Table Of ContentMasculinity/Femininity:
Re-Framing a Fragmented Debate
Critical Issues
Critical Issues
Series Editors
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Dr Daniel Riha
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Professor Margaret Chatterjee Martin McGoldrick
Dr Wayne Cristaudo Revd Stephen Morris
Mira Crouch Professor John Parry
Dr Phil Fitzsimmons Paul Reynolds
Professor Asa Kasher Professor Peter Twohig
Owen Kelly Professor S Ram Vemuri
Revd Dr Kenneth Wilson, O.B.E
A Critical Issues research and publications project.
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The Gender and Sexuality Hub
‘Femininities and Masculinities’
2012
Masculinity/Femininity:
Re-Framing a Fragmented Debate
Edited by
Ambrogia Cereda and Jon Ross
Inter-Disciplinary Press
Oxford, United Kingdom
© Inter-Disciplinary Press 2012
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Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Ambrogia Cereda and Jon Ross
PART 1 Men(hood)
The Emergence of the ‘Slim Macho’ Trend in Japan 3
as an Example of Adjusting Local Masculinity Standards
in the Age of Westernisation
Agnieszka Pochyla
The New Masculinity and its Ramifications for 11
Policymaking in the Public and Private Sectors
Jon Ross
The Influence of Gender in the Family Law System 21
in Ireland
Anne Egan
Made Men and Constructed Masculinities: Viewing the 29
Father-Son Relationship in The Sopranos
Katarina Gregersdotter and Nicklas Hållén
Performative Masculinity: A New Theory on Masculinity 37
Susan L. Pitt and Christopher A. Fox
PART 2 Representing Masculinity and Femininity
Human/Non-Human: Gender Dynamics and the 49
Female/Animal Condition in Medieval Culture
María Beatriz Hernandez Perez
Their Proper Spheres: Engendering Difference in English 59
Essay Periodicals of the Eighteenth Century
Caroline Lafitte
Tracing Identities. Body Modifications as Inscriptions of 69
Gender
Ambrogia Cereda
‘Doing a Lynndie’: Artist Responses to Representation of 79
Gender in Abu Ghraib Torture Photographs
Uros Cvoro
PART 3 Blurring the Boundaries of Genders
Introducing Gender Equality in the Early Childhood 89
Classroom
Denise M. Maynard
Barbie: Is She a Postfeminine Icon Now? 97
Dikmen Yakalı-Çamoğlu
Between Inverting and Perverting Gender Affiliation? 109
Doing Research on Men in Contrasting Occupational
Settings
Isabelle V. Zinn
A Feminist/Femininity Perspective on Esther Tusquets’ 121
Self-Representation in Confesiones de una Vieja Dama
Indigna
Nicole Dobianer
PART 4 Femininity/Masculinity: De-Normalising a Continuum
The United States of Tara: Gender Trouble in Popular Culture 133
Sarah Lécossais
Who’s Afraid of Grace Marks? A Perspective of Feminist 141
Disability Studies on Female Insanity in Margaret Atwood’s
Alias Grace
Barbara Braid
Non-Phallic Masculinity as Homophobia in Fight Club 151
Tamas Nagypal
Renaming the Self, Recreating the Past in Erna Brodber’s 159
Louisiana
Sonia Gertzou
Conclusions 167
Ambrogia Cereda and Jon Ross
Introduction: Femininity and Masculinity at the Crossroads:
Reframing a Fragmented Debate
Ambrogia Cereda and Jon Ross
This book includes provocative essays which have been presented at the First
Global Conference: Femininity and Masculinity, held in Warsaw on 16th - 18th
May 2011. There many people gathered from academic and non-academic fields
and backgrounds to discuss and reconsider a traditional and controversial topic
from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Femininity and Masculinity, among many interpretations, might be understood
as the typical ways in which we give a meaning to the some aspects of the world,
since we need to give a shape and a precise order to what happens around us and
within ourselves.
One of the most ancient examples of this effort might be found in Plato’s
Symposium,1 written around the 4th century B.C., where the protagonist of the
dialogue, Aristophanes, relates a myth about the creation involving three original
sexes: female, male and androgynous. Due to the jealousy of the father of gods,
Zeus, who could not stand their happiness, they were split into two parts and
condemned to look for the lost ‘other half’ for the rest of their lives. In this
account, even the heterosexual couples - made up of man and woman - descend
from ambiguity, the original androgynous sex. Therefore, the myth of
Hermaphrodites is revealed as the source of the heterosexual relationship (of love)
and provides an explanation for the dichotomical division of genders.
Far from being a polished reference, this issue lies at the very roots of the
reflections displayed in this book, through which the debate about two fundamental
branches of the articulation of gender are re-considered using new lenses. The two
categories have been separated for a long time, signifying two oppositional ways of
entering society and expressing one’s individuality. The assignment of gender and,
moreover, the feminine or masculine traits of an individual, only recently have
been questioned as to their ambiguity and fluidity, and this questioning has
revealed a much more complex reality than that portrayed in the mutual exclusion
male vs. female. The existence of a third gender, or a fourth or more - deposited
beside male and female - has challenged the dichotomical and Western
ethnocentric way of organising the world. Ethnographic examples coming from
varied communities (i.e., Thailand, Polynesia, Melanesia, Native America, Asia,
Borneo, and Sulawesi) made their contribution to invalidate the effort of
normalisation by the ‘official discourse’ around femininity and masculinity.
Nevertheless, in the reference to normality and to heteronormativity much more is
at stake than the interpretation of masculinity or femininity, the opportunity to
understand what the margins of the discourse are.
In essence, the question is deeper than one of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity,’ or
femininity vs. masculinity; it appears more as one of ‘femininities’ and
viii Introduction
__________________________________________________________________
‘masculinities,’ with a distinct emphasis on the plural of each. There is no one
femininity or masculinity, identifiable and tangible like mass-produced items from
a catalogue or supermarket; one version of the ‘artifact’ of ‘female’ or ‘male’ is not
like the next, or the rest, or any other. Perhaps the African-American novelist and
playwright, James Baldwin, put it best, when he said that we are all androgynous,
not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but
because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other - male in female,
female in male, white in black and black in white, therefore, we are a part of each
other.2
Western society and its mass culture have constructed ‘gender’ to signify one
set of ‘values,’ behaviours, and expectations (which several of the contributors to
this volume would call ‘performance’). Michael Kimmel, for example, has spoken
to this overarching construct and the media-driven ‘performance’ expected of men:
‘The media portray a wide variety of masculine images, informing us about the
positive characteristics toward which we should aspire and warning against the
negative facets of personality that we must avoid. Media representations tell us
who we are, who we should be, and who[m] we should avoid.’3 Though mediated
culture and social, religious, and family institutions often attempt to dictate (in
many cases, harshly) otherwise, the primal need to be an individual - one’s own
woman or man (or even something in-between, a ‘third gender,’ perhaps) - is
powerful. Who defines what ‘appropriate’ behaviour is for an individual woman or
man, or for all women or men? What is ‘womanly’ or ‘manly,’ ‘feminine’ or
‘masculine’? To anyone who has fallen outside these invisible yet real boundaries,
consequences - often to the extreme - can result. This volume and its contributors
take a stand against these societally mandated, arbitrary constructs and constraints,
considering how they and the subjects they address are transforming the old ways
and outdated definitions of who they are or should be, and further that they take
control of these definitions. To some extent, they are consciously subverting and
overturning the long-dominant norms.
For example, at the end of the 1990s, finding evidences in the transformations
occurring in the social scenario of that period (i.e., the appearance on the scene of
queer subjects, drag queens and drag kings) Judith Butler suggested two different
notions, ‘performativity’ and ‘performance,’ where the former can be referred to
the process of discursive production and the latter to a specific type of self-
presentation.4 ‘Performing’ masculinity or femininity, in this framework, is only
subversive because it is ‘the kind of effect that resists calculation, which is to say
that signification is multiplicitous, that the subject is unable to control it, and so
subversion is always occurring and always unpredictable.’5 Even these two terms
appear today too reductive to say something about the changing reality we can
experience, or if we want to describe (in literary style or scientific language) the
psychological and cultural landscape of an individual.
Ambrogia Cereda and Jon Ross ix
__________________________________________________________________
In the first section of the book, ‘Men(hood): Evolving “masculinities,”’ the
question of ‘performance’ becomes quite clear - in how men are expected to live in
and are often limited by - their bodies, their families, as fathers, and, in fact, in
virtually every social setting. A long-standing culture clash of East vs. West plays
out in Agnieszka Pochyla’s paper that explores a new trend of ‘Slim Macho’ in
Japan - thin, slightly-muscled men who represent more traditional Japanese male
builds than the ‘gorilla macho’ men and their Westernised image. She argues that
the conflict - represented in her study of popular television commercials that depict
a humorous ‘clash’ between the two masculinised types - speaks to Japan’s
resistance to major elements of Western cultural and media images. To Pochyla,
the trend, at least among Japanese male youth, appears to be moving in the
direction of the Japanese image; to some degree, ‘Slim Macho’ is winning the
battle of conflicting, contested masculinities.
What impact does the global economic shock have on men, their identity, and
families? Jon Ross addresses this question on a many levels, exploring how
American men now lag behind women in many aspects, particularly in the
managerial workforce. The strain on these men - economically to be sure but on
their identity as traditional breadwinners to an even greater degree - presents
numerous challenges of a societal, cultural, and political nature. Ross argues that
public policies must be responsive to help the millions of men dislocated by the
global recession, and that the emphasis of these policies must be as much to
encourage them to take more active roles as caretaking, even co-parenting fathers
as it is to provide them new job and career opportunities.
Men have traditionally written most laws, as they have long held the
predominant share of legislative and legal positions in Western society. Anne
Egan’s probing evaluation of Ireland’s family law court system demonstrates the
downside of the patriarchal tradition for some men. Egan discusses how the Irish
court system - an offshoot of the 1937 Church-influenced Constitution - defines
legal and societal roles that reinforce traditional mores and attitudes. As a result,
Egan argues, unmarried fathers are treated legally as something less than a full and
equal parent in many instances. The bias against unmarried fathers is inherent in
the system, she asserts, leaving the burden of proof on them to prove their worth as
parents. The system’s defined slant against unmarried fathers reinforces archaic
constructions of marriage and family, arguably at the expense of many of the
children it claims to hold so dear.
The father-son relationship and the often-contested concepts of masculinity
within it are the subjects of Katarina Gregersdotter and Nicklas Hållén’s discussion
of the popular American television series The Sopranos. The strained dynamics
and divergent sense of ‘values’ between Mafioso Tony and son A.J. present
themselves through confrontation on many fronts, based on what the authors
characterise as a ‘strict gender regime,’ leading to a dramatic tension over, among
other factors, how each man defines and ‘performs’ masculinity. The father’s
