Table Of ContentACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book originated out of a curiosity to determine whether the obser-
vations I had read in a great deal of feminist scholarship concerning
men and their desires—observations made largely, although in no way
exclusively, by women—were true. My curiosity turned to frustration
when I realized that if I couldn’t determine whether the observations
were true about me, then there wasn’t any hope for determining their
veracity for men in general. I nevertheless continued interrogating sit-
uations in which I or others I knew (not all of whom, by the way, were
men) did or did not evince the particular features deemed characteristic
of masculinity. Thus was born a hypothesis of masculine hysteria,
which, if it didn’t yet have the clinical or theoretical backing, neverthe-
less had the particular advantage that it just felt right.
Fortunately for me, a great number of people were willing to put up
with the hysteria. It is often the case that one’s closest friends are not
one’s best readers. Emotional or a√ective proximity sometimes seems
to oppose critical distance. My friends, however, have been only too
happy to tell me when I don’t make any sense; my students seemed to
consider it their duty, and those in ‘‘Contemporary French Thought,’’
‘‘Constructions of Masculinity,’’ and ‘‘Freud and Lacan’’ helped shape
significant portions of this book.
Friends and colleagues at the University of Rochester in the Depart-
ment of Modern Languages and Cultures and the Department of En-
glish, as well as in the interdepartmental programs in Visual and Cul-
tural Studies and the Susan B. Anthony Institute collaborate in
producing a lively intellectual climate, and a great deal of this book grew
out of our discussions and debates. I am also indebted to specific people
for their special help. In particular I thank Sue Gustafson, Cilas Kemed-
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jio, Trevor Hope, Joel Morales, Noreen Javornik, Tim Walters, Kien Ket
Lim, Michael Holly, Douglas Crimp, Claudia Schaefer, Darby English,
Eva Geulen, Babacar Camara, Beth Newman, Kathleen Parthé, and
Mohammed Bamyeh (who did me the added favor of making me real-
ize I needed a much bigger house). To Pat Gill, who is sometimes me,
there is no need to express thanks, because she’ll finish this sentence
for me anyway. Randall Halle valiantly defended my defense of the
phallus, and John Michael let me get away with nothing, which requires
more energy than anyone should have to expend. Thanks also to
Richard Estell, who showed me that you actually can learn how to see,
and to Sharon Willis, who over the years has done me the tremendous
favor of reading me especially well. I thank Rajani Sudan for her theo-
retical insights, and also and especially for asking di≈cult questions
totally in the dark. I thank Je√ Hilyard for still hearing the saxophone
music after so many years.
viii Acknowledgments
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INTRODUCTION: BELIEVING IS SEEING
I object to a strategy which situates men in such a
way that the only speaking positions available to
them are those of tame feminist or wild antifemi-
nist. —K. K. Ruthven, Feminist Literary Studies
S
ometime during the early 1990s, the dead white male, that extraor-
dinarily prolific author who wrote most of the books featured in
high-school and college curricula across the United States, died. An-
other white male took his place, but this one wasn’t dead—he was angry.
Suddenly angry white men were popping up everywhere, and what they
were mad at, at least according to the dozens of newspaper and maga-
zine articles reporting the phenomenon, was the decline in their value,
both cultural and economic, to the general population. From the front
pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, feature stories
in Time and Newsweek, and from discussion groups on the Internet, we
have learned that angry white men resent the imposition of a≈rmative
action and the so-called reverse discrimination it produces. They de-
plore the competing definitions of family, history, and politics that arise
along with increasingly diverse—and increasingly vocal—minority pop-
ulations. Perhaps most of all, however, they rage against the mutating
definition of white masculinity itself as it responds to shifting social,
political, and economic tides.
There is really nothing new about white men being angry, however.
In fact, anger seems to be constitutive of the identity. Even if we go as
far back in time as Homer’s Iliad, what we see is that white men—or at
least men belonging to those cultures that would later be identified as
white—are not only angry, but confused about who they are supposed to
be as well. ‘‘Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus,’’ the Iliad
opens, and that perhaps first of angry white men must later decide
whether revenge or a burgeoning form of compassion should be what
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characterizes his culture’s heroic male. But Achilleus is hardly an iso-
lated example: Ariosto’s sixteenth-century Orlando Furioso was pretty
mad, and we cannot forget Peter Finch’s character Howard Beale (he
was ‘‘mad as hell,’’ we recall) in Sidney Lumet’s Network, or Sylvester
Stallone’s Rambo.∞ Moving to real life, the wrath of individuals such as
terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Unabomber Ted Kazinski correlates
the fury of the KKK, the more recent rural militiamen, and the angry
young high school boys who began shooting their classmates and their
parents in the 1990s, with perhaps the most spectacular and gruesome
scene occurring at Columbine High School in Colorado during the
spring of 1999.
By all accounts, at least according to the popular press, angry white
males are fuming over the cultural changes that conspire to eject them
from the social order’s defining center. The features that have tradi-
tionally not only characterized but distinguished the white male seem
no longer important. Possessing physical strength, heading a house-
hold, working outside the home, and having sole access to the most
respected and profitable arenas of culture are all features that either no
longer pertain exclusively to white males or that are no longer par-
ticularly valued. Consequently, the white male appears no longer to be
the focus of identification, and it seems increasingly true that such a
focus no longer exists. But if the center can no longer hold, it’s not
necessarily the case that things fall apart: the same categories that main-
tained the white male in the culture’s identificatory focus certainly con-
tinue both to endow and constrain people with identities today, but as
we have seen most notably in the realm of virtual reality, people seem to
be developing the ability to assume di√erent and even multiple or con-
flicting identities. What we are currently experiencing in the anger of
the white male, then, might be the contradiction caused by the endur-
ing historical weight of an identity no longer invested with the preemi-
nence it once enjoyed, and the contemporary push toward opening up
new raced, gendered, and sexual identities that do not take the white
male as their normative ground. If that isn’t enough to anger those who
feel cheated out of occupying a center stage, it just might be enough to
make them hysterical: as I will show, in fact, the identity ‘‘white male’’ is
about nothing if not a form of hysteria.≤
In this book, I take a close look at the complex nature of the white
male identity, with particular emphasis on white masculinity as a re-
2 White Men Aren’t
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sponse to specific cultural phenomena.≥ While white masculinity con-
stitutes a hegemonic force in contemporary social, political, and eco-
nomic domains, we need to analyze it as a symptomatic reply to cultural
demands, not as a self-generating ahistorical entity somehow able end-
lessly to reproduce itself.∂ We need to be careful, in other words, not to
construct white masculinity as an apodictic force with no exterior. We
must take care not to conflate a hegemonic force in culture with the
source or prime motivator in that culture—simply put, the identity in
question cannot perform the taxonomically impossible task of defining
itself. Finally, we need to take care, at the most fundamental level, not to
equate an identity, which is the product of cultural activity, with that
activity itself. In contradistinction to a great many studies of mascu-
linity, then, I insist not only on the cultural conditions inhering in
the production of specific strains of masculinity—in this case, white
masculinity—but also on the cultural work that white masculinity con-
tinually performs in order to retain its hegemony. There are, conse-
quently, two extremes of white masculinity, neither of which is for any
practical purposes readily available to us: on the one hand is the figure
of hegemonic stability to which all other forms of identity are explicitly
or implicitly compared; and on the other hand there is the identity as it
is lived by real human beings. It is precisely because these two so rarely
match up that white males are so often angry: sustaining the contradic-
tion between how the culture defines them and how they experience
their lives, white males are often frustrated by their inability to live up to
cultural ideals. Indeed, studies in the 1940s and 1950s indicated that
over-identification with cultural ideals of masculinity produced anti-
social, even criminal behavior.∑
It seems likely, in fact, that no one is really supposed to live up to the
ideals our culture constructs for white men. If we take a look at models
of masculinity suggested in psychoanalysis or popular culture, for ex-
ample, it seems fairly obvious that the figures that men are enjoined to
emulate are models of impossible identification. Throughout the psy-
choanalytic writings of Sigmund Freud, for example, the male child is
continually frustrated by his inability to possess what his father has. The
principal conflict that psychoanalysis describes—the Oedipus complex,
which will come under close scrutiny in chapter 1—produces a situation
in which the young male child is required to be simultaneously like and
unlike the father: Freud maintains that the superego tells the young
Introduction 3
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male, ‘‘‘You ought to be like this (like your father).’ It also comprises the
prohibition: ‘You may not be like this (like your father)—that is, you may
not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative.’’’∏ If inhabiting
masculinity involves disentangling the threads of conflicting cultural
values, it also involves recognizing how those values are incarnated in
the male body.π Little Hans, Freud’s famous five-year-old analysand
with a morbid fear of horses, feared that his own penis would never
measure up to his father’s.∫ But conflicting cultural signals concerning
what a man is supposed to be are not limited in psychoanalysis to the
young male child. Freud tells us that the little girl passing through her
society’s civilizing processes learns that ‘‘a husband is . . . never any-
thing but a proxy, never the right man; the first claim upon the feeling
of love in a woman belongs to someone else, in typical cases to her
father; the husband is at best a second’’.Ω For both the little boy and the
little girl, it seems, the father is an unattainable ideal, a too-perfect
model that sets them up for failure.
The basic premise informing my excavation of the white male iden-
tity is that the principal poles of identification—whiteness, maleness—
are impossible ones, since according to the cultural logic that has de-
fined them, no one could ever be completely white and/or completely
male.∞≠ The ideal white male figure, in other words, is not simply a
fiction, like the father in psychoanalysis’s heuristic tales, but a fiction
constructed to prohibit comprehensive identification. Throughout the
course of this book I will examine the manner in which ideal white and
male figures are constructed, with an eye toward understanding pre-
cisely how and why they are impossible ones. To analyze the social
construction of the white male I will often be using models drawn from
psychoanalysis, principally because I believe that the processes through
which we adopt or reject the models of identity our cultures put forth
operate on a largely unconscious level, but a level that nevertheless
informs our most fundamental ways of signifying and knowing, and
hence the ways we live our social, economic, and political lives. But
placing stock in the operations of unconscious thought processes need
not imply a wholesale acceptance of specific models of psychoanalysis:
one of the aims of this book is to understand the cultural prejudices in-
hering in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and the blind
spots those prejudices produce. As I interrogate the construction of the
white male identity, beginning roughly at the end of the seventeenth
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century, I will be simultaneously investigating some of the conse-
quences that ensue from the presuppositions informing psychoanaly-
sis and its theories of gender.
It may be interesting to note that many of the earliest studies of
masculinity came not from the perspective of psychoanalysis, but from
that of sociology. The work of Victor Seidler, David Morgan, Andy Met-
calf, Martin Humphries, R. W. Connell, and Harry Brod come to mind
immediately as part of a new generation of scholars working in the field
of gender studies and directing their attentions nearly exclusively to
masculinity.∞∞ Rather than present a list of what I consider to be the
most notable studies on masculinity from the past twenty or so years, I
will cite what I consider to be the most influential works in the field at
moments in my argument more appropriate to the subject matters at
hand. Likewise, the scholarship on race, and what is especially germane
here, whiteness studies, has increased dramatically just in the past few
years, and in order to avoid an overwhelming list of titles at this junc-
ture, I will include discussion of many of the signal works at relevant
moments. As I hope will become clear, however, this book is not simply
the conjunction or intersection of ‘‘race’’ and ‘‘gender,’’ as if the two
were simply ingredients one could unproblematically add in a recipe of
human identity. The whiteness and masculinity I will be looking at here
are not only mutually dependent; they are overdetermined and articu-
lated in such a way that each becomes more complex by association
with the other.
White Men Aren’t looks at the white male identity in several di√erent
moments of history. It is not intended to present a seamless narrative of
the origins of that identity and its subsequent development throughout
history, primarily because such a history would leave out or conflate as
much as it included. Instead, I have chosen times and places that seem
significant for the development of white masculine hegemony, fully
recognizing, of course, that explanatory narratives often produce ex-
actly what they’re trying to describe. Indeed, I will argue in chapter 1
that such a phenomenon is precisely what lies behind Freud’s produc-
tion of the Oedipus complex, particularly as that complex involves the
active obfuscation of forms of identity that do not pertain to gender.∞≤
Psychoanalysis has traditionally taken gender to be the fundamental
di√erence informing the production of subjectivity. Indeed, the Freud-
ian reading of Oedipus typifies most other interpretations of the classic
Introduction 5
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tragedy—including the more traditional literary ones—in its active ob-
fuscation of forms of di√erence the work quite explicitly underscores.
Form mirrors function in such readings of Oedipus in that the work that
goes into not seeing ethnic, civic, and other kinds of di√erence operat-
ing in Sophocles’ tragedy correlates modern productions of whiteness
as an invisible or empty marker of identity.
In chapters 2 and 3 I look at the uneasy relationship western Euro-
pean travelers, anthropologists, and naturalists maintained with people
they considered to be radically unlike themselves—for the most part
Africans and, to a lesser extent, Asians and Americans—and ask how
and why they identified specific morphological features as enough un-
like their own to consider these people fundamentally di√erent. In
other words, how do we recognize similarity and how do we identify
di√erence, particularly when the terrain on which we are operating is by
and large new? What caused Europeans to focus on skin color, particu-
lar facial features, or hair when trying to determine whether a specific
cultural group was principally like or unlike them? Why did they see
di√erence, and not sameness? What metaphors, necessarily grounded
in their own cultural systems of meaning, informed the manner in
which they saw and understood other peoples?∞≥ How do we locate
di√erence, and what does it mean when we (think we) find it?∞∂ Finally,
how and why do we marshal specific features based on the contin-
gencies of our own cultural classificatory systems into the engulfing
and presumably trans-human taxonomic systems we call ‘‘race’’ and
‘‘gender’’?
Chapter 4 is devoted to the Lacanian phallus, that organ that seems
to bear an uneasy and ambivalent relationship to an anatomical marker
of di√erence—in fact, to what is normally taken to be the anatomical
marker of di√erence: the penis. Extrapolating from my reading of Oedi-
pus the King, I will argue that to conflate phallus and penis is to perform
two simultaneous and related operations: on the one hand such a con-
flation casts all forms of di√erence in terms of sexual di√erence, and in
the process masks a host of di√erent social identifiers; and on the other
hand the conflation of signifier of di√erence with male anatomy re-
produces a form of masculine hegemony that figures masculinity ei-
ther as seamless and integral, or as something that needs to be exposed
or dismantled. I will show that to fail to consider the phallus as a
signifier operating in any (and potentially every) domain of di√erence is
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to obfuscate the crucial operations that invest bodies with signification,
and hence to naturalize the very forms of domination that critiques
aimed at aligning the phallus with the penis have sought to expose.
Such critiques ironically end up defending the very form of phallic
power they generally seek to repudiate. Finally, in chapter 5 I will
more fully address what I call the hysteria of white masculinity. Begin-
ning with nineteenth-century fears and anxieties over what constitutes
whiteness and whether the ‘‘white race’’ might be contaminated by
nonwhite blood, I will address the more sophisticated manifestations of
those concerns prevalent in contemporary culture: the African Ameri-
can or Latino conscripted to tell the white man who or what the latter is,
and to know more about his identity than he himself apparently does.
White Men Aren’t begins with the simple premise that the systems of
classification that we take to be fundamental—the mantra of gender,
race, and class that we have heard so much about of late—not only mean
something di√erent in di√erent historical and cultural contexts, but
that they might have no meaning at all for the specific social groups
they are meant to characterize. Whether by casting all di√erence as rep-
resentable through a specific set of cultural metaphors—indeed, by cast-
ing di√erence as representable at all—or by imposing labels through
brute force, white masculinity ascends to a position of power and cul-
tural predominance. The power that this identity assumes—and it is
important to remember that like all identities white masculinity is
not so much a thing as it is a complex encoded response to cultural
phenomena—derives in large part from the fact that in most areas of
Western culture a single unit or measure of value gives expression to
many others. White masculinity’s hegemony arises because it causes
di√erent kinds of subjectivity to become expressions of the central posi-
tion that it represents; manifestations of di√erence get subsumed into
terms not only designed to represent the central position, but restricted
to such use, in much the same way, for example, that a film can be
expressed in terms of its narrative but at the cost of its filmic specificity.
In other words, white masculinity assumes what we might call the least
common denominator of subjective identity, since part of its mythology
has long been that it is an identity in which expressions of other identi-
ties are crystallized.
It seems crucial, if not by now almost gratuitous, to stress that the
issue here is not biological, even if for several hundred years natural-
Introduction 7
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ists, anthropologists, philosophers, and jurists tried to demonstrate that
it is, as I will discuss in chapters 2 and 3. Rather, the issue is a cultural
one and it is a subjective one, by which I mean it pertains to how people
think themselves and their relationships to their communities and to
the world. But scientific explanations quite often lend legitimacy to the
most outrageous ideological propaganda, since the things that appear
to be natural or empirically observable generally also seem to be with-
out political content. For example, the nineteenth-century anthropolo-
gist Arthur de Gobineau deployed the discourses of science and equal-
ity predominant in his time to ‘‘prove’’ that white people were the most
beautiful. ‘‘Taking the white race as the standard of beauty,’’ he writes,
‘‘we perceive all others more or less receding from that model. There is,
then, an inequality in point of beauty among the various races of men,
and that inequality is permanent and indelible.’’∞∑ One of the questions
we need to formulate, then, concerns the extent to which empirical
observations are themselves already steeped in the politics of what their
ostensible objectivity is called on to prove. Simon LeVay, a neurobiolo-
gist investigating the ‘‘cause’’ of homosexuality, perhaps unwittingly
demonstrates the manner in which scientific discourse blinds itself to
its own workings when he writes that ‘‘it is not unrealistic to expect a
gene or genes influencing sexual orientation to be identified within the
next few years, since there are at least three laboratories in the United
States alone that are working on the topic.’’∞∏ What this kind of sci-
ence thinks it will find is determined in advance by the epistemological
frameworks that themselves give rise to investigation in the first place.∞π
But scientific investigation into the nature of human identity, be it
race, gender, or sexuality, is only a symptom, and not a cause, of the
phenomenon I am investigating. We need to determine the manner
in which the abstractions we produce to describe the material world
around us are necessarily already inflected by that world. Furthermore,
we must understand how the world is a√ected by our abstractions. As
Margaret Homans puts it, ‘‘The discourses of race and of gender in this
country have historically been characterized by debates about the body:
about the ontological status as well as the interpretability of biological
di√erence.’’∞∫ As the above citations from Gobineau and LeVay indicate,
the material and the ideal—which also turn out to be the two fundamen-
tal and completely imbricated components of signification in the forms
best known as signifier and signified, a point to which I will return
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