Manhood Acts: Gender and the Practices of Domination

213 Pages·2014·1.21 MB·English

by  Michael Schwalbe

Manhood Acts

Manhood Acts
Gender and the Practices of Domination
Michael Schwalbe
Paradigm Publishers
Boulder • London
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any media
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retrieval systems, without the express written consent of the publisher.
Copyright © 2014 Paradigm Publishers
Published in the United States by Paradigm Publishers, 5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Boulder, CO
80303 USA.
Paradigm Publishers is the trade name of Birkenkamp & Company, LLC,
Dean Birkenkamp, President and Publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schwalbe, Michael, 1956–
Manhood acts : gender and the practices of domination / Michael Schwalbe.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61205-546-6 (hc. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-61205-562-6 (Institutional eBook)
1. Sex role. 2. Male domination (Social structure) 3. Masculinity. I. Title.
HQ1075.S377 2014
155.3’32—dc23
2013030690
Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the standards
of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.
18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5
Contents
Chapter 1 Gender Theory after Auschwitz 1
Chapter 2 The Masculinities Industry 26
Chapter 3 Theses on Manhood Acts 51
Chapter 4 Drone Morality 75
Chapter 5 Capitalism and the Compulsions of Manhood 98
Chapter 6 The Limits of Trans Liberalism 124
Chapter 7 Feminism or Barbarism 148
Notes 172
Acknowledgments 199
Index 201
About the Author 205
v

Chapter 1
Gender Theory
after Auschwitz
I am haunted by Theodor Adorno’s essay “Education after Auschwitz.”1 Adorno
(1903–1969) was one of the major figures associated with the Frankfurt School
of critical theory. The essay, first published in 1967, is both a cri de coeur and a
somber exhortation. “The premier demand upon all education,” Adorno begins,
“is that Auschwitz not happen again. . . . Every debate about the ideals of edu-
cation is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again
Auschwitz.” What education must do, Adorno argues, is to disrupt the conditions
that enable holocausts to occur. Adorno feared that such conditions were still in
place in the 1960s. I fear they are still in place today.
Adorno points to conditions that are both internal and external to individu-
als. One of the external conditions is aggressive nationalism. Another is a “netlike
environment” of hierarchical administrative control—much like Max Weber’s
iron cage, albeit with real jailers at the ready. Cultural values that encourage the
worship of action and efficiency, blind identification with the collective, and trust
in authority are also enabling conditions. Adorno’s main concern, however, is
with what education must do to ensure that individuals cannot be mobilized to
perpetrate mass horrors. What it must do, he says, is to reveal the social mecha-
nisms that render people capable of horrific deeds. Education must also nurture
capacities for critical self-reflection.
The goal of education, in Adorno’s view, should be to create people who
are sociologically mindful, self-reflective, and morally autonomous. Sociologi-
cal mindfulness is an antidote to what Adorno calls reified consciousness—a
consciousness “blinded to all historical past, all insight into one’s own con-
ditionedness, and posits as absolute what exists contingently.” Sociological
1
2 Chapter 1
mindfulness makes it possible to see that the social arrangements to which
allegiance is demanded are neither divinely ordained nor immutable, but rather
human creations reflecting the interests of the powerful.2 Critical self-reflection
is necessary to recognize and resist one’s socially ingrained tendencies to obey,
to identify with the collective, and to emotionally detach from the Other. The
result, ideally, is an individual capable of making independent moral judg-
ments and thus not being a willing or unwitting participant in the schemes of
“desktop murderers.”
In Adorno’s essay, “Auschwitz” is a stand-in for the entire Nazi program of
exterminating Jews, Romani (“Gypsies”), gays and lesbians, and communists.
The scale, intentionality, and bureaucratic efficiency of this multifaceted geno-
cide mark it as historically unique. Not so its enabling conditions. To see these
conditions and counter the threat they pose, we must overcome investments in
not seeing what is closest to us.
Although he does not speak of gender in the manner of contemporary
sociologists, Adorno references it in several ways. He speaks of the “cult of
action” that attracts those who desire to do something, to make things happen,
and who vaunt “efficiency” even when it leads to irrational or inhumane results.
He speaks of the “ideal of hardness” that encourages indifference to the pain of
others. He speaks of virility construed as the ability to endure pain. He speaks
of denigration heaped on the weak. He speaks of initiation rites that inflict pain
as a condition of acceptance into the collective. Adorno has in mind the Nazi
cult of masculinity.3 But his description of the character that makes holocausts
possible—hungry for action, eager to get the job done, tough, patriotic—fits the
contemporary ideal of American manhood.
Adorno’s essay haunts because it reminds me that the conditions that made
Auschwitz and other Nazi crimes against humanity possible are not behind us.
Aggressive US nationalism? Yes, see Afghanistan and Iraq. Hierarchical adminis-
trative control? Yes, in the workplace and, as the surveillance state has expanded
post-9/11, ever more so in public life as well. Vaunting of action and efficiency,
even if destructive in the long run? Yes, that’s what market fundamentalism and
privatization amount to. Indifference to the suffering of others? Yes, as evident
in rationing health care on the basis of what is profitable to sell to whom. Indif-
ference to the suffering of others is also evident in the use of bombs and drones
that inevitably kill innocent civilians. Admirable manliness defined by power,
toughness, and a capacity for violence? Yes, today still, as in Homer’s day.
“All political instruction,” Adorno concludes, “finally should be centered
upon the idea that Auschwitz should never happen again. This would be possible
only when it devotes itself openly, without fear of offending any authorities, to
this most important of problems. To do this education must transform itself into
Gender Theory after Auschwitz 3
sociology, that is, it must teach about the societal play of forces that operates
beneath the surface of political forms.” The requisite instruction, it seems to me,
is that which equips us and compels us to critically examine the taken-for-granted
systems of inequality that shape us as persons and within which we live our every-
day lives.4 Adorno believed, as do I, that the insights thereby possible can disrupt
the processes that create humans with dangerous inclinations to dominate and to
obey. What most needs to be disrupted, as Adorno implies but seems reluctant
to say, is the making of particular kinds of men. To prevent another Auschwitz,
what is thus necessary is a critical sociology of gender.
There is no shortage of sociologies of gender, as even a cursory perusal of
textbook offerings and journals will make clear. More theorizing and research
about gender goes on today than in Adorno’s day; it has become a mainstream
academic enterprise. But this mainstreaming has come at the cost of domestica-
tion. It has entailed a loss, or sidelining, of the most critical perspectives—those
that deconstruct gender at its roots, that treat gender itself as a system of inequal-
ity, and that give central place to the exploitation and oppression of females and
women by males and men. So while we have plenty of sociological studies of
gender-related phenomena, we are not looking at gender in the ways necessary to
satisfy Adorno’s imperative. Until we do, as I argue in this book, we will remain
poised to repeat the worst of human history, in between times of routine exploi-
tation and smaller-scale violence. If there is a way out, finding it will require, as
per Adorno’s admonition, offending all manner of authorities.
* * *
All critical social theory is sociological in the sense of taking culture, social organi-
zation, group interests, and interaction into account. Critical social theory is also
particularly attentive to power and inequality, and to how power and inequality
shape consciousness.5 All sociological theory, however, is not critical social theory.
Both aim to make sense of the social world, but conventional sociological theory
embraces the positivist project of reducing the social world to “variables” and
trying to explain patterns of covariation among those variables. The goal of this
kind of theorizing, when it is intended for practical application, is knowledge
that policy makers and managers can use to more effectively control others.6
Conventional sociological theory thus seeks to emulate natural science theories
that have yielded more control over the physical world. The aims of critical
theory are different.
As noted, critical theory shares with mainstream sociological theory the
purpose of making sense of the social world and how it works. I would add that
both are concerned, or should be, with offering accounts and interpretations that