In search of masculinity

Doc M. Billingsley

18 March 2007

Sex, Gender, & Power: In search of masculinity

Connell, R.W. and James W. Messerschmidt

2005 Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. Gender & Society 19 (6): 829-859.

I have to preface my comments this week by expressing some apprehension over the choice of male subjects for this unit of the course: drug dealers in East Harlem and fraternity gang rapists(?!). Given the demographics of the class, I have a feeling I may be put on the defensive for the next 3 weeks, even though I don’t personally sympathize with – much less identity with – the latter group of men. It’s interesting how the tables can turn as we move from exploring diverse femininities to diverse masculinities: When we read about pasinja meris I never once considered the possibility that some members of the class might feel uncomfortable exploring a subversive / rebellious feminine subject, but now I find myself in exactly that position with regard to the examples of masculine subjects that we will be exploring. I identify as a man, and I feel especially involved or attached or otherwise tied up in the questions that Connell and Messerschmidt raise and that Bourgois and Sanday will elaborate upon.

On a pragmatic level, I question whether these images feed into the negative evaluation of hegemonic masculinity that Connell and Messerschmidt identified as an artifact of essentialist stereotypes and psychoanalytical tautologies (2005:840). What is the “family resemblance” (Ibid.:850) between the sexual exploits of professional and college athletes that get tremendous air time on the media, and stories told by my own friends or acquaintances about sexual experiences of their own? Even more unsettling to consider, how do my actions compare to those of individuals who try to “act like a [hegemonic masculine] man” by demonstrating violent behavior, exerting physical control over women, and pursuing sexual conquest through the objectification and symbolic consumption of women? I use the terminology of Connell and Messerschmidt (who borrowed it from Wittgenstein) because they raise the intriguing possibility that all these diverse masculinities – my own included – may be informed by the same regional or global hegemonic examples (850-851). As the latest luxury watch commercial would have me believe, every man wants (or should want) to be James Bond, despite his violent temperament and the pathological superficiality of his relationships with women. If I share with a fraternity gang rapist a certain admiration for the suave romanticism of Agent 007, does that make me somehow complicit in whatever objectionable behaviors or attitudes the rapist expresses?

It’s important (e.g., for maintaining my own sanity) to recall Connell and Messerschmidt’s point that there are dynamic and diverse masculinities, and even hegemonic ideal types are transient at best. Especially given the global circumstances of international human rights discourse, economic development, etc., gender relations and hegemonic role models are undergoing perpetual revision even as I type. This leads me to an area of thought that Connell and Messerschmidt noted repeatedly but couldn’t fully develop within the limited parameters of their article: the influence that goings-on in one gender have on the other, both at the level of individuals (e.g. mother-son, wife-husband interactions) and at social-level interactions such as media images and political actors and movements (848,

Without wishing to disregard or downplay men’s dominant positions vis-à-vis women, I wonder whether it is entirely accurate to counter-pose “hegemonic masculinity” to “emphasized femininity” (848). The term “emphasized masculinity” seems equally accurate to me for representing men’s intentional strategic adoption of discursive practices and statures to achieve certain aims

The expressions “be a man” or “act like a man” imply some hegemonic standard “man” to imitate; “being a man” involves emphasizing certain traits (which vary individually and in relation to the hegemonic standard du jour) that would presumably help achieve the given goal. (I have even heard women tell men to “be a man,” and men tell women half-jokingly to “be a man,” but I’ve never heard anyone say “be a woman.” Is this where the hegemonic aspect of masculinity appears?)

Bourgois, Philippe

2006 In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. 2^nd edition. Cambridge University Press.

Bourgois does a great job of preserving the idiosyncratic individuality (i.e., the humanity) of Primo and Caesar and the other subjects in his ethnography, even while discussing the structure of “apartheid” in which they’re embedded. He makes it clear that the political and ethical implications of their actions are far more complicated than New York City’s “quality of life” laws suggest. One of the major contributions of his book is in problematizing the stereotypical and simplistic equation of “cops = good, drug dealers = bad,” as portrayed in media and especially in educational materials for children. The instrumental use of violence by both groups is unsettling, though presumably police brutality (“terrorism with a badge”) is less necessary (35-37), given the legal and political dominance of police officers over street dealers and minority criminals / suspects, while the underground economy of drug dealing seems to rely on strategic (and possibly irrational and self-destructive) displays of violence as a means of maintaining one’s capital (24).

Trampoline

An "ethnographer" designed it?
http://blogs.iht.com/tribtalk/technology/metamedia/?p=67

Addendum: The Enron demonstration is pretty neat. Apparently they have all N thousand emails for you to peruse at will!

Two reasons to smile

For work: http://www.nytimes.com/university Free access to the NY Times Select! Just register your .edu email address.

And for play: http://www.slacker.com Look out Pandora and Last FM. Heck, look out iPod! This is a cool service, and the upcoming handheld models look worthwhile (priced $150-300). I wonder if there will be copyright issues...?

Blues & Gumbo

I suspect that the alien anthropologists who watch us are especially fond of Blues bars. They probably zoom in with their space binoculars and think to themselves, "This is surely the pinnacle of human civilization." It's a lot like gumbo; a mix of this and that, old and new, which altogether makes up something greater than the sum of its parts. We can really make beautiful music together. Or delicious soup.

Re: Sociology & Anthropology

I think there are really 3 issues here. The most obvious difference between anthropology and sociology, historically, has been the concentration of anthropologists in foreign countries -- especially in the colonies of their respective nations. I don't know enough about the history of the two disciplines in every country (I am pretty sure that what we consider "socio-cultural anthropology" is united with sociology in some countries) to identify where the two diverged and why, but I don't think it had much to do with disagreement over theory. It was probably more of a difference in methods (e.g. participant observation versus survey, or qualitative over quantitative), and focus (e.g. colonies rather than colonists). Anyway, to this day anthropologists borrow a lot of sociological theory (and vice versa).

Professor Merry White's comment reflects a long-standing bias in anthropology toward studying the 'Other', which we still see in ample evidence today: even when anthropologists do study within their own nation-states, they tend to focus on subaltern groups with which they do not (closely) identify. I don't think there's anything wrong with this; I think a lot of anthropologists are guided by research questions that are best addressed by focusing on certain groups that experience phenomena from perspectives that we don't commonly share in our privileged status. However, it is unfortunate that domestic fieldwork doesn't seem to carry as much prestige as studying "over there," wherever that may be; indeed it often seems like the distance between the field site and the nearest community of ex-pat / tourist Westerners is directly proportional to the level of prestige attached to working there. This is a shame, because I think anthropologists have a lot to offer through domestic fieldwork (the whole value-status disequilibrium problem is similar for historical archaeologists, but that's another post)


The second issue has to deal with the "holistic" approach that anthropologists still bravely advocate. While I'm a strong supporter of four-field anthropology, and I cringe whenever I hear about departments at other universities where the subfields are administratively segregated, I won't pretend to harbor expectations of becoming professionally proficient in all 4 areas. Honestly, I can't identify a single university that still takes the four-field approach seriously enough to require a generalized education. I suspect that the shift in academics toward a business-model is partially responsible: the folks in charge want anthropologists to contribute research on, and to teach about, specific (and especially, esoteric) subjects, not to teach how anthropology can vastly expand your worldview and raise your quality of life. Anyway, the sad fact is that most roomfulls of anthropologists are about as unlikely as sociologists to discuss the wide array of phenomena and research techniques pertaining to any given subject. You're much more likely to find discussions of pre-ceramic cultures at the SAAs, Japanese primates at the APAs, and early attempts to incorporate GIS into research at any conference, on any topic -- regardless of its geo-spatial applicability. (Money talks, and there's funding for GIS right now)


Anyway, if anthropologists really want to reclaim the "holistic" approach, we need to do more inter-subfield collaboration and train ourselves to work between the boundaries. We need more hybrid anthropologists. I'll see what I can do :P The point remains valid that anthropologists employ a wider range of techniques than sociologists, if primarily because we investigate a much wider range of subjects. I'll reiterate my campaign slogan for encouraging undergrads to declare anthro: you can pick virtually any issue discussed in any department at a major university and find a way to study it as an anthropologist.


Perhaps we're not so much "holistic" as we're spread out and diversified. This brings me to my final point, which is really more about socio-cultural anthropology than about the four-field discipline as a whole. I think anthropology has traditionally been a pipe dream. We've been in the business of making better stereotypes since the very beginning. Using various techniques informed by various schools of thought, we've tried to depict "the world as it is for _____," where it was assumed that ample scientific observation of any group _____ could paint a valid and "holistic" view of that group and their entire social structure. Hence the focus, originally, on "simple societies" that we assumed would be more easily manageable than our own societies, with which we are familiar enough to recognize the heteroglossia of everyday phenomena. By studying the "Other," especially the non-industrialized pre-literate "Other," anthropologists hoped to 1) avoid partiality and maintain objectivity, and 2) achieve a complete picture. All four branches have been accomplices to this scheme. We've focused on certain practices shared by a number of specific individuals, labeled these practices according to our own vocabulary (while shaving off any unexpected indigenous significances in the process), and then cataloged people according to whether or not their practices meet the criteria for those we've already standardized (read: butchered). Thus, for example, certain unorthodox Mormons in the U.S. Southwest are "polygamists," and in any given anthropological study dating before 20 years ago, the fact of their polygamy would have been the centerpiece of discussion. Descriptions would either: 1) clarify how they are different from the assumed "us," i.e. the Other-ness of their distinguishing practice, polygamy; or 2) reveal what we share in common, i.e. (implicitly or explicitly) defining the limits of polygamy. Two things happen when we apply a stereotype: we debase the stereotype, and we debase our knowledge of the people to whom we apply it. If I am a "student," for example, then my student-ness is assumed to be an integral and potentially overwhelming aspect of my identity. In some domains it may be the only quality that matters; likewise, my behavior and characteristics inform what it means to be a "student." However, the fact that I read journal articles on Sunday mornings doesn't mean that all students do; nor do I necessarily share values that are commonly associated with students. If I somehow gain celebrity with a wider social audience, then their impression of "student" might change -- even if the entire rest of the population that meets the criteria for being classified "student" remains unchanged. In sum, stereotypes of any sort are homogenizing and essentializing, as were earlier ethnographic accounts of group ____ , e.g. "the Hopi," or "the Japanese" as Benedict depicted them in Chrysanthemum and the Sword.

Anthropology wasn't destroyed by the serious critiques leveled against it during the post-colonial, post-modern period: rather, it emerged as a more realistic and potentially more scientific approach. Anthropologists can now begin the business of demystifying stereotypes; of pointing out the inherent limitations of all classification schemes and working towards "not the erasure of all differences but the recognition of more of them and of the complex ways in which they crosscut" as Abu-Lughod and Said demanded. We will continue to produce and inform stereotypes through our work; generalizations are a necessary component of the process of understanding our world. However, we can now recognize the limitations of our knowledge and instead of aiming for holistic pictures of entire groups, we can shoot holes in our own representations in order to demonstrate the wide diversity of lived experiences on the ground. The anthropologist's role is to ground truth generalizations, to show when and where stereotypical descriptions fail, what they always fail to capture, and how they might be used for political purposes that we never intended.

zotero

Free Firefox extension worth the 12 seconds to download it: zotero

zotero saves research sources in your web browser, especially useful if you do any research on the 'net (and you can be part of the "in-crowd" using it--or whatever).

From the site:

Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you to annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct fields.

ps:
You must have FF 2.0 for it to work...so update already.

Sociology vs Anthropology--diff yo?

Awhile back I was reading a socio-politico-cultural blog on Japan written by W. David Marx a cultural commentator cum musician of sorts. In a recent entry he discusses Japan’s status as a major or minor country in the world and to explain it he offers this tidbit of information:

My thesis advisor Prof. Merry White once said something like, at the beginning of her academic career, studying Japan was considered to be "anthropology" because Japan was a third-class country, but when the economy bounced back, Japan research became "sociology." The change from tribe to complex society.

Now, don’t get me wrong here Professor Merry White who holds professorships in both the department of anthropology and the department of sociology at Boston University certainly has not only the letters (PhD) and the experience to make anything I have to say seem amateur; but to assert that sociologists study complex societies whilst anthropologists study “third-class”, “tribal” societies is downright ludicrous. I highly doubt this is what she truly believes and if she does then god help me I will never go to BU.

First, just because a culture or society is not that of an industrial or post-industrial nation does not mean that it is not complex. Much of the history of anthropology has been centered around discovering and consequently proving exactly that—primitive does not equal simple, nor does non-Western = not complex. Granted Lewis Henry Morgan may have come up with some levels of cultural evolution and used complexity as one of the criteria—but it was one of the criteria, not the criterion.

Secondly to draw the boundary between sociology and anthropology on the crux of studying third-class countries –whatever the hell THAT is—and presumably 1st class countries is ridiculous. To do so would suggest that a large part of anthropology today is in reality sociology, and furthermore that sociology is eclipsing anthropology. Yes, anthropology in a large part was born out of post-colonialism but anthropology is NOT limited to studying only post colonial or isolated “ primitive” cultures, the latter because few of those really exist anymore.

Thirdly, at the beginning of her career Japan was a third class country makes me ask one question: how old is Merry White? Does she have the secret to immortality?

Again the problem rests on the usage of the term “third-class country” an absurd term that I cannot even begin to try and define nor do I wish to try to.

The primary differences between anthropology and sociology are as follows: (1) anthropology tries to be more holistic and thus encompasses its four fields including archaeology and physical/biological anthropology. You usually don’t have a room full of sociologists where some are talking about monkeys, others about GIS, others about pre-ceramic cultures, and others still about oh for the sake of being a bitch: Japan.

Just as importantly, (2) they come from slightly different but related and overlapping intellectual histories. They differ in their specific genealogies of theoretical and intellectual shapers that form the basis of the discipline. That’s it really.

I say po-tah-toe you say po-tay-toe in the end its all just culture.

SISE - Mariposa

Hyperwords

This is the most exciting extension for Firefox I've encountered in a while, probably since installing all-in-one mouse gestures:
http://www.hyperwords.net/
The in-line translation tool is especially nice. Check it out!

Dark Room / Write Room

For all your writing needs: http://they.misled.us/dark-room

Or for Mac: http://www.hogbaysoftware.com/product/writeroom

Basically old-school text editor emulators (but with more modern functions built-in).
I haven't had a chance to play around with them yet, so I don't know how well the auto-save feature works. Anyway it seems more useful for getting started on projects than for revising major papers --- but it's nice to have an uncluttered (digital) workspace sometimes.

Kudos to Prof. Parikh for the heads-up on this one.

Free zune t heme -- make XP run in black and silver

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=75078

nice freebie from microsoft.

BoingBoing link: Guatemala: Mayan priests to purge Bush's evil after he leaves

BoingBoing link: Guatemala: Mayan priests to purge Bush's evil after he leaves

Agency & Victimhood

“People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” -- Foucault


What is agency? Foucault's diatribes about power and agency leave me questioning whether he even leaves room for free will. People act, but we're constrained by the system of force relations, i.e. the power structure. What does he mean by that? Is he talking cognition, like a strong view of hegemony? Can we even imagine acting in ways that aren't sort-of programmed into us by this mysterious power structure? He really doesn't seem to leave the door open for agency to begin with, so how can we attribute agency to women who are placed in even more heavily constrained situations than we find ourselves in? Or maybe that's the trick -- maybe under the bio-politics system of power, we're more self-constraining because we operate via a system of norms rather than regulations. Maybe these women actually have more freedom (of mind?) because they can contradict their social orders (e.g. by becoming pasinja meris and ruining their families' chances at recovering bridewealth) without sacrificing their own feelings of self-worth. Maybe by being "dividuals" or having "relational personhood", people have different perspectives on agency and victimhood -- maybe agency and passivity are less clearly distinguished for them, because they interpret acts in terms of relationships (e.g. codependent arising); thus what I define as an instance of victimhood -- being raped, for example -- is not as exclusively passive for a typical Tuli woman because there are social repercussions, i.e. her male kin will exact a restitution from the rapist (or force him to marry her); perhaps it only becomes locally contextualized as victimhood when the male kin fail to react as expected, and it thus becomes a "trigger" toward the path of a pasinja meri. This act, likewise, I would define as highly agentive, especially given the women's own "triumphalist narratives" and the "seemingly self-authoring, autonomous 'I'" that they use to describe their agency in their life histories (157). However, for the same reason, perhaps this act is less exclusively agentive and shares some passive qualities b/c the women's agency is "negative agency," i.e. their actions are calculated to have deleterious effects on their kin; they are merely negating their "proper" roles as reproducers. Also, the triggers seem like social formulas: women become pasinja meris when their male kin fail to provide a stable environment.
This kind of makes sense, but perhaps only because I'm projecting my own fundamental understandings of agency and identity, i.e. codependent arising.
Argh.

Spanish Imperialism and German Nazism: Profound similarities?

Link to an interesting book sponsored in some way by an applied anthropological group in Belgium:

http://www.xpeditions.be/whatdowedo/appliedanthropology/sangreimpura/sangreimpura.html

Preface

Hello random passersby.

I intend to use this blog as a convenient means of sharing ideas with friends and colleagues. You're likely to find half-formed thoughts posted here as I write course papers or respond to ethnographic literature. Don't expect polish or finesse. This is an open forum: no wrongs, just write.