres of British society, and in spite of the increasingly outward
‘masculization’ of gay men in general.
Probably nowhere is this forced repression of the ‘feminine’ more evident
than in our military institutions. Segal points to the paradoxical tolerance (in a very
limited sense) for actual homosexual behaviour within the army despite rigidly
enforced taboos on tenderness and a rampantly homophobic 4 ideology. Here
‘femininity’, it would appear, belongs more to the realm of ‘unmanly’ feelings than to
the perversity of certain sexual acts themselves. Segal adds that, ‘in institutions
committed to “making a man” out of young men, those who suffer the most from
homophobia, routine bullying…are …as likely to be heterosexually as homosexually
inclined’ (1990:143).
Male bonding and intense male friendship, Foucault suggests, are inimical to
the smooth functioning of many modern institutions such as the army or educational
and administrative bureaucracies. ‘Heterosexual’ men are expected to be aware of
how different they are from both women and homosexuals—between being a
homosocial man and a homosexual man, or, to put it another way, between being a
‘man’s man’ and ‘interested in men’. The ideological construction of ‘homophobia’
serves to tell us how different the two are. Yet ‘homophobia’ continues to flourish,
remaining implicit in much government legislation covering female and gay male
sexuality, and frequently explicit in the right-wing press, in school playgrounds, at
the pulpit, in men’s clubs and in the military.
The problem of ‘bonding’ is now confounded by the fact that western men
individually and competitively seek proof of their ‘manhood’, through sporting
achievements, sexual exploits and the restructuring of their bodies (through weighttraining, body-building, even plastic surgery). Initiations of this sort, together with
this simultaneous erosion of the sexual division of labour and the emergence of the
male body as a ‘desired’ and ‘objectified’ commodity, seem to have produced a
certain recentring of the masculine arena. We may be witnessing the proliferation of
certain identities based on sexual practices, fashion, life-styles or certain fetishes, but
these revolve around the athletic male body.
This shift cuts across class and cultural boundaries. The ‘functional Rambo’ is
not only a North American phenomenon.
Yet commercial appeals to man’s
‘masculine’ heritage often seem little more than a parody of a mythic past. Rambo
star Sylvester Stallone refused to visit Europe because of his fear of ‘terrorists’; hunky
male models for Levi Strauss jeans may reveal their ‘ideal’ athletic bodies on our TV
screens, but their sex appeal also relies upon make-up artists, male toiletries and the
like. Whatever its contradictions or changing characteristics, ‘male masculinity’ is tied
to a masculine body. This body is hard, muscular and athletic; a symbol (if not a
guarantee) of power within a hierarchically gendered society. Gay men may be
attracted to different degrees of masculine expression, of which the body is just a
part. But by enhancing our physical ‘manliness’ we have done much to dilute the
myth of our ‘womanly’ and inferior nature. Yet through our ‘masculinization’ are we
not also reinforcing the very gender categories which are frequently the source of that
oppression? Surely, as Marshall has pointed out, ‘the emergence of [gay] “macho
men” illustrates the extent to which definitions of male homosexuality continue to be
pervaded by the tyranny of gender divisions’ (1981).
However, we also need to be aware of the paradoxical nature of this gay
masculinity. Pronger claims that, ‘Masculinity is the source of homoerotic desire’
(1990:130), yet it is a masculinity, he insists, which is fundamentally at odds with
what he calls ‘orthodox masculinity’. For example, homoeroticism violates the
difference of manhood from womanhood because it is directed towards gender
affinity:
Because homoerotic desire focuses on manhood but ignores the sexual acts
that bring about manhood, homoeroticism reflects a paradoxical sense of
what it means to be a man. Because it both embraces and violates
masculinity, homoeroticism is a paradoxical eroticism. (Pronger 1990:71)
Pronger also highlights its potentially subversive nature. He notes,
In our culture male homosexuality is a violation of masculinity, a
denigration of the mythic power of men, an ironic subversion that significant
numbers of men pursue with great enthusiasm. Because it gnaws at
masculinity it weakens the gender order. But because masculinity is at the
heart of homoerotic desire, homosexuality is essentially a paradox in the
myth of gender. (1990:2)
It would be safe to say, then, that gay masculinity must be seen simultaneously as
both subversive (in that it challenges orthodox masculinity) and reactionary (in that it
reinforces gender stereotypes—a crucial factor in the oppression of gay sexuality). To
suggest that this butch-shift is one or the other is to ignore the paradoxical nature of
masculinity in general, and gay masculinity in particular.
The same sort of dilemma, it is useful to note, forces attempts at
understanding the gay ‘camp’ alternatives of the 1960s and 1970s and the more recent
‘queer’ movement. ‘Camp’, as Segal points out, may enable gay men ‘to be different
and proud of it’ (1990:145), but some of its key ‘attributes’, such as artistic creativity,
‘queerness’ and ‘femininity’, are still seen as somehow less serious or important than
the ‘masculine’ world of work and reason. It was hardly surprising, then, that such
movements in the 1970s remained largely in the domain of the urban middle class:
students, academics, artists and others with perhaps less to lose in adopting such an
identity.
Aside from the very real threat from ‘queer-bashers’ it is important to
remember that most gay men can, and often do, pass as ‘straight’, and in doing so
continue to reap the advantages awarded to them as men. Even camp’s positive
features, such as insistence on one’s ‘otherness’ and a refusal to pass as straight,
remain ‘irredeemably compromised by complicity in the traditional, oppressive
formulations of that “otherness”’ (Blanchford 1981: 202–3). As such, camp can be seen
as replacing the signs of ‘masculinity’ with a parody of the signs of ‘femininity’,
therefore reinforcing existing social definitions of both categories. Conversely, it may
act as ‘little more than a kind of anaesthetic, allowing one to remain inside oppressive
relations while enjoying the illusory confidence that one is flouting them’ (ibid.). Even
camp’s more ‘masculinist’ successor—the ‘queer’ movement which has emerged over
the last few years—seems to attempt little more than to ‘dethrone the serious’ in a
selfconscious and very postmodern ‘form-is-content’ style (Pronger 1990:229). What is
crucial is that politicized movements of this sort, failed or otherwise, must not be
looked at in isolation.
THE POLITICIZATION OF THE GAY MAN
As we saw in the second section, the emergence of the masculine gay man could not
have take place without the coming together of large numbers of otherwise isolated
homosexual men. The emerging ‘gay scene’ created an arena for a particular
masculinization of the gay male. With its bars, night-clubs, magazines and
newspapers, bookstores and various groups—political and otherwise—there is little
doubt that ‘the scene’ succeeded in meeting some of the most basic needs of its
young, predominantly (but by no means exclusively) white middle-class participants.
It has also played an important part in what has become a sort of collective gay
identity. It has deepened our sense of gayness and to some extent reinforced
essentialist notions of difference, where sexuality has been seen as the main
determinant of this difference.
Although written with reference to the development of ethnic identities,
Comaroff’s excellent analysis of group dynamics and identity formation (1987) may
also be applied to the emerging collective gay identity. Once ‘ethnicity’ is seen by a
group as the factor determining its particular (in this case, subordinate) place within
the social system, events may then conspire to perpetuate and deepen such an
identity. Moreover, as Vance suggests, within an ideological and political context it is
often to the advantage of all groups struggling for resources to stress not only group
unity (in this case based on same-sex behaviour) and historical privilege, but also
their status as an essential group to which members have no choice in belonging
(1989:27–8). We may note, for example, the instant (if cautious) welcome given to the
recent ‘discovery’ of what scientists in America termed ‘the gay gene’; the main
response appears to have been ‘told you we couldn’t help it’ (LeVay 1992).(5) In
addition, a ‘gay history’ is being slowly assembled around ‘outed’ public figures from
King Edward II through to William Shakespeare and Field Marshal Viscount
Montgomery.
In certain fundamental respects categorization not only seeks to deter people
from drifting into ‘deviancy’, it appears to foreclose on the possibility of drifting back
into ‘normality’ (MacIntosh 1968:32). However, I would suggest that gay identity
depends on context. Moreover, I am not so sure we can be certain that gay men make
such conscious distinctions in the first place. Nevertheless, as Altman argues, this
collective identity, for all its benefits, also has the effect of reinforcing prejudices that
homosexuals are a distinct group rather than ‘a potential open to us all’ (1980:56).
Whether homosexuality is a ‘potential’ open to us all is not the point. What is
important is that this construction of an exclusive, mythical past and present must be
seen in its wider social context. This relationship has been well documented,6 though
several issues deserve emphasis here.
Collective lesbian and gay ‘resistance’ has been very much a part of the
alternative, non-class-based strategies emerging in the late 1960s. Strongly influenced
by the feminist movements, political programmes were, and continue to be,
propagated by the unelected and largely white, male, liberal, middle-class ‘leaders’
who incline towards the view that, ‘whatever income bracket lesbians and gay men
enjoy, their sexuality expunges privilege and expels them from class’ (Rouge 1990).
True, gay sexuality is rigorously policed and regulated to the point where most gay
men experience some degree of oppression and discrimination as gay men, but pace
such arguments, it quite clearly fails to deny gay men most of the privileges
associated with manhood, and clearly does not expel us from class. Nevertheless,
comparatively wealthy professional middleclass and upper-class gay men—highly
vocal and powerful within ‘the community’—are expected to coexist with
unemployed white or black unskilled workers.
Yet the former, on account of their position as class subjects in a class divided
society, do not automatically lose all the material and social benefits awarded to them
even though the dominant social practices of that very same society are instrumental
in sustaining their oppression as gay men. For them, capitalist social practice may not
seem too bad even if it tends to be policed by bigoted ‘homophobes’. In addition, both
unemployed gay men, who otherwise have very little at stake in the present system,
and wealthy gay men benefit from their position as men in a society with a massive
history of sexual inequality.
Perhaps, as Eagleton observes, ‘it is because being
oppressed sometimes brings with it slim bonuses that we are occasionally prepared to
put up with it’ (1991:xiii).
Given the long tradition of suspicion and even contempt our white, liberal,
middle-class political elite (gay or otherwise) has towards the collectivist working
class, the personalizing tendencies in the gay movement are hardly surprising. The
success of this process in imperializing the political consciousness of the gay
movement and of ordinary working people in general, though, is as much to do with
the fact that gay men, like women and ethnic minorities, constantly have to face a
personal and private struggle as it is a reflection of broader global defeats of
collectivist class action (especially since 1968). Transcending this ‘personal-problem’
perspective seems quite difficult. As Denneny points out, there appears to exist a
‘widespread tendency to believe that once we have accomplished the psychological
ordeal known as “coming out”, we are suddenly and magically free of the negative
conditioning of our homophobic society’ (1983:420).
One bonus western capitalism seems to have delivered (if reluctantly) is a
highly developed ‘gay scene’. As part of ‘the gay community’, we join a whole host of
apparently free and equal ‘elective communities’ or ‘communities of choice’ (Weeks
1989a). ‘Community’ status can be based on ethnicity (the Asian community) or
occupation (the mining or business community) as well as sexuality.
For most gay men a sense of community has always been centred on a
commercial scene—pubs, clubs, bookstores, porn movies and so on. Since the late
1970s, however, there has been a proliferation of such commercial activities. Gay
businesses in London have mushroomed, while mainstream businesses are not slow
to latch on to the ‘high disposable income’ of many single gay men in work. From
gyms, through certain ‘men’s magazines’ with their homoerotic undertones, to music
and TV shows with large gay followings and even the sale (as in some Canadian gay
bars) of a beer called ‘Pride’ (Rouge 1992, no. 11), business appears keen not to drive
away ‘the pink pound’.
Our sense of a gay community is increasingly determined by commercial
interests. And for some gay men for whom community emphasis predicates political
action there has been a ‘shifting stress from the language of oppression, liberation,
and “the movement”, to one of discrimination, rights, and “the community”’ (Altman
1982:21). This, Altman suggests, ‘indicates the new integration of gays through the
commercial world into mainstream society’ (ibid.). Though some gay groups see
assimilation into mainstream commercial society as undesirable, they challenge
neither the new consumer ethos nor the idea of a separate or exclusive gay culture.
Such is the case with the ‘queer movement’ that appeared in Britain at the end of the
1980s.
Anti-assimilationist groups such as ‘Homocult’ and ‘Outrage’ promote the
concepts of ‘queer’ and ‘difference’, but do so using commercial means—fashion,
night-clubs, cinema and so on. Like the politicized camp of the 1970s, the queer
movement’s activists appear to subscribe to the philosophy that if they are loud and
outrageous enough, they will be able to promote a different or better kind of ‘gay
culture’. Mass kiss-ins, outrageous attire at gay weddings and male ‘nuns’ on rollerskates make good copy for newspapers, but it is doubtful whether they change the
behaviour or psyche of those gay men or heterosexuals outside ‘the queer
movement’.
Of course, whether we are talking about the mainstream ‘gay community’ or
the antics of ‘queer life-stylers’, we must recognize the porous nature of such cultural
boundaries. ‘Community’ membership overlaps with membership of other
‘communities’ and frequently cuts across class and gender divisions. A sense of
community membership is situational and fluid. It differs from individal to
individual and can only be one facet of identity. Like ‘masculinity’, ‘community’ may
be seen as very ‘real’ in that it has a real impact on our lives. But, equally, it is a
myth, something forever beyond our grasp.
CONCLUSIONS
Throughout this chapter I have attempted to draw out the key elements in the
formation of a distinct and hegemonic masculine gay male identity in Britain, both in
the personal/individual sense and in its collective/political manifestations. This
notional identity is far from static, monolithic or contextfree, and the constructs on
which it depends, such as ‘the masculine’ and ‘the community’, do not have a reality
outside the contexts in which they are ascribed particular meanings. A more detailed
analysis would look at the effects of class, ethnicity, religion, age, ability/disability
and regional environment upon identity formation and composition. Nevertheless, I
argue that even the most elementary understanding of the changing nature of gay
male identities can only progress when we start to consider such phenomena in the
broader context of a ‘total society’; as a ‘product’ of both the underlying material and
ideological (that is, ‘social’) practices and what constitutes human praxis—the ongoing struggle between individuals, groups and classes in their widest setting.
POSTSCRIPT
This paper was written as an undergraduate student at SOAS in the early 1990s.
Although I stand by much of what I wrote, in particular the usefulness of a
“materialist” analysis in looking at the construction of gendered, racial or sexual
“identities”, it now seems somewhat dated given the tremendous social and cultural
changes that have occurred since then. There remains a largely uncritical acceptance
within the former “gay community” of biological determinism (“born this way”), that
sits clumsily with a similarly uncritical scramble to be accepted into historical
mainstream institutions such as marriage and the nuclear family, and a paradoxical
refusal to jettison a variety of self-consciously constructed “gendered identities”.
However, I see more significant shifts that have thrust to the fore. These
include the narcissism and increasing defensiveness of those who linguistically
“police” and “protect” these so-called “minority” identities (paradoxically often still
including women - 50% of the population); the explosion of claims of victimhood by
individuals within so-called “marginal” groups against perceived threats and
oppression by the norm or series of norms (“the norm” might include “the gay
community” itself); and the uncritical ease with which the broader metropolitan
society in general, the mainstream liberal cultural and political elites in particular,
have accepted, even championed, such shifts.
NOTES
1. The words ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ are frequently used interchangeably in present
discourse, though it might be useful to note one or two distinctions. Humphries
suggests ‘Gayness’ ought to be seen as the ‘social form of homosexuality, whilst
homosexuality is a part of sexuality’ (1985:74). Similarly, Cass notes how ‘the
proponents of the homosexual/gay dichotomy suggest that a gay identity is (also) a
more “advanced” identity since it reflects the individual’s development of strategies
for effectively dealing with a stigmatized status’ (1983–4:117). Denneny insists that
‘“homosexual” and “gay” are not the same thing: gay is when you decide to make an
issue out of it (1983:409). Similarly, Pronger claims that by becoming “gay” one
cultivates a positive attitude towards the homosexual paradox by asserting one’s
legitimacy in thought, word, and deed’ (1990: 121). Both words will be used during
the following discussion, but I will try to adhere to the abovementioned distinctions
where possible.
2. Three more recent and particularly poignant examples of this regulation exist in the
shape of Section 28 of the 1986 Local Government Act, under which it became illegal
to ‘promote’ homosexuality as a ‘pretended family relationship’: and clauses within
the more recent Criminal Justice Bill (1991) and Children’s Act. Even the apparent
liberalizing laws (regulating male homosexual activity) of the 1967 Act (England and
Wales), must be seen as ‘not so much an acceptance of homosexuality as a change in
its official definition’ (Weeks 1980). Homosexuality now becomes a ‘condition’ to be
partially accepted, but the rest of society (this is made clear by the distinctions made
in the Act between ‘public’ and ‘private) is to be warned against it. Following the
passage of the Bill, as Weeks notes, there occurred a tripling of convictions for
consenting homosexual acts in what were defined as public places. Whether we wish
to read into this a particular sinister intentionality on the part of the authors of this
Act is largely irrelevant for the purposes of this discussion. It is important to note,
though, that the continued ‘WE’RE HERE, WE’RE QUEER’ 109 regulation of
sexuality and the clear distinctions before the law between homosexual and
heterosexual serves to reinforce those tendencies which make for a separate
homosexual identity; as a discriminated minority in a society which frequently
distinguishes its subjects in terms of their sexual preferences (Weeks 1977, 1989a;
Shepherd and Wallis 1989; Gough 1989; Plummer 1981; Altman 1982).
3. Of course role-playing, particularly in ‘sado-masochistic’ practices, may establish
differences in the physical sense of passive versus active. But there is little evidence to
suggest that such roles are carried beyond the sexual act itself. Indeed, even within
such sexual acts the ‘active’ dominant partner may deal out ‘punishment’ to his
dominated captor, but the latter may be seen by both of them as ‘man enough’ to take
the physical pain and punishment willingly. The important point is not that some acts
may be seen as ‘passive’ or some as ‘feminine’, but that both gay men would identify
themselves as men and masculine men at that.
4. ‘Homophobia’ is an awkward construction in that it suggests a hatred of both
lesbians and gay men. Yet, as Bristow has noted, ‘anti-lesbianism’ and ‘antigaymaleness’ manifest themselves very differently. Lesbians, for example, are at the
receiving end of misogyny, which can come into operation to enable men to control a
situation whether at home, at work, or in the street (1989:57). In fact gay men can be
part of this sexual hatred. Pronger also makes the point that many ‘out’ gay men are
themselves homophobic in their hatred of those who are ‘effeminate’ or ‘camp’. Many
of us hold a fear of our ‘masculine’ violation; a fear of loss of patriarchal power—we
cannot ignore this aspect of the term.
5 A review of these developments can be found in Ray (1992).
6. See Weeks (1977), Plummer (1981), Shepherd and Wallis (1989).
Chapter 6
Gendered identities and gender ambiguity
among travestis in Salvador, Brazil
Andrea Cornwall
The main road leading from the old centre of Salvador, Brazil’s fifth largest city,
heaves by day with shoppers and hawkers. By night scantily clad feminine figures
cluster to sell sex. Ambiguity is part of the game on the trottoir: these glamorous
‘women’ are often travestis, with the allure of a phallic femininity. Also at night, in
any of the hundreds of temples (terreiros) of the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé,
filhas de santo (literally ‘daughters of the saint’, devotees) clad in white lace dresses
take to the floor as they receive their deities (orixás) in possession. In most Candomblés,
it is only ‘women’ who can be ‘mounted’ (gún, Yoruba) by the orixás. In many
terreiros, travestis enjoy this privilege. On the trottoir and in the terreiro, travestis adorn
themselves in feminine trappings. They shape their bodies to exaggerate the curves
identified with the female body, with a ‘hidden extra’: bodies with breasts and a
penis. They do not self-identify as homens (men) or mulheres (women), but as travestis.
The literature on prostitution (e.g. Espiñeira 1984; Bacelar 1982; Oliveira 1986;
Pereira 1988) and on Candomblé (e.g. Bastide 1978; dos Santos 1988; Segato 1986;
Teixeira 1987; Fry 1982) contains scant but suggestive references to those who move
between the domains of the trottoir and the terreiro. My interest here is in the
gendered identities travestis assume and are accorded by others as they traverse these
spaces. Drawing on a range of secondary sources, including some excellent
unpublished Master’s theses from the University of Bahia – especially the work of
Oliveira (1986) - complemented by preliminary ethnographic fieldwork carried out in
Bahia in 1990 for an undergraduate final year dissertation project, I examine gendered
identities and gender ambiguity in street prostitution and in the performative and
ritual domain of Candomblé. My interest is in exploring wider questions about
processes of gendering and with it, questions of masculinity, agency and power.
So pervasive is the gender dichotomy within western discourse that
anthropological accounts of cross-gender behaviour have either re-created it using
different, but equally fixed, criteria (Whitehead 1981; Devereux 1937)(5) or defined an
intermediate ‘third gender’ (see Wikan 1977; Mageo 1992): that which Carpenter
(1919) called ‘the hybrid kind of life’. Reconfiguring the gender dichotomy or placing
the travesti in the category of a ‘third gender’ implies that the terms ‘men’ and
‘women’ have some kind of presence outside their situational usages in different
activities and arenas. This merely reinforces an essentialized notion of gender. Such a
move side-steps the issues of power in the attribution and enactment of gendered
identities.
The apparent gender ambiguity of travestis poses several theoretical
challenges for analyses of gender. I begin by exploring some of these issues. Setting
travesti prostitution within the wider frame of prostitution in Salvador, I explore
representations of adult ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ prostitutes who possess penises. I
go on to examine what Foucault (1978) terms the ‘historical apparatus of sexuality’,
looking first at hegemonic discourses about sex and gender and then at subordinate
variants that establish alternative frames of reference within Candomblé. Taking up
the issues that arise from the intersections of these schemas in different settings, I
explore implications for analyses of gender.
MALE WOMEN OR FEMALE MEN?
In western European discourse, the term ‘transgender’ is recent; David Valentine’s
(2007) ethnography Imagining Transgender places its invention in the early 1990s, just
as the original version of this chapter was being written. Valentine notes how the
term came to embrace
a collective category of identity which incorporates a diverse array of maleand female-bodied gender variant people who had previously been
understood as distinct kinds of persons, including self-identified transsexuals
and transvestites. (2007:4)
Transgender identification is, Valentine notes, is in the US fundamentally different
from identification as homosexual or gay. Yet in Brazil, at least at the time in which
this study was undertaken, being travesti – a term better translated by ‘transgender’
than any other available English-language equivalent – was widely equated with not
only being homosexual, but a particular kind of homosexual: one who is penetrated.
What is a travesti? For one thing, travesti are commonly understood to have
begun their lives in the male gender, born as boys and brought up as men. For
another, most if not all live much of their lives in clothing that is generally associated
with women even if they retain the secondary sexual characteristics of a man. The
very notion of the travesti carries with it a sense of dissonance. Transvestites
transgress, moving across the boundaries marking gendered difference. To call
someone a ‘transvestite’ involves making a series of prior assumptions. These cluster
around the notion that there is some original ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ to which they ‘really’
belong. Transvestites cross-dress; they do not just dress. In doing so, they pose a
challenge to the taken-for-granted association of ‘men’ with ‘male’ and ‘masculinity’,
and ‘women’ with ‘female’ and ‘femininity’. Dislocating the markers of femininity
and masculinity from the bodies of females and males, transvestites represent
‘gender’ as not only achieved, but actively fashioned.
In Britain and North America, forms of male transvestism vary in both degree
and kind (Prince 1957; Woodhouse 1989; Stoller 1976; Butler 1990; Baudrillard 1990).
Transvestite men may be defined or may self-define as heterosexual, bisexual or
homosexual. Male transvestism can range from (hetero)sexual fantasies staged in the
bedroom, to dressing up, to performing on stage in ‘drag’, to attempts to ‘pass’ as
‘women’ in a range of social settings. Most transvestites do not wish to become but to
perform as ‘women’. Transsexualism, on the other hand, has been treated as the
clinical category of ‘gender dysphoria’ since the 1960s (Stoller 1976). Transsexuals do
not wish just to perform, but to transform their bodies so as to experience the
congruency of feeling female and having a body that feels female to be in.
In Salvador, several kinds of cross-gender behaviour can be observed.
Transformistas can be compared with the UK/US category of ‘gay drag artiste’. Most
transformistas confine cross-dressing to an evening’s work, presenting male
femininities within a particular temporal and spatial context. Travestis adopt clothing,
gestures and styles gendered female in Brazil, make permanent or semi-permanent
body changes and attract feminine terms of address. For the most part travestis do not
think that they are, nor are they taken to be, ‘really’ women or men: they are travesti
(Oliveira 1986; Kulick 1998). Travestis are part of a wider class of persons whose nonnormative gender and sexual identities and identifications distinguish them from the
(hetero)normative category ‘homem’ (“man”), pejoratively labeled ‘bichas’ (‘bug’).
‘Being a homem [man]’ is defined less in terms of ‘sexual orientation’ than in terms of
an imputed preference for the insertor role in sex. Such men are not considered to be
homossexuais, even where they primarily have sex with men.
One variety of cross-gender behaviour escapes pejorative labelling in
Salvador: that associated with the explosion of colour and chaos of Carnaval.
Parodying selected and exaggerated feminine attributes, cross-dressed men take to
the streets. Most of these men are not regarded as bichas, but as homens. They appear
to perform neither as if women nor as women, but as ‘not not men’, to borrow
Schechner’s (1985) phrase: hairy chests are displayed, beards retained, genitals bulge
under lycra. Trevisan argues that carnaval ‘proclaims the rule of ambiguity’
(1986:156), permitting the ambivalence that runs as a strong undercurrent in Bahian
sociality a legitimate space to emerge. Travestis carry the fantasies of carnaval and of
their clients outside the space marked by carnaval for the containment—and
toleration—of ambivalence, into the domain of everyday activities. They embody a
paradox of desire and denial.
Applying western European notions of ‘sex’, ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ to Salvador’s
travesti would require imposing a number of problematic presuppositions.
Considering how travestis can be located in terms of theoretical approaches to
‘gender’ raises further issues, to which I now turn.
RETHINKING SEX AND GENDER
The polarized debates between essentialism and constructionism (see Vance 1989;
Wieringa 1989; Gatens 1983) reveal just how much binaries of sex and gender pervade
theorization of difference. In drawing ‘a distinction between sex, in the physiological
sense, and gender, which is a cultural construct’ (Caplan 1987a:1), constructionists
present ‘gender’ as constituted in various ways in different social, cultural or
historical settings.
Rather than dispensing with essentialized ideas about the
‘natures’ of women and men altogether, such accounts tend to reinstate essences
elsewhere. As Butler notes, ‘the presumption of a binary gender system implicitly
retains the belief in a mimetic relation of gender to sex whereby gender mirrors sex or
is otherwise restricted by it’ (1990:6). And ‘sex’ is often used in narrow reference to
the biological material onto which ‘gender’ is inscribed in variant ways: ‘anatomical
sex differences’ become given, fixed, biological ‘facts’.
Accounts of the construction of ‘gender identity’ tend toward the assumption
that once formed, such identities are fixed and coherent. In descriptions of people in
similar social, cultural or historical settings, ‘gender’ often emerges as a stubbornly
static entity. The notion of ‘gender constructs’ obscures processes of gendering over
people’s life-courses, in different spaces and through different activities. People
gender others and actively create, perform and modify their own gendered identities
in different settings. Bodies are not mere biological material providing a canvas for
the bold strokes of gender to be painted on. They can be reshaped and modified to
embody discourses about sexuality or gender – quite literally. In different settings, to
different actors, parts of the body may be alternately marked or disregarded in
attributions of gender (Kessler and McKenna 1978).
Gatens (1983), Grosz (1987) and other feminist theorists of difference have
argued that there is no such thing as an unmarked body; ‘anatomy’ is necessarily as
cultural as ‘gender’. As Gatens (1983) points out, the alleged neutrality of the body
carries with it the implicit rationalist assumption that posits a split between body and
mind, physical presence and consciousness. This denies the active subjectivity of the
person inhabiting a body, which is always already a culturally and historically sexed
body. Foucault (1977) identifies the body as the site on which discourse is inscribed,
yet does not account for the agency of subjects in choosing the body they inhabit.
Using Lacan’s notion of the ‘imaginary body’, Gatens takes this a step further. She
suggests that subjects actively develop socially and historically specific images of the
body, marking certain bodily experiences and attributes as ‘privileged sites of
significance’ (1983:149). Thus, she suggests, the experience of being feminine or
masculine in a female or male body is qualitatively different.
This raises the further question of how female and male bodies are defined
and differentiated in different domains of discourse. Gatens suggests that images of
the body are ‘constructed by a shared language; the shared psychical significance and
privileging of various zones of the body; and common institutional practices and
discourses on and through the body’ (1983:152). I would go further. The body may be
talked about, constructed, imagined and given psychical significance differently by
different actors in different domains of discourse. Accordingly, the ‘site[s] of
significance’ ‘privileged’ by particular actors may also vary.
Kessler and McKenna (1978) illustrate the extent to which western distinctions
privilege the presence of male genitalia in categorizing two ‘sexes’.[1] Definition of
what is ‘male’ by the possession or absence of the penis is, they argue, no cultural
universal. The possession of a penis, it seems, is only contingently linked with
attributions of ‘male gender’. This provokes a number of questions about the sex as
well as the gender of travestis. Defining the travesti as ‘really male’ in terms of some
original state or by virtue of possessing a penis raises difficulties. Travestis are made,
not born. Initiated by older travestis, the transformation is called ‘making the travesti’
(feito travesti). This process is conceived as a rebirth and, significantly, bears striking
similarities to initiation into Candomblé. ‘Being made’ brings a new name, a new
body, a new identity. Defining travestis, then, in terms of a prior state is problematic.
Further, travestis possess penises, but the ‘privileged site[s] of significance’ of that
which is designated ‘female’ equally form part of their simulations of femininity.
‘Partible’ (Strathern 1988) ‘female’ attributes are literally incorporated by the travestis,
who shape their bodies not only by mechanical means, but also with hormones.[2]
Travestis have the bodies of ‘males’ and of ‘females’. Their ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ is
not something that can be defined in abstraction. Travestis may adopt and be ascribed
a range of gendered statuses in different settings. Only in certain contexts or activities
does the penis take on the indexical load associated with the male gender (cf.
Garfinkel 1967). ‘Masculinity’ is often conflated with being ‘male’ or ‘being a man’.
These notions lack any single definitional ground and may be more usefully regarded
as loosely bounded clusters of ‘family resemblances’ (Wittgenstein 1963). The
meanings ascribed to these terms by different actors may overlap to a certain degree,
but also vary significantly in different domains of discourse. Dislocating ‘masculinity’
and ‘femininity’ and taking a closer look at the ways these terms are defined and
attributed reveals the power effects of gender attributions. Gatens (1983) contends
that it is not masculinity per se, but male masculinity that is valued in mainstream
western discourse. And, while male masculinities are always also plural, particular
representations of the masculine—what we term ‘hegemonic masculinity’, following
Carrigan et al. (1985)—may be deployed in ways that marginalize and do violence
(literally, in this setting) to others.
Attributions of ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ vary according to the frame of reference
within which they are made. So too, then, do associations of particular, gendered
attributes with agency or power. By examining the masculinities and femininities
represented on the trottoir and in the terreiro, I seek to disrupt any essential ground
for defining a singular ‘masculinity’, as well as a unitary and unmarked notion of
‘maleness’. In doing so, I explore alternative models of agency that displace the
hegemonic association of ‘masculinity’ with power.
FAZER VIDA: CONTEXTS OF PROSTITUTION IN SALVADOR
The old centre of Salvador, whose decaying elegance serves as a chilling reminder of
the transatlantic slave trade that brought the city to prominence, has long sustained a
population regarded by outsiders and some locals alike as marginal. Gaining status
as a UNESCO world heritage site in 1985, the present-day Centro Histórico is all
gentrified, brightly coloured façade, behind which some of the older inhabitants and
life-ways survive. The Brazilian term marginal (plural marginais) carries with it
connotations beyond that of its English equivalent. It is often used in expressions of
disgust to describe those considered as the lowest form of life: comments about the
marginais of the centre often refer not only to the prostitutes, dealers, hustlers, thieves
and travestis in the area, but, by extension, to most of its inhabitants. The district was
marked out in the 1920s as an area for containing prostitution, and by the 1960s,
‘prostitution and the activities that revolve around it…formed [its] ambience’ (Bacelar
1982:54). Initiatives to restore the centra histórico (‘historic centre’) began in earnest in
the 1970s and 1980s. This set in motion a mushrooming of enterprise, supplying
attractions for the streams of visitors seeking Africa in Brazil.
Once repressed by the state, Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé, had by 1990
acquired semi-official status and cachet for the fashionable. Tours are laid on to visit
the most ‘traditional’ cult houses (terreiros). Waitresses and streetsellers (popularly
known as Baianas) dress in the white lace and beads of Candomblé to serve
secularized ‘African’ ritual cuisine to tourists. Images of Baianas feature on postcards
and holiday snaps, marketed as ‘cultural symbols’ of the nation. Official tourism
offers shows or courses of Afro-Brazilian dance, music and capoeira, an acrobatic
blend of dance and self-defence developed by slaves in the interior of Bahia in the
squares for tourist audiences and in shows for the wealthy, where uniforms of calico
may be swapped for ‘African’ leopard print. The ‘discovery’ of ‘African Bahia’ has
brought wealth to some. Yet the shift from stigmatization to celebration of black
Bahia has done little to ameliorate racist discrimination or the hypocrisies of the
masculinism that permeates all sectors of Bahian society.
The sale of sex continues to play an important part in the economic lives of the
inhabitants of the district. Although the market in sexual services has diversified to
capture opportunities from tourism, changes appear to have been inspired more by
the desires and fantasias of local clients. Female prostitutes (referred to by the
derogatory term putas) work the bars in the port area attending to a stream of foreign
sailors and local regulars. In the backstreets of the centre, the clientele is local, while
in the bars of the main squares a more lucrative trade for the younger puta lies with
tourists. The tourist market has created in addition a new, subtler, form of
prostitution framed around the ‘holiday romance’ (see Loizos, Chapter 3 in this
volume). Male hustlers, dealers and ‘guides’ often derive their income from ‘holiday
romances’ with tourist women. Gathering outside bars or performing capoeira in the
central squares, they often do not have to move any further to make their catch.
Accommodation and sustenance - and the occasional jackpot of their lovers’
possessions or a trip to Europe - are exchanged for sex, protection and a
wellrehearsed patter about the Afro-Bahian secrets of the quarter.
In the alleys away from the central squares, boy prostitutes loiter at night in
darkened doorways. Older male prostitutes, bofes (also called mîches), ply the sidestreets. Most are in their late teenage years. Travestis, once so repressed by the police
that they could not emerge from their houses by day, now form part of the colourful
confusion of the area. The tourist trade, with its glamorization of the exotic, may have
permitted more of a space for travestis to move. Their clients, however, are more often
locals than foreigners. Characterized as marginais par excellence and barred from gay
clubs and bars, travestis work the streets and are subjected to police harassment and
violent attacks (Mott and Assunçao 1987). Most of the travestis on the streets of
Salvador are in their twenties, many are black. In 1990, travestis and gay men were
regularly beaten up, murdered and harassed (Mott 1988; GGB, personal
communication, 1991); for all the progress that has been made on sexual rights since
then, they remain victim to homophobic violence and abuse.
The market in sexual services in Salvador is complex and diverse. For the
purposes of this analysis, my focus is on two categories of adult prostitutes—travestis
and bofes—those who possess penises and service a predominantly local clientele. In a
brilliant Master’s thesis (Oliveira 1986), and an associated article in the popular press
(Oliveira 1984), Neuza Maria de Oliveira draws on interviews with Bahian travestis
and their clients to explore their representations and expressions of sexuality. I draw
on her work extensively in what follows.
DISLOCATED DICHOTOMIES
In Brazil the cult of the body beautiful has long had an enthusiastic following.
Representations of the feminine dwell on curvaceous bodies in figure-hugging
clothes; images of the masculine portray sculptured torsos, taut, tanned and
muscular. Gender attributions based on clothing, style and looks would appear
extremely straightforward, so limited is the scope for apparent ambiguity. Two
sharply differentiated genders are presented, which, while inviting play, also bound
its possibilities. Travestis and bofes appear to embody these two alternatives. Travestis,
clad in miniskirts and high heels with curls and vivid make-up, pose to striking
effect. Their depilated bodies are clenched at the waist to produce curves, their
breasts accentuated. The glamour of an exaggerated femininity carries with it a sense
of both fantasy and artifice. While they present the codes of femininity, it is the
presentation to excess that renders them identifiable as travestis. One travesti
remarked to Oliveira, for example, that they could see no merit in being a mulher
(‘woman’) as, ‘when a mulher passes no-one bothers to look, but when a travesti
passes everyone wants to look, to have…to be a travesti’ (1986:84, my translation).
Representations of gender difference in mainstream discourse do not only
draw on appearance and anatomy. They present homens and mulheres in terms of
agency and its apparent absence. The hegemonic version of masculinity portrays
strong, capable and virile protectors. The term homem, as noted earlier, carries with it
explicit reference to how ‘real men’ are expected to behave in bed: as ativo (‘active’)
and as comedor (literally ‘eater’; inserter), irrespective of whether their sexual partners
are women or men. Mulheres are represented as those who inspire or are the subjects
of the actions of others, and are portrayed in sex as in life as acted on, as passive, as
doador (literally ‘giver’; insertee). Despite Brazil’s libidinous image, purity and
innocence still appear to be valued in women of all social classes; and may be fiercely
protected by patriarchs. Yet in cultivating and displaying sexual allure, many women
play to notions of the irrepressible desire of the macho and the inherent desirability of
the sensuous woman. These notions offer a glimpse of a potentially alternative model
of power, raising questions about the imputed lack of agency of those who ‘give’.
Stereotyped notions of travestis and bofes draw on these representations of the
‘natures’ of the feminine and the masculine, transposed onto male bodies. Bofes
present the figure of the macho with muscular bravado. Lounging on street corners,
often wearing body-sculpting trousers revealing every detail, bofes represent an
archetype of virile male masculinity. Appearing to signal embodied femininity,
travestis are widely believed and expected to participate as insertees in the sexual act.
Correspondingly, bofes, with their swaggering virility, are envisaged as insertors.
These polarized extremes appear to preclude spaces in between. Matters are,
however, rarely as straightforward as these rigid dichotomies might suggest.
A closer look at issues surrounding attitudes to gender reassignment surgery
is revealing. Many - although not all - travestis are against the idea. It appears that the
primary concern in ‘having it all chopped off (as one put it) is material, rather than
psychical or even physical. Changing sex is an option that requires not only a large
amount of money, but also the ability to sustain a livelihood outside prostitution. One
Bahian travesti cited by Oliveira, reveals: ‘I would never want to cut off my penis …I
think that it is [my penis] that makes me most interesting, it is that men see the whole
of me, with this penis in the middle’ (1984:3, my translation). The juxtaposition of
male and female attributes forms part of the allure of the travestis and defines the
value of the commodity they sell. Further and more compelling reasons exist,
however.
Travestis talked of the operation as rendering them ‘useless’ in sexual
transactions with clients and drew attention to the loss of potential for orgasm
through ejaculation (cf. Oliveira 1984, 1986). This hardly seems to support the notion
that travestis act as if ‘female’, acting as insertee or fellator to clients or lovers. By all
accounts, it appears that the converse is usually the case. According to members of
GGB, services involving the travestis performing in the ‘active’ role provide much of
their custom. The following description, given by a São Paulo travesti, Luana, makes
this explicit: ‘At the moment my penis is like a workman’s drill; unless he opens
holes, he doesn’t get paid’ (Acosta n.d.: 5). Penis size plays a part in determining the
market value of travestis as well as bofes: clients judge both by their ‘virile member’.
Almeida (1984) details strategies adopted by bofes/mîches for enhancing apparent
penis size through padding or by standing hands in pockets to maintain an erection
as clients pass. In the case of travestis, Pereira (1988) reports that clients stop their cars
to feel what they are paying for before negotiating a price.
Sexual services are offered according to a menu, termed the programa. Not
only sexual activities but also notions of gendered sexual behaviour determine the
pricing system. Chupetinha and punhetinha (blow and hand jobs, respectively),
perhaps the most frequent services performed, are the cheapest. Where clients request
penetrative sex, two distinct pricing systems exist, corresponding with hegemonic
notions of the feminine passivo and the masculine ativo. In the case of travestis, Mott
(1982) and Oliveira (1986) describe a sliding scale of prices. This runs from chupetinha
and punhetinha to bundinha (being penetrated), programa completo (bundinha and other
services as passivos, including an overnight stay), sacanagem completo (which can
include penetrating the client, being fellated by the client) and troca-troca (involving
both ativo and passivo sexual roles). For bofes too, deviation from the normative ativo
sexual role commands a higher price (Almeida 1984; McRae 1985; Pereira 1988).
Who, then, are the clients of travestis? I spent a lot of time in Salvador in bars
talking with female sex workers and their clients. The clients of travestis are less easy
to find sitting around for a casual drink. Many have cars and custom is solicited at the
roadside. According to researchers such as Mott (1982) and Oliveira (1986), most
clients seem to be middle-aged, middle-class, married men. Oliveira reports that
some are older men who have problems in achieving erections; some caution the
travestis never to mention that they are travestis and not women; and some just want
to gape at the bodies of the travestis. Clients are, however, cast in the popular
imagination as the ones to act as insertors in sex and ‘remain homens’. Travestis talk
of such clients with disdain and call them mariconas (glossed as ‘closets’), feeble
creatures who take advantage of the veneer of respectability attained by marriage and
procreation. This echoes on the very masculinist attitudes that render the travestis
themselves objects of abuse. Oliveira cites one travesti who remarked: ‘At heart they
are much more veados [literally ‘deer’; derogatory term for homosexual] than us’
(1986: 194). Female sex workers had similar views on bisexual men, terming them
giletes (after the double-sided razor). Some giletes, I was told, produce a dildo and
request the women to penetrate them with it. A sex worker friend was particularly
dismissive of them: ‘These kinds of men are all bichas! They want to be fucked and
pay women to let them seem as if they are not bichas.’
A further, albeit very rarely found, type of client is female. Oliveira reports
that clients are often female prostitutes and that, ‘this is considered among the
travestis as the maximum in eroticism and the height of inversion’ (1986:189, my
translation). For them, the programa is called suruba, Oliveira reports, one of the most
expensive. This, she argues, reflects the notion that love between two travestis or a
travesti and a mulher is considered scandalous. Unfortunately, I was unable to find out
more to shed further light on Oliveira’s comments. I was, however, told on several
occasions that travestis may set up home with sapatões, so-called ‘butch’ lesbians. This
was considered acceptable, a marriage between male femininity and female
masculinity.
The feminine appearance of travestis and their association with idealized
femininity masks homoerotic desire. Clients, with a beautiful ‘woman’ in their
passenger seats, appear to be enacting the ‘myth of the macho’. Some travestis
counted this as one of their major attractions, although, as one informant put it,
‘everyone knows: no-one is fooled except them!’ Others declare that although
dissimulation is one aspect of the encounter, the allure of the travesti lies in the
perceived eroticism of the female form endowed with a penis. ‘It is the ultimate
fantasy’, one remarked. The femininity of the travestis re-creates the ‘male’ in their
clients; what Mott refers to as ‘restor[ing] their camouflaged masculinity’ (1987:52).
With the repositioning of assumed sexual roles in relations with clients comes
an adjustment not only of the pricing structure, but also of the behaviour of the
travestis. Prices rocket. Sometimes travestis increase the price after sex, as well as
when additional services are requested in the privacy of a hotel room or car. There
are occasional reports of travestis extorting all the valuables the client is carrying,
through threats of violence or exposure. Oliveira cites a travesti who tellingly
described their reaction to clients who do not pay up: ‘When they don’t pay, one
forgets what is feminine and vira (turns) into a homem machão (he-man) and it
becomes necessary to smash his car and his face in’ (1986:181, my translation). In
‘forgetting what is feminine’, travestis ‘virar machão’: they (re)turn to dominant,
powerful and violent behaviour. The perceptions of outsiders and locals echo this
image, dwelling on the aggressiveness and violence of the travestis, as thieves,
muggers and the most marginal of marginais. Through displays of violence towards
maricona clients, travestis replicate hegemonic masculinism. This creates a number of
interesting paradoxes. Travestis, in taking on a ‘male’ sexual identity, adopt its
corollary attributes—such as violence—in such situations. They reinstate the
dichotomy, in reverse.
The male masculinities displayed by bofes are similarly compromised by the
demands of their clients. Again the weight of masculinism is brought to bear on
clients. Bofes refer to such clients as bichas, rather than ‘real men’. The pleasures of
many customers do indeed lie in what one informant described as ‘the fantasy of
submeter ao macho (submitting to the macho)’. A significant number of clients, however,
prefer to take the ‘ativo’ role. This, as McRae (1985) stresses, is no secret. Bofes,
however, do not regard themselves as homossexuais, but as homens. They vigorously
defend their macho image, often adopting strategies such as bragging about the
women they have toyed with to reaffirm their ‘maleness’ (see Pereira 1988). The sale
of their bodies is strictly defined as ‘work’, a means of earning cash (McRae 1985;
Almeida 1984). Detaching commoditized desire defers responsibility: ‘they think that
if they receive money in return, it isn’t them, but the person who pays, who is the
“homossexual”’ (Pereira 1988). Denial and the contradictions of desire can have
explosive results. Bofes may turn to vicious assaults on those who appear to embody
the possibilities of homoerotic desire: again, turning to violence to assert a particular
male masculinity. [4]
The expected sexual roles of ‘man’ or ‘woman’ set the classificatory frame in
these transactions, despite the array of sexual practices. Rather than stepping outside
this frame, variations become inversions that replicate notions of how a ‘man’ or
‘woman’ should behave in bed. In ‘off-duty’ relationships, this framework persists.
Travestis who gain their income from acting as inserters in commoditized sex talk of
their ‘husbands’ who are ‘man enough’ never to wish to be penetrated. Bofes
sometimes cohabit with travestis, or with bichas, whom they may dominate and
disrespect; playing out the stereotypical macho. The association of homem with
‘active’, dominating, male masculinity and the residual category not-homem with its
lack has arisen through particular historical circumstances. Turning to the ‘historical
apparatuses’ of sexuality in Salvador, further issues arise.
‘SINS OF THE FLESH’: DOMAINS OF ‘DEVIANCE’
Foucault argues that ‘sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given
which power tries to hold in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries
to uncover’ (1978). Foucault’s emphasis is on the, often discontinuous, production of
categories deployed in processes of ‘normalization’ within particular ‘regimes of
truth’. Inspection of the production of homosexualities in Salvador from the sixteenth
century to the present reveals shifting frames of reference.
The arrival of the Inquisition in 1591 produced the first documentary evidence
of attempts to categorize and control sexual behaviour in Brazil. Prior legislation had
marked out forms of ‘deviance’ that said more about non-reproductive sexual acts
than actors: sodomy, the ‘abominable sin’, and mutual masturbation attracted
penalties for both parties (Mott 1988). Cross-dressing was criminalized as a separate
offence: the ‘sin’ of ‘pretending to be in a different state and condition’ (Mott 1988:32).
The 1603 Ordinance narrowed the terms of reference, directing attention to what
would now be termed homosexual relations, interestingly making reference to what
is now called lesbianism. This set the frame for later refinements, yet continued to
refer to acts rather than ‘types’.
The terms comer (literally ‘to eat’; to penetrate) and dar (literally ‘to give’; to
be penetrated) appear in confessions. The Inquisitors classified those who engaged in
sodomy accordingly: as agente (active) or paciente (passive).
Inquisition records
referred to pacientes ‘performing the duty of a female’ and ‘acting as a woman’
(Trevisan 1986:55). Interestingly, a third category emerges from the records, Mott
(1988) reports, accounting for a significant 25 per cent of confessions: troca-troca,
both/neither agente and paciente. Independence from Portugal in 1820 brought new
legislative measures, which took their point of reference from nineteenth-century
European discourses on the ‘family’ (cf. Foucault 1978). The ‘abominable sin’ became
one of the ‘crimes offending morality and good custom’ in 1830, tellingly replaced in
the 1890 Republican Penal Code by ‘crimes against the security and well-being of the
family’ (Trevisan 1986:68). Punishment for cross-dressing remained, meriting a less
severe penalty; as ‘wearing clothes inappropriate to their sex in public, in order to
deceive’ (Trevisan 1986:69). Above all, the emphasis was on procreation within
marriage, with a corresponding emphasis on a hierarchical and mutually exclusive
‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. ‘Homosexuality’, defined by Kertbeny in 1869, began
to be used as a psychiatric category in Brazil in the late nineteenth century, along
with notions of the ‘pervert’ and the ‘invert’ (Trevisan 1986; Foucault 1978; Marshall
1981).
The focus had shifted away from the act to the actors: the categories agente
(‘active’) and paciente (‘passive’) now came to refer to persons rather than sexual
positions. Troca-troca, with its implication of a less hierarchical model for sexual—
and, by extension, social—relations, disappeared from the frame. The (imputed) act of
penile penetration became synonymous with male gender and became prominent in
defining ‘masculinity’. Two categories emerged: homens and bichas (Fry 1982).
Homens, glossed simply as ‘men’, were assumed to be ‘ativo’ and therefore not
‘homossexuais’. Bichas were typed as the ‘passivo’ partners of homens, the ‘other half of
a heterosexual model of submissive femininity and assertive masculinity. Only bichas
were considered to be homossexuais.
‘Deviance’ was recast in terms of relations between ‘people of the same
gender identities’ (Fry 1982:91). Bichas became objects of persecution and ridicule,
while homens retained the privileges of ‘male’ status. Travestis were now doubly
offensive, cast as bichas and as committing the ‘crime’ of crossdressing.
As the
example par excellence of ‘deviation’ from ‘normal’ familial relations, the travesti—
more even than the prostitute identifying as female—came to carry the symbolic load
of and stigmatization for alternative forms of desire.
In the south of Brazil (Fry 1982) and increasingly outside radical activist
circles in Salvador, ‘homosexual’ men have come to embrace a new gay identity.
However, in Salvador, in 1990, the classification of men into ‘real men’ and bichas was
still pervasive. Use of the category homem continues to turn on the act of penile
penetration allied with the possession of a penis. In one emotionally charged
discussion I had with a mixed group of neighbours, for example, all agreed that a
man who lets himself be penetrated, a woman who penetrates her male partner with
a dildo or women who have penetrative sex with other women were all classed as
not-homem. As one man exclaimed, when I asked if his comments on bichas applied to
lesbians: ‘No, women who have sex with women are still women, but a bicha is no
longer a man—he has become a woman as he lets himself be fucked’ (my emphasis).
From this brief account, it becomes apparent that shifting discourses have
produced variant sexualities and genders over time. Sexual and gender identities may
be regarded as the effects of discourses, but there is never only one option available.
Hegemonic discourses on sexuality and gender clearly impinged on relations of
sociality among non-white Bahians, yet are part of a more complex picture. The
emphases on reproductive sex and on marriage through different periods were as
much concerned with maintaining a white/ non-white boundary as with the
production of reproducers. The disciplining concerns of the wealthier classes are not
so easily extended to those outside these groups.
Accounts dating back to the early days of slavery and colonial occupation
suggest that among several African, as well as indigenous Amerindian, groups
‘homosexual’ relations were by no means uncommon. Nor were such relations
described as a source of stigma or social condemnation within these communities
(Oliveira Marques 1971; Mott 1988; Trevisan 1986). Inquisition records refer not only
to confessions of ‘the abominable sin’ between whites and other races, but also among
and
between
negros
(blacks),
mestiços
(bi-racials)
and
indíos
(indigenous
Amerindians). Cases of transvestism appear in these records from the sixteenth
century onwards (Mott 1988). Of particular interest is the connection that emerges
between African feiticeiros (medical and ritual specialists) and the wearing of ‘female’
clothes.
The association of African religious practice with alternatives to heterosexual
marriage appears to have become significant as black communities reconstructed
‘tradition’ during the following centuries. Devastating rates of infant mortality and
the separation by slavers of couples from their offspring and each other (Woortman
1987), as well as demographic gender imbalances between towns and rural areas,
affected the stability of heterosexual partnerships in black communities. Discourses
about homoerotic desire, which recognized and affirmed the possibilities for
alternative partnerships, appear to have become prominent.
Religious expression played an important part in the process of re-creating
‘African culture’. The systematization of religious practice during the nineteenth
century drew on the symbolic media of ‘African religion’ and the Catholic church to
form Candomblé. One of the major influences on the development of Candomblé
appears to have been the religious practices of the ethnic group spanning present-day
southwestern Nigeria, Benin and Togo, now referred to as Yoruba. Women,
numerically and economically dominant within Salvador’s black communities during
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, played major roles in these cults. As vessels
of the deities and as traders or vendors, women held considerable power relative to
men, who had limited economic opportunities in the cities (Herskovits 1966;
Woortman 1987). These were not the submissive wives of the bourgeoisie, but
assertive and purposeful agents in their own right. Candomblé became a sphere in
which women consolidated their power. Women could gain status and influence as
devotees or priestesses and benefit from the web of informal social and economic
networks that ramified from the cults (Herskovits 1966).
Landes, researching in the 1930s, dubbed Salvador ‘The City of Women’ and
wrote of the ‘cult matriarchate of Candomblé’ (1940). She noted that while cult
membership consisted mainly of women, there were also ‘notorious passive
homosexuals’ (1940:393) in the cults. Ribeiro (1970) and the Leacocks (1972) confirm,
for Afro-Brazilian cults further north in Recife and Belem, both the presence of bichas
and public perceptions to this effect. These men were often possessed by ‘female’
deities, in an arena which was dominated by powerful women. Landes, Ribeiro and
the Leacocks offer the explanation that Candomblé provides a space for ‘homosexual’
men to express their ‘femininity’. As such it is portrayed as a palliative, to provide
them with temporary solace from societal persecution. This line of argument
resembles that of Lewis (1971) and has similar problems. For, in viewing the
participation of the marginalized from the position of the powerful, alternative
perspectives are not brought into the frame. Segato offers quite a different view. Cult
members she worked with in Recife referred to ‘homosexual’ relationships,
particularly those between women, as a ‘custom’. Further, Segato contends,
‘Homosexuality [is] not accidental or superfluous to, but a structural aspect of
understanding the Weltanschauung of the cult’ (1986: 75).
Karin Barber (1991) makes the interesting observation that among Nigerian
Yoruba:
Gender classifications are not organised in fixed schema: they are ambiguous
and fluctuating. This…must be understood in terms of the importance
placed…on the maintenance of a multiplicity of differences and alternatives.
(1991:277)
Through an exploration of the multiple differences offered within Candomblé,
alternative frames of reference emerge. Within these the travesti as devotee may be
attributed ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ according to quite different criteria.
‘THE LIFE OF THE SAINTS’
The ‘saints’ of Candomblé appear in images and writings as a fusion of Catholic
saints with counterparts from the anthropomorphic pantheon of Yoruba deities
(orisa), referred to in Brazil as santos or orixá (Bastide 1978). Devotees (filhas de santo)
venerate the deities who ‘call’ them to become their vessels and ‘mount’ them in
possession trance. Initiation is described as ‘making the saint’. The devotee’s orixá is
not an essentialized given. Rather, each individual creatively styles her/his orixá from
a diverse collection of attributes. Although devotees are ‘mounted’ and ‘possessed’ by
their orixás, they may also reject particular orixás for others: they are not merely
passive vessels. Each orixá has a sex, gender and personality, which his/her devotees
enact in trance and often carry into their interactions outside the space marked by
possession.
Among Yoruba, individual orisa form the focus of separate cult groups and
the constellation of deities varies widely from place to place. In Candomblé, however,
the orixás are represented as part of a family and each terreiro propitiates and
celebrates a restricted pantheon of deities. Fictive kinship bonds between devotees
replicate the família de santo (family of saints) (Costa Lima 1977), forming part of an
extensive informal network with close affective ties.
Myths and oral art within
Candomblé portray a different image of the family to the bourgeois model.
Heterosexual partnerships are presented as fragile and fraught and descriptions of
the actors in these scenarios present alternatives to the hegemonic version of
masculinity and femininity (Segato 1986).
Representations of the orixás in myths, paintings and ritual objects subvert
hegemonic notions of gender. They establish masculinity and femininity as fluid,
rather than fixed: offering gender as a continuum of qualities found in both males and
females. Masculinities are associated as much with emotion and softness as with
forceful dominance; and femininities include images of the fierce and the powerful, as
well as the sensuous and gentle. Notions of masculinity and femininity are
represented as interchangeable, contingent options, displacing the assymmetry in
mainstream discourse of a hierarchical ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’. Personalities,
rather than sexed bodies, sexualities and social gender, form the key principle for
attributing orixás (cf Lepine 1978). While the personalities of the orixás cover the
entire range of human experience, each is usually ascribed a mythical ‘sex’. According
to Teixeira, definitions mark three categories: abord (male), îaba (female) and méta-méta
(literally ‘half-half’; intersex) (Teixeira 1987). Initiates acquire santos-homens (‘male
saints’), santos-mulheres (‘female saints’) or the intersex santos according to the
correspondence between elements of their personality and that of the respective
deity. [5]
In the selective recombination of gendered traits, the sexuality and sex of the
orixá replaces that of the devotee for certain purposes and in particular settings.
These permutations and substitutions are open to play, presenting a range of choices
and alternatives within which people can locate themselves. [6] Dressing for the
orixás lends legitimacy to the identity of travesti. Intersex saints, such as Logunedé
and Oxumaré, enable devotees to conduct their lives as ‘women’ and as ‘men’. As one
geui male informant suggested: ‘Logunedé sets an important precedent. People can’t
then discriminate or they would be sending Logunedé out into the street. It is a
question of identification.’
A further classificatory level gives both a name and a legitimate space to
homoerotic relationships and cross-gender behaviour. This framework distinguishes
not two, but four ‘genders’: homens and mulheres, adés/adéfontós and monokós/monas do
aid (Teixeira 1987). From Teixeira’s (1987) description, it appears that these categories
collapse the axes of difference used in western classifications—those of sex, gender
and sexual orientation—into a scheme for describing both the ‘gender’ and the
‘sexuality’ of devotees. These distinctions appear to overlap with those based on the
attribution of orixás, whereby adés and monokós are often (although not always)
possessed by santos-mulheres and santos-homens respectively. Adés are generally
identified as bichas, or travestis, monokós as sapatões (‘butch’ lesbians) and, in that, as
symbolic possessors-of-penises.
Possession and performance in rituals are usually limited to the two categories
of women and adés in many Candomblés (although, these days, only those professing
to be ‘the most traditional’). As vessels of the gods, women and adés hold spiritual
power and attain respect and recognition. As ‘women’, travestis can enjoy the
privileges this brings. A further system of classification appears to emerge from
consideration of the non-ritual tasks performed by initiates. The division of labour
within terreiros appears to intersect with classification of initiates in terms of the
‘mythical’ sex of their orixás (Teixeira 1987). Hegemonic distinctions between ‘men’s
work’ and ‘women’s work’ are, however, replicated within the practical arenas of the
cults. The tasks of cleaning, sewing, cooking and washing fall to women and adés,
while only ‘men’ perform the more prestigious duties of sacrifice, protection and
patronage. The least valued tasks fall to women with santos mulheres; those with no
claims to ‘mythical’, biological or classificatory maleness.
Whereas adés are permitted the scope to become as if ‘women’, where it is
desirable, there are limited options for monokós to become as if ‘men’. For certain
purposes, it seems that classification according to ‘biology’ takes precedence, where
two ‘sites of significance’ are privileged: the possession of a penis and the capacity to
extrude menstrual blood. Teixeira reports that in terms of practical activities, those
without penises are barred from taking on certain tasks irrespective of their ‘mythical
sex’, sexuality or possessing deity. Even where women are allowed to perform certain
duties as monokós, this is strictly limited to the periods during which they are not
menstruating or to those among them who are past reproductive age. Costa Lima
(1990) notes the description of the latter class of women as ‘a woman who has already
become a man’. Such women, like the adés, are ambiguously gendered and can cross
the boundaries that mark appropriate tasks for men or women. Yet certain activities
are still categorically denied to them. This would seem to suggest that their transition
to ‘maleness’ is incomplete. They may be possessors of ‘mythical’ penises and no
longer fulfil the principal criteria of ‘femaleness’ as they are no longer able to
procreate, but they do not have the physical organ itself.
In the different activities and contexts within the terreiro, it seems that adés have
the best of both worlds:
Adés possess flexibility, or better, an ambiguity that permits them to be seen
sometimes as women, sometimes as men, according to what is being
valorised at that moment, whether it is the state of biological maleness
[which they retain] in non-religious activities…or of femaleness which is
adopted in religious activities. (Teixeira 1987:43, my translation)
Within this space, possession of a penis again does not in itself signal ‘maleness’. For
a feminine devotee of a santo-mulher the penis ceases to have any significance. Yet in
contests over the allocation of prestige or power, possessors of penises have the
advantage of being able to make claims to a ‘maleness’ that is defined in different
ways to those that would be outside the terreiro. A ‘sex change’ would do nothing to
enhance their status. They can draw on and inhabit representations of the feminine to
consolidate their positions in some situations, with no concomitant impact on their
status in activities where being male offers advantages.
While a range of alternatives and possibilities is offered within the domain of
the terreiro, its members are agents in more than just this sphere. The attitudes and
values of the mainstream impinge on and intersect with the alternatives offered
within Candomblé, as they do on the ways in which its members interact with others
both within and outside the cult. Alternative models of power and agency may
supersede those of mainstream society in certain respects. However, hegemonic
notions of masculinity continue to impinge, providing possessors of penises with
strategies for repositioning themselves within these different frames.
COMPROMISING POSITIONS?
Travestis move from ritual to secular space and back again: within and between
different, although not entirely discrete, frames of reference. Bürger puts forward the
notion of ‘the dialectic of the boundary’ (1990:49), whereby boundaries persistently
defy abolition and are instead constantly reinstated. This may be usefully applied not
only to the boundary between subordinate and hegemonic discourses about sexuality
and gender, but also to that between ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, ‘male’ and
‘female’, ‘ativo’ and ‘passivo’: the contested sources of these representations. The
dissonance generated through boundary flux gives travestis the scope to enact a
range of gendered identities in different situations.
In the context of street prostitution, it is not possession of a penis that confers
‘maleness’. Rather, it is in the use of the penis to penetrate. Travestis called upon to
service their client in this way may virar machão (re-turn to a violent, male
masculinity) only to take on the part of the glamorous belle in negotiations with the
next client. In the terreiros of Candomblé, ‘mythical’ penises may be attributed to
those who lack their biological counterpart, while possession of a physical penis may
play no part in attributions of ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ for others. Conversely, possession of a
penis may provide sufficient grounds to claim ‘male’ status in the absence of most of
the elements associated with hegemonic versions of ‘masculinity’. It is again the
possession of a penis that allows the travestis, generally inhabiting the ambiguous
category of adé within Candomblé, often with santos-mulheres (female deities), to cross
the boundaries between ‘women’ and ‘men’. By retaining the penis, travestis defy the
rigid boundary that mainstream gender ascriptions create and benefit from strategic
boundary crossings within Candomblé. In doing so, they juxtapose femininity and
maleness: to strategic ends that do not always cohere with the egalitarian promise
that this might suggest. For, as Bürger (1990) suggests, the boundary is never
removed, merely repositioned.
Strathern contends: ‘Idealised masculinity is not necessarily just about men, it
is not necessarily just about relations between the sexes either’ (1988: 65). The
slippage of travestis between these different frames of reference suggests the power
effects of acts of classification. The mutually exclusive categories of ativo and passivo
that form part of mainstream gender attributions have less to do with sexual
expression than defining and normalizing gendered relations of power. The use of
the notions of comedor and doador extends beyond the frame of sexual interaction to
describe appropriate displays of hegemonic masculinity—or its lack. Thus, winning
football teams ‘eat’ their opponents (see also Archetti 1992). However, to regard the
giver as passive and powerless would deny, and obscure, more subtle relations of
power between the actors (Hobart 1989). A giver, after all, gives something to
someone else. Domination, like submission, is situational: differently understood and
continually reevaluated and disputed.
Attributing passivity as an essential attribute of a particular category is, then,
an act of power that serves to legitimize inequalities rather than define them. The
conflation of sexual acts with gendered identities locates the submissive (as well as
the ‘deviant’) as residual to the category homem. This preserves the space for
‘straight-acting’ men to take full advantage of the privileges offered to them as
homens (cf. Forrest, Chapter 5 in this volume). The ritualized inversions of Carnaval
may open a space for wider expression of gender dissonance. However, both these
and the everyday transgressions of travestis do little more than reinforce and restore,
rather than redress, gendered inequalities. In representing femininity as passive,
subordinate and a mere object of masculine desire, the travesti supports—and
exemplifies—a particular version of patriarchy. In re-enacting male masculinity, both
in their attitudes toward women and their relations with mariconas (closets/clients),
travestis reaffirm the ‘myth of the macho’.
Within mainstream discourse and on the streets a particular variant of
masculinity—that of the idealized homem — is associated with agency and with
power. Alternative conceptualizations of power within Candomblé dislocate these
associations. Individuals may be attributed different ‘sexes’ and ‘genders’ according
to the context. And opportunities also exist for those of apparently ambiguous status
to benefit from a range of gendered identifications. Candomblé offers a continuum of
gendered attributes. The alternatives offered within the terreiro resist the closure
implied by hegemonic masculinity and femininity and expose the contingency of the
relation between men and masculinity, women and femininity. Within this space, the
association of travestis with the feminine and their positions as devotees of powerful
female deities locate them within a different model of agency. Submission to the
orixás does not connote the powerlessness associated those who are ‘mounted’ by
their lovers. Yet neither this domain nor the actors within it exist in isolation from
wider society.
Gendered hierarchies that draw on, rather than subvert, masculinist values also
form part of the repertoire: both those inscribed within the recreated ‘Africas’ of the
terreiros and those that carry the hegemonic principle of male prerogative into these
and other spaces. Travestis move between spaces and are gendered by others
according to overlapping, yet conceptually discrete, sets of criteria. In the domains of
the trottoir and the terreiro, it is not what travestis ‘are’ but what they do which
confers their ‘sex’ or ‘gender’. Travestis resist an essential definition as ‘male’ or as
‘female’, but are certainly not neuter (ne-uter; neither one or the other). The
mutability of ‘gender’ in this case raises the wider question of how to make sense of
expressions of masculinity and point to the contingency and situational nature of
gendered identities. As Butler suggests:
Gender ought not to be construed as a stable identity or locus of agency from
which various acts follow; rather, gender is an identity tenuously constituted
in time, instituted in an exterior space through a stylised repetition of acts.
(1990:140)
NOTES
Many people have contributed to the writing of this paper. I am especially grateful to
Grupo Gay da Bahia, Vivaldo da Costa Lima, Robson ‘the Baiana’, Maria, Antonio
and Snr Geraldo and his filhas de santo for all their help while I was in Bahia. I would
like to thank Kit Davis for her help with an earlier version of this chapter and
Hermann Bennett, LaRay Denzer, Richard Fardon, Angie Hart, Mark Hobart and
Nancy Lindisfarne for their insights and comments. I am grateful to Luiz Mott and
Peter Fry for their encouragement.
1. Kessler and McKenna report an interesting experiment. A mixed sample of
Americans were shown two pictures: one portrayed a long-haired, depilated,
curvy body with a penis and the other a short-haired, hirsute body without a
penis. They were asked to gender the figures. Responses to the first picture were
almost unanimous; 96 per cent thought it represented a male. The second picture
produced a more mixed response, with 72 per cent of men and 57 per cent of
women suggesting that this figure represented a female (Kessler and McKenna
1978:145).
2. Informants told me that travestis either take oral contraceptives or buy injectable
hormones, which are sometimes locally administered to the breasts.
3. I use Brittan’s (1989) term ‘masculinism’ here as the term ‘homophobia’ implies a
fear of ‘homosexuality’, already a problematic notion in this setting, rather than
what appears to have more to do with the pervasive enforcement of hegemonic
masculinity.
4. Mott (1982) reports that most of the murders of gay men in Salvador at that time
had been committed by bofes.
5. In addition, Kinni-Olusanyin (n.d.) suggests that at some times it may be a
particular aspect of an orixá that is referred to as a ‘man’, where the ‘sex’ of the
orixá is established as ‘female’, and vice versa.
6. Several people remarked that bichas come to the cults to be initiated as filhas of
Oxum, whose representations include the most conventionally ‘feminine’ of
attributes. A person cannot simply choose an orixá, however, but must be chosen.
Nevertheless, due to the confluence of their characteristics with those of the deity,
it is common to find bichas as filhas of Oxum.
Chapter 7
Pandora unbound
A feminist critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality
Lin Foxhall
It is rare that we who study past societies can claim any analytical advantage over
colleagues who work in the present. But however much we do not and cannot know
about a culture long dead, we have a panoramic view of social landscapes that those
caught in the on-going flow of the same present as the people they study can never
catch.
The influence of Foucault’s writings on sexuality, especially The History of
Sexuality (1978–86), on subsequent studies of sexuality, gender and the discourses of
power and oppression has been profound. In particular, Foucault has revolutionized
the study of the social history of classical antiquity, where, with fifth-fourth century
BC Athens, he ultimately decided to begin his investigations. Foucault’s intellectual
framework is a maze in which a large amount of recent work on gender in classical
antiquity is trapped. But every maze has a way out. Here I will argue that there are
considerable difficulties with Foucault’s historical construction and contextualization
of the discourses of sexuality and the implications of these discourses for both past
societies and our own. This is not to say his contribution has been negligible; far from
it. Foucault provides an analytical framework that can be expanded to explore the
implications of sex and gender in the whole of social life.
Foucault fashioned his analytical ‘techniques’ over a lifetime of archaeology,
geneology and ethics. This is grossly oversimplified, but archaeology (to maintain the
metaphor) consists less of the systematic excavation of discourses than of remote
sensing: of inferring the meanings of hidden landscapes of the mind by the lumps
and bumps on the textual surface. Geneology is the progenesis of power in discourse:
the uncomfortable kindred relation between claims to authority and the use of power.
Ethics first emerges in Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, its development as an
analytical technique seems to be entangled with the major change in scope and design
of his project. Ethics is best summed up by Foucault’s own phrase, ‘rapport à soi’; that
is, the relationship of the self to itself and the concomitant creation of moral systems.
All these techniques have opened new directions in historical and cultural analysis.
But the weakness of archaeology and geneology is that in both Foucault’s usage and
other senses of the terms they are modes of enquiry founded in a past that has only a
tenuous sense of the breadth and complexity of their present.
Ethics, in contrast, collapses in on itself. The revelation that there is a reflexive
dimension to morality is an immensely valuable insight. But the exercise falters in the
absence of the protean ‘others’ which are part of the self’s reflexive definition.
Foucault produces a sophisticated history of ideas but ignores the complex
ethnographic settings of these ideas. In the case of classical Greece (as laid out in The
History of Sexuality, Volume 2) it is especially crucial that the reflexive self has been
limited to an idealized male self—a limitation totally unjustified by the historical
evidence. This kind of masculinist reflexivity underwrites and absorbs the masculine
ideologies of the past as part of the process of living out those of the present.
The dimension of enquiry I add to redress the balance could be called
ethnography; that is, a consideration of the synchronic, simultaneous, changing
contexts in which conflicting (often incompatible) discourses operate. Here I
reevaluate sexuality as a part of personal and political identity through the social acts
of constructing gender, whose meanings change with context. Being a man or being a
woman, male or female, boy or girl does not always mean the same thing.
Not that the Greek sources give us much positive assistance in such an
exercise. For specific reasons, all sorts of text from classical Greece are largely the
products of a dominant masculine ideology. One can hardly blame Foucault for
taking them literally. So do virtually all other scholars. I have tried to circumvent this
problem by searching for the meanings of actions as well as ideologies, without
delegating preferential constitutive status to either.
I have also tried to avoid a mistake made by Foucault and others in working
with Greek material—that of construing the part for the whole. Even for
ethnographers (in both a metaphorical and a practical sense) working in
contemporary societies, not all contexts are accessible or are equally accessible. For
ancient Greece only a limited number of contexts can be explored. Precisely because
of the nature and context of the production of virtually all our sources, the touchstone
of understanding is always the free, adult, male citizen. Hence discourses on power,
love and life itself frequently take on the form of hierarchical definitions of ‘otherness’
in polar opposition to the pivotal pillar of society: the adult, free, male citizen. This
illusion, partly a consequence of the production of the sources themselves, blurs our
vision of the intricate detail of lived reality, if we allow ourselves to be swallowed up
in it (Foxhall 1996).
The ‘other’ of man is not only woman, but also slave, child, old man, god,
beast and barbarian. But what is the ‘other’ of woman? For Foucault, she has no
‘other’; only male selves are admissible in his analysis, and he never questions
whether women complied with this negation of female selves. It is indeed harder to
perceive woman as a first element from the texts alone. So, for example, women are
never the starting point or focal person for defining an ankhisteia—which is the
formally structured bilateral kindred that children of first cousins used to determine
inheritance and funerary obligations. In anthropological terms a woman can never
formally be ‘ego’, because ‘significant’ kinship networks were seen to link men.
None the less, women were essential for connecting the ankhisteia together.
Indeed, it could not work without them and frequently female links were chosen as a
means of emphasizing relationships between men who had no male link. Moreover,
there were alternative social and kinship structures, which operated in particular
contexts. These were just as real in people’s lives as those governed by the ideology of
the adult male citizen. What is interesting is that they are not openly expressed in the
texts. But if we start instead from the viewpoint that a number of significant aspects
of social life were governed by feminine ideologies, an entirely new set of
contemporary and simultaneous contexts is opened up in an ethnographic way (1)
There are three aspects of life in which male and female discourses are at
cross-purposes, to the point that they are sometimes mutually unintelligible. One is
the relationship to time and hence to monumentality. Another is the constitution and
political construction of households, and the relation of individuals to them. The third
is the area problematized (but not so contextualized) by Foucault: the development
and construction of sexuality vis-à-vis social and political relationships.
TIME AND MONUMENTALITY
Women and men experience time in different ways. I think this is probably true in
many societies, but it is certainly demonstrable for classical Greece. There are two
areas where gender-specific relationships to time are most obvious. One is the
different ways men and women pass through life stages; the second is the way
individuals access the past and the future (which are different pasts and futures for
men and women) beyond their own life spans.
One can still read that Greek women were considered to be permanent
children (Sealey 1990:40–2; Foucault comes close to arguing this). This is surely
incorrect. Xenophon in the Oikonomikos portrays a newly married woman as an adult
(albeit a young adult), who is taking on adult responsibilities with her marriage:
women are realized, children are potential. Of course adulthood did not mean the
same thing for women as for men. But it would seem that in general girls were felt to
reach adulthood sooner than boys (cf. Aristotle, de gen. an. 775a.5ff—females take
longer to generate in the womb, but grow up faster; female diseases work on different
time spans from male diseases). Girls might be ‘finished off’ after marriage under the
tutelage of a mother-in-law (e.g. Lysias 1), but they were fully adult when the babies
started to arrive, within a few years of their marriage shortly after puberty (12–14 or
so, so they were ‘adult’ by the time they were 15 or 16).
Boys slid more gradually into adulthood over a longer period of time, through
a process that began at around age 17 or 18 (cf. Vidal-Naquet 1981). They might not
reach full adulthood until around 30, and few Athenian men married much younger
than this. Similarly at the other end of life, women frequently remained powerful and
active in their world of the household longer than men remained powerful and active
in the world of the city. Men faded out of politics when they were no longer militarily
active, but women’s influence over their younger kin increased as they grew older.
The corollary of these differences in life cycle must be that the meaning of being a
man or being a woman itself changed in relation to the other over time.
Individuals’ contact with the past and the future is similarly gender specific,
and related to gender-specific life cycles. Women projected themselves into the future
directly via their children and grandchildren, especially their sons (Hunter 1989). In
most of the contexts of everyday life, classical Greeks rarely had much concern for a
past or future reaching out more than three generations (Foxhall 1996). So, for
example, the ankhisteia comprised the group of people who shared an ancestor three
generations back; concomitantly one planted olives for one’s grandchildren and
great-grandchildren. Indeed much of a household’s social and economic activity was
for the sake of its children; that is, its own immediate future. Because of the special
role of women’s relationships in directing and managing households, much of the
practical direction of life on this three-generation time scale was in women’s hands. I
shall return to this point, though it is worth noting that in a Greek context household
management means much more than simply doing the housework, since a family’s
economic enterprises (including factories and farms) were conceptually contained
within the household—no notion of independent, corporate, economic institutions
existed (see Foxhall 1989).
Men were dependent on women for access to the three-generation time scale
that framed most of everyday life (some of the later discussion about sexuality
returns to this theme). But the formal network of kinship was appropriated by men.
This was the ankhisteia (mentioned earlier), which was most often invoked when
kinship affairs became public matters (as in funerals, or in the marriage of brotherless,
fatherless girls, which could become a state problem). Men also appropriated a largerscale past and future, which existed in a rather undifferentiated way beyond the
three-generation limit, and excluded women from it. The way in which this kind of
time was used I have called monumentality (see Foxhall 1996). This notion of
monumentality is explicit throughout Greek literature, art and inscriptions. It
becomes entwined with a complex rhetoric about fame, glory, reputation and
memory. For example, the (male) historical/journalistic writer Thucydides describes
his account of the Peloponnesian Wars as ktema eis aei, ‘a possession for eternity’.
Many other examples of male monumentality could be cited, in forms varying
from the Parthenon to individuals’ grave stelae or vases inscribed with graffiti.
Virtually all of the literary and epigraphical sources for ancient Greece emanate from
this context of male monumentality, generated by men in their relatively short period
of full, powerful adulthood. More specifically, they are the artefacts produced by the
purveyors of a (perhaps ‘the’) ‘hegemonic masculinity’ which attempts to dominate,
subordinate and feminize the rest, and their production is an intrinsic part of this
process of domination (see Cornwall and Lindisfarne, Chapter 1 in this volume).
Similarly with access to the past, because men married older than women and
older men married much younger women, children were likely to have contact for
longer with a grandmother than with a grandfather. Thus part of classical Greek
socialization processes would have been learning about the short-term past from
women in the household.(2) The past and the future (on this roughly three generation
scale) were thus more accessible to women than to men, and it may be partly because
of this that women had special roles in marking the passage of time in human lives—
in rites de passage, notably weddings and funerals and most obviously in childbirth.
These contested discourses, the problematizations of gender and time, also
reverberate in the relationship between the ritual and the agricultural calenders of
ancient Athens. There were three major festivals of Demeter and Kore, which related
directly to crucial periods in the growth of cereals, the main food staple, and to a
lesser extent grapes. The Thesmophoria was celebrated in late October over five days
just before the start of the sowing period, which was also the busiest period of the
year for agricultural work. The festival excluded men (virtually no Athenian festivals
excluded women), and during this period women took over the city, held sacrifices,
fasted, and performed magic to infuse the seed corn with fertility. The Haloa, a
rowdy women’s festival (again excluding men) celebrated at the end of December in
honour of Demeter and Kore and Dionysos, marked the end of the autumn
agricultural work (sowing and vine pruning). The third festival of this type was the
Skira in June, which was tied to the ritual plastering of threshing floors towards the
end of the harvest.
Significantly, in all of these festivals women displayed their sexuality to,
among and with each other in the absence of men—Aristophanes depicts
‘homosexual’ as well as heterosexual desires and behaviour between women in these
gatherings, and this is supported by the anxiety with which other sources document
these festivals. It is also significant that immediately after the Thesmophoria and
shortly before the Skira there were festivals to Apollo centred on the phratries
(patrilateral clans) and thus celebrated the principles of male descent. The Apatouria
(immediately after the Thesmophoria in early November) also celebrated the moment
at which youths were becoming men (beautifully analysed by Vidal-Naquet 1981).
The Thargelion came in mid-May, just before the cereal harvest. Though it included a
sacrifice to Demeter Chloe (Green Demeter), the victim was a ram—one of the very
few occasions when a goddess received a male animal. Perhaps most important in
relation to the Thesmophoria were Haloa and Skira (the women’s festivals to Demeter
and Kore): all of the agricultural tasks at the heart of the rituals were men’s jobs.
Over and over, women’s ritual activity was essential for men’s work to be
effective. That ritual activity consisted in large part of women constituting their
sexuality. The core of Greek social continuity was symbolized by Demeter and
Kore—the relationship of mother and daughter. This became symbolically tied up
with the continuity of the physical body through the social activities of food
consumption and production: Demeter was the kourotrophos, the nursemaid, of
humanity (this was one of her cult titles). In contrast, the celebration of the
generations of men in festivals to Apollo complemented, or perhaps resisted, the
centrality of continuity and kindred through female links which excluded men.
Demeter and Kore—lines of mothers and daughters spanning generations of men —
thus provided alternative kinship structures to the male-dominated ankhisteia (threegeneration kindred) and phratry (patrilateral clan). Women might almost be said to
control time in some contexts, but hegemonic masculinity wrested the control of one
kind of eternity from them. Monumentality in the public sphere, the struggle to
achieve glory, fame and remembrance, largely excluded women.
THE CONSTITUTION AND POLITICAL
CONSTRUCTION OF HOUSEHOLDS
Even for Aristotle (Politics 1), the fundamental sociopolitical unit of Greek citystates
was the household (oikos), not the individual. The household was not simply ‘the
private sphere’ to which women’s activities were relegated, leaving it as ‘other’ to the
public, political world of male citizens (usually defined as more important by modern
academics). ‘Public’ and ‘private’ were interleaved in a complex way, and were not
always hierarchized with the ‘public’ holding sway over the ‘private’. Depending on
the context, the household was itself a public entity, with political significance. The
adult male in his prime (3) held a privileged position vis-à-vis the household in that
as kyrios (literally ‘master’, head of household), he could move freely between the
contexts in which the household behaved as the private sphere and those in which it
became a public entity (Foxhall 1989). 4 Much of the power of the kyrios derived from
his ability to transcend contexts and to mediate in this way.
In spatial terms, it has been observed that in Greek town planning, household
space (houses and fields) dominated over public space (Jameson 1990a, 1990b). And
houses themselves contained space that was, at different times, sometimes defined as
‘private’ and sometimes as ‘public’, though on the whole exclusively male activities
were marginalized within Greek houses. It was the aggregate of household decisions
that formed the economy of Greek citystates, since economic enterprises largely
existed and were managed within the structure of households. Similarly, it was
households that were represented by individuals in the assembly, the law courts and
the agora, as well as at the Thesmophoria. And households could not be constituted
without their women; indeed women might be said to have constituted the
household more fundamentally than the men who spoke for it. ‘Plato is wrong to
argue that women and men can do the same work on the analogy of animals’, says
Aristotle. ‘Animals don’t have households to run’ (Politics 2).
Interestingly, Aristotle’s objection to Plato here is not that women are
physically or even mentally inferior to men (though he certainly implies this
elsewhere) or that they do not have the capacity to do men’s work, but that culture is
‘biologically’ intrinsic to humans as it is not to other animals, and people ‘naturally’
live in households in societies (so ‘humans are political animals’, Politics 1). Hence
the nature of man is culture, and without woman that culture is impossible.
It was households that reproduced the political institutions of a city, for
descent was one of the most crucial tenets of citizenship in all Greek city-states
(though its precise significance varied). Citizens emerged from households and
claimed their right of citizenship by virtue of the place they held in a household.
Obviously women were essential to physical reproduction. And clearly men
attempted to appropriate social reproduction, especially its public and political
aspects, by monopolizing civic life. But I would argue women were central to other,
equally important aspects of social reproduction, because of their special relationship
to time. Oikoi (households) did not stretch themselves into the past and the future in
simple linear continuity. Rather, when property and social roles passed from one
generation to the next, oikoi re-created themselves, rather than continuing indefinitely.
This is reflected in the naming system: people died in the household in which
people named after them (their grandchildren) were the next step in the re-creation
process (Foxhall 1989). Oikoi were then really re-created every other generation. But
because women’s life cycles were ‘out of synch’ with men’s, they married earlier, they
were ‘adult’ for longer and they had a different relationship with the past and future
of lived life; so it was that women were most likely to be the ones bridging the two
generations it took to re-create the household. In other words, men lived within one
generation while women’s lives spanned over two formal generations of men. This
also reinforced the special relationship already noted between women and rites de
passage, and their relation to time.
In a sense this relation of women to time might be said to be at the heart of the
social reproduction of the household. And, as I shall discuss in more detail below
when I come to sexuality, men’s institutions of male social reproduction could be
seen as an alternative discourse to those of the household in its communal setting,
which centred on women. Women (as constituents of households) penetrated even
apparently ex clusively male, ‘public’ arenas. In Athens and Corinth and other Greek
cities the earliest public buildings in the agora (datable to the seventh and sixth
century BC) were not law courts or council chambers or stoas, they were fountain
houses. And women used fountain houses. These were areas of female public space
in zones of male activity. Here women met, talked (away from men), and filled their
jugs with the water necessary to keep their households operating. Tyrants like
Peisistratos in sixth-century BC Athens rated the building and upkeep of fountain
houses high among their most important public works, essential to the identification
of themselves with the community of the polis and hence to their maintenence of
power. To what end? That women could keep the households of the city running and
reproducing.
Foucault has construed the household as a male-dominated institution whose
bars between itself and the outside world confined women’s lives, including (perhaps
especially) their sexuality and its expression. But the bars separating off households
were different ones for women and for men. Men traversed them, but the only
unproblematic way in which they could do so was as kyrioi—heads of household.
But while men usually lived out their lives in one household, women lived in two:
their natal and their marital households.5 This left open an avenue with the potential
for some autonomy which many women seem to have traversed with alacrity (for
example, Demosthenes’ mother; see Hunter 1989). Women became related (in terms
of kinship) to their husbands, their mother-in-law, and their marital households
through their children, while they also maintained their relations of kinship and
affect with their parents and siblings from their natal household, especially with
female kin. Women’s networks of alliances, then, ranged quite widely beyond the
confines of their own households. Men could suppress these bonds so long as they
were formed so that women remained nested in their ‘proper’ place within the
ankhisteia. From here, women’s bonds strengthened the household unit against
threatening competition from other households outside. Women kept to their place,
and that place upheld men’s individuality.
But women were not always passive and families and households were not
always ideally configured. Women could and apparently often did form relationships
with other kin, especially female kin, with slaves (especially female slaves) and with
children, which contravened the interests of men and their positions of authority visà-vis their household. Men’s control over women’s relationships and bonds was in
fact often tenuous. This is perhaps what spawned the male fantasies of women
conspiring against men which are prominent in comedy (Menander, Samia;
Aristophanes, Clouds, Ekklesiazusai, Thesmophoriazusai, Lysistrata), tragedy
(Medea, Agamemnon, Anti-gone, Bacchai) and law-court speeches (Lysias 1;
Antiphon 1; Demosthenes 41; cf. Foxhall, 1995). In most of these examples, women
are perceived and portrayed as acting against the autonomy and the interests of an
individual man (or men) via relationships and bonds over which the man is not fully
in control. Male individuality appears as a discourse incompatible with the bonds
and relationships, generated by women, which ran so much of men’s everyday lives
through household structures.
For men, kinship within and beyond the household was an important tool for
maintaining their political and economic status and autonomy. The interesting thing
is that though women’s manipulation of kinship ought to have been subject to male
authority according to the dominant masculinist ideology, patently it often was not.
SEXUALITY, SOCIALIZATION AND POWER
Greek male ideologies of sexuality have a lot to do with notions of control, autonomy
and individuality, as Foucault has quite rightly argued. A very important source of
men’s power and authority as heads of households was that (ideally, at least) they
could control the sexual activities of other household members (including animals
and slaves), but that they themselves were autonomous and no one else could dictate
their sexual activities. But reality, however hard to get at, is usually more complicated
than ideology. And this ideology works only as long as women are assumed to be
passive and boys obedient. I shall consider women’s sexuality first, then boys.
That women’s sexuality was not passive is clear from the sources. Sexual
offences by men involving women (rape, adultery, seduction, even sexual insults)
were offences against men’s authority over their households and against their power
to control the sexual activities of household members, as Foucault argues. So, for
example, in a law-court speech, a man arguing that he had caught the man he killed
in bed with his wife says: ‘he committed adultery with my wife, and he violated me
inside my very own house’ (Lysias 1.29). Moikheia (usually translated ‘adultery’, but
probably really sex with a woman in someone else’s charge) was committed with the
wife, and this was hybris against the husband (see Cohen 1991; Cantarella 1991;
Foxhall 1991).
But moikheia was not legally worse than rape nor were legal penalties in
Athens more severe, as Foucault (and others) have maintained. The situation is more
complicated and more interesting. Rape was not isolated as an offence, nor was it
specifically construed as a crime against women. Generally it came under the
category of hybris, ‘assault’, in legal terms. Hence boys and men, as well as women,
could be victims of what we call ‘rape’. Moreover, moikheia and rape were legally not
very clearly distinguished, and the punishments were the same most of the time
(Harris 1990). The reason for this was almost certainly that from the point of view of
the laws the victim of both crimes was not the person attacked but the man in whose
house she dwelt. But when we turn to the moral assessment of rape and moikheia (at
least in terms of male ideologies), a different picture emerges. Women (like boys) who
were objects of rape were pitied (Cole 1984:111–13) and gratuitous violence against
free women was despised. Women could be moral, if not legal, victims.
In moikheia both parties were considered despicable (for different reasons).
This difference in moral attitude between moikheia and rape has as much to do with
the reality of women’s behaviour as with ideologies of male superiority. In moikheia
it was less easy to maintain the ideology that women had no well-defined sexuality of
their own but were merely the passive vehicles of men. Moikheia, at least in the few
cases where we have some details, implied a longer-term, larger-scale relationship,
with a more active role played by women (and female networks). For example, in the
case I have just cited, the wife was said to have been close to (and attended a major
religious festival with) the mother of the murdered adulterer, while a slave girl acted
as go-between for the lovers. The husband claimed he was finally informed about
what was going on by a disgruntled ex-lover (female) of the adulterer. And perhaps
most significantly, all the trouble with the wife started (so the husband says) when
his mother (who lived with the couple) died. A woman with a lover (moikhos) has
taken control of her own sexuality, and has taken that control away from the man
who purports to dictate her sexual activity (cf. the women in Lysistrata who swear to
have sex with neither moikhos nor husband). A woman with female lovers takes her
sexuality away from men altogether. The paucity of references (though there are a
few) to female homosexuality may represent the threat it posed to male individuality
and autonomy, and its removal from male spheres of activity and knowledge.
Foucault argued that adultery depended on the behaviour of only one marital
partner: the woman. In fact, it seems to have depended more on whether the
existence of a wife’s lovers were acknowledged by her husband. There was an
uncomfortable subtext for the man whose authority and power was penetrated by a
moikhos. A public accusation of moikheia must have elicited the communal question
of whether the control exerted by the accuser was ineffectual. A man whose wife took
a moikhos was a cuckold. Was the accuser, then, considered to be as much at fault in a
social sense as the accused might have been at fault legally? It is hard to know the
answer to this. But this aspect of moikheia allows for a slightly different interpretation
of the interesting penalty problematically referred to by Demosthenes (59. 66–7) and
Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 51.2), permitting the wronged husband to attack the guilty and ‘to
use him however he wished without a knife’. Was this a chance for a cuckolded
husband publicly to re-exert his sexual authority and his autonomy via his own
physical strength and personal courage, as well as having the more obvious aim of
taking revenge for the hybris committed against him?
The unflattering implication that a man might not be looking after his
authority very well, the potential messiness of divorce, and, in perhaps a number of
cases, status differences between the offended party and the moikhos all provide
reasons why real cases involving moikheia are thinly represented in our sources. This
is certainly implied in Aiskhines 1.107, where he suggests that the cuckolded
husbands of Andros would not be willing to expose themselves to testify to
Timarkhos’ iniquities with their wives. Whether or not this is a spurious excuse on
Aeschines’ part to account for lack of witnesses, it was meant to sound plausible to
jurors. It is probably significant that the one victim of moikheia of whom we can be
certain, Euphiletos (Lysias 1), had to choose between representing himself as a
cuckold and the possibility of execution for murder. Again this disjuncture of
incompatible discourses made room for women to wrest some autonomy from men.
Male sexuality, especially the emergence of male sexuality from boyhood, was
also problematic in relation to notions of adult male control and autonomy. By
Foucault and some of his commentators (e.g. Poster 1986:213; Seidler 1987; Winkler
1990) this was considered the central problematic of Greek sexuality. What he did not
consider was the connections between the emergence of male sexuality, the tension it
created between the development of a male, autonomous individual from childhood,
and the relationship to household bonds and structures of this new person (with a
new notion of self) who came out of the chrysalis of a very long male ‘adolescence’.
We can still, with Foucault, avoid the long line of psychoanalytic explanations of the
development of male sexuality from Freud to Chodorow, for the issue is not the
separation of the male child from his mother but the life cycle of socialization which
excluded fathers (by the self-separation of a boy from the household) as it came to
include mothers.
The creation of female sexual identity took place within the household (indeed
within two households: marital and natal). But the creation of male sexual identity
happened out of reach of the household, in the gymnasium and in other public
places, at a time when a boy or a young man was still part of a household which he
did not ‘control’ (that is, he was not the head who spoke for it and represented it).
This is at the heart of the problematic nature of male erotic and ‘romantic’ love which
Foucault persuasively identified. The whole process of the emergence of male
sexuality happened over a long time, starting before puberty and culminating in
marriage around age 30. The emergence of female sexuality was much faster, and
seems to have taken only the couple of years around puberty (though it probably
continued to develop within marriage).
Although boys were ideally not supposed to take pleasure from their passive
role in sex, they are sometimes shown with erections during the sex act. Further,
among the numerous depictions of sex between males in Athenian vase painting, a
large minority do not show the canonical erastes/ eromenos (lover/beloved—
older/younger male) relationship, but men or boys who are closer in age. Moreover,
boys and adolescents are frequently shown having sex with girls and women. This
shows up the cracks in the dominant masculine ideology of the erastes/eromenos, so
prominent in the literary sources. Though boys were subordinate in certain
circumstances to older men (who might also often have been of higher status),6 they
were neither entirely passive nor fully feminized. Boys and women shared some
traits in masculine perceptions, but they were inherently different. Overly feminine
boys were disdained, and a boy was beautiful specifically because he manifested the
acme of masculinity, just as a girl or woman was beautiful through her femininity.
The development of adult male sexuality pulled a boy away from his
household (as it took place outside it), most especially away from the authority of its
head (usually his father). The conflicts between sons entering adulthood and fathers
losing control are highlighted in Attic comedy, a literary genre which by its nature
frequently homes in on the critical structural tensions of Greek social and political life
(Aristophanes, Clouds, Wasps). A father’s authority became weaker as his son’s
sexual identity (and with it autonomy and individuality) grew stronger over time.
Foucault’s paradox of the eromenos (the beloved) who evades his father to submit to
a lover (erastes), and who must submit without being seen to do so too easily or
dishonourably, is not, as Poster argues, simply the problematization of the sexual
passivity of free boys and thus the implication of unfree status. Status was relative
and so boys submitted to men. It is in fact also another paradox: submission to
unrelated male lovers from other households weakened the ties of authority to a
boy’s own father (whoresisted the infringement of his authority). Yet this was
essential to the development of a young man’s own sexual identity, autonomy, and
his ability to become the head of a household of his own and a political person in his
own right.
Adolescence presented similar tensions, though in a different sociopolitical
context, to the association of ‘ritualized’ homosexuality with entry into adulthood
which Herdt (1987) has identified among the Sambia in New Guinea. This process of
developing autonomy was complete or near completion when the son married and
became an autonomous head of his own household. And the ramification, the really
crucial paradox which Foucault did not take on board, is that this culmination, which
put the newly matured son almost out of reach of paternal authority, brought him
back into the maternal fold. When he married, the network of female bonds of his
household and that of his mother (and other female relatives) took responsibility for
socializing his wife into her new household, and ultimately his children as well (as in
Lysias 1, the adultery case mentioned above). His mother’s authority might be
enhanced at this time relative to his father’s.
In summary, the gymnasium, like other institutions of male social
reproduction, pulled young men away from the dominion of their households, thus
encouraging their development as sexual and political individuals. The irony is that
the end of that process brought a new kind of tie to the household, which was rooted
primarily in female links. It is significant that it is these masculine institutions of
social reproduction which are monumentalized and celebrated in art and in literature,
to the near-exclusion of female roles in social reproduction.
CONCLUSIONS
Seidler (1987) has argued on rather different grounds from me that Foucault’s attempt
to analyse discourses of sexuality fails because it is divorced from structures of
gender. Gender was probably the most important organizing principle for Greek
society, both on the level of everyday life and on the level of metaphor. It is clear that
the complexities of gender were the template for expressions of power I have tried to
show that most aspects of life in classical Greece consisted of complex discourses and
‘conversations’. Though the dominant masculinist ideology of the elite, citizen, adult
male shouts loudest, this voice never quite overwhelms the others, though it certainly
configures their speech. No voice can shout continually, and when the dominant one
pauses for breath, the others are ready to fill the gap in their own way, even if they
can never permanently win. It is my task as a feminist scholar to listen for the other
voices and report what I hear.
Foucault’s arguments and methodologies in The History of Sexuality are
significantly flawed. One aim of this revised account of Greek ‘sexuality’ has been to
make manifest these problems, by examining the intricacies of gendered roles in areas
of Greek life that went beyond ‘sexuality’ in a narrow sense and yet were intimately
entwined with it. The wider context of the household in its temporal, spatial and
political settings provided the context in which sexuality was expressed and
developed. Foucault illegitimately removed masculine sexuality from that context.
The most fundamental problem remains: that the nature of the historical
sources and the contexts of their production and survival emanate from, and indeed
celebrate, only a very small slice of male life and power. The contexts of the
production of these texts happen to be the ones that our culture privileges: I am not
sure this was so in ancient Greece, and there is enough evidence of other discourses
to problematize Foucault’s privileging of these. Is it possible that Foucault’s
intellectual methodology itself, in isolating the discourse as the object of analysis and
interpretation, succeeds in decontextualizing discourses from their social setting
precisely because alternative discourses are not always mutually audible or
intelligible? In refusing to hear alternative discourses he has deprived Greek women
of their selves, he has left them passive and compliant in the face of male ideologies of
oppression, and he has robbed them of their recourses to autonomy. I would not
argue that women in classical Greece were not oppressed, but I would maintain that
they resisted suppression. The dominant masculinist ideologies which ruled political
life and serve as the context for the creation of most of the surviving source material
never completely drowned out the other voices in the Greek conversations we can
still hear.
NOTES
1. I do not use the unmodified terms ‘man’ and ‘woman’ in an essentialist way. I refer
specifically to persons of the citizen category. Of these, the best-documented group
are the wealthy elite of Athens; their behaviour was not necessarily typical of less
well-off citizens of their own or other cities.
2. Contact with the past via older men may have been largely outside the household,
in a context that pulled young men away from it, as is described below with respect
to sexuality.
3. Sometimes more than one adult male resided in a household, but this could cause
trouble, as I discuss later. Long adolescence usually prevented more than one
household head.
4. Like many words in ancient Greek, kyrios is protean and context-specific. It also
refers to a man who acted for a woman in a public capacity in contexts from which
women were excluded. Although it is often translated as ‘guardian’, no fixed relation
to the woman is implied and the relationship was negotiable—see Foxhall (1995) and
Hunter (1989).
5. This, at least, is the ideal. In practice, the man who married an epikleros (a
fatherless, brotherless girl) and/or was adopted by another household did not live out
this ideal, and may have had a different relationship to the women of his household.
6. Frequently the man or men who were a boy’s lovers became his political and
economic patrons when he grew up.
Chapter 8
Men don’t go to the moon
Language, space and masculinities in Zimbabwe
Chenjerai Shire
In this chapter my concerns are with the widest range of linguistic and spatial
representations of masculinities in Zimbabwe. My account is autobiographical and
what I describe has my own experiences and memories as its referent. General terms
like ‘Zimbabwean’, ‘Shona’ and ‘masculinity’ mask fragmentary contexts. There is no
universalized ‘Zimbabweanness’ or ‘Shonaness’, just as there is no single,
universalized masculinity. I use the term ‘masculinities’ here to examine male
preoccupations as celebrations of ideals of maleness, pluralized to render a definition
as fragmented as the many domains in which men are constructed as ‘men’ through
language and space.
The noun murume (man), apart from being a designation of anatomy, has
connotations of not only gendered difference but specific functions. To women in
spaces designated as female, murume is a site of bother. The term used to describe
what men do in courtship, kuruma—to seduce or literally to sting, bite, stimulate—
defines masculinities in terms of activities and actions addressed to women. Mukadzi
anoruma (the woman is seduced) shows, by use of the passive, the woman as being
acted on. Kuruma can also be that which has potency. These idealized representations
portray men as active and in control, yet they also carry with them a sense of the
dependency of men on women and of the ways in which masculinities are defined
and shaped through interactions with women. As I will go on to suggest, women are
far from passive in these processes.
Masculinities are negotiated and constructed in different areas through
specific language usage. Spaces designated as male, such as the dare (traditional
meeting place of men) and the beerhall, are places in which men can show their
prowess through the skilful use of language and embellish particular masculinities. In
these domains, definitions and descriptions of murume create ideals of autonomy. In
proverbial self-definition, the ‘Shona’ say ‘murume murume, anoti chamuka inyama’. A
free translation would read ‘a man is a man, he asserts that anything that arouses is
fair game’, meaning that it is a prerogative of men in their own spaces to take
whatever is placed before them. The use of metaphor to define maleness in this sense
alludes to various ideals. The use of the word nyama (game, meat) not only defines
men as masculine subjects in terms of their hunting prowess, but alludes also to
anything discursive as fair game. The use of language in these domains marks out a
space in which men contest and confirm particular masculinities through shows of
verbal versatility, competence in the ‘language of men’ and the use of particular
forms of discourse.
As they grow older, boys learn what it is to be a murume chaiye (‘real man’) not
only through their interactions with those who profess to embody these ideals, but
also through the myths of masculinity which are spun by female relatives. In spaces
designated as female, in which men are not welcome, the discourse of women shapes
the masculinities of boys as they move in and out of these and other gendered
domains. Female relatives—particularly the vatete (father’s sister) and ambuya
(paternal grandmother)—impress certain masculine ideals on young boys, instructing
them in what it takes to ‘be a man’ and in the arts of courtship and love. Women, as
custodians of the praise poetry which marks the particular masculinities of each
totemic group, celebrate and affirm men in the language of mutupo (totems) in public
places, and between lovers in private, through praise poetry known as madanha
omugudza, ‘lovers’ discourse under the blanket’.
THE SHAPING OF ‘SHONA’ MASCULINITIES
My analysis draws on my own experience and that of my generation, rather than on
published sources. My narrative describes a past in which I, as a young boy living in
a rural area in the south of Zimbabwe, moved within gendered spaces learning the
language of men. This experience is characterized by colonial occupation, under
which ‘Shona’ men’s lives were in perpetual motion between a number of places. As
men moved from rural communities to be relocated in farming compounds, mines,
town locations and schools, their identities shifted. Ideas about zvechirume, freely
translated as ‘male preoccupations’, were dislocated as a result of this movement.
They remain in constant motion, as different identities are being defined.
With the changing circumstances brought about by the colonial presence,
zvechirume underwent dramatic modifications. The descendants of chiefs became
subjects in circumstances that altered the physical nature of the spaces in which men
expressed and learnt what it was to ‘be a man’. Men who once constructed their
identities through the rich vocabulary of totemic connectedness were renamed using
a term signifying an area for colonial government: the ‘Shona’. My use of the term
‘Shona’ here refers only to the cluster of totemic and language communities in a
geographical area now known as Zimbabwe. The definition and meaning of this term
are embedded in colonial power relations. Opinions differ as to its original meaning.
I suggest that it derives from the name ‘Shona’, the feminine version of the Gaelic
man’s name ‘Sean’ (cf. Doke 1931a, 1931b; Chimhundu 1992). ‘Shona’ men, within
this setting, internalized a masculinity designed to place them in emasculated,
subordinate relations with the colonial power. This does not mean that zvechirume
were equally emasculated. They were, instead, transformed.
In traditional ‘Shona’ society, power relations did not necessarily follow a
single-sex hierarchical structure. Masculinities, in this setting, could be organized as
much around female as male dominance. Patriarchal masculinity was embedded in
British colonial discourse, and the internalization of a masculinity based on war and
phallocentrism became a part of social reality during the period of occupation as a
result of the Zulu and Boer wars of the late nineteenth century. The presence of the
British settlers in southern Africa led to concepts of masculinities based on weaponcentred ideals. Settler fantasies about Zulu warriors systematically undermined and
effaced ‘Shona’ masculine ideals. Language in places where men spent their time
reflected the masculinities of the men of the assegai and the rifle. Unlike the Nguni,
whose masculinities were constructed around the period when the Shaka’s defiance
of the colonial invasions shaped views on the Nguni male, the absence in male spaces
of weapons as objects of fantasy had an impact on ‘Shona’ men’s preoccupations.
Elsewhere, and especially in towns, ‘Shona’ men became the ‘boys’ of the
colonizers. Colonial discourses impinged on their masculinities, expressed and
contested in beerhalls and other places where ‘Shona’ men gathered. In the rural
areas, where the bases of ‘Shona’ masculinities were more systematically eroded by
interventionist legislation, identities were reconstructed around borrowed notions of
defiant aggression. The great patriarchs of the ‘Shona’ resorted to telling tales about
the Nguni assegai or muscet: objects of desire, which symbolized the machismo of the
warrior and resistance to colonial domination. Others expressed this identification
through the use of the Ndebele language. SiNdebele signified the epitome of a very
physical masculinity: an ability to use the knobkerry and the myths of the Zulu
fighters like Shaka. SiNdebele related to organized male space and about organizing
to fight. As I grew up, most men in the Zvishavane and Mberengwa area spoke
SiNdebele while among other men, whether or not they themselves were Ndebele. I
remember SiNdebele because of these men; men who felt that they were male enough
to speak SiNdebele. Anyone who could not speak it fluently was not treated as a
murume chaiye, a ‘real man’.
The changes brought about by colonial rule make the exploration of what was
once a traditional, gendered cultural identity, represented most vividly in various
instances of language use, little more than a romantic recovery of the past. This
account is neither a project of recovery nor an attempt to capture or distil ‘Shona’
ideals of masculinity through use of the ethnographic present. In choosing instead to
draw from my own experiences, I speak as a ‘Shona’ man who grew up in and moved
between rural areas and towns, between male and female spaces. During this period,
resistance to colonial rule produced multiple, changing masculinities: manifestations
of the experience of domination and of struggles appeared in many domains and
helped to define what it took to ‘be a man’.
MEN IN THEIR SPACES
As I grew up the most important male space was the dare. As boys, we started to
spend more and more time in the dare, moving between this ‘outside’ space and the
‘inside’ space of the hut, the domain of women. The dare was used to structure
various ideas about maleness. It was a place used to debate and assess masculine
ideals, for judicial matters and for relaxation. The dare was always located far away
from the women’s spaces, such as the kitchen or the women’s sleeping quarters.
Women were not denied access to this space, but their approach was limited to those
occasions when they entered the dare as victims, victimizers or jurors in judicial
matters or when they brought in food for the men.
The prerogative exemplified by murume murume, anoti chamuka inyama, which
could mean something very different when used in another space, was validated
within the dare. Masculinity was often shaped here through the use of metaphor and
proverbs, whose meanings we began to understand as part of the process of
achieving linguistic competence as ‘men’. Men who were unable to demonstrate
verbal prowess, whether in terms of command of SiNdebele or in skills of
argumentation and use of proverbs, were challenged in this space. Those who were
unable to compete would be labelled ‘boys’ (mukomana) and sent away to run errands
and to enter women’s spaces. By contrast, no matter what age boys were, if they
could speak well and had a strong opinion to voice—whether on the subject of
herding cattle or elopement—older, less fluent people might be sent for errands.
Having strong views and the verbal agility to argue a point meant that boys as young
as 8 or 10 were listened to and taken seriously. The dare was very much a space for
talking rather than doing. Here we were taught manners and formalities, as well as
skills for fighting, hunting or grazing. We would go out and experiment with what
we had learnt there, sometimes recreating the stories from the dare in fights with
boys of other areas.
As boys passed into the dare, they were taught about the gender of certain
material objects that were of importance in constructing male identities. Apart from
the assegai, which signified Nguni military machismo, objects such as munondo
(sword), shahu (axe) and pfumo (spear) were to be found in male spaces, for use by
men. These items had metaphorical associations with the changing forms of
zvechirume that emerged during the colonial era, defined in terms of a weapon-based
masculinity. For example, when men talked about pfumo (spear), they did not only
talk about the weapon, but also referred to a military regiment. Proper names such as
Pfumojena (the-radiant-spear) or Chinemukutu (one-with-an-arsenal) could also refer
to related notions. These are gender specific and constructed from military historical
folklore; they are sometimes evoked in praise of the male descendants of such men.
The dare was also the space in which men exchanged experiences and learnt
about making love and pleasing women. Men did not exclude boys from these
conversations, or from hearing about their physical or sexual problems, unless those
boys were seen as spending too much time in women’s spaces. Gossip was something
that took place only in the female domain, so the talk of men was regarded as
something which needed to be contained to prevent its transformation into gossip.
The notion that ‘real men don’t tell’ was impressed on boys, and those who did talk
about the news they heard in the dare were termed ‘weak hearted’ or matera
(cowards)—a term which can only be used of men. At times they would be chided
and mocked by other boys and men, who might ask: ‘Are you a musikana [girl]
then?’. Such characters were not given a place in the male space, but were sent away
to run errands, leaving the men free for discussion. As boys, until we were able to
prove that we were not spreading information left, right and centre, we were not
allowed to spend long periods of time in the dare.
Within this space, differences between men extended beyond those of ‘boys’
and ‘men’. Specific discourses also marked out and addressed particular groups of
men. At times, certain forms of language were used by married men or those whose
advanced age threatened sexual potency to exclude younger, single men.
These
discourses concerned ways of improving love-making and giving sexual pleasure to
women, and involved the passing on of knowledge about aphrodisiacs to ‘strengthen
the spine’. Men were treated differently not only with regard to their age or status,
but also according to their kin positions relative to other men. These defined the
particular parts men played in dealing with one another, irrespective of their age.
Relationships with different types of kin produced different kinds of masculinity,
both within and outside the space of the dare. Masculine identities that related to
being raised by maternal relatives differed from those produced through
relationships with paternal kin.
Closely linked with the embellishment of aspects of manliness in the dare was
the killing and eating of a beast there. Different parts of the beast’s body signified
different masculinities. Young boys were encouraged to roast and eat the gakava
(sinews) of the beast to acquire vigorous argumentative skills. A mazondo (cow’s
foot) was regarded as an aphrodisiac that bolstered sexual performance for married
men. Certain cuts of meat were given to men who occupied different positions within
the family, marking relations of junior and senior men and defining their
masculinities within this relation. The rwatata (pancreas) was given to nephews and
grandsons. The chisusu (first stomach) was for herdboys, the tsvo (kidneys) for the
father. The male in-laws took the bandauko (shoulder) to their wives. The
distribution of meat within this space, and of the food cooked by women in their
spaces, reinforced both gendered divisions and relations of authority among men.
These relations were disrupted by the changes brought about by colonial
occupation. The dare, once the site of contests over power for ‘Shona’ men, no longer
formed the only arena in which men gathered to display and discuss zvechirume.
Younger men were sent off to towns in search of wage labour to pay the colonial
taxes, away from the sphere of influence of their elders. If an older boy went to town
he would come back with trousers and the young women would be attracted to him
because he had something new. This in turn influenced younger men who also
wanted to go to town. Men returning from town with only a bicycle and a watch to
show after fifteen years of work would stay for a while, then go to another town to
keep up the role people admired. Women and children were left behind in the rural
areas to work the land. Since the women soon found out that they could do things for
themselves, men were no longer able to command the same kind of respect from
women.
The city was a space inhabited mostly by migrant labourers. As migrants, they
were travellers who expressed their masculinities by identifying with the ideals
which privileged roving. In ‘Shona’ nomenclature, a man who disappears to the city
is referred to by the same term as one who is broke: muchoni. Rural men addressed
men born in cities or towns as ‘mabhonirokisheni’ (‘born in locations’). The plural
prefix ‘ma’ communicates a negation of cultural authenticity, defining them as
‘objects’ and devaluing the manner and place in which they were born. The
masculinities of urban ‘Shona’ men were constructed from their wage-earning power
and through the assimilation of colonial definitions of masculinity. Men were no
longer ‘men’ because they belonged to a totemic group or were the heads of lineages.
They became instead chattels, slaves. Their sexuality and gendered expectations were
structured by colonial discourses on ‘African’ men. Thus in terms of gender, men in
towns could take on a variety of roles. When working for wages, they did not mind
cleaning and cooking for their masters, yet at home they would not contemplate
doing the same for their wives.
In male urban spaces, then, the discourse of men underwent significant
changes. Their masculinities reflected what was on offer in towns within a settlercolonial discourse. Dress codes took the form of mabhogadhi (tight jeans), important
because of the maleness of film heroes such as Humphrey Bogart. In style, they were
regarded as matsotsi (rebel males) who wore masatani (blue jeans), signifying a
‘satanic’ masculinity (this, itself, an effect of colonial Christian discourse) or
something foreign. My generation got its macho-ness from the swagger of cowboy
movies, and from rock-and-roll bands with their guitars as a kind of phallic symbol.
We wore headbands and Afro hair: with one pair of bell-bottomed trousers and flipflops we were kings. We also had to fight for our own independence.
Stripped of their totemic masculinities, urban males inhabited a masculinity
that regarded women as mahure (whores) whose presence in male spaces, such as
beerhalls, evoked extreme forms of misogyny. Any form of violence was legitimized
within the male space of the beerhall. Male attitudes towards women in towns were
reflected in the language of the beerhall: ‘ihure rega rirohwe’ (‘it’s a whore, let it be
beaten’) and ‘mukadziibhiza kupingudza rinoda kukwigwa’ (‘a woman is a horse, to be
broken it needs to be ridden’). Such attitudes remain entrenched in male spaces. Any
gender-specific role structured by rural ‘traditional’ culture was discarded in favour
of a masculinity that was both phallocentric and macho. This is not to suggest that
these attitudes remained unchallenged by women, particularly those with an
independent income. In both urban and rural areas, women continued to shape
masculinities through their interactions with both men and the boys who spent so
much time in their charge.
BECOMING A MAN IN WOMEN’S SPACES
Women constructed masculinities right through the lives of men, from birth to
adulthood. Women, in their spaces, had a material culture that was exclusively used
by women. Objects such as musika (whisk), mugoti (wooden spoon), guyo (grinding
stone), duri nomutsi (mortar and pestle) and mutsvairo (broom) were taboo in male
spaces. And men were excluded from using objects belonging to and for the use of
women. By reinforcing the femininity of these objects women also defined
masculinities. This was done in two ways: on the one hand their use was associated
by men with the idea of men becoming female, and on the other women used such
objects as weapons to drive young boys and men out of women’s spaces. Our fear as
young boys was twofold; we feared being beaten by a woman’s object and we feared
being rendered effeminate and growing breasts. In spite of this, there were boys who
through the patronage of the grandmother or aunt had access and were able to
remain
close
to
women’s
spaces.
The
name
given
to
such
boys
was
nzvengamutsvairo, literally ‘broom-dodger’: a man who evades male spaces.
A man did not brag about his masculinity in women’s spaces since male
discourse was severely restricted by women in such domains. In speech and deed
men were not taken seriously once they entered the women’s domain. Men were a
bother to women in domains like the kitchen. It was not only that male discourses
were ignored or restricted; none of the material objects celebrated as markers of
masculinities was of any interest within the women’s sphere. The construction of
masculinities through processes of exclusion was enforced in these spheres, and the
gender identities produced by these processes were taught to young boys and girls
within the domain of women and reinforced by senior women, particularly the
paternal aunt (vatete).
The power of the vatete to enforce traditional cultural practices derived, in
some part, from her status as muridzi womukadzi (literally ‘the owner of the wife’).
All women married to her brothers were regarded as her ‘wives’; in divorce cases, in
particular, the vatete held great influence and power. The spiritual power of ancestors
was mostly evoked through the vatete. Before ‘Shona’ power structures were broken
by the colonial onslaught, there were aunts who never married and who became
heads of households as mbonga (female spiritual leaders). Mbonga held
responsibility for the continuity of the family, as well as success in social and political
organization. A chief or king could not exercise his patriarchal power without
evoking the mbonga’s spiritual powers. In war the mbonga were supreme; if they
were sexually violated by the enemy, the king’s pfumo (regiment) were emasculated.
In peaceful times, the vatete united families through her power over her brothers and
their wives. Not only was her approval and assistance required for marriages to take
place, but often it was also difficult for any of her brothers to divorce their wives
without her agreement.
Within women’s spaces, vatete held great influence over their brothers’ wives
and over the boys who spent time in these spaces. Through teaching wives the praises
and the histories of their husbands’ lineages, vatete also vested in these women the
potential to contest the masculinities created through lineage associations as well as
to celebrate them, in discourses about love and sexuality. We were made aware of
the power women had to undermine men’s sense of themselves, particularly when
men transgressed in women’s spaces. It was the vatete who taught us about
mupfuwira, the love medicines women were said to use to render men amenable to
them. Mupfuwira, regarded as the weapon of women, seduced men away from a
power-based masculinity. Its effects were to make men behave in ways which
displayed docility, rather than dominance, in the presence of their lovers or wives.
And it was from the vatete that we learnt, as boys, about the ways to treat
women. They taught us about all kinds of things, about practical matters such as
contraception and also about sex: about what kinds of character to marry, the kinds of
pleasure which would stop women from leaving, and ways in which women could be
handled or controlled. In this way, the vatete instilled particular expectations about
women in boys. For example, one aunt of mine always told me that if you argue, a
woman will always leave. You might want to beat her up, but at the end of the day
she might just disappear or she can use medicines to poison you or make you insane.
It was the vatete, more than anyone else, who reinforced myths of maleness.
BOYS ‘OUTSIDE’: EXPERIMENTATION AND
DISCOVERY
Maternal uncles (sekuru nomuzukuru) also played an important part in teaching boys
about sex and sexuality even while they were still spending a lot of time in women’s
spaces. From the sekuru, we learnt about a masculinity whose discourse centred on
giving pleasure to women. The learning process took us into spaces where we learnt
about medicinal plants and acquired ideas about sexual prowess. Outside the dare, in
places where boys herded cattle and played, masculinities were structured in
activities centred on the admiration of the body and its sexual parts.
From an early age, boys engaged in games concerned with ensuring procreation in
adulthood. Certain fruits and pods signified potency and formed the basis for
activities centred on notions of sexual competence.
For example, the mumveva
(Kigelia pinnata) fruit was regarded as signifying this kind of masculinity. When the
fruit was in season, boys would bore a hole in the young fruit, into which they would
insert their penises. They would then wait to see whether the fruit matured or died. If
the fruit died or became deformed, this signified a threat to their sexual potency. If it
grew to maturity, this was seen to result in sexual competence and an enlarged penis.
We played games that grew out of our awareness of our bodies as different
and of the changes which they underwent. One of these games was to piss as high in
the sky as we could, without it falling back down on us. The kinds of game we played
as little boys were ones we knew girls could never play—this was a time when we
began to look at our private parts and start to think about how they actually worked.
In order to be able to compete, the penis could not be flaccid. One would have to wait
until it was hard enough to be able to aim straight. Also, we soon found out that it
was hard to do a jet without pulling back the foreskin, so we learnt how to do this.
And—something grown-ups did not teach us, but which was passed down by older
boys—we learnt how to perform a painful operation with a thorn and a bull’s hair to
free the foreskin. It hurt a lot, but after that it became easier to compete and win the
competition. This operation had significance beyond the contexts of these games, in
its association with the passage of semen in adulthood. Boys who did not want to
have this operation were teased and laughed at; they were called ‘chickens’, told that
they were not really boys and that all they wanted to do was to stay home and look
after chickens.
There were many more games that we played as young boys in our own
spaces, games in which we learnt about our bodies and our sexualities. For boys of 8
or 9 it was acceptable, even expected, to spend time together playing in this way. For
boys to continue with such games into puberty was, however, regarded as deviant.
Such boys were called names alluding to bullocks with only one testicle, which are
unable to fend off other bulls that mount cows, and which were only able to mount
oxen. The term, ngochani, has now become the word for ‘homosexual’. While I was
growing up, homosexuality was never talked about. The first I learnt of it was when I
was sent to a mission school, where the boys who did not have school fees would stay
with the priests. We thought of it then as something connected with Christianity.
As we grew older, girls were more often involved in our games. In one, we
would catch a certain kind of beetle found in the river, living on the surface of the
water. We would put them on our tongues so that they would bite. After this, we
would be able to whistle like men. We did this at an age when boys and girls were
still allowed to swim together in the river and girls were just starting to develop
breasts. The same beetles would be caught and given to girls to bite their breasts and
make them swell up. The boys would then tease them and touch them, finding out
about their bodies. Other games boys played with girls involved acting out ‘pretend’
marriages and setting up a home together somewhere in the bush. These games,
mahumbwe, could at times end up provoking jealousies as it became obvious that
people were not just playing, but that something else was going on.
At the same time as we played these games ‘outside’, while herding cattle or
goats, we were learning to be men in gendered spaces. We were gradually expelled
from women’s spaces to spend more and more time with boys and other men. Our
sense of ourselves as men, as we moved away from the domains in which women
held sway, was embellished and reinforced not only in male spaces but in places
where men and women came together as lovers. As adult men we draw on a complex
and overlapping repertoire of masculinities to fashion our present gendered identities
as men.
CELEBRATING MASCULINITIES: LOVERS’
DISCOURSE UNDER THE BLANKET
Using the language of mitupo (totems), learnt under the tutelage of the vatete,
women as wives and lovers celebrate the variant masculinities of men of different
totemic groups. In private spaces, women’s praises both create and affirm particular
masculinities. Women use this information to bolster their husbands’ sense of
themselves, but also need it to survive within their husbands’ families. The term for
these praises, madanha omugudza (‘lovers’ discourse under the blanket’), carries a
specific reference to the spaces in which men and women meet to make love. Within
these praise poems, metaphors allude to the maleness of the different totemic
animals. Within each totemic group, there are a number of chidao (sub-clans), all of
which have their own particular praises, which invoke potent images of various
masculinities.
Those of the Ngara (porcupine) totem receive praises that boast of their sexual
prowess and fertility. Terms are used which display the sharpness of the porcupine
quill, likening it to an arrow: ‘Vakapfura dombo nomuseve rikabuda ropa’ (‘those who
struck the rock with an arrow and drew blood’). The penis of these men is likened to
an arrow, so sharp and so rampant that it penetrates through impossible obstacles. In
this case dombo (rock, stone) alludes to a sterile woman to whom fertility is restored
by the sexual prowess of the Ngara man. In war, the spines that protect the porcupine
itself denote Ngara men as vakuru vehondo (magnificent men of war).
The masculinity of Hungwe or Shiri (bird) men is celebrated in a language
regarded as shameful in everyday speech. However, there is nothing shameful about
that language when it is used to praise Shiri men for their sexuality. The sexual
organs, masked by metaphors in other areas, are openly praised. It is not regarded as
obscene or pornographic when these men praise themselves or are praised as
‘machende eshumba…muranda wemheche’ (‘lion’s testicles…slave to the vagina’),
although both machende (testicles) and mheche (vagina) are regarded as coarse words
in everyday language. Those of the Mhofu (eland) totem are addressed, if male, as
‘mhofu yomukono’ (bull eland). Theirs is a masculinity celebrated as secretive and
powerful through their knowledge of metallurgy. Discourses regarding their
masculinity are held to be sacred. To cite one example in full, women married to a
Shumba-Mhazi (lionamour) man might celebrate her husband in the following
manner:
Hekanhi Shumba!
Thank you very much Lion!
Mhazi
Rampant
Maita Mhukahuru
You immense beast
Makashareni shanga mumakoto You-selected-me seed among the husks
Segukuru remudurunhuru
Like a cockerel in a rubbish dump
Zvamunoti mondigwangura
When you do desire me
Mosvosva nomongo
You delight the marrow
Muchindimatisa senzombe
Provoking me to bolt like a trek ox
Munoti ndivuchire sei she wangu?
How do I show you respect, my lord?
Munondirezva sorusvava
When you fondle me like an infant
Nezvanza zvine nhetemwa dzegwiti
With palms possessing pouchedmouse
paralysis
Munoti mandikoda pane shungu dzangu You titillate me where I am most
responsive
Menge mandikanda mudhidho rouchi
And it seems as though you have thrown
me in a pool of honey
Hi-i…! Hi-i…!
Hekanhi Shumba
Thank you Lion
Ndorobwa nebuka rinoomesa mitezo yangu soruware
I am struck by convulsions that
stiffen my limbs like a rock
Radzirai Shumba
Pound it hard, Lion
Musanyenya muchiurura napamusoro Do not tease and skim on the top
Dzisai murove bwendedszo
Penetrate and strike the target
Ehe-e Shumba
That’s it, Lion
Mazobaya mbariro dzechityu
You have now perforated the lath of the
breast
Ndokuitirai zvipi
What can I do for you
Zvingaturutsa mate enyu machena anobva mugona? Which can lure down your clear
saliva from its rocky fastness?
E!
That’s it!
Ririri rovunga bwusina chirashwa
Burning violently, it bubbles without splash
Maita Tembo
Thank you Tembo
Maita Shumba
Thank you Lion
Maita Chibwa.
Thank you Chibwa.
(Hodza 1982:9; my translation)
LANGUAGE, SPACE AND MASCULINITIES
In this chapter, I have provided glimpses from fragmentary contexts that reveal the
masculine identities of ‘Shona’ men not as homogeneous, but as associated with
particular language uses and particular gendered terrains. In different spaces and at
different points in the lives of men they move between these spaces and acquire or
are addressed by gender-specific languages. The multiple ways of being a man and
the signalling of gender identities through the use of language in different spaces is
so central to ‘Shona’ society that there is little need for macho events to authenticate a
notion of ‘masculinity’. Women, as well as men, construct and define masculinities,
by policing men to keep them out of women’s spaces and by creating and affirming a
range of male identities through their interactions with men as vatete, mothers, wives
and lovers.
I would like to end this chapter with an anecdote. I came home from school one
day—I must have been about 14—so excited about the news that the Americans had
landed on the moon that I blurted it out to my grandmother in ‘Shona’. Her response
was swift. She grabbed me by the ear and started to beat me until I retracted my
words. I had used a language permitted only in women’s spaces; the phrase kuenda
kumwedzi (‘to go to the moon’) is used to talk about menstruation. Later, as I sat, still
sobbing, she turned on the radio and heard the news. She turned to me and said:
I heard that Americans have gone to the moon. If they are men, how could
they? And, if they have gone to the moon—so what? Women have gone to the
moon every month—so it is nothing new.
Chapter 9
An economy of affect
Objectivity, masculinity and the gendering of police work
Bonnie McElhinny
GENDER AND THE WORKPLACE
Sex segregation in the workplace persists in the United States. Workplaces are
gendered not only by the numerical predominance of one sex within them, but also
by the cultural interpretations of given types of work. Men’s work is stereotypically
associated with the outdoors, with strength and with highly technical skills (whether
they be mechanical or scientific knowledge). It is perceived as heavy, dirty,
dangerous and requiring creativity, intelligence, responsibility, authority and power.
Women’s work is stereotypically understood as being indoors, lighter, cleaner, safer,
repetitive, requiring dexterity rather than skill, having domestic associations, being
tied to a certain work station, and often requiring physical attractiveness and charm
(Bradley 1989).
Important modulations of this generalization are necessary for understanding
class and ethnic divisions within the workplace. Middle-class jobs are more likely to
allow workers to exercise mental skills (analytic reasoning for men, social and
interpersonal skills for women) while working-class jobs require the exercise of
physical skills (strength for men, dexterity for women). Because many ethnic
minorities tend to have working-class or lower-middle-class jobs, the jobs designates
as ‘men’s’ and ‘women’s’ within these communities will often be specified according
to community norms about which sorts of work are best done by men or by women.
In most cases, men’s work, however defined, is rewarded more heavily in terms of
money and prestige, because the skills ‘men’s’ jobs require are more highly valued
and more likely to be recognized as labour.
Explicit specifications of the sex of workers (sometimes couched as
‘protective’ legislation) have often maintained this sex segregation of the workplace
in the past, though such dictates are increasingly rare in the United States.1 Today
more subtle cultural pressures work to reproduce sex segregation in the workplace,
from the tracking of girls and boys into different career paths to unions’ and
professional organizations’ attempts to maintain power and jobs for existing
members. Social stigma arising from sexism and homophobia prevents women and
men from taking jobs normatively linked to the opposite sex. The fear of being
labelled as a lesbian or masculine works to prevent all women from protesting sex
discrimination or taking on sexatypical roles (Pharr 1988)(2)
In this chapter I describe the manipulation of emotion within a workingclass
workplace that has traditionally been defined as all-male and all-masculine—the
police force. My focus is on how women learn to integrate themselves successfully
into previously all-male and masculine workplaces, and how the workplaces adapt to
them. In 1975 a court injunction was issued to the City of Pittsburgh requiring each
incoming police recruit class to be 25 per cent black females, 25 per cent white
females, 25 per cent black males and 25 per cent white males. Large movements of
women into male-dominated workplaces like those produced by this injunction are
rare (the few historical examples include clerical workers, telegraph operators, bank
tellers and waitresses), and such movements are usually rapidly followed by the
complete reversal of the gendertyping of the workplace (Reskin and Roos 1990: 12–
15).(3) In Pittsburgh the quota-hiring system has led to a slow, steady increase of
women and African-Americans, so that members of each category now compose
approximately 25 per cent of the force.(4) Pittsburgh thus has a larger percentage of
female police officers than any other major American city but Detroit (US Department
of Justice 1987a, 1987b).5 This workplace thus provides a unique opportunity to
consider how gender norms change as workplaces become sexually integrated.
What happens to individuals and institutions when their individual gender
identities and the gender of the institution to which they belong are presumptively
different? Do women who enter traditionally masculine, workingclass workplaces
adopt masculine behavioural strategies in order to be perceived as competent by co-
workers and customers/citizens? In order to address this question, I begin by
describing why police work has traditionally been considered ‘men’s’ work. I then
develop an ethnographic fragment that concentrates on one attribute of the gendering
of police work—the nonprojection of emotion. I close with a brief review of the
implications the study of police officers has for the study of the gender of work, as
well as for studies of masculinity and femininity more generally. (6)
THE GENDERING OF POLICE WORK
Policing has traditionally been regarded as ‘men’s work’ and, despite increasing
numbers of women, it is still so considered by many citizens and by male and female
police officers (even female police officers who consider themselves and other
females very good police officers). In general, blue-collar jobs like policing are
generally thought to be more masculine than white-collar ones, and bluecollar jobs
which require strength and/or violence are perceived as more masculine than those
which do not. Martin has suggested that:
for blue collar men whose jobs often do not provide high incomes or great
social prestige, other aspects of the work, including certain ‘manly’ features
take on enormous importance as a means through which they confirm their
sex-role identity. Work that entails responsibility, control, use of a skill,
initiative and which permits the use of strength and/or physical agility
characteristic of males is highly valued not only for its own sake but for its
symbolic significance. Similarly working in an ‘all-male’ environment
reinforces the notion that they are doing ‘men’s work’ and is a highly prized
fringe benefit of a job. (1980:89)
Police work is defined, in public representations and in many male police officers’
minds, by the situations in which police officers are required to exert physical force to
keep the peace. Male officers who do not believe women should be on the job often
argue that women cannot handle these situations.
Most female officers, while
recognizing differences in physical ability between themselves and male officers,
argue that on serious calls one rarely needs to act without back-up and can cooperate
with other officers to bring the situation under control. Female police officers also
tend to distinguish between physical strength (which they agree they do not have)
and institutional force (which they argue they do). As one woman put it, ‘It’s never
just a fight between a man and a woman—it’s a fight between a man and a police
officer.’ This comment points out that police officers have certain tools (nightstick,
blackjack, gun) as well as certain extraordinary abilities (the power to arrest and the
ability to use a radio to summon, as one officer put it, other members of ‘the largest
gang in the city’). Female police officers also note that there are some frightened,
weak, do-nothing men on the job—a retort to male officers that attempts to suggest
that women should not be regarded as a group, but rather as individuals, and which
thus contests hegemonic interpretations of gender roles and behaviours.
Many female police officers believe they are more likely to stay calm and cool
in conflictual situations than are male police officers precisely because they cannot as
easily resort to force, and so must use talk as a tool instead. This claim is difficult for
me to evaluate, since despite the images perpetuated by TV shows, situations
involving physical confrontation between officers and citizens are relatively rare. The
few officers who were identified by other officers as likely to ‘go off’ (too quickly
escalate into use of force) were all men. The few female police officers who are
labelled masculine (by male or female officers) are those who are perceived as getting
‘too’ angry too fast, as ‘not treating people right’ and as using ‘too much’ profanity.
There are other differences in how some men and some women interpret the
job of policing. More women than men emphasize the importance of reportwriting in
getting convictions. Men who object to women’s presence on the job are likely to say,
‘I will give them that—they’re good reportwriters’—a backhanded compliment, since
these men often accord little importance to report-writing. Women are also believed
to be better at other tasks like taking reports from rape victims, comforting frightened
or abused children and dealing with women involved in domestic disputes. Female
officers’ emphasis on the bureaucratic (or clerical) and social-work aspects of the job
is often shared by younger men and, to a lesser extent, by men with post-secondary
education.
That policing can be interpreted as such a wide range of jobs—as law
enforcement, as crime prevention, as social work, as clerical work, as therapy—marks
a change in progress in the role of policing in American society. Police officers in the
late 1960s were associated with considerably more physical violence than they are
today.(7) Growing restrictions on and supervision of police action, as well as
increases in the number of civil suits filed against police officers, have led to
requirements for written documentation of each action. ‘God forbid you fire your
gun’, said one officer. ‘You might as well hire a novelist.’ The beginning of the growth
of the modern bureaucratic state, of which police departments are a part, in the
nineteenth century required a change in the pattern of gender relations and, crucially,
a change in the normative pattern of masculinity from physical aggressiveness to
technical rationality and calculation (Connell 1987:130–1)(8) This in turn led to
arguments by, for example, Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan B.Anthony that women
should be able to participate more fully in the state. Changes in the normative pattern
of masculinity have taken place, however, at different rates in different parts of the
state. Only in the late 1960s did changes in the interpretation and organization of
policing allow women to become police officers. The inclusion of women has in turn
hastened the transition from a physical workplace to a more bureaucratic one (9)
This transformation of policing is a movement from one masculinity (with an
emphasis on physical displays of force) to another (with an emphasis on objectivity
and rationality). The workplace may well be perceived as less masculine than before
because an emphasis on physical force or strength contributes to a stronger
perception of a job as masculine than does an emphasis on emotionless rationality.
Rationality and emotional control, however, are gendered masculine in American
culture by virtue of their contrast with the emotionality associated with women (see
Lutz 1990). This movement from one masculinity to another is evident in
macrostructural reorganizations of police departments to accommodate increasing
paperwork and court appearances and in individuals’ interactional styles and
psychological adjustments to the work of policing.
GENDER AND AFFECT AT WORK
The projection of emotion is a type of often-uncompensated work shaped by the
requirements of work structures within which individuals find themselves. For
instance, the display of positive affect is one of the chief privileges of secretaries, one
of their chief sources of power, one of their most important tasks and one of their few
avenues to professional advancement, since loyalty to and care for a particular boss
can lead to promotion when that boss is promoted (see Kanter 1977). Hochschiid
(1983), writing of how airlines train flight attendants (who are still largely female) in
the projection of warmth and cheerfulness, notes that jobs involving emotional labour
(especially service jobs) comprise over a third of all jobs, but they form only one
quarter of the jobs men do, and over one half of those women do. When men are
required to perform emotional labour, it is often the projection of negative emotion
(threatening those who have not paid corporate bills, as bill collectors do, or ‘acting
crazier than they do’, as police officers do), or of affectlessness (as in the rationality
and impersonality required of businessmen and bureaucrats).
An economy of affect: emotional requirements of policing
The emotional work that policing exacts is quite different from that of the typically
feminine jobs described above. One young female rookie (formerly a teacher)
describes how she adapted to workplace interactional norms:
(Do you think women who come on this job start to act in masculine
ways?) Umhm. (Like what are some of the things you see?) Your
language. I know mine, mine changes a lot from… When I’m at work I
always feel like I have to be so, so like gruff you know. And normally I’m
not like that. I’m usually kinda bitchy but I’m not like real. Sometimes I
try to be like such a hard ass. I, I don’t smile as much. I’m not saying that
men, you know that’s a masculine trait. I think you…you have to pick up
maybe not necessarily fighting but techniques to subdue people or just
hold them or whatever and I don’t think that’s naturally feminine either
you know. I think it’s mostly language. You know… My, mine’s atrocious
sometimes. I’ve toned it down a lot. When I first started you know cause I
worked with a lot of guys it seemed like, they didn’t may not even have
swore but I felt like I had to almost like be tough or something around
them you know. And that was my way of being tough. (Is it like mostly
profanity, or do you do it like with tone of voice or something?) Little bit
of both. Like I said I’ve toned down my profanity a lot. I just kinda use it
to describe things now, like I don’t call people names and stuff. But I
don’t know. Sometimes I try to like talk to people. Like I said about how
black women were able to kinda command respect from people in the
projects, I try to like pick up some of their slang, either their slang or their
tone something. Then I like I listen to myself sometimes. I’m like God I
sound like you know I sound like a HILL person [a person who lives in a
largely black, largely poor area of Pittsburgh]. And then I think I should
just be able to be me. I shouldn’t have to be everybody else(10)
This police officer feels as though her occupational persona is a mask. She describes
learning a combination of emotional skills—emotionlessness (‘I don’t smile as much’),
toughness and gruffness that she does not believe to be natural to her. This sort of
alienation from the emotional labour required by a job was also widespread among
the flight attendants interviewed by Hochschild (1983)—the ways that they were
required to act had little to do with how they themselves felt.
Many officers believe that some sense of reserve is the only way to survive on
the job—otherwise it is too stressful. One female police officer who had been on the
job for twelve years was describing the amount of drinking many officers do, and the
frequency of divorce and suicide. She described her reaction to seeing her first bad
accident, and her way of coping with this and other traumatic scenes:
So my first dead body, which was one that was a girl that was very young,
19…. And I see ALL this, this pool of blood came all the way down and
made a huge pool at the end of the street. So much blood. And I said I don’t
know if I can handle it or not boss, I never seen one before. [He] said okay,
said if you think you’re gonna throw up, turn around and don’t throw up
on my shoes. I remember him saying that…. So he pulls back the sheet and
I look at this and I was SOOO FASCINATED…. I was TOTALLY fascinated
and he said THAT’S ENOUGH. He said ARE YOU GETTING SICK? I said
NOOO! He said SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH YOU KID —he said YOU
SEEN ENOUGH. He put the sheet back on her…. That is when I looked
and decided that was not a person… I don’t get emotionally involved….
They’re like clients. You always have to be impartial…. So that’s just the
way I do it. And it works for me. I don’t have to drink myself to sleep at
night.
In this case, the older male officer expects the young female officer to react in a
stereotypically female way—by shrinking away, by being horrified, by being
sickened. When she does not react ‘appropriately’ he dismisses her from the accident
scene. For the female officer, the expenditure of emotion on others, especially
sympathy or empathy, is understood as support lost for her. If she allowed herself to
feel too much for others she would be torn apart herself, so she has to take care to
isolate herself, not to get involved, not to allow herself to see her clients as people.
Emotion is here understood as a limited commodity, and using it means losing it.
Being impartial and suppressing one’s own reaction is in her eyes also being
professional, as doctors, lawyers and coroners are with their clients.
In addition to dealing with traumatic incidents, officers often find themselves
in situations where seemingly innocuous calls suddenly turn into life-threatening
ones. Depending on the situation, caution may manifest itself as emotional
guardedness (‘flattened affect’) or as anger. Police officers learn to act like ‘tough
cops’ who limit their conversation to the formalities of the investigation because
increased interaction offers further opportunities for excuses, arguments, complaints,
reprimands, fights or worse (Rubinstein 1973:264). It is not, then, any marked lack of
compassion that produces these interactions. Police officers, male and female, will
say, ‘When I’m in uniform, I’m not a woman/man—I’m a police officer.’ They mean
to emphasize that they have set aside personal lives, personal opinions and
personalities while they are on the job.
The result of experiences like this is the development of an occupationally
conditioned habitus, which I will call an economy of affect. Habitus is the notion
developed by Pierre Bourdieu to describe how experience structures interactional
behaviour. Habitus is ‘a system of lasting transposable dispositions which,
integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions,
appreciations and actions’ (Bourdieu 1977:82–3). It is ‘history turned nature’,
interactional experiences incorporated into memory, to form the common sense with
which people’s expectations about, and reactions to, subsequent incidents are
shaped.(11)
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus provides an explanation of why a person’s
interactional style might be slightly inappropriate for a given situation even if she
believes she is accommodating to that situation: she has not had experience in
producing the appropriate style, or her experiences have conditioned her to produce
a different style in the same situation. Bourdieu tends to emphasize the role of family
and school in establishing the individual’s stylistic repertoires and to define style as
use or non-use of standard language. I focus more centrally on the role of the labour
market in shaping adults’ speech styles, in particular on the ways occupations shape
the norms for appropriate expression of affect.
The traumatic, dangerous and hostile interactions which police officers
regularly experience produce an economy of affect. By economy I mean to suggest the
extent to which this style is shaped by the particular nature of their involvement in
the labour market, and that officers are economical (in the sense of thrifty) in their
expenditure of (especially positive) affect with citizens; and also that police officers
understand the expenditure of positive affect in terms of a closed economy (a
significant expenditure of sympathy or grief on others means that less is available for
themselves). (12) Police officers do express positive affect on the job, but they choose
the situations in which they do so carefully—as if they were on a limited budget.
They often invest emotion where a pay-off seems most likely—with children,
or with an individual clearly needing help. Because the situations in which most
complainants meet police officers are characterized for them by high emotional
intensity, the businesslike way that officers usually set about taking their reports is
likely to strike complainants as cold, or heartless.
The possibility for
miscommunication is immanent in western interpretations of ‘unemotional’ as either
calm and rational or withdrawn and alienated (see Lutz 1986:289–90; Lutz 1990). That
which police officers interpret as the first, citizens may interpret as the second.
The linguistic devices used to remove traces of opinion and personality in
written language—passive voice, substitution of ‘one’ for ‘I’, etc.—have been widely
studied (Biber and Finegan 1989; Chafe and Tannen 1987). Because both male and
female officers have the same experiences and the same tasks, and interpret these
tasks and experiences similarly, they resort to the same linguistic style while making
these reports—a sort of bureaucratese, or facelessness, in face-to-face interaction.
OBJECTIVITY, MASCULINITY AND CHANGING
WORKPLACES
That women who move into powerful and masculine institutions sometimes adopt
the interactional behaviour characteristic of these institutions might disappoint some
feminists. But it seems clear that our idea of who can do certain jobs changes more
rapidly than expectations about how those jobs should be done. The process of
women entering a masculine workplace necessarily includes some adoption, as well
as adaption, of institutional norms. I focus here on an interactional style that male and
female police officers share, in part because I want to represent their work
environment as they understand it, and one of the important ideologies which
structure this workplace is that ‘it’s us versus them’, and ‘we all wear the blue’. I also,
however, focus on these as a response to the extant literature on gender, which often
begins by asking what are the differences between men and women, rather than
whether or not there are differences between men and women. The focus on women
versus men threatens to reify social differences in ways not so very different from
sex-based essentialist theories.
I argue here for a more flexible definition of gender, one that recognizes the
degree of agency accorded to people in developing a style of living, behaving,
speaking and being based upon their own occupational choices, personal histories,
sexuality, life-styles and more. Rarely is any given social act interpreted as solely
masculine or feminine (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992). Usually it is perceived as
conveying a wide range of information about the actor, from her personality to her
level of fatigue, from her age and regional background to her ethnicity and class.
Close attention to all the local meanings attached to certain actions will produce a
more dynamic view of gender and power relations because it can recognize the
resources for challenges to hegemonic and binary gender norms that are already
available within each community. Although resistances to and reinterpretations of
hegemonic interpretations of gender may be particularly evident in some settings—
women doing ‘men’s’ work, or lesbian and gay men’s choices about how to project
their own gender identities—they exist in every community.(13)
In planning this project I set out to discover the extent to which female police
officers would manipulate the socio-symbolic resources at their disposal—clothing,
strength displays, ritualized ways of handling tools, and use of language —to present
themselves as competent workers, which I believed, on the evidence of earlier
ethnographic studies of other women in traditionally all-male, workingclass jobs
(Martin 1980; Williams 1989), and because of the centrality of occupation in defining
identity in the west, would mean studying how these women learned to present
themselves in masculine ways. This expectation was not entirely fulfilled—not
because the behaviours of women do not change to accommodate their jobs, but
because they do not interpret their behaviour as masculine. Because masculinity is
not referentially (or directly) marked by behaviours and attitudes but rather is
indexically (see below) linked to them, female police officers can interpret behaviours
which are normatively or frequently understood as masculine (like non-involvement
or emotional distance) as simply ‘the way we need to act to do our job’ in a
professional way. The implicit recognition of the nature of this link evident in police
officers’ own interpretations of their behaviour shows that indexicality can be
exploited in ways that foster the integration of women into workplaces from which
they were previously barred.
The distinction between referential and indexical markers of gender (Ochs
1992) is crucial for understanding the differences between the ways that academic
feminists and female police officers tend to interpret masculinity. Referential markers
of gender are unequivocal, unambiguous, categorical symbols of gender (for instance,
the terms ‘she’ and ‘Ms’ reference female identity).(14) Indexical markers of gender
are non-exclusive (they may mark other kinds of social information like age,
sexuality, personality traits, etc.), constitutive (so that one trait [‘emotionlessness’]
may be linked to another [‘objectivity’] which in turn indicates ‘masculinity’) and
probabilistic (as emotionlessness is often linked with masculinity but not exclusively
so). When the rookie in my first example says ‘I don’t smile as much [now that I’ve
come on the job]’ but then immediately adds that she does not necessarily believe that
not smiling is a masculine trait, she demonstrates an understanding of the
indexicality of gender. The fact that not smiling occurs to her in connection with
acting masculine is an indication of a probabilistic association; the fact that she is
reluctant to say that all men fail to smile is an indication that the link between not
smiling and masculinity is not exclusive (since not smiling can also mean one is not
happy).
Not smiling is also constitutively linked to masculinity in that it is
understood as a trait of one who passes judgement or is in a position of great
authority, and that such people are often men. Female police officers exploit the
indexicality of gender by choosing not to recognize the probabilistic connection
between their objective, emotionally distant behaviour and masculinity. In so doing,
they are also redefining masculinity and femininity.
Female officers attach less importance to appearance in defining femininity than
traditional versions of femininity do (as, for instance, described in Brownmiller 1984)
and more importance to behaviour. Attention to appearance may even be understood
as excessive attention to appearance, as when police officers (male and female)
dismiss some women (‘those women with the long polished fingernails’) as being
unable to work the job. These women are dismissed as overly feminine, as in the
caricature of the indecisive woman in the example below. This twelve-year veteran
female police officer demonstrates that, for her, being tough and being able to handle
a man with a gun are not incompatible with being a woman:
You wear men’s clothes. It is predominantly a physical, men’s type job you
know and you do sorta have to look tough. But it comes with the turf you
know. It’s not necessarily the job, but the way people treat you, relate to
you. You know, you don’t want somebody coming on a call where there’s a
man with a gun going ‘oh gee, what do we do now?’. You know, you want
somebody that knows how to take control of a situation and handle it. Yeah
I think a lot of us do sorta act a little tough. I have no identity crisis, I know
who I am, I know I’m a woman and that’s just what I want to be. I’m happy
to be one.
The redefinitions of masculinity and femininity that female police officers undertake
(including their understanding of objectivity) make it possible for them to think of
police work as not incompatible with their own felt gender identities (15)
I conclude by comparing the interpretive work done by female police officers
to create a place for themselves in that previously all-male and masculine workplace
with that done by feminist scholars to establish themselves in their previously allmale and masculine workplace. For academic feminists, establishing the link between
objectivity and masculinity has made possible a critique of prevailing academic
practices which have often excluded women and the study of women. Keller (1990),
for instance, approvingly cites Simmel’s statement that in ‘the history of our race the
equation objective=masculine is a valid one’ (1990:41), and proceeds to demonstrate
how masculinity’s connotation of objectivity, autonomy, separation and distance has
excluded women (who were presumed to possess other characteristics) from the
practice of science, and has contributed to the mastery of a feminized Nature. Critical
examinations of ‘objective’ judgements about which events are important historically,
or which literary works are ‘great’, show how such judgements reflect and support
prevailing patriarchal ideologies which devalue, obscure or distort the contributions
of women and other marginalized groups as historical and cultural actors (Westcott
1990:59–60).
Such examinations have also engendered innovative modes of intellectual
enquiry that self-consciously scrutinize academic practices, including the relationship
between studier and studied (see Nielsen 1990). Instead of asking what is or is not
objectively valuable, feminist scholars ask ‘valuable for whom?’. In this way they can
determine whether ‘objective’ judgements of value work to promote hegemonic
cultural norms about what is historically important, artistically valuable and
scientifically unquestionable, and they make explicit the assumption that there is a
variety of audiences (not just a single, unified, homogeneous one) whose opinions
and value-systems deserve to be taken into account in determining value. These
critiques of objectivity have created a space for women and scholars studying women
and gender in academic workplaces.
Feminist scholars, then, focus on the ways that objectivity is linked with
masculinity and argue against ‘masculine’ norms by arguing against objectivity. To
do this, however, is to leave the association of objectivity with masculinity largely
unchallenged, and thus to leave some of the pre-existing dualistic complexes of
femininity and masculinity unchanged. It is to treat the indexical link between
objectivity and masculinity as a referential one. To insist on a necessary link between
‘objectivity’ and ‘masculinity’ (as the terms ‘equation’ and ‘connotation’ do) is to
refuse to recognize both the historicity and the indexicality of the link between
masculinity and objectivity and thus to refuse the possibility of altering these
associations, in ways that begin to disrupt the everlasting binary associations we find
in our culture between masculine/ objective/rational/strong/cultural and feminine/
subjective/emotional/weak/ natural.
Female police officers adopt a different approach. They challenge the
association of objectivity with masculinity by seeing themselves as objective, but not
as masculine. In doing so, female police officers, unlike feminist academics, may not
question some of the negative effects that acting objective may have, on either
themselves or clients/citizens. They may also not recognize the paradox of
contributing to the construction of a new ‘rational’ and ‘neutral’ masculine workplace
as they emphasize their own bureaucratic, social work and mental skills as a way of
contesting the older interpretation of the workplace as one which required a physical
one.
Neither of the interpretive strategies adopted here by either of these groups of
women working to foster their own inclusion in traditionally male environments
provides us with a conclusive solution as to how to continue working against sex
typing and sex discrimination in workplaces or elsewhere. But the two models do
illustrate that different tactics for understanding masculinity can be deployed, and
deployed effectively, in attacking different sorts of discrimination. And it shows that
neither of the practitioners of the two models—police officers or academic feminists—
has or should have a monopoly on knowledge creation, on cultural interpretation, or
on the deconstruction of traditional notions of gender. (16)
NOTES
1. Such protective legislation persists in workplaces that prohibit women of
childbearing age from working in areas where they might be exposed to chemicals
harmful to foetuses. Such dicta usually discriminate against women rather than
protect them (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective 1984:89–90).
2. Although fears of being labelled as gay or effeminate also work to keep men
confined within traditionally masculine roles and behaviours, Williams’ (1989, 1992)
comparisons of women in non-traditional jobs (e.g. women who are marines) and
men in non-traditional jobs (e.g. men who are nurses, elementary schoolteachers or
social workers) demonstrate that men in such jobs may encounter prejudice from
people outside their profession, but encounter structural advantages within the jobs
which tend to enhance their salaries and accelerate their promotions (cf. Forrest,
Chapter 5 in this volume). This is in stark contrast to women in nontraditional jobs
who experience prejudice outside and inside the profession.
3. The movement of large numbers of men into all-female workplaces is even rarer.
When it does take place foreign-born men tend to replace native-born women, as
when Irish men replaced native-born white women in US textile mills as women were
drawn to teaching and other jobs that native-born white men were vacating (Reskin
and Roos 1990:15).
4. No separate figures are available to indicate what percentage of women are white
and what percentage are black, nor are the categories of black and white police
officers broken down into male and female.
5. I alternate between usage of ‘black’ and ‘African-American’ here. Pittsburgh police
officers with African-American heritage almost universally refer to themselves as
black, and citizens are also generally described by officers as black or white. I use the
term ‘African-American’ in sections where the voice and opinions are my own.
6. I draw upon a year of fieldwork conducted in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September
1991–August 1992 (cf. McElhinny 1992). My forthcoming dissertation (McElhinny
1993) describes my field methods, police culture and police interaction in more detail.
7. See Westley (1970) for a description of physical force used in one department
during the late 1960s.
8. Though the institution of policing was part of the growth of the state and urban
economies (see Martin 1980 for a historical review), the aims and attitudes of police
officers and the structure of the workplace had and has more in common with the
structure and attitudes of military organizations than with industrial bureaucracies,
and thus the prevailing masculine norms were associated much more with physical
aggression and much less with emotionless rationality than is true in other parts of
the state.
9. As women have moved into the police department, some parts of it have become
perceived by male and female officers as preserves of (hyper-)masculinity. One such
preserve is the City’s newly formed Drug Task Force, which is almost entirely staffed
by men, and is said to be perceived by drug dealers as the only effective and fearinspiring part of the police force.
10. In all transcriptions, comments in parentheses are my questions or reactions.
Capital letters indicate increased volume.
11. ‘Common sense’ is the police officer’s version of the technocrat’s ‘rationality’.
12. Curiously, anger does not participate in the economy of affect in the same way
that sympathy/empathy does. It is not a limited resource, but a dramatic mask.
Although all police officers must perform anger or impatience on occasion, they
usually perceive this as a carefully controlled act (‘acting crazier than they do’).
13. The recent interest in feminist circles in the study of gender ambiguity and
crosscross-gendering (see Butler 1990; Devor 1989; Epstein and Straub 1991; Garber
1991) marks a new era in feminist thought, characterized by attempts to explore the
malleability of gender. The rapidly growing field of lesbian and gay studies, in
addition to raising its own questions about constructions of heterosexism,
homophobia and sexual identity, also raises important questions about the flexibility
of gender identity,
14. Though the reference of even these markers is being transformed from female as
some members of the gay community adopt female pronouns to refer to one another.
15. At times female police officers try to avoid the label of masculinity at all costs—
sometimes it is deferred spatially, sometimes it is deferred temporally and sometimes
it is deferred spatially and temporally. I have been told that women when they first
came on the job had to act masculine, but that women do not need to do that any
more; or that ‘women at that other rougher station need to act masculine, but that
women do not need to do that at this station’; or that, ‘I used to act masculine [when I
was at that other tougher station] but I don’t any more.’ This all simultaneously
marks the importance that the distinction between femininity and masculinity holds
for definitions of self in the US (however masculine and feminine are redefined, the
distinction is still retained) at the same time as it marks the difficulty in maintaining
the distinction.
16. In 1991, four white men challenged the Pittsburgh police quota-based hiring plan
as reverse discrimination. After the courts reviewed the decision, the City was
ordered to drop the fifteen-year-old injunction calling for quota-based hiring. The
City began to develop an alternative affirmative-action hiring plan. In the same year,
the police union negotiated a contract that allowed large numbers of police officers to
retire immediately on very favourable terms. Officers with twenty-five years of
service who were at least 50 years old could retire with a pension set at three-quarters
of their salary, rather than one-half of it. The City was faced with a sudden need to
hire officers. It decided to hire the top fifty scorers on the police exam on existing civil
service lists. This resulted in an all-male and nearly all-white recruit class. When local
civil rights groups protested, the City decided to abandon that plan, and regular civil
service procedures, and hire police officers from nearby boroughs and municipalities.
Official details on these hirings were not released, but conversations with some
applicants suggested that all the applicants were male and about one-third of them
were black. The police union is currently protesting this plan. Ironically, the wave of
retirements by officers over 50 means that for the first time some of the senior officers
in the department will be female, and that the percentage of women will increase to
over 25 per cent (all the retirees are male), just as the workplace is in danger of being
redefined as one where only men need apply.
Chapter 10
The ‘White Negro’ revisited
Race and masculinities in south London
Les Back
We are witnessing a considerable growth in academic interest in the politics of
masculinity. However, much of the emerging literature on masculinity fails to explore
the relationship between racism, ethnocentrism and sexual politics (Carby 1982;
Feminist Review 1984; Barrett and Mclntosh 1985; Ware 1990). One of the features of
the new literature is that it is positioned in a culture that gives priority to individual
solutions. In particular, the articulation between racism and masculinity is obscured
by the ethnocentric nature of selfcentred sexual politics.(1) Mercer and Julien
comment:
the questions raised by race, ethnicity and cultural difference cut across the
complacencies of a personalized politics that remains in the prison-house of
sexuality and the culture of narcissism. How white feminists and antisexist
men take on these issues is up to them; the point is that race can no longer be
ignored or erased from their political agendas. (1988:124)
This chapter explores the interconnectedness of racism and gender in the context of
masculine identities among white, working-class young men living in south
London.(2)
LEARNING TO LABOUR, LEARNING TO BE MEN
‘Masculinity’ in conventional usage conveys a unitary idea of maleness. However, in
particular social contexts, registrations of masculinity are complex, multiple and
contradictory. They are defined in interactive and rhetorical situations and vary over
time and across social groupings.
My starting point is the complex ways in which gender and power are
articulated in working-class cultures and the varying masculinities this produces.
Where men are economically dependent on the sale of their labour, the expression of
maleness provides a means to exert power; power is assocated with maleness, its
absence with feminization. Such dualism appears in the feminization of young male
apprentices (Cohen 1988).
Apprentices in factory cultures are given a variety of trivial duties to perform.
The older men define themselves as doing ‘real work’ and the apprentices are seen as
their juniors. However, this is an area of contest and negotiation: seniors compel
apprentices to inhabit a feminized position while apprentices strive to transcend it.
Apprenticeship is about becoming not merely a qualified worker but also a qualified
man.
The worker/apprentice division is most apparent in the verbal play endemic
on the shop floor. (3) The commonest games in south London are known as
‘windups’.
These rituals involve publicly losing or gaining face and consist of
making the subject angry, then showing this anger to be meaningless: ‘It doesn’t
mean nothin’—only winding you up!’. The dynamics of the wind-up are described by
Darren:
Darren: Well me and Rodders we’re on the building now ain’t we.
Les: Do you like it?
Darren: Yeah, it’s alright innit Rodders. Bricklaying, innit alright. Yeah we
‘ave a great…it’s alright you know what I mean. The blokes we work with—
they are—na mean—everyone gets the piss taken out of them but they are
alright. It’s like when you are new they suss you out—make you look stupid.
There was this one geezer today and they told him to go down to the stores
and get a bag of ‘glass nails’ and he fell for it. They’re always laughing and
joking with you but that’s the way it is.
Les: Do they do the same to you?
Darren: Me, not really. I remember once they sent me to the stores for a
‘rubber hammer’ (laugh). Another time they tried to get me to get some holes
for a bag of nuts—stupid things like that. But if you don’t know what kind of
things come out of the stores how are you going to know any better?
Les: Do they get you sweeping up and things like that?
Darren: Na, they have someone else do that because I’m a bricklayer—that’s
what they’ve got me there for and that’s what I’m going to learn.
As Darren said, ‘Everyone gets the piss taken out of them.’ The apprentices are made
to look stupid, giving them a non-adult/junior/subordinate status and an underdeveloped masculinity, while the perpetrators reinforce dominant masculine
identities. Darren recognizes this but resists it by claiming the skills and knowledge
of a worker.
Young working-class men are initiated into this gendered culture long before
they enter the labour market. The ‘wind-up’ is a significant way in which workingclass young men explore masculinity and negotiate positions of status.
In the
following passage, occurring in the youth club of a predominantly white council
estate, Bob, aged 16 and of white English parentage, is the main actor and Robert,
aged 15 and of Irish parentage, is the wind-up subject. Tony, aged 16, and of AfroCaribbean and white English parentage, is the observer/foil.
Bob: ‘Ere Tony ’ave you seen the size of his hands (pointing at Robert’s
hands).
Tony: Yeah come here Robert let’s ’ave a look at those hands. Bob: Put your
hand down there next to mine (looks at Robert). (Robert looks at Bob and puts
his hand down.) (Bob takes the spoon out of his hot tea and puts it on the back
of Robert’s hand.)
Robert: Agh—you wanker!(4) (Bob and Robert laugh.)
Bob: What a wally. (All three boys laugh.)
Two things are important: first, Tony agrees to enter a group where wind-ups
are not insults but a kind of play (Davis 1982:63–6; Kochman 1972); secondly, within
this interaction, Bob and Tony establish themselves as the agents, and Robert—the
subject—is shamed. Robert is included in the peer group, but at the same time is
temporarily relegated to being a ‘wanker’. This process is constantly repeated among
young men in public settings: the actors may be agents of wind-ups in one situation
but relegated to being subjects in others. In this way peer status is contested and
continuously modified. Wind-up rituals are practised by black and white young men
alike, providing them with a common sense of identity; and, as we shall see, these
rituals also provide the context in which racist name calling most often takes place
(Back 1990).
Since I grew up in a white, south London, working-class family, these windup rituals are familiar to me. During the fieldwork period I was employed as a youth
worker, and I decided to avoid these rituals and play fights. This became evident to
some of the young men, especially those I had a poor relationship with, who
frequently called me a ‘poof’ or ‘fairy’ for not accepting their challenges. This
situation changed after a wind-up in which I was sold a free ticket to a football match.
In a chip shop where young people hung out, Paul, who had sold me the ticket,
shouted at me, ‘What a wanker!’. I told Paul that we were not in the youth club now
and added, ‘You wouldn’t get away with that with anybody else and you’re not
getting away with it with me.’ One of the older youths said, ‘Watch it, he means it!
He’ll lump [hit] you!’ Paul tried to make light of the situation: ‘Alright, don’t get
heavy, I was just winding you up!’. The next day Paul said, ‘Yeah, sorry about last
night. I was a bit ready. I was out of order.’
This was a turning point in my relationship with the young men; I had
defined myself within their terms of reference. The insult Paul had levelled at me
asserted that I did not have comparable public masculinity to that of the young men.
I was being vilified as a ‘wanker’, a feeble outsider. However, when I challenged Paul
to a physical confrontation, I positioned myself within the group and as a resident of
the estate. My assertion of an alternative masculine identity was quickly accepted.
I have reflected on the gendered nature of these fieldwork relationships elsewhere
(Back 1992). The point I want to make here is that these interactions provide a space
where the nature of working-class masculine identities is defined.
In particular,
heterosexual codes are implicit within these rituals and as a result they become
statements of what is deemed ‘normal’ sexuality within the culture. Homophobic
assertions and name calling in this context are used to challenge the status of a young
man vis-à-vis his peer group. Additionally, participation in these rituals constitutes a
kind of communion with these heterosexual versions of masculinity.
Young, white, working-class men do not uniformly embrace ‘the street’ as a
place to act out versions of masculinity. On the predominantly white estate, a folk
division exists between young men defined as ‘estate kids’ and those referred to as
‘homebirds’. ‘Estate kids’ are associated with public spaces (the street and youth club)
while ‘homebirds’ are young men who stay within the confines of the flat or house
and are alienated from publicly enacted masculinity. Deano, a ‘homebird’, rarely
ventured into the youth club although he knew most people who attended it. He had
one close friend and he shunned peer interactions in large groups. He found both
school and the neighbourhood fraught, and stayed in his bedroom for long periods.
When asked why he did not go to the youth club, he replied, ‘Well, there is always
someone on your back, you know, giving you a hard time. I go there when there isn’t
a lot of people around. I just don’t like the pressure.’
Male ‘homebirds’ are subject to a different kind of feminization from that of
the apprentices. The home signifies not just social rootedness but also a gendered
female space. One of the young men from the estate once referred to Deano as a
‘mother’s boy’. Deano certainly strongly identified with his mother and often
contributed to domestic work. A different notion of masculinity develops, contrasting
with the competitive forms found in public contexts. Deano moved between these
gendered domains, although not without ambivalence and stress. The wind-ups are
intimately tied up with particular expressions of masculinity. However, this does not
mean that young women are not involved in these forms of behaviour. Young women
can take on masculine identities as ‘tomboys’.
The ‘tomboy’ label is applied to young women who adopt ‘male’ forms of selfpresentation and participate in social interactions on an equal footing with their male
peers without stigma. However, the participation of young women in this masculine
culture decreases when young women turn away from public expressions of
masculinity and embrace what McRobbie has termed an adolescent ‘culture of
femininity’ (1981, 1982). This decline is directly connected with the growing
importance of heterosexuality in adolescent relations, whose impact means that
masculine and feminine identities are both clearly differentiated and more tightly
policed. Young women who continue to participate in masculine rituals are liable to
have their heterosexuality questioned.
It has been suggested that the impact of
heterosexual cultures of masculinity and femininity place young women in a
bedroom culture and young men in a street culture (McRobbie 1981, 1982). Mirza
(1992) has challenged the idea that this model applies to the position of black women.
While black and white young people may share elements of experience, such
elements may not account for other aspects of gendering nor accommodate the
racisms implicit in whiteness.
The different masculinities found in adolescent communities in south London
are generated as young people move between social spaces. Clearly, there is no
single, uniform working-class masculinity, but a variety of masculinities determined
situationally. Young people position themselves simultaneously in relation to gender,
ethnicity and race. It is to these issues that I now turn.
YOUNG MEN, RACISM AND INTER-RACIAL
DIALOGUE
The part of south London in which I did fieldwork has a long history of migration
(see Back 1991b), mainly from the Caribbean, from the 1950s onward. By 1981 black
people constituted 25 per cent of the overall population of the borough and in some
districts between 40 per cent and 50 per cent. In addition, small numbers of people
settled from Pakistan, India, Africa, Greek and Turkish Cyprus, and during the 1980s
a large number from Vietnam.
A dimension of my fieldwork was the degree to which racism structured the
relationship between a white researcher and black and white respondents.(5) As with
gender differences (Back 1992), the trust black young people offered me was always
contingent. Paradoxically, south London is associated with both the most extreme
manifestations of racism and some of the most profound moments of inter-racial
dialogue. These twin processes are most evident in youth styles. As Hebdige points
out (1974a, 1974b, 1979, 1981, 1983), the impact of black culture on white young
people is not uniformly progressive: for example, skinhead style incorporates
Jamaican music, yet proclaims white power and white pride. In this case black culture
was an emblem of white chauvinism (Mercer 1987); the appropriation of black
cultural forms was allied with an imperial notion of national pride.6
The taking on of black style and language has resulted in a radical
reconfiguration of white working-class culture in multiethnic locales (Chambers 1976;
Gilroy and Lawrence 1988). It is vital to appreciate that folk anti-racism can be
generated in the context of these encounters, but it is also necessary to identify the
particular gendered constructions of race that white young men, in particular, find
attractive.
Black icons? The doubling of fear and desire
The man who adores the Negro is as sick as the man who abominates him.
(Fanon 1967)
Young white people of south London have an intimate relationship with black forms
of speech and style. Interaction within multiracial peer groups has opened up black
cultural practices to white appropriation. While this process is most profound on the
multiethnic estate, it is also found within the adolescent community of the
predominantly white estate. Amongst young whites there exists a continuum of
identifications with black culture from the most rudimentary usage of Creole to cases
where young white men and women expressed a desire to be black (Back 1991b).
Stuart Hall suggests: ‘Just as masculinity always constructs femininity as
double —simultaneously Madonna and Whore—so racism constructs the black
subject: noble savage and violent avenger’ (1988:28). As in Hall’s formulation, in
south London adolescent communities, black young men were sometimes viewed by
whites—both male and female—as innovators of prestigious youth styles. Yet at the
same time black young men could equally be characterized as undesirable, dangerous
and aggressive. Many black young men talk of cases where white adults ‘hold on to
their bags tightly’ or ‘put their heads down and walk away’.
As Tim points out here:
White people fear black people. Lotta people out there don’t know black
people. It’s only what they hear and read in the newspapers. Walking
down the road you see white ladies holding onto their bags tight as you
pass them, as if you are gonna rob dem.
Such reactions relate to a gendered construction of black masculinity which includes
fantasies about black male heterosexuality, sexual potency and violence. From a black
perspective these notions of fear and desire are both restricting and unrepresentative,
bell hooks, writing on her experience of growing up in the American south,
comments: ‘whiteness in the black imagination is often a representation of terror’
(1992:342).
While the stereotypes of black masculinity are embraced by some, many of
these young men feel constrained and alienated by the mythology of ‘black macho’.
Wilson, aged 17, comments,
Yeah, there is this expectation to be this big black macho thing. Some
people play to that, that’s OK if they want to do that. But I think that’s like
making black people to be like, you know, closer to the beast. It’s pure
wickedness. There’s a lot of stuff about how black men treat women and
that. It is true that some black men are pure idiots but to make it like saying
all black men are this, or all black men are that is just rubbish.
The important point here is that black men are not passive subjects in the face of this
kind of racialized and gendered stereotyping. They engage in alternative discourses
in which they sometimes manipulate and invert the stereotypes which in other
circumstances they would completely reject (Back 1991b).
Young men are characterized in these racist discourses as having oversized
penises and predatory desires, while young women’s sexuality is viewed as addictive
for white men. Delora, aged 17, refers directly to this process: ‘Yeah, I remember one
white boy saying about going out with black girls, it was like, what did he say—
“Once you go black, you never turn back.” Like black girls are supposed to be some
sex machine.’ Delora points to the well-known process by which racism makes black
sexuality an element of white fantasy. What is common to these images is that they
share a reductive biologism, which fixes black sexuality in the realm of natural
attributes. As Hall has commented, it is impossible to understand contemporary
racism(s) without ‘crossing the questions of racism irrevocably with the questions of
sexuality’ (1988:29).
The existence of an interlocked dualism of ‘fear and desire’ is an essential
feature of white constructions of black masculinity. This syndrome was acted out
during a visit by our Floodplain estate basketball team to Great Yarmouth. I was the
only white player. We played two games, the second of which we lost by the smallest
of margins. The team contested the result and was disqualified from the tournament.
I have no doubt that the decision was influenced by racism on the part of the white
organizers. Winston, the team captain, said: ‘I don’t say this often, Les, but these
people are racist.’ Pauline, the team coach, said, ‘The people here will do that if we
don’t behave properly…they say, “What do you expect from them ghetto boys?”’. Yet
these young men were hardly children of the ghetto; they were all employed, some in
white-collar jobs, or studying.
On Saturday evening a dance was held. The team attended with mixed
feelings. The irony of the situation was that during the course of the evening the
organizers ran a ‘best-looking player’ competition, and it was won by one of our
team. Suddenly black became beautiful! There was a suggestion that as a protest
Derek should not accept the prize. However, this did not happen and the team
celebrated a strange victory. While our white hosts could allow young black people to
be individually glamorous, collectively the same young blacks were threatening. This
comes close to what Hall, inspired by the suggestive comments made by Franz
Fanon, calls the ‘doubling of fear and desire’ (1988:28).
White working-class masculinities and racialized
Hierarchies
Although non-racist sensibilities are communicated to whites through the process of
cultural dialogues (Hewitt 1986; Jones 1988), the ‘fear and desire’ couplet can also be
present. For white young men, the imaging of black masculinity in heterosexual
codes of ‘hardness’ and ‘hypersexuality’ is one of the core elements which attract
them to black masculine style. However, the image of black sexuality as potent and
‘bad’ is alarmingly similar to racist notions of dangerous/ violent ‘black muggers’.
When racist ideas are most exposed, in situations where there is intimate contact
between black and white men, stereotypical ideas can be reproduced ‘dressed up’ as
positive characteristics to be emulated. White identification with black people can
become emmeshed within the discourse of the ‘noble savage’, which renders
blackness exotic and reaffirms black men as a ‘race apart’.
Staples (1982), writing about black masculinity in America, has shown that
while these themes are at the core of classical biologizing racist ideologies, some black
men have none the less embraced them. Staples locates this process within the wider
context of racial subordination in American society, where the ‘macho’ gender role
underpins the survival strategies of the ghetto ‘hustler’. What appears to be the case
in south London is a convergence between these processes and the white workingclass macho displayed in the policing of a local territory. Whites create a racialized
image of black masculinity assembled from fragments of their own experience; the
image of blackness is a white artefact. The result is that a particular version of black
heterosexual masculinity is adopted in the styles and rituals of white men without
necessarily transforming the whites’ use of racist discourses. This may have specific
pay-offs with regard to white attitudes towards black men. Certainly, it does not alter
the wider racist environment. That is, appropriation of black styles may occur
simultaneously with more profound and politicized dialogues and within complex
exchanges of all kinds.
Previously I have shown that the notions of race and racism adopted by the
young men in south London are contradictory and ambiguous (Back 1991a, Back
1993). Although in the predominantly white working-class estate there exists a widely
held view that racism and prejudice are wrong, young whites repeatedly use racist
discourse to characterize black people outside the area. Racist name calling is
prevalent and used in the wind-ups. In this sense there is a clear relationship between
the ritual expression of masculine identities and popular racism: the former provides
the platform for the latter. The use of racism in these strategic settings violates the
widely held view that it is ‘out of order’ to use racism or bring colour into multiracial
peer interactions. Indeed, the contradictory nature of these ideas allows black young
people to gain acceptance by non-blacks on occasion and to resist forms of racism
which exist within these peer settings. However, the situation is very different for the
newly settled Vietnamese refugees. In many ways, Vietnamese youth operate outside
the linguistic and cultural exchanges that take place in multiracial peer groups and
constitute a subordinate youth group; what Hewitt (1990:141) has termed a
sociolinguistic underclass.
White young men justify the absence of the Vietnamese young people by
asserting that they ‘like to keep themselves to themselves’—they ‘won’t mix’.
However, it is clear that their lack of participation in friendship groups is a
consequence of racist encounters.
In the course of fieldwork a Vietnamese boy, Tanyi, started to come into the
club with two white boys, Cliff and Jack. Cliff and Jack were from established ‘estate
families’. Cliff’s father was reputed to have been a supporter of the National Front in
the 1970s and vehemently opposed the settlement of the Vietnamese on the estate.
The three boys were said to ‘hang around together’ on the estate and in the youth
club.
The three boys often came to the club to play football and pool. Sometimes
Tanyi’s Chinese/Vietnamese origins were mentioned in wind-ups, most frequently in
terms of a stereotype of ‘Orientals’ proficient in martial arts. On one occasion when
the three boys were playing pool Cliff rolled the pool cue over his shoulder and
adopted a fight stance in front of Tanyi. He then withdrew, saying, ‘I’d better watch
it. Tanyi would make Bruce Lee [the famous martial arts hero] take up pool.’ All three
boys laughed at this. While Tanyi was accepted as part of the peer group, his
‘difference’ was often referred to in these exchanges, demonstrating that his presence
was contingent on Cliff’s and Jack’s approval. The three boys used their masculinity
as a common register around which to build friendship. In this sense, wind-ups as
forms of play were expressions of this process at work (Back 1990). However, these
friendships do not last long.
After two months there was tension between Tanyi, Cliff and Jack. Once, a
new worker at the club entrance asked Tanyi to spell his name. Cliff said, ‘Just put
Tony’. Anglicization of names is common amongst British Asian young people who
move in white peer groups. On this occasion I think that Cliff’s ‘naming claim’ was of
greater significance. It signalled an increasing resentment towards Tanyi’s
‘difference’. This change also manifested itself in their interactions within the club.
Cliff challenged Tanyi in wind-ups more often and subsequently the boys spent less
time together. Three weeks later Tanyi stopped coming to the club.
Cliff and Jack told me that Tanyi had decided to ‘go back to his own kind’. A
few days later I saw Tanyi. He said:
I was jus[t] sick of the way they treat me. You know, ‘yellow’ this ‘yellow’
that, ‘Chink’ this ‘Chink’ that. I decided that I didn’t want them to use me
as something to play with. See they say we don’t come to club because we
don’t want to—but would you want to be treated like that? I go to the club
when they have Vietnamese disco on Sundays but no more in the week.
In the face of this kind of harassment it is hardly surprising that the Vietnamese
young people are reluctant to enter into close relationships with other young people
in the area. The question is: why can young black people gain access to a contingent
insider position while the Vietnamese cannot? The answer lies in how racism and
gender intersect in the two cases. Despite references to an imagined relationship
between ‘Orientals’ and martial arts, Vietnamese young men are typically vilified as
feeble, soft and effeminate, while black men are constructed in the terms of the fear
and desire couplet. In short, the internal configurations of white working-class
masculinities define the parameters of racist exclusion.
When I met Chas in 1987, he was 14 years old. He is white, lived on a
predominantly white estate, but was intimately involved with black musical cultures.
He had adopted the full blazonry of black style—a gold-capped front tooth, ‘tram
lines’ shaved into the sides of his blonde hair, and a medallion with the symbol of
Africa in red, gold and green. He was unequivocal about the issue of colour. ‘It’s pure
wickedness to cuss people’s colour…. Like my black friends have as much right to be
here as I have.’ However, the politics of Chas’ posturing did not extend beyond his
particular image of blackness. His model of racial hierarchies became clear when we
passed a Vietnamese refugee and her son. Chas turned to me: ‘I can’t stand the
Chinks. Their cooking stinks and they keep themselves to themselves like. They don’t
want to mix.’ I asked, ‘But isn’t that just as bad as saying that all black people are
muggers?’. He replied, ‘Na! That’s not the same at all! My black mates wouldn’t let
people walk over them the way the Vietnamese do—do you know what I mean?
Black people have nuff respect for who they are. If you said things to dem you’d get
nuff licks [physical retribution].’
In this short episode the articulation between gender and racism is clear. Black
and ‘Oriental’ youth are characterized by white working-class youth in terms of a set
of gendered oppositions. The terms of inter-racial dialogue are set by this process of
creating difference: an image of blackness associated with the hardness and
assertiveness which is valorized among white working-class males results in the
definition of black young men and young women as contingent insiders. By contrast,
the young Vietnamese men are feminized and excluded. Black youth are seen as
sexually attractive, and, unlike Vietnamese men, are the objects of white fantasies of
Oriental hypersexuality (cf. Said 1978).
Franz Fanon showed that in colonial and neo-colonial societies the
psychological legacy of racism is complex. He sought to deconstruct the ‘white
masks’ which racism imposed on black people, or, as Bhabha puts it, ‘the white man’s
artifice inscribed on the black man’s body’ (1990:188). Bhabha himself suggests that
the divisions between Self and Other are always partial, with the result that neither is
sufficient unto itself (ibid.: 193). Appropriating Fanon’s metaphor, one might also ask
why white young men adopt ‘black masks’. My answer is that white masculinity does
not involve the assertion of a monolithic racialized persona. White young men
identify with particular constructions of blackness but reject any form of
identification with the feminized images of the ‘Oriental’.
CONCLUSION
The white Negro accepts the real Negro not as a human being in his totality, but as
the bringer of a highly specified and restricted ‘cultural dowry’. In doing so he creates
an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place (Polsky 1961:313).
Polsky’s
comment refers to Norman Mailer’s famous essay ‘The White Negro’. In it he claims
to show how white Hipsters in 1950s’ America took on black language and style. Or,
as Mailer put it, a ‘new breed of [white] adventurers, urban adventurers who drifted
out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts’ (1961:285).
Polsky’s key point is that the Hipster’s appropriation of blackness was restricted to a
particular stereotype of what being black meant. He suggests the Hipsters did not
want black men to be ‘Uncle Toms’ but they still wanted them to be ‘spooks’ (Polsky
1961:313). The point here is that the ‘black through white’ cultural appropriations I
have described in this chapter have a long history. I have argued in this chapter that
in order to evaluate these appropriations it is necessary to cross our analysis of racism
with a politics of masculinities.
There is no one notion of masculinity found in white working-class culture in
south London but rather a constellation of masculine rituals, practices and identities.
These notions of masculinity are racialized in complex ways. Part of this process
results in white men and women taking on black cultural forms of style and
communication. While acknowledging that this experience may communicate
egalitarian discourses resulting in a grounded dissection of racial inequality (Hewitt
1986; Jones 1988; Back 1991b), I have concentrated on how this form of appropriation
can also result in more complex forms of racism. The notions of blackness which
white young men, in particular, identify with may simply be the artefacts of a
complex form of white identity. White young men create these images which are
assembled from fragments of experience and discourse, then project them on to the
bodies of black people. These attributes are not the external features of difference but
the reassimilation of its shadow, a selective construction of blackness confined within
the parameters of whiteness.
The gendering of blackness and oriental otherness places black and
Vietnamese young men in different positions in white male ‘common sense’. I argue
this process is at the root of new expressions of racism in discourse and action. This
process is not monolithic; rather these processes are at work with varying degrees of
impact and importance. I may have endowed them with too much explanatory
weight and emphasis. Yet I maintain that to appreciate the contingencies of the
politics of inter-racial dialogue it is necessary to appreciate the particular crossing of
racism and gender. It is only then, for instance, that we can begin to understand why
it is that Vietnamese young men and women in this part of south London are so
viciously harassed.
Moreover, the processes which result in the ‘fear and desire’ couplet have
important implications for the partial muting of forms of popular racism, and help to
explain why young black men can win inclusion among white youths. Yet it is the
way in which this process is mediated by notions of masculinity that explains the
emergence of new and complex forms of racialized hierarchy. If we are to challenge
racism successfully in the domain of popular discourse, we must place an
understanding of gendered processes at the centre.
NOTES
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to many people for helping me to create this
chapter. An early version of it was given at a seminar series on racism and gender
convened by All Rattansi at City University, London. I would like to thank Ali for his
useful comments and encouragement. John Solomos and Parminder Bhachu gave
inspiration through example and Caroline Hardman provided insightful comments
on an early draft. Lastly, thanks to Pat Caplan for advice on this and countless other
matters.
1. Cf. David Jackson’s Unmasking Masculinity (1990), which is a brave attempt at
writing a critical autobiography, drawing inspiration from black women’s use of
autobiography in political writing, yet doing little to engage with the articulation
between racism and masculinity in the substance of the book.
2. I draw on an ethnographic study of racism conducted in 1985–9 focusing on two
post-war council estates in south London. One estate has predominantly white,
working-class residents. The second is a multiethnic neighbourhood. For a discussion
of the methods, aims and results of this research, see Back 1991b.
3. The presence of elaborate word games in monotonous work such as assembly lines
has been recorded in a variety of contexts (Roy 1953; Vaught and Smith 1980).
4. The literal meaning of ‘wanker’ is someone who masturbates. It is commonly used
to suggest that someone is a fool, or, in the absence of dominant masculine styles of
behaviour, unmanly. In the context of play insults, the meanings of such a term are
further multiplied.
5. Here the notion of blackness refers to a social and political construction articulated
within, but not confined to, the south London context. It both signifies the specific
qualities of black London and also resonates with identifications with the African
diaspora. While on some occasions this construct was widened to include political
opposition to racism, it was rarely applied to the experience of the Vietnamese.
6. There is a long history of European white people appropriating African cultural
forms. Roger Bastide (1978) has shown that even within the most acute forms of racial
exploitation the crossing of black cultural forms took place. His analysis of African
religions in Brazil points out that the de-Africanization of black people occurred
simultaneously with a less profound Africanization of whites. Equally, others have
demonstrated that white America has a distinctly African heritage (Philips 1990;
Mailer 1961; Hewitt 1983).
Chapter 11
‘Real true boys’
Moulding the cadets of imperialism
Helen Kanitkar
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll
be a Man, my son!
(Kipling 1990, ‘If-’)
Rudyard Kipling provided a memorable summary of idealized qualities for those
destined for positions of military or civil leadership in the far-flung British Empire.
The poem ‘If-’ is fluid, rhythmic and neatly rhymed, easy for schoolboys to commit to
memory. Such idealized notions of masculinity were inculcated during the imperial
period not only through formal education and training, but also through reading and
leisure activities. My focus in this chapter is the entertaining light literature to be
found in such annuals as the Empire Annual for Boys 1909–19 and story collections of
the same genre. These were published at Christmas and intended as lively, but
morally instructive, reading for boys attending public schools, where ‘manliness’,
sportsmanship and the team spirit, upright conduct and a horror of effeminate
behaviour were lauded. Many of these young men were destined for service in the
Empire as army officers or government administrators; numbers of them already had
fathers or uncles serving abroad. There are many tales which have as heroes young
men holidaying with relatives in various parts of the Empire before going up to
Oxford or Cambridge. The clubbable, ‘old-school-tie’, Officers’ Mess world is the
background for many stories in these annuals and adventure tales; it is definitely the
ethos of the genre.
In these tales, the emphasis is on the masculine values of the late Victorian
period and the early years of the twentieth century; a time when, as Gilmore has put
it, ‘manhood was an artificial product coaxed by austere training and testing’
(1990:18). As elsewhere, ‘manhood’ was defined in terms of the received notions of
the social environment and the age. To achieve it boys underwent rites of passage
which separated them from home and the familiar, most particularly from their
mothers’ care and influence. They passed into the charge of men unrelated to them,
and were to suffer the dominance of older boys with authority over them. They were
expected to stand on their own feet until the time came for them to exercise authority
and power in their turn. The aim was to make ‘big men of little boys’, as the Boy
Scout manuals of the day put it. Often actual tests of courage, judgement and
initiative were included in these rituals; similar trials appear in Empire Annual
stories: a boy may have to stand up to the school bully, or, better still, rescue that
unpleasant character from a dangerous situation, the boy thus proving not only his
bravery but his mature generosity of spirit as well.
The club, the regimental dinner, the boarding school were worlds which
women either did not enter except by special invitation, or were only tolerated in out
of necessity as school matrons, maids, cleaners and kitchen staff. Likewise, in these
boys’ stories, women characters seldom play a part.1 If they do appear, their roles are
circumscribed and used to help to define the hero as bold, honourable and
considerate of those weaker than himself—all qualities considered worthy of
emulation. For example, women may provide an excuse for a brave rescue by being
kidnapped by wild tribesmen or carried away by a swiftflowing river. Arthur Mee,
editor of the New Children’s Encyclopedia, indicates that women operate through
their influence on men, but not as direct initiators of action; they have ‘great power to
stir men to glorious things’, they act as the ‘gentler soul’ at the side of great men; and
their ‘greatest pride is to be womanly, not manly’ and to ‘have nothing to do
with…girls who would be men’, as ‘the manners of men are not for girls to put on’
(Mee 1913b:749–50).
A woman retains respect only if she accepts circumscription of opportunity
and development; when in the Empire overseas, she takes her boundaries with her,
for even there her governance is limited to her domestic circle and those who move
within it. Stoler (1991) has noted that those women who went to live in the colonies
during this period were subject to greater restrictions on their activities than those
who stayed in England. They were to be kept away from natural dangers, as well as
close contacts with the indigenous peoples, lest understanding and appreciation of
local mores lead to the horror of ‘going native’, bad enough in the case of men, but for
women unthinkable. The peripheral role of women in the adventure tales highlights
the fact that their involvement in the dangerous situations described would be
unlikely, even improper, in real life. Moreover, in the stories, participation of a
decisive, outcome-determining type is rare for the subjects of imperial rule in colonial
countries. Both were expected to be under ‘mature’ governance, for their own
welfare. Women, members of the lower classes, and ‘natives’: all may offer excuses
for action but they are almost incidental to its outcome.
To be moulded into this imperial masculinity, boys either entered the highly
structured, all-male, boarding-school environment or were presented with idealized
views of such institutions through ‘ripping yarns’. Those boys being prepared for
entry to public schools were likely to have moved already beyond the governess’s
schoolroom, where their sisters and younger brothers attended classes, to the
transitional phase of instruction by a tutor. This move signalled a young man’s entry
into male company, with its associated interests, choices of career and means of
advancement in the world. At entry to boarding school new loyalties and points of
pride—friendship, school, sports team—were generated, 184 ‘REAL TRUE BOYS’
preparing boys for later, greater loyalties to regiment, nation and empire. Readership
of ‘ripping yarns’ extended to boys from a variety of backgrounds a positive and
beguiling image of the public-school code, presenting the virtues of a class whose
position of undeniable power and privilege was, so these books imply, derived from
adherence to its ideals.(2) Three images stand out in this literature as providing
appropriate role models for the shaping of imperial masculinity: the sporting boy, the
all-white boy and, above all, the Christian boy.
THE SPORTING BOY
The upright, manly boy was one who neglected neither physical fitness nor his school
work. Mens sana in corpore sano was the pattern set before him. The games
recommended were team sports which required qualities of leadership, working
together and loyalty. (3) A growing interest in female company, which we might
regard as a signal of transition from boyhood to manhood, was certainly nothing to
boast of in 1911, or so it would seem from an idealized description of the reader of the
Empire Annual for Boys published in that year’s volume:
Were you to ask the ‘real, true boy’ [his favourite read or author] you
would get an amazing variety of replies. But…one and all would tell you
they did not want any ‘love rot’ in their tales. There is a kind of boy,
however, who prefers love stories, and these of a particularly sickly
sentimental, and sometimes ‘nasty’ kind. But these immature and weedy
youths are not true boys at all; rather they are of the kind of youth that can
be seen, with pale and pimply face, sucking cigarette or cane-top, loafing
about and ogling the girls, instead of joining in the sports of their more
manly fellows. (Williams 1911:281)
That this stereotypical ideal of the ‘real, true’ sporting boy had spread with the
Empire, and become an internalized value even among the Indian intellectual elite,
can be seen from letters sent by Jawaharlal Nehru’s father to his son while a student
at Harrow. Motilal Nehru had firm ideas as to the way his son could acquire the
attributes and personality of a ‘real man’:
I should like you very much to practise shooting as much as you can. It is
one of the most necessary qualifications of a well-educated man…what I
was thinking of was the practice of college games such as cricket…. You
can engage the services of a professional as some Harrow boys who can
afford it sometimes do…. The practice of riding is well worth keeping up
and improving upon and I would not grudge you the expense it will
involve. (Kumar and Panigrahi 1982:82, 79, 83)
The Foreword of the first volume of the Empire Annual for Boys, published in 1909,
was written by J.E.K.Studd, Captain of the Cambridge University cricket XI in 1884.
He could not have put the value of sport higher:
The bond of sport is one of the strongest and most far-reaching in the
British race. It…is accepted as almost a hallmark of uprightness. ‘To play
the game’ is constantly quoted as the supreme standard of excellence.
(Studd 1909:7)
Three sporting values are worthy of cultivation in life: to aim high, never lose heart
and to help your neighbour. The sports that figure most frequently in the annuals,
whether in factual articles or school stories, are cricket, rugby and association football
(which by 1913 was being termed ‘soccer’, but only in inverted commas). Volumes
published during World War I years stress the military exploits and achievements of
individual officers, who are represented as coming from a public school/Oxbridge
background. They are ‘brave, noble fellows’ who have won
grander and more lasting triumphs and more immortal renown than they
ever won even on the international field at Twickenham, in the Test Match
at Lord’s, on the river between Putney and Mortlake…. There was no
hanging back by these men, no ‘waiting to be fetched’. (Wade 1917:21–2)
The loss of such sportsmen on the battlefield is mourned, whereas soccer, the game
normally associated with the working class in Britain, compares unfavourably with
the public school/Oxbridge games as a provider of brave soldiers ready to die for
Britain and the empire: ‘Soccer football was indeed late in starting, compared with
some other sports, when the call came’ (Wade 1917: 24). The emphasis on team games
and the way they are played at public schools and Oxbridge is yet another pointer to
the intended readership of these books.
Mee addresses a wider audience when he emphasizes the process of
formation of male loyalties:
you will bring…the willingness to sink yourself in entire forgetfulness, and
to place your qualities at the service of the team…you will be a part of the
machine and a part of the force which drives it…[with] perfect selfmastery
and perfect submission…you will realise yourself growing into fullness of
manhood…. On the playing field…only the flower of life, and not the
weed, can grow. We must be loyal, or the game is lost…. If we are loyal to
our team, to our school, we shall be loyal to our village, to our town, and to
our country; the very beginnings of patriotism lie in the cap that a
schoolboy wears. (Mee 1913a:544–6)
Mee urges participation in, rather than mere observation of, team games. These
demand not only fitness and skill but assimilation of such moral values as loyalty,
pride in the achievements of oneself and of others, leadership, and the ability to get
on with one’s peers:
the playing field is in very truth the High School of [a boy’s] life. It is there
he finds the great distinctive English qualities that mark a man all over the
world. I once heard of a man who came to the university of a great English
town from a country in the East. He was cultured, kind, and made friends
everywhere; a lovable man. Yet every now and then this lovable man
would do something terrible in English eyes; he would make you want to
hit him, said my friend. He had not learned the laws of honour. Now, no
English boy can be a healthy boy and miss the laws of honour. Seek first
the Kingdom of Out-of-Doors…one of the first rules of games is to lay the
foundation of a full and splendid manhood…you will keep… the thought
that a noble mind should live in a noble body…. You would scorn to break
the great English rule of Fair Play by playing for a baser motive than the
pure love of the game. (ibid.: 543)
Represented here are national values: those who are trained in them will always carry
them in their pursuit of enlightenment of the ‘other’. The hero of the publicschool
story in boys’ annuals is almost always the captain of cricket or rugby, or at least a
star player of the First Eleven or Fifteen. By contrast, tales lauding missionary
activities in Asia or Africa are often accompanied by photographs showing the pupils
lined up in the school soccer team, as a representation of the working-class youth.
Class and race values are thus institutionalized on and through the sports field.
Mee condemns ‘players’, those who are paid for their sporting skills, as opposed to
‘gentlemen’, for whom sport is a serious, but unremunerative, recreation:
You will scorn the sham sporting spirit of these days, the mania of
football, whose victims imagine they are sportsmen because they look on
while other people play…you will have nothing to do with the fraudulent
sport which makes a football team a business and buys and sells men like
sheep. (ibid.: 546)
He continues by describing the depressed areas in which the working classes live,
and those who spend their free time in public houses, ‘ranks of despair which gather
week after week at a big football match, and talk of football as if it were deciding the
fate of nations’ (ibid.: 546). Such behaviour, such companions, are not worthy of the
‘true boy’, who is urged to ‘Quit you like a man: be strong’.
The virtues of the all-male sporting arena and the ‘work’ of empire building,
which the Annuals so proudly extol, sit rather uncomfortably with the assumption
that adult males are married men. The emphasis on the great outdoors and the
exotica of empire is obvious; so too the absence of female figures. Especially
important is the extra-national nature of the activities described and illustrated. Boys
are being encouraged to extend their horizons, to see their future as taking them
outside their small island, while nevertheless retaining its ideals and culture. These
‘cadets of empire’ are being urged to see themselves as a breed apart, not only from
those they may dominate later overseas, but also from those of their homeland who
differ, whether by class allegiance or gender attributes.
THE ‘ALL-WHITE’ BOY
We define ourselves by opposition to others…. Each culture inevitably
generates its own perception of what is, either as dream or nightmare, its
‘other’. (Ardener 1989:162)
The notions of the idealized masculine character common to this period are
reinforced by the contemporary popular literature. Prevalent were tales of heroism in
lands perceived as exotic, wild and uncivilized; these inspired boys to accept their
future roles in maintaining and expanding the Empire. Such images are created not
only by the lesser-known writers of the era but also by the likes of Buchan and
Kipling. John Buchan’s Prester John presents the white man’s role in Africa:
I knew then the meaning of the white man’s duty. He has to take all the
risks…. That is the difference between white and black, the gift of
responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king, and so long as we
know and practise it, we will rule not in Africa alone, but wherever there
are dark men who live only for their bellies. (1910:88)
Kipling reiterates the ideal with tongue-in-cheek cynicism:
Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need.
(1990, ‘The White Man’s Burden’)
‘The White Man’s Burden’ may be jingoistic, but it is jingoism with a cutting edge. A
more paternalistic presentation appears in the Empire Annual 1910, which presents a
story purporting to be by a Ugandan mission schoolboy, describing his daily life and
the benefits missionaries have brought. The tale is in fact written by a white
missionary and is replete with racist images, evidently adjudged as suitable reading
for English boys of the period:
Of course, we people are all black-skinned, and though we don’t look so
nice as you do—at least, so we think—and we used to think God did not
like us so much as He does you, or He would have given us white
skins…. In dress we envy you, for we think you look so much nicer than
we do. Michael, one of our fellows, dressed up a little time ago in some
borrowed things, and he looked so handsome. (Hattersley 1910:57–8, 64)
As if to make sure the writer’s point is understood, this tale is accompanied by a
photograph of a Ugandan schoolboy standing, with a marked swagger, in shorts,
blazer, boater, knee-length socks and walking shoes, carrying under his arm a rolled
umbrella.
These representations of superiority are fundamentally racist and held sway
throughout the empire, not just in black Africa. Images of ‘native adults’ are
complex—they are seen as swarthy, duplicitous and, most relevant to this discussion,
childlike. By contrast the young English boy is preter-naturally mature and decisive
in an environment that is often actively hostile. An example of this contrast between
the hyper-mature English boy and the adult natives who cannot safely manage their
own affairs is to be found in the Empire Annual for Boys 1914. This is a story with the
emotive title ‘The Famine Ghoul’, who turns out to be a Hindu grain merchant,
repeatedly referred to as ‘the Hindu’, who has locked up his stocks during a time of
scarcity until prices are forced up. Some Muslim beggars, claiming to be descendants
of rulers of the area, draw near to the verandah of one of the ‘best bungalows’ of the
plains, where the District Officer’s young son and his cousin are relaxing one broiling
afternoon. The ensuing conversation is worth quoting in full:
‘This is terrible, Dick!’ [Jack] exclaimed. ‘But what can we do?’ ‘It must
drive these poor beggars mad to see us sitting here in cool white and
drinking tea, while they…’ ‘The victims of famine! Yes, old man, it must be
awful for them.’ (Saxby and Simpson 1914:110–11)
A rupee is thrown to the beggars, who respond by saying it is food they need; money
will buy them little to eat, as the price of food is soaring because of the merchants.
‘Oh, the brutes! …I never heard of anything so rotten.’ ‘Government
ought to have laws to stop such a thing,’ said Jack… ‘send along a decent
monsoon; that’s about all that would put things right. The natives live
from hand to mouth; they never provide for hard times.’ ‘Shall I call the
boy for more tea?’
’Ah well! I suppose it won’t do any good to moan over other people’s
troubles. Hullo!’ and the speaker burst out laughing. ‘What has happened
to my boy? He’s actually running!’
‘He’s coming homewards—to grub—in haste like a horse,’ remarked Dick
sarcastically…but the Hindu continued in his surprising exhibition.
(ibid.: 111–13)
The servant is hurrying to tell his master that a merchant has been murdered in the
bazaar by the starving people, and says that there are threats to do the same to a big
grain merchant nearby. Jack interrupts him sharply (it does not do to encourage
gossip with servants):
‘That’ll do, Thumbao; you can go to your work.’ He had suddenly risen, and
there was a set look about his face that indicated no small purpose ruling
him at the moment. (ibid.: 114)
The young English boys force the merchant to sell his grain at a fair price, so saving
his life, and preserving peace under the Raj.
This tale indicates how the Englishman selflessly brings order and a sense of
fair play to places where, it would appear, such ideas were hitherto unknown.
Important matters have to be dealt with by a manly Englishman who can organize
and direct the ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, /Half-devil and half-child’, as Kipling put
it. In these boys’ stories internal qualities are reflected in external appearances; a
hierarchy of racial groups, constructed according to a range of desirable/ undesirable
national characteristics, is apparent. Even pets do not escape the imposition of
desirable qualities of personality. Dogs are the most popular, faithful to their masters,
lively and sporty by nature, courageous in a crisis and prompt to obey the orders of a
higher authority; in short, they embody all the noble attributes of masculinity and are
thus worthy companions of real men.
In these adventure tales there is immediate suspicion, usually justified by later
events, of anyone who does not look wholly European; a story entitled ‘The Puttipore
Rivals’ (Moore 1912), about two motor car salesmen in India, has as its villain ‘a stout,
dark-haired man’, with ‘evidently very little European blood in his veins’. Sure
enough, the truth emerges, though the author does try to be generous in his
judgement: ‘his father was a Frenchman and his mother a native. That, of course, is
no reason why he should not be an honourable, decent fellow, but…there is not a
bigger rogue than he in Puttipore’ (ibid.: 120). Initial impressions are proved correct;
how differently drawn is his rival, a ‘smart young Scotsman’. Others take the same
mould, such as the upright individual encountered while holidaying in Scotland: ‘a
typical young Englishman, goodlooking, brave, a keen sportsman’ (Wilson 1919:105).
Some ethnic groups are treated with respect by the authors of this juvenile
popular literature. Among them are Sikhs, the tribesmen of the North-West Frontier
and Gurkhas, who are seen as exemplifying familiar martial qualities of courage and
respect for orderly discipline, both of which are admired by the imperial English. The
Gurkhas are ‘brave to recklessness’, and ‘their wonderful dash, faithfulness to their
officers, and devotion to duty have won the admiration of the whole British Army’
(Danvers-Dawson 1917:119). That the Gurkhas helped British forces during the
Indian mutiny is acknowledged, as is their World War I service. Nevertheless, the
author of one article on the Gurkhas cannot avoid some condescending comments.
He writes that the Gurkhas have shown a ‘generous spirit of courtesy which was
worthy of a more enlightened people’ and adds, ‘they can hardly be called handsome
even by their best friends’ (ibid.: 120).
Certainly the black-and-white illustration accompanying this account
represents the Gurkhas most unflatteringly. As they charge from the trenches,
brandishing the dreaded kukri, the knife that is their favourite weapon, their features
are depicted as savagely simian. Lionel Caplan (personal communication) has
suggested that Gurkha qualities praised by English officers are those adjudged
characteristic of the English public schoolboy of the Victorian and immediately postVictorian period: they are loyal, quick to respond to a command, brave and upright.
Nevertheless, like schoolboys, they are in need of direction; the schoolboy is destined
to grow up and command in his turn, but the Gurkhas are not—their adulthood
remains unacknowledged, not least because they remain subject to the orders of
British officers.
Foreign accents, or the inability to speak grammatical standard English, are
irresistible to the authors of these boys’ adventure yarns as a source of fun which can
belittle the speakers. As we have already seen, such examples can be drawn in plenty
from stories of the Empire which incorporate native characters, who fall ready
victims to mockery. But there are examples much nearer home. In a tale of the Great
War, a French general responds to an English officer who has brought him important
news: ‘I am ver glad to get dis… Et make a great deefference to our plans… You vill
stay an’ haf som’ sopper with me, eh?’. The same author draws verbal distinctions
between British army officers and NCOs:
‘’Ere you, Bates and Simpkins, are your revolvers ready? But don’t loose off till
I do, then stan’ up an’ let ’em ’ave it! …Good sort o’ place for a hambush, sir.’
Although the speaker is an experienced regular soldier, the subaltern who is in
charge of the expedition emerges as the hero and is regarded by his superiors as a
fine leader of men. His background is precisely what we might expect in an Empire
Annual tale:
when war had broken out, he was still a mere public schoolboy…. But
when Great Britain threw down the gauntlet… Ponsonby, like a good many
other young men of his class, determined not to be left out in the cold.
(MacDonald 1915:9–10)
Even the choice of surnames implies a hierarchy of rank: Ponsonby is the officer,
while the ‘Other Ranks’ are designated Bates or Simpkins, names characteristic of
working or lower middle classes in these stories. Ponsonby, certainly, is never made
to appear comic, through speech or action. Heroes of the Great War are sometimes of
very tender age, and there is no hint of the tragedy that the battlefield often brought
to a young life; only the glory dazzles and tempts young readers to commit
themselves to emulation. The Battle of Mons offers the true tale of a 16-year-old
bugler:
the brave little chap was smiling cheerfully at his soldier friends, though
his left arm had been shot away and both his head and feet were bandaged
…the spectators gave the gallant lad many hearty cheers…. Ordered to
sound his bugle to encourage the regiment, he did so until he had four
bullets in him, and even then he continued to blow till he fell quite
unconscious…. Yes, every man in the regiment is proud of him!
(Wade 1915:80–1)
Such virtues are not confined to the white protagonists of imperial rule, however;
individuals from among the ruled can also show noble qualities, and stories of these
are used to strengthen positive role-models as well as to demonstrate the difference
between these noble souis who have acquired such qualities from their rulers and the
rest of their people. Conformity to English ideals of honour is what is recognized and
admired.
THE CHRISTIAN BOY
The ideals carried by the English imperialists reflect a ‘muscular Christianity’ which
ties in with the other ideals of masculinity to which English boys were expected to
aspire. An episode from Eliza F.Pollard’s White Dove of Amritzir illustrates the
refusal of an English District Officer to compromise his faith when confronted with
what seems to have been interpreted as religious adoration from the ‘natives’. It
begins with a group of Sikhs seen worshipping a District Officer who has been sent to
the Punjab to ‘rule’ them. They see him as a reincarnation of Guru Gobind Singh (or
so we are invited to believe). This disgusts the District Officer, John Nicolson:
‘Kasan Singh, how dare you!’ …the speaker…looked down with an
expression of mingled anger and pity at a man crouching at his feet,
muttering words in a strange tongue…he dragged himself to where the
officer stood, and then prostrated himself on the ground… Nicolson
exclaimed—‘Faith! and it’s more than a man who calls himself a Christian
can stand!’
(Pollard n.d.: 164)
Kasan Singh is sentenced to three dozen lashes for his ‘blasphemy’, which treatment
is presented as provoking even greater adulation for Nicolson from the Sikhs.
According to the imperialists, God had favoured the white man, and
especially the Englishman, through the gift of Christianity. In turn, the white
believers, or at least some of them, came from their homes to bring the gift to ‘the
heathen in his blindness’. An embarrassingly obvious tale equating whiteness of
complexion with purity of spirit is that of ‘All-white’ John, a Christianized New
Guinea tribesman whose ambition is to,
‘Go to heaven, be white mans, be English some day. All white, all white, jes’
like this’, as he shows a picture of an angel; ‘All white! All white! … black
fellow no more; all English!’ John’s black eyes rolled and glistened.
(Bevan 1910:19)
The refrain ‘All white! All English!’ is eagerly reiterated throughout the story; the
epithets ‘white’ and ‘English’, with all the virtuous qualities John has been persuaded
to perceive in them, appear synonymous. Other New Guinea tribesmen, effectively
condemned in John’s own words, are designated: ‘men of the hills; black all through;
no white in them; devils!’. To the author, their outward appearance instantly betrays
their evil nature: they are ‘dwarfish fellows…naked, sinewy, ugly, bones thrust
through the nostrils like sharp tusks, they looked more beast than human’ (ibid.: 25).
John demonstrates the value of the noble qualities that have come to him
through conversion and his association with ‘white English men’ by rescuing them
from these New Guinea tribesmen. His clever rescue, however, does not win him
credit for intelligence but only for a natural instinct which is shared with the animal
kingdom: ‘[John] yearned to be “white mans all through”, but Nature had made him
black and trained him for years in every wile of his race’ (ibid.:26). John is a comic
figure because of his manner of speaking English and his over-simplified faith; the
story also describes the gulf fixed between the intelligent, reasoning white and the
instinctual black.
Missionaries are least likely to show regard for the way of life that surrounds
them. They see themselves as there to challenge it, and to ‘make real men’ of the boys
put in their charge via an English education. A series of articles by Tyndale-Biscoe
(1911:205–8, 211) on a mission school in Kashmir is a case in point. The writer first
describes the Kashmiri capital in a markedly unsympathetic manner:‘The inhabitants
were crawling about, for people in the East are not as a rule fast walkers’ through the
snow in the ‘dirty white city’. The missionary condemns much of what he sees,
‘which I had not dreamt of even in nightmares’: people walking not abreast but one
behind the other, according to age, gender, caste and wealth. He has a vision of
Srinagar of the future: ‘I saw knights-errant walking about these streets, not at the
gentlemanly bullock pace, but young men of muscle and grit who had awakened
from their lethargy and sleep of years to a life of activity and manliness’, which will
be realized by his teaching ‘Christian principles and public school ideas to the boys
and young men of Kashmir’. He is impressed by the work of his colleagues: ‘When I
have seen these countrymen of mine …just doing their duty without fuss or noise,
because they are just what they are, I thank God that I have been born a Christian and
an Englishman.’
Rarely does condemnation of the ‘other’ descend to invective, but occasionally
prejudice becomes blatant and venomous, as when a missionary describes some of
the pupils in the mission school, the purpose of which is ‘to make men—men of true
Christian character—out of the material to be found in Kashmir’:
There were 200 or more dirty, smelling Brahman things squatting on the
floor devouring with great keenness the wisdom from the West…. These
Brahmans in embryo were swinging backwards and forwards without
ceasing, just like a metronome…pressing their dirty little fingers along the
lines of grease-bedaubed Persian or Sanskrit reading-book.
(Tyndale-Biscoe 1913:279)
Tyndale-Biscoe sees the purpose of his missionary experiences in north India as ‘to
make budding bipeds into such men as we believe Almighty God wishes them to be’
(ibid.: 283). There is much in the same vein: success stories are proudly told, in which
Brahman boys learn how to help others, regardless of status or caste, developing,
through missionary influence, a generosity of spirit towards the elderly, women,
beggars and animals. Again it is the accepted values of the Christian west that are
held up for emulation. Englishmen must see themselves as having the God-given
right, as well as the duty, to govern and control those unable to do so for themselves.
CONCLUSION
These adventure tales were composed for boys living seventy or eighty years ago,
and are historically and culturally specific to a period of British history. The boys had
inherited what was thought to be a consolidated empire built up and maintained by
Englishmen who had idealized service overseas as evidence of loyalty to queen and
country. Any historic text is ‘bound to the signifying network, the cultural context
which produced it’ (Ash 1990:76), yet it cannot be assessed from within that cultural
context, but only from the perspective of the present.
The Empire Annuals and other such books are no longer read by British
schoolboys. Superficially, styles of masculinity have undoubtedly changed.
However, versions of the dominant masculinities these stories reveal are firmly
rooted and reworked on the rugby field, in the club and round the boardroom table.
Thus in 1992 The Times could quote a committee member of London’s Garrick Club
on the admission of women members: ‘If women members come in, it will change. I
don’t know in what way, but why should I risk it?’ (Barker 1992:1). Misogyny,
chauvinism, class and racist prejudices continue to define a hegemonic masculinity of
‘real true men’ subscribed to by many of the British establishment.
NOTES
1. Women occasionally figure in stories about an earlier historical period, when their
activities are not threatening to the dominant images of masculinity of the early
twentieth century.
2. Joseph Bristow (1991) provides a full account of the development and ethos of these
schools.
3. A detailed study of the significance of sport in the English public school can be
found in Mangan (1981). The same author examines the contribution of imperialist
juvenile literature to the development and maintenance of a public school educated
colonial elite (1989).
Chapter 12
The paradoxes of masculinity
Some thoughts on segregated societies
Deniz Kandiyoti
In this chapter, I discuss the concerns that led me to explore aspects of masculinity in
Muslim societies, although these did not form an explicit component of my original
research agenda. In the process of assembling material for quite a different project—
namely a comparative analysis of women, Islam and the state (Kandiyoti 1991)—
insights and hypotheses concerning the construction of masculine identities crept up
surreptitiously and eventually called for attention with an insistence that could no
longer be ignored. This focus on masculinity led me to revise and amend some of my
earlier assumptions about the nature of patriarchy (Kandiyoti 1988a) and to question
my reading of materials I had been using. A clarification of my intellectual trajectory
is therefore in order as a means of situating my observations, which at this stage
remain tentative and exploratory.
Anyone working on questions of modernization and women’s emancipation
in the Middle East must inevitably come across those ‘enlightened’, pro-feminist men
who were often the first to denounce practices which they saw as debasing to
women—enforced ignorance, seclusion, polygyny and repudiation (a husband’s
unilateral right to divorce his wife). I considered their appearance as unproblematic
since a whole panoply of explanations was available for their emergence: the effects
of colonial expansion and exposure to the west (Ahmed 1992), the rise of new classes
in this context (Cole 1981) and a more universal thrust towards modernity inherent in
emergent nationalist projects (Jayawardena 1988).
None the less, I had misgivings about the deeper motivations of male reformers
and wondered if they were being self-serving by manifestly bemoaning the subjection
of women while in fact rebelling against their own lack of emancipation from
communal and, in particular, paternal control (Kandiyoti 1988b). Yet how was I to
explain instances where their tone was not merely rational and didactic, but strident
or full of rage and disgust? Even in a relatively recent text, Mazhar Ul Haq Khan
adopts an impassioned tone to talk about the ravages of the purdah family on the
male psyche:
The Purdah husband’s treatment of his wife or wives is authoritarian, in
some cases actually harsh and sadistic. In fact, if polygamous, he can
maintain peace among his wives only by the exercise of strict authority and
command. The little children note the frightened flutter in the zenana at his
appearance, which engenders the same emotions of fear, flight and general
avoidance as they notice in their mother or mothers and other inmates of the
zenana. This creates an emotional gulf between them and their father.
(1972:113)
The helpless mother also instils similar emotions in her son and unwittingly moulds
him in her own image. Yet the male child has an inordinate amount of power over the
secluded mother and comprehends the sources of her helplessness at an early age.
This leads to ‘a strange, though silent reversal of relationships between the purdah
mother and her little son’ whereby she depends on him to move through the streets
and bazaars, and he may even rebuke her for her conduct and instruct her to observe
purdah if there are men around (Khan 1972:119). The message is clear; the subjection
of women through purdah and polygamy ultimately mutilates and distorts the male
psyche.
Having identified men as the beneficiaries of existing power differentials
between genders, I could only explain this type of discourse as the emergence of a
novel male agenda which did not necessarily have as its main concern women’s
liberation, but rather their own.1 It is only gradually that I started noticing that, quite
often, male reformers were not speaking from the position of the dominating
patriarch, but from the perspective of the young son of the repudiated or repudiable
mother, powerless in the face of an aloof, unpredictable and seemingly all-powerful
father. Was I hearing the rage of an earlier, subordinated masculinity masquerading
as pro-feminisim?
What I had overlooked was the fact that some men might have had genuine
cause to vent spleen in relation to their formative experiences in the family. I had
made the elementary mistake of assuming that they had come into being as fullblown
men, as patriarchs themselves, on the flimsy grounds that this role was culturally
available to them. Had I shown the necessary sensitivity to the gendered structuring
of different stages of men’s life cycles in Muslim societies, I would no doubt have
perceived the intricate web of confirmatory and contradictory experiences behind
what I naively assumed to constitute some seamless adult masculinity.
It was at this point that I came across Connell’s work (1987), which resolved
some of my difficulties. Connell presents masculinity as a social construction which is
achieved within a gender order that defines masculinity in opposition to femininity
and in so doing sustains a power relation between men and women as groups. As
such, there is no single thing that is masculinity. Power relations among men, as well
as different patterns of personality development, construct different masculinities.
From my point of view, his most useful suggestion was that gender politics among
men involve struggles to define what Connell terms ‘hegemonic’ or ‘socially
dominant’ masculinity, and that the form of masculinity that is hegemonic at a given
time and place involves a particular institutionalization of patriarchy and a particular
strategy for the subordination of women.
In my earlier work, I had paid attention to these variations only from the
perspective of women’s subordination and resistance. I proposed an important, but
relatively neglected, point of entry for the identification of different forms of
patriarchy through an analysis of women’s strategies for dealing with them. I argued
that women strategize within a set of concrete constraints that reveal and define what
I called the ‘patriarchal bargain’, which may exhibit variations according to class,
caste and ethnicity. I assumed that these patriarchal bargains would exert a powerful
influence on the shaping of women’s gendered subjectivity and attempted to analyse
how women, at different points of their life cycles, accommodate to, subvert or resist
particular patriarchal scripts (Kandiyoti 1988a). However, I remained partially
oblivious to the dynamics among men because of my implicit belief that patriarchy
reproduces itself primarily in the relations between rather than within genders; this
also led me to privilege some institutions (kinship and the family) over others (such
as the state and the army). Although I still believe that patriarchy finds its starkest
expression in relation to the subordination of women, an adequate explanation of the
reproduction of patriarchal relations requires much closer attention to those
institutions which are crucially responsible for the production of masculine identities.
Connell’s approach opens up the possibility of examining subordinate
masculinities and the ways in which certain categories of men may experience
stigmatization and marginalization. In the west, this examination has mainly focused
on men stigmatized because of their sexual orientation or on the experiences of
working-class or black men. In the Third World, the psychological effects of
colonization have occupied centre-stage. These effects are often described in the
language of gender. This is most explicit in Nandy’s treatment of British India, where
he notes that western colonialism used a homology between sexual and political
dominance and produced a cultural consensus in which political and socioeconomic
dominance symbolized the dominance of men and masculinity over women and
femininity (Nandy 1983). He contends that some nationalists had to produce
compensatory discourses to redeem Indian masculinity which, in fact, amounted to
identifying with the aggressor. (2)
How, you may well ask by now, did these incursions into hegemonic and
subordinate masculinities alleviate my predicament in relation to Middle Eastern
male reformers? Surely, all the forms of subordinated masculinity I referred to are
traceable to structural inequalities of class, caste, ethnic location or sexual orientation.
What possible relevance could this have to a male elite that was in the vanguard of
social change in their societies? Indeed, there may be some relationship in so far as I
came to reinterpret their stance, at least partly, as a possible crisis in hegemonic
masculinity. This involved, among other things, a rejection of the life-styles implied
by their fathers’ domestic arrangements. (3)
I disagree with those who, like Nandy, attribute such crises to external forces
alone, namely the effects of colonialism and western hegemony. I think that
insufficient attention has been paid to the internal contradictions of certain types of
patriarchy. If there are specific masculinities linked with particular social contexts,
then an analysis both of enduring patterns and of change must address itself to a
concrete examination of such contexts. I therefore turned my attention to the
production of masculinity and the main institutions responsible for it in the Muslim
Middle East at the turn of the century, with a a special emphasis on Ottoman Turkey.
DISTANT HUSBANDS AND CHERISHED SONS
Although the family is the obvious starting point for such an enquiry, I had some
reservations about the ways in which the construction of gendered subjectivity is
commonly addressed. A focus on the family inevitably tempts one to fall back upon
some variant of psychoanalytic theory. In a broad-based survey of cultural concepts
of masculinity, Gilmore, like many, invokes neo-Freudians to account for the
development of masculine identity:
To become a separate person the boy must perform a great deed. He must
pass a test; he must break the chain to his mother…. His masculinity thus
represents his separation from his mother and his entry into an
independent social status recognized as distinct and opposite from hers.
(1990:28)
Or, as put more bluntly by Stoller and Herdt, ‘The first order of business in being a
man is: don’t be a woman’ (1982:34). Despite the fact that these and similar statements
appear to have the ring of universal truth, I found psychoanalytic theory, in both its
Lacanian and object-relations variants, of limited usefulness in elucidating culturally
specific forms of masculine, or for that matter feminine, subjectivity.(4)
There has also been some dissatisfaction with the category of gender as a tool
for social analysis among some feminist anthropologists. Gender, it is argued,
obscures as much as it clarifies our understanding of social reality. Ortner (1983)
suggests that a gender-based analysis might be less useful than an analysis grounded
in analogous structural disadvantages. Rosaldo expresses a similar concern when she
states:
We think too readily of sexual identities as primordial acquisitions bound
up with the dynamics of the home forgetting that the selves children
become include a sense of not just gender but of cultural identity and social
class. (1980:401)
Ortner’s concept of structural disadvantage is particularly promising for an
understanding of how gender differences interact with other differences (age, class
and ethnicity) to produce shifting subjectivities and more fluid constructions of
gender. My dissatisfaction with psychoanalytic theory does not stem from the fact
that it ‘fixes’ gender once and for all as a stable, developmental acquisition
(constructionists have laboured that point sufficiently, and Lacanians are not in any
case guilty of this), but that it cannot fully account for the possible effects of culturally
specific types of structural disadvantage.
A rare personalized (as opposed to strictly ethnographic) account of AraboMuslim male identity, by Abdelwahab Boudhiba (1985), opens up new possibilities
for taking structural disadvantage on board. In his account the mother is presented
not just as a woman, but as a woman enmeshed in the concrete gender asymmetries
of a sex-segregated, polygynous society. Right from the beginning of her relationship
with her son, she brings to bear the psychic burden implied by her structural
disadvantage as ‘a woman in a precarious position without a son’. This emotional
tone is something that psychoanalysis alone cannot fully account for. Rather, the key
to the psychological dynamic of the relationship lies elsewhere, in the particular
institutional context of the Muslim family and the power relations enacted in it. This
is to say, not that this dynamic will be devoid of enduring, intrapsychic
consequences, but that it may not be useful to talk about these at the level of
generality implied by Gilmore in his rendering of the post-Freudian position. A more
fruitful point of entry might be sought at the intersection of specific structural
disadvantages and their possible psychic representations. Such an analysis may still
be served by the central insights of psychoanalysis, although it would have to include
more explicitly the social dimensions of the unconscious.
Where would depictions of family life at the turn of the century fit within such
a perspective? There are repeated suggestions in the psychoanalytic literature that in
societies with structural patterns that tend to weaken the marital bond, where
motherhood (especially of male children) is highly valued while wifehood and
daughterhood are debased, intense and ambivalent maternal involvement with sons
may result.5 The implication is that the culturally defined female role has a decisive
influence on the experience of maternity. The affective needs of women are assumed
frequently to be starved in the conjugal union and feelings for the husband displaced
onto the male child, sometimes with the expression of open erotic feelings. However,
the son may become the target of both maternal seduction and her repressed rage, as
the mother alternately builds him up as an idealized protector and rejects and
ridicules his masculine pretensions. This is assumed to make for a narcissistic and
insecure masculinity.
The temptation of assuming that such graphically described patterns of
structural disadvantage will generate predictable intrapsychic consequences for
mothers, who will then foster a particular sense of masculinity in their sons, is
attested by the volume of literature in this vein. I could not, in the last analysis,
subscribe to it, despite the fact that some ethnographic details on family life in the
Middle
East
corroborate
depictions
of
spousal
distance
and
maternal
overinvolvement with sons. My resistance echoes Loizos’ refusal to entertain a
unified concept of ‘Greek masculinity’ (Chapter 3 in this volume) due to the sheer
complexity of the societies in question and the varied contexts in which male roles are
enacted.
In the case of my material on Ottoman Turkey, it was quite clear that the few
biographic accounts on growing up in a polygynous household emanated from a
small, upper-class elite. Indeed, recent work on historical demography confirms that
the actual incidence of polygyny in Ottoman times may have been not only very low
but also confined to high-ranking government officials and men of religion (Behar
1991). We know very little about household dynamics in other social strata and even
less about the formative experiences of men and women in relation to their gendered
identities in different contexts. Besides, the mother-son dynamic is but one element of
a much more complex picture, which must be taken in its entirety to make sense of
the layering of experiences that constitute one’s sense of gender. However crucial
experiences in the family may be, they are but one instance of a whole range of
institutional arrangements which go into the definition of what it means to be a man
or a woman. The greatest interest surely lies in the multiplicity of gendered selves,
and their interactive nature, and the way they are reconstructed in new institutional
settings. In what follows, I explore some avenues for research to help us achieve some
sense of this complexity.
REREADING MALE NARRATIVES
With hindsight, it now seems that the best way to have tackled my initial problem
with respect to male reformers would have been to re-read a wide variety of sources,
especially biographies and novels, for the full range of masculinities they reveal. Such
texts have rarely been examined with a view to gaining insights about the authors’
formative experiences as men, and the voice of the male child, negotiating and
constructing his identity from his childhood experiences, has rarely been heard and
recorded. Thus, we must consider how the young boy experiences his maleness in
relation to his mother, his sisters and the world of women, and ask what other
qualities of masculinity are negotiated through his experiences with men. Most
importantly, we must try to piece together how these quite different experiences of
his masculinity are brought together, with all the contradictions and ambiguity this
implies.
Let me illustrate what such a project might entail by introducing one of the
most telling accounts of boyhood I could find in the literature. Boudhiba, a Tunisian
author, writes of an experience of childhood that was almost certainly shared by men
who grew into adulthood in the Middle East during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. This is the experience of being taken to the public baths
(hammam) by one’s mother. He writes,
Indeed, it is customary for children to go to the hammam with the women
and this continues up to the age of puberty. Since the age of puberty is not
the same for everyone, the threshold at which one has ‘grown up’ is
highly flexible; since a mother always tends to see her son as an eternal
child and since other women are in no way inconvenienced by the
presence of a boy, young or not, and since taking a boy to the hammam is
a chore that the father would prefer to leave, for as long as posssible to the
mother, the spectacle of fairly old children, more or less adolescent,
consorting side by side in their nakedness with women of all ages, is by
no means rare. (1985:168)
This promiscuity with women continues until such time when the boy, by some
inappropriate look, comment, or gesture, signals that the time of exile from ‘the
kingdom of the mothers’ has come.
What Arabo-Muslim has not been excluded from the world of naked
women in this way? What Arabo-Muslim does not remember so much
naked flesh and so many ambiguous sensations? Who does not remember
the incident by which this world of nakedness suddenly became
forbidden? We have been given more than a memory. One could not stop
himself pinching that big hanging breast that had obsessed him. Another
was banned for being too hairy, for having too large a penis, buttocks that
protruded too much, a displaced organ. For the boy the hammam is the
place where one discovers the anatomy of others and from which one is
expelled once the discovery takes place. (ibid.)
The transition to the men’s hammam also means entering the world of adult men in
an abrupt and definitive manner, consummating the separation between the sexes
institutionalized in Muslim societies.
To enter the world of adults also means, perhaps, above all, to frequent
only men, to see only men, to speak only to men…. The body is now
literally snatched up by the male world. (ibid.: 169)
And how is this new body experienced? Unfortunately, male authors seem more
explicit about their experiences of the women’s hammam, and even Boudhiba gives
only the briefest account, though an intriguing one, of the young boy’s first
experience with men:
The practices of the hammam are structured in a new way from the
moment one is taken from one’s mother, so that the first hammam taken
with men is like a consecration, a confirmation, a compensation. It is a
confirmation of belonging to the world of males…. Did not one receive
the congratulations of one’s father’s friends, whom one now meets for the
first time scantily dressed and some of whom will not fail to make
indecent propositions. (ibid.: 170)
We are left to ponder what range of feelings the nubile boy might have experienced
under the adult male gaze. It is at the point of entry into the male world that he might
have felt ‘feminized’ by virtue of his still immature body, whereas his status as the
unquestionable possessor of a penis might have been more secure among women. It
is a matter of conjecture whether or not this experience is reactivated throughout
men’s lives, particularly when they find themselves in all-male contexts that involve
hierarchies of power in which they perceive themselves as relatively powerless (for
instance, as conscripts in the army and new students in boarding schools).
A paradox of sexual segregation is that it results in young males’ prolonged
and promiscuous contact with women and abrupt and possibly disturbing entry into
the male world. I find Boudhiba’s description of the male child’s move from the
women’s to the men’s bath-house a powerful metaphor for this transition. It is merely
a metaphor, however, since the hammam occupies a particular historical position. It
is an institution that, in so far as it exists at all nowadays, has a very different
character. In the past, it was a specifically urban phenomenon, which presupposed a
degree of wealth and development of specialized public facilities that were absent in
the pre-modern architecture of private households. None the less, it is also an
experience which many now middle-aged men can themselves remember. I recall a
male colleague describing how the bath-house attendant chided his mother, saying,
‘Next time, why don’t you bring his father?’, a cliché which tells a woman that her
son is too mature to be welcome in the women’s hammam. The different kinds of
femaleness which boys experienced (the uninhibited matriarchs, the pre-pubertal and
young nubile girls, the modest and silent new brides) and remembered from this
exposure are important, as are the ways in which they related to women in each of
these stages in the life cycle. Equally important is the boy’s confrontation with other
versions of his masculinity, constructed as a subordinate male in the world of adult
men in the men’s hammam where, again, actual embodiment is salient.
Keeping in mind the metaphor of the hammam and the complexities it
implies, let me return to the problem of re-reading textual sources. Few accounts by
male authors—especially if they are autobiographies—are as candid as Boudhiba’s
writing or as transparent as Khan’s prose. The concern with presenting a coherent
persona encourages rhetoric and the concealment of personal feelings. This is why the
novel, in which authors can speak through their characters in ways in which they
would avoid if writing in the first person, is so fruitful as an alternative source in the
search for male voices.
As an illustration let me mention a single contemporary example: the male
child protagonist, Kamal, in Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk (1990). In this novel,
Mahfouz offers brilliant insights into the ambivalence and confusion of the small boy
caught between the maternal world of secluded women and the world of his father
and older brothers. The world of his mother and sisters is comfortable and soothing,
while the adult male world, the world of his father, is by comparison forbidding and
hostile. The figure of the father is one of god-like remoteness and authority, filling
Kamal with terror. Yet within the women’s world there are crucial differences
between the boy’s relationship with his mother and with his plain but doting sister,
Khadija, and his virtually incestuous interest in his very pretty sister, Aisha.
A dramatic and revealing incident occurs in relation to Kamal’s mother
Amina, A totally secluded woman who never crossed the threshold of her home, she
has a deep longing to visit the mosque of al-Husayn, the outlines of which she can
barely discern from her balcony. Her older children are aware of this innocent
yearning and encourage her to an escapade on a day when her husband is away on
business. With much trepidation she decides to go, in the company of Kamal as her
guide. A male child, however young, legitimates a woman’s presence in public spaces
and Kamal is excited and proud at the prospect of being her chaperon. The visit to alHusayn proceeds smoothly, but on the way back Kamal, with a particular pastry
shop in mind, leads her to a busy street, when his mother, overwhelmed and
disconcerted, falls in a faint and gets hit by a car. Kamal, her accomplice, is not only
the witness to his mother’s panic and pain, but also carries the burden of guilt for
somehow having precipitated this tragedy through his untimely desire for sweets.
Throughout the domestic drama that follows—his mother returns with a fractured
shoulder and confesses to her husband who repudiates her (temper arily, as it later
turns out)—Kamal is racked with guilt and terrified on her account. He is definitely
part of the ‘coalition of the weak’ who clamour for her return against his father’s
obstinacy.
In relation to his pretty sister, Aisha, Kamal is practically love stricken, so
much so that when a suitor comes to take her away he is not only broken-hearted but
sees the suitor as a hostile rival for his sister’s affections. Kamal’s attentive sister
becomes unavailable to him when the suitor appears, and in his devastation when she
leaves the house in marriage, his affection for her is tinged with protectiveness and
sexual jealousy. Suad Joseph, in an ethnography based on Lebanon, makes a strong
argument for the centrality of brother/sister relationships in defining a sense of
gender. She suggests that Arab brothers and sisters are caught up in relationships of
love and nurturance on the one hand, and power and violence on the other, in a
manner that reproduces Arab patriarchy (forthcoming).
Mahfouz’s novel not only describes the complexities of the boy’s experience of
the world of women, but offers many other insights concerning his relations with
adult men. The child’s male role models are presented in a multilayered collage, in
which some are accessible and benign, while others are forbidding and remote. His
older brothers, one studious and idealistic, the other dissolute, offer contrasting
versions of adult masculinity, as do his authoritarian father and his sister’s
mysterious suitor. Moreover, the young boy is befriended by an English soldier
billeted next to his house. The child is full of pride in his secret adult friend, who
impresses him with his size and his gun. He is deeply wounded when his secret
loyalty is exposed as culpable by his older brother’s harsh criticism of the British. In
short, Mahfouz weaves an exquisitely intricate picture in which to situate the male
child’s subjectivity.
CONSTRUCTIONS OF MASCULINITY IN MALE/
FEMALE INTERACTIONS
The subtlety of the novel refers to something that could also be documented
ethnographically, although this is not attempted very frequently. My own
observations, based on a village in southwest Anatolia, reveal a range of gendered
relations, which I suspect to be quite widespread in the rest of Turkey and beyond. In
this coastal village, men were away a great deal of the time fishing, sponge-diving or
running excursion boats, while the women were busy weaving carpets at home. In
one such household, I well remember an 8-year-old lad who, when the sole male in
the house with his mother and three older sisters, would appear at the table and
shout, ‘Is there no one here to bring tea to a man?’. And though his sisters were
highly amused by his arrogance and display of machismo, this did not prevent them
from playing along and bringing him his breakfast.
Even though they may tease him affectionately, it is not unusual for adult
women to celebrate a young boy’s physical masculinity and to humour him by
spoiling him and acceding to his demands. As long as the boy was alone with his
mother and sisters, he could play at being the uncontested master of the house.
However, when his older brother and father returned, the situation changed
drastically. He was pushed around and given menial tasks to do, and all his
posturing disappeared. If it had not, he could have expected a thrashing from his
father. In short, he was still part of the female domain and of very low status. He was
neither yet old enough to take part in the masculine world defined by the work of his
father or brother, nor, when they were present, would he dare to show any disrespect
to his older sisters, whose privileges due to their seniority would be upheld by the
father. The young boy knew his place and he also knew that he had a very small
space in which to act out an assertive version of masculinity.
While the world of women reaffirms certain attributes of maleness and, at
times at least, the young boy can bask in the comfort of being the male child, this
comfort and certainty are shattered when he is with adult men. Vis-à-vis older males,
the little boy is charming, placatory and obedient; in many ways, his behaviour
replicates that expected of women in the face of adult male authority. Moreover,
there may be an undercurrent of violence in masculinities that emerge in relations
between men. Themes of dominance and subordination are much in evidence not
only in intergenerational interactions, but also in interactions among peers. In what
follows, I shall attempt to examine some sources of the violence, and at times
nurturance and altruism, that are enacted between men.
HOSTILITY AND NURTURANCE IN MALE
RELATIONSHIPS
Although male violence is by no means specific to any one context, the types of rage
enacted in some relations between men in Turkey deserve comment. In everyday
interactions, it takes the form of ‘being on a very short fuse’, so that the slightest
disrespect or provocation may result in what appear to be disproportionate
consequences. A strong connection exists between class extraction and expressions of
aggressive masculinity, with more restrained and verbal styles among the upper
classes and more abandoned and physical ones among the popular classes. It is worth
exploring whether one variant of this violence may be traced to men who re-create
their own early passivity, by forcing others to take the one-down position.
This replay of earlier weakness may, by imposing it on others, help men both
to relieve and exorcise those experiences. Whatever the character of early childhood
weakness in relationships, the situation is likely to reproduce itself through contact
with a series of hierarchical, all-male institutions, the most inevitable and ubiquitous
being the army, of which the entire male population will have had first-hand
experience. As conscripts, all men will have known the experience of utter
helplessness in the face of total, arbitrary authority, where each man will have been
controlled by the whims of another man and where, in the absence of compliance,
public humiliation and physical punishment may follow. This is an area that has not
even begun to be explored and that, despite its importance, will be extremely difficult
to research. Although men frequently relate and recall their experiences of military
service, what appears to be on offer is more often than not an expurgated and
idealized retrospective, sometimes performing a thinly disguised reparatory function.
On one of the rare occasions when I was a witness to such a group discussion
among men in a village in central Anatolia, there was a striking absence of reports of
negative personal experiences. One villager described in graphic detail the brutality
of one of his officers whose actions bordered on the sadistic. When asked whether or
not he had himself been subjected to harsh treatment, he smiled coyly and said
‘Hayir, biz kendimizi sevdirdik’ (‘No, we made ourselves liked’). This is not an
unusual response. Indulgence from superiors may be earned through diligently
making oneself useful, performing a special craft acquired in civilian life, or
demonstrating resourcefulness and wit by running special errands, but most of all by
maintaining a consistently deferential posture—the placatory and disarming stance of
the boy. Although the institution of authority and control in the army must build
upon earlier childhood experience, it may also act as a template to reproduce these
experiences in the following generations.
There is, unfortunately, very scant research evidence about the nature of
intergenerational relations between men. However, a recent study of Istanbul
households (Bolak 1990) based on intensive interviews with women breadwinners
and their husbands (many of whom were unemployed or intermittently employed)
offers, among other things, important clues concerning men’s and women’s differing
orientations to parenting. The primary aim of the study was to illustrate the
complexities in the relationship between male breadwinner status, male occupational
instability and gender relations at the household level. The situation of women whose
income is indispensable to their household’s livelihood represents a culturally nonsanctioned form of sexual division of labour, and provides a vantage point for
studying the mechanisms for coping with possible disjunctions between the ideology
of the male breadwinner and the realities of economic survival. The ways in which
men who find themselves marginalized as providers mitigate threats to their
masculine identity also offer important insights into gender.
The men interviewed typically expressed their experiences with their fathers
in an unfavourable light. Although they stated that they hoped to be better parents
themselves, there were signs that the unresolved ambivalence in the father-son
relationship was often recapitulated in their own parenting relationship. Some of this
ambivalence came out in relation to budget control and spending priorities, with men
objecting to purchases their wives made for their children which they considered
fancy and superfluous—like better clothes, books and encyclopedias or extra tutoring
in some school subjects. Some men explicitly resented sons whom they saw as
recipients of luxuries and favours they themselves never had, like the father who
objected to the purchase of a pair of sports shoes, saying, ‘nobody got me shoes like
that’. Quibbling over purchases and commodities may be a surface manifestation of
the husband’s competition with the children over the mother’s nurturance, with sons
appearing to steal the love and attention they themselves crave. In addition, since
many men in the research sample lacked effective control of the household budget
they could not, in fact, fully influence their wives’ spending priorities.
On the other hand, their preoccupation with proving their masculinity
compelled men to try and maintain their community status by holding on to symbolic
gestures of manliness, such as entertaining friends lavishly and an inability to reject
unwelcome requests for loans. Many wives ended up blaming their husbands for
being ‘too generous’ and diverting precious resources away from the household and
especially children’s needs. One respondent offered the following account of his
motivation for generosity:
I’ve been crushed as a kid. I couldn’t live my childhood. If a beggar comes
to the door, I’d give him 100 liras instead of 10. If a friend of mine needs
help, I give him 2,000 liras instead of 500 liras, if I have it. This causes a
problem. She [my wife] considers me to be too generous.
The same man, however, rejected his wife’s request to take their sons to school in his
truck when it snowed, saying, ‘My father never took me to school. They should learn
to rough it on their own.’
This study also reveals a connection between men’s domestic alienation and
their tendency to seek confirmation and male companionship outside the home.
Thus, male largess outside the household mandates female thrift and good judgement
within the home. In some instances this may trigger a vicious circle, whereby
women’s accusations of irresponsibility further fuel men’s desire to establish their
masculine credentials with other men through profligate spending, entertaining
friends and taking risks at cards. Loizos points to the contrast in Greece between the
‘domesticated’ masculinity of the responsible householder and that of the ‘freespirited’ men whose domain is the coffee shop (Chapter 3 in this volume). In this
Istanbul sample the free, unfettered masculinity enacted in the coffee shop may have
a compensatory value for those who, due to economic circumstances, fall short in the
fulfilment of their breadwinner roles.
It must, however, be recognized that so-called status-gaining activities among
men certainly also entail forms of male nurturance and altruism which deserve
attention in their own right. The solace men may receive from their peers and the
nature of their interactions have been little explored in the literature on the Middle
East. Yet, especially where the segregation of the sexes is particularly evident, the
spectacle of male groups of varying ages and sizes strolling together, sitting at coffeeshop tables and shop fronts or eating and drinking together is one of the most
striking and visible features of urban space. Single-sex groups (both male and female)
engage in a great deal of expressive behaviour, such as dancing and singing and
indulging in physical displays of affection, including hugging and putting arms
around shoulders, without being labelled as homosexuals. Expectations of nurturance
from male peers may mandate enormous tolerance of all kinds of minor infraction
and misbehaviour which involve letting one’s guard down, such as getting drunk
and maudlin, making a fool of oneself and being carried home by one’s mates. In
theory, and often in practice, this camaraderie has no strings attached: a great deal of
delicacy is involved when men handle other men’s displays of vulnerability.
There is much evidence, however, that the function and character of male peer
groups change throughout the life cycle, providing distinct arenas for the enactment
of different forms of masculinity. In the central Anatolian village referred to earlier,
there were three recognized age sets for adult men, corresponding to changes in their
social roles, in contrast to the twofold distinction for women between kiz (unmarried
girl) and kadin (married woman). The children were called bala (child) irrespective of
their gender. Delikanli (literally meaning ‘those with crazy blood’) referred to
adolescents and young unmarried men, who enacted a version of masculinity
vaiorizing the untamed and undomesticated. In fact, a certain amount of deviant
behaviour was accepted as an inevitable concomitant of this stage. Causing
disruptions at weddings, tractor chases, pranks and minor theft produced reactions
ranging from amusement to annoyance, but never incurred serious consequences.
This stage came to a close with military service, which was closely followed by
marriage. The group of adult married men, referred to as akay (men), ranged in age
from their twenties to their mid-forties and constituted the active group in the village,
economically and politically. They were members of the Council of Elders and were
clearly in charge of many other village activities. Finally, the kart akay (old men) were
men whose married sons were mature enough to take over the day-today farming,
and who could lead more leisured lives. Old men were explicitly expected to show a
marked increase in religiosity and often congregated in and around the mosque.
It would be quite inappropriate, however, to elevate any one version of
masculinity into some sort of cultural ideal or norm, especially in view of the
considerable latitude that exists for actors within each of the three categories before
they risk being labelled as deviant. Male homosexuality, on the other hand, always
carries that risk and presents interesting puzzles for the management of masculine
identities.
THE AMBIGUITIES OF GENDER AND MALE
HOMOEROTIC DESIRE
Although existing sources make it very difficult even to piece together a tentative
history of sexualities in Ottoman and contemporary Turkey, the work of Resad
Ekrem Koçu (1905–75) constitutes a very rich source of material on homosocial and
homosexual masculinities. Koçu was a historian and folklorist who, after losing his
university post in 1933, devoted his life to popularizing historical writing by
contributing to newspapers, writing historical novels and more generally chronicling
the life of Istanbul (Eyice 1976). Among these works, his history of the Istanbul Fire
Brigade (Yangin Var! Istanbul Tulumbacilari, 1981) documents the lore, modes of
dress, relationships and types of entertainment of the firemen in what amounts to a
tantalizing account of a homosexual subculture in turn-of-the-century Istanbul.
The city was then dominated by delicate wooden buildings and very
susceptible to fire. After the abolition of the Janissaries, each neighbourhood had its
own brigade of sturdy young men who worked as a team. Running swiftly with bare
feet, they carried a huge water container on their backs. These young men were often
orphans or youths from impoverished backgrounds for whom the brigade
dormitories were a haven in the urban environment, although some joined because
they were attracted by this life-style. Their colourful nicknames reflect their diverse
regional and ethnic origins: Ali the Laz, Hristos the Boatman, Emin the Gypsy, Husnu
the Black, Artin the Girl and even English Hidayet (alias Charles Morgan!).
The individual biographies of these firemen reveal that they were the object of
homoerotic desire expressed in love poetry or verse narratives recounting their lives
and prowess. This poetry simultaneously celebrates their ‘feminine’ beauty (sleek
cheeks, thick eyelashes, curly fringe, slender waist and flirtatious manners) and their
allure as swift-footed, strong, muscular and above all virile young men. These images
defy any active/passive or masculine/feminine stereotypes: For example:
One beauty among a thousand youths
From the Davutpasha Quay
That godless boatman
Has the eyes of a doe
See the imposing beauty
When on his face appears a frown
Braves who fall in love
Such a brave youth must love.
(Koçu 1981:71)
The youths are portrayed as the objects of desire and competition among older men
(both officers in the fire brigade and outsiders whom they met in taverns and coffeehouses), among other youths (who were their peers within the brigade), and among
women of the neighbourhood who try to entice them into becoming their lovers.
These women are depicted as sexually active and as using their material affluence to
send out household slaves and eunuchs to procure a youth by paying for his sexual
services. One such lady, piqued by a young fireman who jokingly demanded a
golden watch and a diamond ring, reported him to the police for molestation; he
received forty lashes on his bare feet. The poet, clearly enamoured of the young man,
curses the police commander by saying:
How dare you beat the prince’s feet
That are worthy of my kisses.
(Koçu 1981:363)
At one level, the youths are presented as studs. Yet for older men (the perspective
from which Koçu is writing), they are also irresistible for their feminized beauty and
berated for their fickleness and cruelty. It is above all youth and beauty that are the
object of desire, and the loved one is depicted as elusive and all-powerful. Yet,
sociologically, the young men’s power is a myth: they were often dependent on a
powerful male patron for their livelihood and vulnerable to abuse of all kinds. Some
biographies suggest that they often ended their days in abject poverty, in prison, or as
victims of crimes of passion.(6) However, there is also ample evidence that for many,
homosexuality did not constitute an exclusive life-style, since they went on to marry
and have families, sometimes with the blessing and support of their former patrons.
What is remarkable here is the extremely complex ways in which these men were
eroticized. As youth they combine a whole range of masculinities and femininities—
the smooth features and slenderness of adolescence mingled with the vigour and
energy of their manliness—that were evoked and selectively mobilized in their
portrayal as objects of desire, rendering equally ambiguous the gendering of the
desirer.
CONCLUSION
I am acutely aware, as I conclude this chapter, of having exposed the reader to a
bewildering array of historical periods and social contexts. This was not, however,
meant to be a purely descriptive exercise documenting the temporal, situational and
relational relativity of masculine identities, although such an exercise could be
justified as an exploratory device. I was also intending to make a strong case for
situating masculinities—however fragmented and variegated they may appear —in
historically and culturally specific institutional contexts that delimit and to some
extent constrain the range of discourses and choices available to social actors. These
institutional contexts are the site of material practices that inform and shape gendered
subjectivity and yet are subject to constant change and transformation.
My very choice of some institutionalized features of the segregation of the
sexes as a backdrop for a discussion of masculine identities is an anachronism,
especially in Turkey. Generations are growing up who have never known polygyny,
actual or potential, and most men who still remember the women’s hammam will
soon pass away. The particular relations of domination, resistance and negotiation
inscribed in these settings will also have been transformed, and with them both
personal and cultural constructions of what it means to be a man or a woman. I had
reasons of my own for wanting to probe into the mental worlds of men of a particular
generation; I learned in the process that behind the enduring facade of male privilege
lie profound ambiguities that may give rise to both defensive masculinist discourse
and a genuine desire for contestation and change.
NOTES
I would like to thank Peter Loizos for his thoughtful and detailed comments on an
earlier version of this chapter. To Nancy Lindisfarne and Andrea Cornwall go my
warmest thanks for giving me the confidence to explore a terra incognita on which
much further work needs to be done. Without their encouragement and very hard
work this project would not have seen the light of day, although all omissions and
errors of judgement are, of course, my own.
1. I was aware of, but dissatisfied with, psychoanalytic accounts, such as the one by
Ashis Nandy explaining Indian reformer Rahhamoun Roy’s activism against sati as a
massive (and public) reparation for his ambivalence towards his own mother,
overlaid by a broader cultural ambivalence towards women (Nandy 1980).
2. Colonialism was undoubtedly about more than struggles over contending
definitions of masculinity, but it is a testimony to the resilience of such imagery that it
has also permeated inter-communal conflicts in the post-colonial period in India.
Indeed, the Hindu revivalist and fascistic Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS) still
plays upon images of emasculated Hindu malehood in contrast to virile and
bloodthirsty Muslims and calls for a regeneration of Hindu masculinity (Chhachhi
1991).
3. It is no accident that the modernization of Ottoman society was primarily talked
about in terms of a ‘crisis’ in the Ottoman family (see Duben and Behar 1991). That
this modernization also implied changes in masculinity and femininity receives less
explicit recognition in the literature.
4. To the extent that Lacanians posit the timeless universality of the Law of the Father
(and the Oedipal break) as the major structuring principle of the human unconscious,
they come close to an invariant concept of human nature and invite charges of
essentialism. Object-relations theorists, who implicitly concede that different
organizations of the family and society may yield different patternings of the psyche,
display a crippling fear of falling into ‘sociologism’ and compromising the
irreducibility of psychic events. As a result, their ability to integrate the social seldom
goes beyond a potentiality.
5. The surprising similarities emerging out of analyses as diverse as those of
Obeyeskere on Sri Lanka (1981, 1984) and Nandy on India (1980) are striking.
6. A collection of prison poems (Zindan Siirleri) attributed by Koçu to a former
fireman, Nusret the Georgian, serving time for the murder of his lover Ismail, depicts
a homosexual prison subculture where men sought solace in hashish and sexual
intrigue. It seems clear that some elements among the firemen merged into a semilegal urban fringe.
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Name index
Acosta, A. 112
Aeschines 141
Almeida, S.J.A. 119
Altman, D. 101, 106
Archetti, E.P. 15, 21
Arendt, H. 25
Aristophanes 136
Aristotle 137, 138, 141
Back, L. 13, 17
Barber, K. 124
Bastide, R. 181n
Bhabha, H.K. 179
Blanchford, G. 12
Bly, R. 15
Boddy, J. 87
Boudhiba, A. 88, 199, 201
Bourdieu, P. 163
Braidotti, R. 45n
Brandes, S. 32, 77
Bristow, J. 109n
Brittan, A. xi, 32
Brod, H. 28, 30, 31
Buchan, J. 188
Bürger, P. 127, 128
Butler, J. 39, 113, 129
Campbell, J.K. 66, 67, 68
Canaan, J. 27, 33
Cañas, J.M. 52
Carpenter, E. 111
Carrigan, T. 3, 18, 19, 115
Cass, V. 108n
Chodorow, N. 31, 32
Clements, L. 37
Clogg, R. 70
Comaroff, J.L. 105
Combs-Schilling, M. 92
Connell, R.W. 32, 196, 197
Cornwall, A. 16, 36
Costa Lima, V. da 127
Crawford, S. 69
Crisp, Q. 98
Davis, B. 81, 85
Dennemy, M. 107, 108n
Eagleton, T. 106
Fanon, F. 176, 179
Forrest, D. 12, 13, 42
Foucault, M. 22, 23, 36, 39, 45n, 100 103,
121;
History of Sexuality 132, 139, 140,
141, 142, 144
Foxhall, L. 22
Gatens, M. 35, 36, 114, 115
Geertz, C. 35
Ghalem, A. 90
Gilmore, D. 26, 32, 49, 65, 82, 182, 198
Goddard, V. 88
Gough, J. 100, 101
Griffin, C. 27, 33
Grosz, E. 36
Hall, S. 175, 176
Hanmer, J. 28
Hart, A. 15
Hautzinger, S. 16
231
Hearn, J. 32
Hebdige, D. 174
Herdt, G. 32, 143, 198
Herzfeld, M. 77, 89
Hewitt, R. 177
Hochschild, A.R. 161
Humphries, M. 100, 108n
Idris, Y. 85
Iossifides, M. 75
Jamous, R. 92
Johnson, M. 21
Julien, I. 170
Kandiyoti, D. 32, 37, 42, 45n, 94
Kanitkar, H. 13, 18
Kaplan, G.T. 36
Keller, E.F. 166
Kessler, S.J. 36, 114
Khan, M. Ul H. 195
Kimmel, M. 17, 18, 33
Kipling, R. 24, 182, 188, 190
Koçu, R.E. 208, 209
Lakoff, G. 21
Lamo de Espinosa, E. 53
Lamphere, L. 27
Landes, R. 124
Lindisfarne, N. 42
Loizos, P. 92, 200
Lyotard, J.-F. 38
McElhinny, B. 14, 16, 23
McKenna, W. 36, 114
MacKey, E. 43, 44
McNay, L. 43
McRae, E. 120
McRobbie, A. 173
Mahfouz, N. 203
Mailer, N. 180
Malinowski, B. 26, 27
Malti-Douglas, F. 82
Marshall, J. 104
Martin, E. 21
Martin, S. 158
Marx, K. 100
Mee, A. 8, 183, 185, 187
Mercer, K. 170
Mirza, H. 174
Mohanty, C. 43
Moore, H. 25, 26
Moore, S. 24
Morgan, D. 32
Morgan, R. 25
Mott, L. 117, 119, 120, 122
Nandy, A. 197
Nehru, M. 184
Oliveira, N.M. 117, 119
Ortner, S. 29, 30, 198, 199
Overing, J. 42
Papataxiarchis, E. 67, 69, 76
Pereira, R.C. 119
Pleck, J. 32
Pollard, E.F. 192
Polsky, E. 180
Porter, D. 32
Pronger, B. 98, 101, 102, 104, 108n, 109n
Ribeiro, R. 124
Rifaat, A. 92
Rogers, B. 94
Rogers, L.J. 36
Rosaldo, M. 27, 30, 198
Rousseau, J.-J. 17
Rubin, G. 33
Sacks, K. 29
Scott, J.C. 23, 45n
Segal, L. 18, 31, 102, 103, 104
Segato, R.L. 124
Seidler, V. 30, 32, 144
Shire, C. 16, 17, 24, 41
Shore, B. 35
Shostak, A. 31
Staples, R. 177
Stolcke, V. 31
Stoler, A.L. 183
Stoller, R. 36, 198
Strathern, M. 24, 37, 39, 46n, 84, 89, 128
Studd, J.E.K. 185
Tamer, Z. 84
Teixeira, M.L.L. 126
Trevisan, J. 113
Tyndale-Biscoe, C.E. 193
Vance, C. 105
Weeks, J. 99, 100, 100, 109
Westermarck, E. 91, 92
Wikan, U. 35, 94n
Williams, C. 168
Xenophon 134
Zinovieff, S. 73
Zita, J. 37
Subject index
adultery, in ancient Greece 140, 141
affect 161;
economy of 163
Afghanistan, men in 85, 95
African culture, in Brazil 123;
‘African Bahia’ 116
Agassi, André 14
AIDS 58
Alicante, prostitution in 48, 53
anatomy 36, 114
Andalusia, masculinity in 77
anthropology 26, 43;
gender and 26, 39;
masculinity and 1, 49
appearance, and femininity 117, 166
apprentices:
feminization of 171;
and masculinity 170
archaeology, Foucault and 132
Argentina, macho in 15
army:
in Greece 69;
repression of femininity in 103;
weakness in 205
black culture 174;
young white men and 175, 179, 180
black sexuality 176, 177
blood-spilling 92
body 12, 101, 103;
gendering of 33, 113, 117
boyhood, Islamic, experiences of 200
boys:
‘estate kids’ and ‘home birds’ 173;
in hammam 201;
learning masculinities 152, 198, 204;
sexuality of 142
boys’ stories 182, 187, 188;
women in 183
Brazil 16;
bofes in 16, 117;
gender ambiguity in 110;
prostitution in 115;
travestis in 16, 110
brides, virginity of 89
butch-shift 12, 96, 100, 104
camp 104, 105
Candomblé 110, 116, 123, 125, 129, 131
cartoons, depictions of masculinity in 21
celibacy 74
Christianity, and imperial ideals 192
class 205;
homosexuality and 106;
in the workplace 157
clientness 47, 51, 53, 61, 119;
married men and 58
Clinton, President Bill 24
colonialism 7, 211n;
and masculinity 147, 150, 182;
political dominance of 197
commerce:
gay community and 107;
sex and 101
commodity logic 20, 40, 84
community, homosexuality and 98, 106
competitive behaviour 84, 85
contraception 101
Cyprus, masculinities in 72, 74, 77
defloration, 93, 94;
wedding night 89
desire 13, 90, 118;
homosexuality and 102
developmental cycle 66
deviance 100, 121, 153, 208;
attempts to control 121
disempowerment 22
dividual people 40, 89
division of labour 101, 126, 206
domination 23, 42, 43, 45n, 85, 128;
sexuality and 71
Durrani Pashtuns 85
effeminancy 14
emotion 14, 15, 125, 160;
in policing 161
Empire Annual for Boys 182, 184, 185,
188, 189
ethics, Foucault and 132, 133
family, Muslim, power relations in 199
fatherhood 31, 95n
‘fear and desire’ 176
femininity 14, 16, 90;
adolescent culture of 173;
and appearance 166;
camp and 104;
hostility towards 102;
representations of 117, 125;
of travestis 111, 115, 118, 120, 129
feminism xi, 29, 38;
and masculinity 166;
and prostitutes’ clients 51
feminist thought 27, 29
feminization 20, 71, 85, 202;
of Vietnamese men 178;
of young male apprentices 171
fieldwork 44
Gascoigne, Paul 14
gay gene 105
gay identities, changing nature of 96
gay men 96;
and masculinity 12, 100, 104;
as parents 31;
politicization of 105;
see also homosexuality
gay scene 102, 105, 107
gender 45n, 198;
anthropology and 26, 39;
body and 33;
and inequality 21, 24, 42;
markers of 165;
postmodernism and politics of 38;
and power relations 164;
sex and see sex, and gender
gender ambiguity:
in Brazil 110;
in Turkey 208
gender differences 32, 102;
essentialist interpretations of 3;
in Salvador, Brazil 117;
Strathern on 39
gender relations, residences and 67
gendered identities 10, 17, 81, 89, 113;
as biologically given 82
geneology, Foucault and 132
Greece:
men in 65, 67, 68, 95;
sexuality in ancient 132, 136, 140
Greek culture, masculine sexuality in 65
Gurkhas 190
habitus 163
hegemonic masculinities 3, 4, 18, 36, 42,
85, 86, 197
hierarchical relations 202;
between men and women 17, 85
homoeroticism 104, 123, 209
homophobia 13, 103, 109
homosexuality 96, 108n, 122;
in the army 70;
in Brazil 122;
and changing gay identities 100;
in Greece 70;
in London 98, 102, 107;
and masculinity 100, 102, 120;
persecution of 103, 106;
in Turkey 208, 210;
in Zimbabwe 153
honour 82, 84, 85, 88, 94;
violence and 86
household 66;
in ancient Greece 137;
as gendered space 30
Hussein, Saddam 21
hymen repair 88, 89, 92
identity, of gay men 99
impotence 91
inequality 44;
gendering of 21, 24, 42
infibulation 87, 88
kinship systems:
in ancient Greece 134, 135, 140;
in modern Greece 67
language 10;
of masculinity 147, 148, 154
Latin men, images of 12
legislation, on homosexuality 108
life cycles, gender-specific 135
London, gay community in 98, 102, 107
love medicine (mupfuwira) 152
‘macho’ 11;
cross-cultural use of 15
‘macho’ man 6, 31, 96, 103;
and homosexuality 12, 121;
masculinities and 11;
racism and 177;
stereotypes of 12, 13;
in Zimbabwe 150
male body, objectification of 12, 101, 103
male bonding 103
male/female dichotomy 8, 17, 33
male/female interactions, constructions of
masculinity in 204
male peer groups 207
male pill 31
male reformers, in Muslim societies 195
male relationships:
and domestic alienation 206;
hostility in 205
male spaces:
in Cyprus 76;
in Zimbabwe 145, 148, 156
maleness 9, 26, 85;
and clientness 47, 55, 61;
definition of 10;
power and 3
manhood 9, 11, 20;
in ancient Greece 135, 137, 140, 142;
apprentices and 171;
Gilmore on 49, 65, 182;
hierarchies of 55;
ideals of 50;
and power 19;
proofs of 103;
in Spain 49;
in Zimbabwe 145, 146;
see also maleness;
masculinity
marginalization 206
marriage 66, 67, 123
married clients, of prostitutes 53, 58
masculinity 9, 17, 115, 125, 128;
and anthropology 26;
apprentices and 170;
black 175;
and changing workplaces 164, 169n;
comparative ethnographies of 3;
definition of 10, 122;
disempowering of 22;
and female virginity 87;
feminists and 165, 167;
in Greek culture 65, 76;
and homosexuality 100, 102, 120;
imperial 184;
and male potency 91;
men and 36;
and objectivity 166;
and physical force 13;
and power relations 196;
use of term in Spain 50;
in Zimbabwe 145;
see also hegemonic masculinities;
manhood;
subordinate masculinities
masturbation 69
Mediterranean, virginity in 84
men:
domesticated men 76;
‘men of spirit’ 76;
murume 145, 148;
‘new men’ 14, 31;
‘real men’ 14, 98
see also manhood
men’s studies 28
Middle East, virginity in 84, 89
missionaries 193
monumentality 5, 135
Morocco, virginity in 91, 92
mother-son relationships 199, 201
Muslim societies, masculinity in 195
Naples 88
nature/culture dichotomy 28, 29, 34
nurturance 206;
from male peers 207
objectivity, and masculinity 166
‘otherness’ 105, 133
parenthood 206
passivity 122, 128
patriarchy 62, 82, 147, 195;
and subordination of women 197
penetration 70, 71, 93, 122
penis:
maleness and 36, 114, 123, 127;
and prostitution 118, 128
pharaonic circumcision 87, 88
physical force, and macho stereotype 13
Pittsburgh, female police officers in 158,
161
police force:
emotional work of 161;
gendering of 158, 164
police officers, female 16, 23, 159, 164
polygyny 200, 210
pornography 29
post-marital residences 62
postmodernism 43;
and politics of gender 38
power 128;
Foucault and 22;
gender and 22, 102, 140;
maleness and 3;
masculinity and 19, 129, 147, 170, 196;
metaphors of 20;
relations of see power relations;
sexuality and 71
power relations 23, 196;
gender and 164
praise poems 154
private/public dichotomy 30, 137
pro-feminism, masculinity and 195, 196
prostitute/client relationship 54, 59, 62
prostitutes:
clients of 47, 48, 51, 53, 119;
feminism and 52
prostitution 52;
gender ambiguity in 110;
in Salvador, Brazil 115, 118;
in Spain 48
protection 84, 85
psychoanalytic theory 198
public schools 182;
sport in 184
purdah 195
‘queer movement’ 104, 107
racism 17, 42, 189;
masculinity and 20, 174
rape, in ancient Greece 140
replication 42
reproduction 31
residence rules, and male/female
dichotomy in Greece 67
resistance 22, 106, 164
responsibility 58, 84, 85
segregation 207;
in the workplace 157
sex:
and gender 34, 36, 100, 102, 113;
and marriage 59;
and tourism 73, 116
sex change 118
sex drives 51, 58, 59, 61
sex roles 31
sexuality:
in ancient Greece 140;
and desire 90;
Foucault on 121;
Gilmore on 82;
in Greece 67, 68;
and racism 176
shame 85, 92
Shona masculinities 146;
in urban areas 150
sites of significance 114, 126
social relations, commoditization of 101
sodomy 121, 122
sporting values 184
status-gaining activities 207
stigmatization 197
structural disadvantage, of women 197,
199
subordinate masculinities 19, 20, 23, 24,
42, 85, 92
subordination 17;
of women 29, 68, 197
third gender 110
time, gender-specific relationships to 134
tomboys 173
totemic masculinities 150, 154
transcripts of masculinity 23
transsexualism 111
transvestism 111
Turkey, masculinities in 91, 204, 205
Vietnamese refugees, harassment of 177
violence 13;
and dishonour 86;
gendered 25;
in male relationships 205;
of travestis 120, 121
virginity 41, 69, 72;
female 82, 87;
illusions of 92;
and wedding night defloration 89
virility 31, 87, 92, 93
‘wanker’ 172, 181n
wedding night defloration 89
white man, in Africa 188
wind-ups 171
women 94, 101;
in ancient Greece 134, 135, 136, 138,
140;
anthropology of 27;
as bread winners 206;
in colonialism 183;
control of sexual behaviour of 85;
in male-dominated workplaces 158,
160, 164;
and masculinities 151, 173;
in Muslim families 199;
power and 23, 124, 126, 152;
as property of men 84;
subordination of 29, 68, 197;
in Zimbabwe 146, 151, 154
women’s spaces 76, 139;
men in 151, 173, 201
work, gender stereotypes of 157
working-class cultures:
masculinities in 170, 176;
racism in 176;
sport in 185, 187
workplace, gender and 157
Yoruba 124;
deities of 125;
language of, used in Brazil 110
Zimbabwe, masculinities in 145