Plural Masculinities

Plural Masculinities This page has been left blank intentionally Plural Masculinities The Remaking of the Self in ...

Author: Sofia Aboim

45 downloads 1485 Views 2MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

Plural Masculinities

This page has been left blank intentionally


The Remaking of the Self in Private Life

Sofia Aboim University of Lisbon, Portugal

© Sofia Aboim 2010 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Sofia Aboim has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Aboim, Sofia, 1972â•… Plural masculinities : the remaking of the self in private â•… life. â•… 1. Men--Identity. 2. Masculinity. 3. Sex role. â•… 4. Patriarchy. â•…I. Title â•… 305.3'1-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aboim, Sofia, 1972â•‡ Plural masculinities : the remaking of the self in private life / by Sofia Aboim. â•…â•… p. cm. â•‡ Includes bibliographical references and index. â•‡ ISBN 978-0-7546-7467-2 (hbk.) -- ISBN 978-0-7546-9984-2 (ebook)â•‡ 1. Men--Identity. 2.â•‡ Masculinity. I. Title. â•‡ HQ1090.A26 2009 â•‡ 305.31--dc22 2009034962 ISBN 9780754674672 (hbk) ISBN 9780754699842 (ebk) V

Contents List of Tablesâ•…â•… Acknowledgementsâ•…â•… Introduction Plural Masculinities: Evidence from the Fieldâ•…â•…

vii ix

1

1

From Dualism to Pluralism: The Power of Categories and the Making of Genderâ•…â•…

13

2

Domination, Hegemony and Hybrid Selves: Rethinking the Plural Dynamics of Masculinityâ•…â•…

37

3

Masculinities and Private Life: Power Behind the Scenesâ•…â•…

61

4

Labour and Love: The Gender Division of Labour and Caring in a Cross-National Perspectiveâ•…â•…

83

5

Inclusion, Defamilialization, Autonomy: The Changing Boundaries of Masculinities within Family Lifeâ•…â•…

111

6

Of Pleasure and Violence: Sex and Sexuality in Men’s Discoursesâ•…â•…

137

Conclusion Reinventing Patriarchy? Renegotiating Power and Identitiesâ•…â•…

157

Bibliographyâ•…â•… Indexâ•…â•…

165 189


List of Tables 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

Principal component analysis of the 26 selected countries included in the ISSP survey, 2002â•…â•… Attitudinal patterns regarding the combination of family and work (average scores for the three indexes)â•…â•… Attitudinal patterns regarding the combination of family and work, by country and genderâ•…â•… Patterns of the conjugal division of paid and unpaid labour in couples aged 18-65, by countryâ•…â•… Logistic regression on the likelihood of having dual earner/equal carer conjugal practices (odds ratios)â•…â•…

93 97 99 102 105


Acknowledgements The making of a book is always the result of a long-time process. Along the road, there are always many people who cross our path and impact our lives. Doing research is never a solitary endeavour. My case is not an exception. There were people without whom it would have been impossible to arrive at the finishing line. First of all, I must thank Neil Jordan, my commissioning editor at Ashgate, for having invited me to submit the initial proposal that gave birth to this book as well as for his consistent interest in this project. My scientific curiosity about men and masculinities started a few years ago, when, after dedicating some years to the investigation of women and their family lives, I started working on a research project that was, instead, concerned with a male perspective of family, fatherhood and identity. Karin Wall, who supported and supervised my work from my undergraduate days to the completion of my PhD, was at the time the coordinator of the project. The work carried out together with my research colleagues, Sofia Marinho, Vanessa Cunha, Susana Atalaia, Sónia Correia and Maria do Mar Pereira, was also important in the empirical collection of the data. From 2004 onwards, a number of key events led to amplify that initial appeal for the subject. Another project, this time with Pedro Vasconcelos, Lia Pappámikail, Dulce Neves, Vítor Ferreira, Vanda Aparecida and Pedro Alcântara da Silva enabled me to pursue this line of research. I am particularly grateful to Pedro Vasconcelos for all the illuminating theoretical discussions that we have had along the years, which have also allowed me to enlarge my knowledge on the subject of men. Without doubt, he taught me much about the paradoxes of masculinity. Without the financial support of the Portuguese Science Foundation and of the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, my ‘will to know’ would have remained no more than a mere project. Alongside our daily basis of support, there are sometimes brief encounters that are a true source of encouragement. Jeff Hearn, who came to Lisbon for a seminar, was also a major help in broadening my theoretical horizons. I also owe my sincere thanks to Colin Archer who has proofread the whole manuscript and, more than that, also helped me clarify some blurry points. The enduring work that he has done throughout the making of this book was of major importance. Finally, I must also mention Samantha Holland. Through our exchange of emails during the past few months she shared with me the many hardships of writing. But, most of all, I thank my friends, my family and especially my mother, whose support and forbearance throughout the whole writing process will never be fully repaid.


Introduction Plural Masculinities: Evidence from the Field Early in the twentieth century the apparently indestructible monument of patriarchal masculinity began to crumble, initiating a process that relentlessly and irresistibly would gather pace over the succeeding decades. That process and its ramifications and repercussions, in practical and theoretical terms, provided the subject matter of this book. It was ‘a man’s world’, they said, but, though it went under, it was replaced by a brave new world of plural masculinities that, in my analysis, oblige us to draw some unpredictable and paradoxical conclusions. As a first step along the road, we may consider the issue of identity, starting with the fragmented perception of it discussed by Georg Simmel. As he noted (Simmel 1989 [1908]), among many other ideas, identities will be more fragmentary the more the individuals are included in different social circles. To him, it was precisely through the juxtaposition of fragmentary and even contradictory realities that modern individuality became an ‘adventurous’ and freer enterprise, almost impossible to fully apprehend. Under the conditions of modernity, the universality of identities could not be embraced by any general theoretical framework. Individuality should, in turn, be investigated in the multiple forms of social interactions. A century after Simmel’s insights, the proliferation of concepts related to the transformation of contemporary social identities, which have become liquid (Bauman 2004), fragmented (Craib 1998), reflexive (Giddens 1991), contingent (Dubar 2000) or patchwork-based (Beck 2000), is definitely a sign of the times. Yet, even if there is now more room for manoeuvre, identities still obey the powerful rules of social categorization – a point that we brings us to focus our attention on our object of study. For most people, a man is still a man and what defines him is, above all, the apparently simple fact of not being, or looking like, a woman. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in 1949: A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man. (…) In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. (…) He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.

˘


But, nowadays, to present oneself as a man is perhaps no longer enough. The growing recognition of diversity has set more demanding criteria to evaluate a man’s identity. Is he heterosexual or homosexual? Black or white? Professionally successful or unemployed? Husband and father or single? Men are still men, but increasingly they define themselves – and are defined by others – through a myriad of material positions and cultural references. Any researcher interested in men’s lives and discourses rapidly sees just how much diversity lies beyond the inescapable inclusion in the social category of ‘man’. Only with great difficulty can the codes for ‘doing masculinity’ be considered universal or neatly related to specific social positions. My experience in researching men has confronted me, from the start, with more diversity than I could ever have expected before going into the field: at the time I had no other equipment than a handful of theoretical readings and a few empirical hypotheses on how to identify ‘hegemonic masculinity’ (Connell 1995) in Portuguese society. The fact is that I was unable to do that, which led me to enlarge my reflection on plurality and then on the cultural and material entanglements that constitute masculinities. Most men seemed to ‘be’ many things at the same time. Most men also seemed to occupy different positions in different spheres of social life, which led them to enact and exert their ‘male power’ very unevenly, according to the circumstances and demands of the moment. Many of these reflections, difficulties and findings are condensed in this book, following lines of research that have grown exponentially over the past few decades. In fact, there has been an increasing interest in men and masculinities, driven by massive changes within the gender order, the second-wave feminist critical assessment of the dominating male culture and practice, and the development of critical scholarship on deconstructing the ideological singularity of a universalistic ‘male way of being’. The deconstruction of the patriarchal male figure, rooted in the traditional provider role and the assumption of uncontested authority over women, has established the need for a deeper understanding of contemporary masculinity as plural masculinities. Yet, although plurality is a central feature of gender relations, no longer conforming to monolithic models, there still exists, as Raewyn Connell has argued since the 1980s (Carrigan, Connell and Lee 1985), a symbolic ideal-type of masculinity that imposes, on all other forms of masculinity (and femininities), meanings about their own position and identity. The concept of hegemony, as applied by Connell to masculinity/ies in an inspiring combination of Gramsci’s (1979[1947]) approach to power with a theory of practice, is a powerful but complex notion meant to capture the underlying dominating structures in gender relations that result in the subordination of women and in unequal relations between different forms of masculinity (e.g. Connell 1995, and also Howson 2005, Demetriou 2001, Donaldson 1993, Hearn 2004). In this view, one dominant form of masculinity gains ascendancy over other – subordinated and marginalized – masculinities, thus creating hierarchical relations among men and groups of men. Although hegemonic masculinity is essentially directed at the domination of women, thereby nourishing a traditionally dichotomized gender system that

Introduction

˘

cuts across social class, it similarly discriminates against men from lower classes and, even more so, gay and non-white males. From this perspective, masculinities are necessarily plural because, more than symbolic, they are related to different positions within a power structure, that is, a gender order that segregates men in accordance with how far removed they are from the hegemonic norm: white, heterosexual, professionally successful. Hegemony and Beyond: The Dynamics of Complicity The idea of plurality that I explore in this book is right at the centre of the heteronormative definition of masculinity. For that reason, I hope to contribute to our understanding of the many-sided building-up of identities among the so-called dominant mainstream group. By focusing on ‘complicit men’ – those who Connell defines as supporting hegemonic masculinity, though remaining ‘without the tensions or risks of being the front-line troops of patriarchy’ (Connell 1995: 79) – I am proposing that it is important to deconstruct the idea of a homogeneous dominant masculinity, normally associated with a man who is heterosexual and a breadwinner. In fact, most men can be viewed as complicit. They are not particularly powerful, nor do they influence the dominant cultural symbols of manhood. Conversely, most men do not explicitly defy the codes of masculinity. Yet, it would be a misnomer to see complicit men as merely passive subjects, sandwiched between those who are the most powerful and those who directly challenge hegemonic masculinity (e.g. gay men or pro-feminist activists). They are simply ‘doing gender’ (West and Zimmerman 1987), and in many ways making masculinity evolve into plurality. For this reason, the range of variations in the practices and the identities of complicit men is, in effect, central to our understanding of what is hegemonic. As a result, the notion of plurality, which I defend in this book, is not only a theoretical tool to sort out different groups of men and different masculinities. Plurality is, in my view, an intrinsic feature of any masculinity. It is its formative and generative principle. Therefore any masculinity is always internally hybrid and is always formed by tension and conflict. Any masculinity, as any man, any individual, is plural both in relation to the material positions that locate him in the social world and the cultural references that constitute his universe of meaning and significance. For this reason, in the title chosen for this book there is an assumption that is theoretically-oriented more than simply aesthetic or just a reproduction of common assumptions about masculinities. However, arguing for the internal plurality of ‘complicit men’ implies further reflections on the subject. As many others before, I speak of plural masculinities, but what kind of plurality am I referring to? The plurality that emerges from men’s practices in their daily lives? Or the plurality brought about by transformations in the proper codification of hegemonic masculinity? In fact, both these theoretical and methodological strategies have been used to disentangle the multiplicity of

˘


masculinities (e.g. Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). However, in the first case, we would simply be arguing in favour of diversity, in so far as the breakdown of strongly patriarchal masculinities has promoted the rise of new forms of building oneself up as a man. Yet, the pluralization of masculinities also has transforming effects on the equilibriums of domination: not only of men over women but also of some men over other men. If patriarchal inequality is no longer the single code for constructing masculinities, are other practices and norms evolving into subordinated or even rebellious forms of masculinity? Or is hegemony becoming internally more hybrid? The present book intends to tackle this problem, which has captured the interest of various researchers reflecting on hegemonic masculinity (e.g. Tolson 1979, Snodgrass 1977, Cockburn 1983, Connell 1983, Kimmel 1987, Weeks 1989, Hearn and Morgan 1990, Segal 2007 [1990] and Collier 1995). Finally, it is also imperative that we bring the dynamics of domination and hegemony down to the level of real men and real masculinities. In the contemporary context of gender change, how are plural masculinities, developing at the ideological level, being linked with the practices and identities of men? Is present-day cultural and discursive plurality matching the practices of men, and vice versa? In the light of these questions, investigating plurality among men requires us to reconcile material positions and culture. In advocating plurality in this broad sense, as will be discussed in Chapter 2, I am also refusing sociological dichotomies such as that which sets a limited vision of plurality, related to a set of materially identifiable positions in the social world, against a never-ending perspective on the discursive generation of identities. The constitution of the self is a complex notion and process. In late modernity, plurality has become a buzzword in research emerging from theorization on individualization, privatization and de-institutionalization. In a world where the old roles are losing their place and both women and marginalized groups are achieving much more social equality, men are definitely facing new challenges. In this context, many men are perhaps changing, not only because the legitimate models (fictional or real) of what a man should be are shifting – for instance, towards the new caring father and partner – but also because the strategies through which men create a social self have been evolving into a sort of a bricolage of identities (e.g. Lash 1999). To say it simply, going back to the Simmelian metaphor, social circles are multiplying, thus allowing men to take on plural cultural symbols and practices in their daily lives. Changing Men and Masculinities: A View from the Private Sphere As a result, my major challenge, and main aim, is to offer the reader a contemporary portrait of the plural dynamics of ‘complicit masculinities’, which emphasizes the multiple, even contradictory, paths through which men are remaking their identities. By looking at heterosexual men, who are partners, fathers and breadwinners, the book proposes a simple but compelling thesis that rather than representing

Introduction

˘

a single development (for instance, from the traditional to the modern or from the male provider to the male carer), men’s practices and identities are taking on multiple, hybrid, even paradoxical forms, as they seek to find a new place in private life. This is not a new idea. Several books have been written arguing that masculinities are plural, in different corners of the world. However, fewer books have specifically focused on the question of plurality among complicit men or have placed masculinities in the realm of family life, its history and its transformation. Similarly, fewer books have explored the links between empirical plurality found among real men living in real families and the reconstitution of hegemonic masculinity/ies. These considerations provide a good reason for contributing another book to a topic as popular as masculinity. Consequently, alongside the focus on the dynamics of complicity, a second important argument in this book emphasizes the fact that an important part of the genealogy of masculinity was, and is still, constructed in private life. Although the power of men has become public (e.g. Walby 1990, Hearn 1992), family and private relationships are not exactly ‘soft institutions’ in terms of gender, as Connell suggests. Quite the opposite – I argue that it is in the historically privatized contexts of reproduction and sexuality that key processes of domination are still occurring, both materially and discursively. We must not forget that the history of Western patriarchy is first and foremost the history of the modern family, as the privileged locus for the reproduction of inequalities, and therefore the exercise of male power. The transition from traditional or pre-modern to modern family forms in industrial and urbanized societies stemmed from major structural and axiological changes which had a crucial impact on gendered institutions, norms and practices. The separation of production and reproduction and the setting up of boundaries between public and private lives, alongside the importance granted to conjugal families and the development of the romantic couple and of new bonds of affection towards children, gave new meanings to gender differentiation. These processes, which â•… In fact, since Connell proposed the idea of plural masculinities, a huge number of articles and books have been published on this subject (e.g. Kimmel, Hearn and Connell 2005, or Flood, Gardiner and Pringle 2007). Perspectives on plural masculinities have also been developing on account of the growing link between masculinities and globalization theories, with the focus on non-western masculinities and broadly on post-colonial gender issues. Several recent publications deal with this contemporary issue (e.g. Morrell 2001, Hodgson 2001, Lindsay and Miescher 2003, Ouzgane and Morrell 2005). Furthermore, the notion of plurality has been thoroughly used by non-English speaking researchers. A good example is found in French sociology, a field in which Bourdieu’s Masculine Domination is not a single example. The works of Elizabeth Badinter or Françoise Heritier (1988) have been/made important contributions to conceptualizing plurality. More recently other French researchers have also approached the topic (see, for example, Castelain Meunier 2004 and 2005, or Welzer-Lang 2000). In Portugal, the first ones to focus on these subjects were perhaps the anthropologists, who were engaged early on in the study of masculinities (PinaCabral 1986, Almeida 1995).

˘


are generally referred to as the privatization of family life, helped to institute the role-model of a familialized man (Collier 1995) who should provide for and guide his family. Today, the disempowerment of men in private domains is not a fully consummated process, nor is the fusional family dominant, as anticipated by Burgess, Locke and Thomes back in the 1940s. In fact, in spite of the persistence of gender inequalities, the erosion of patriarchy constitutes today a major element of our inheritance from the twentieth century, alongside the remaking of family organization in the direction of democracy, individualization and self-expression (e.g. Therborn 2004). That erosion seems to draw men into a number of broad movements of change, thus portraying a plural culture of masculinity, a polyculture of masculinity in the words of the French sociologist Christine Castelain-Meunier (2005). As I will argue in Chapter 5, quite a few men are seeking to be ‘companions’, as they value family inclusion as their main source of identity. Companionship-based masculinities are the corollary of what family historians such as Ariès or Shorter (e.g. Ariès 1965, Shorter 1975) called the making of the modern family, a process in which the ‘domestication’ of men had a key part. Today, for many men, conjugal and parental ties are still essential features of identity, but in a different way. Instead of strongly institutionalized gender roles, it is through relationships (that is, through intimate otherness) that men give meaning to ‘their selves’ (Giddens 1992). Other men, however, are constructing defamilialized masculinities, while substituting the old code of male familial responsibility by other self-fulfilling gendered alternatives. The defamilialization of men is also, however, an echo of traditional masculinities. The model for male hegemony during the first, or organized, modernity (to use Peter Wagner’s expression [Wagner 1994]) was, in fact, codified by complex schemes that emerged from the constant tension between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, freedom and control, heterosexual compulsion and family responsibility, thereby setting the figure of the sexual predator against the family provider, the responsible male adult who domesticated predatory sexual compulsion. Finally, in the move towards social individualization (Elias 1991 [1939-1987], Beck and BeckGernsheim 2002), some men cherish personal autonomy and are trying to create a place of their own, which involves finding strategies to rebuild the self in a traditionally feminine sphere. From a theoretical viewpoint, my key argument is that the composite character of masculinity, as a basic principle of power relations, did not simply result from the erosion of patriarchy. On the contrary, today’s plurality and hybridism is to a greater extent the development of contradictory forces contained in the traditional archetypes of masculinity. Evidently, new trends are also arising. The emphasis on personal autonomy, emerging from historical individualization, is leading men to change the material and mental sets of masculinity and domination. In this scenario, partnership and fatherhood gain a new value and a new instrumentality, as they have become as central to identity as the old patriarchal control was. However, the new male engagement in private life, a traditionally femininized sphere, is pervaded by the tensions between the predator and the provider, the dangerous and

Introduction

˘

the familial, the citizen and the father, thus generating ambivalence in the schemes of domination. These trends emerge within the historical changes that have underpinned massive transformations at the core of the gender order. In contemporary societies, the decline of Durkeim’s or Parsons’s earlier ‘modern family’, which were symbolically dominant until the late 1950s, had further implications for femininities, masculinities and – more importantly – the relationship between the two. Men are, to a great extent, invited to embrace ‘new expressive roles’ within the private sphere, beyond the traditional model of the authoritarian provider or the dominant sexual predator. In so doing, many men transform the old features of masculinity, yet masculinity, rather than a complete metamorphosis, often results from the mix of old and new. That is one of this book’s two chief premises. Another is that it is impossible to fully understand masculinity without looking into its connection with change in both the family and women. Two Case Studies in Contemporary Portugal Over the past few decades, gender relations in Portugal have changed dramatically, in tandem with the transition of the country from the condition of a poor and largely illiterate society to that of a modern, more developed, urban society (e.g. Wall 2001, Viegas and Costa 2000, Aboim and Marinho 2006). In 1960, a third of the population worked in agriculture, the fertility rate was 3.2, 90.7 per cent of marriages were in (the Catholic) church, and women were legally charged with management of the household and owed obedience to their husbands. Only 18 per cent were employed. Family organization was generally based on strong gender differentiation, an institutional orientation and a pattern of integration that associated the husband with autonomy and the public space. However, family life has changed enormously: in 2001 only 5 per cent of the population was employed in the primary sector, the number of children per woman was 1.5, 40 per cent of marriages were non-religious, 25 per cent of children were born outside marriage, the divorce rate rose to 1.8, 65 per cent of women between the ages of 15 and 64 were in full-time jobs, and both husband and wife were legally responsible for household life. The 1974 revolution and the subsequent introduction of democracy ended almost fifty years of right-wing dictatorship (1926-1974), bringing in clearcut changes in values and legislation, strong recognition of women’s work, the affirmation of secular tendencies, and a new logic for the state’s responsibility towards families. These are now some of the specific features of the national context in Portugal. They have contributed to developments in family patterns that reflect certain dissimilarities of outcome in relation to other southern European countries, e.g. the prevalence of dual-earner couples who work full-time, fairly high divorce rates, emphasis on the provision of child-care facilities, and links between family policy and policy for gender equality. At present, research has

˘


already pointed out important changes in the position of men in family life and has brought in new facts to help us understand persisting inequalities in gender relations (e.g. Aboim 2009, Wall 2008, Wall, Aboim and Marinho 2007). In the face of the rapid pace of change in gender relations, Portugal offers, quite clearly, a challenging profile that I explore in the last three chapters of the book. The empirical data used, particularly in Chapters 4 and 5, is drawn from two qualitative investigations, both of which aim at understanding the different scenarios of men’s practices, discourses and identities. My main concern was to know to what extent and in what way men and masculinities are changing. And, against this background, how gender domination is being reconstituted in a society that witnessed such a strong backlash against the enduring patriarchal model of the dictatorship period (1926-1974). Analysis of the interviews with Portuguese men carried out since 2005 has allowed identification of a number of important changes in a context where late processes of modernization have brought in a sweeping transformation in gender relations. Data from the first body of research mentioned above, which I analyse in Chapter 5, was collected in metropolitan Lisbon. In the period 2005/6, around 60 in-depth interviews were carried out with fathers, all of them heterosexual men, living in various household arrangements (conjugal, blended and lone father families). The main purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between the making of masculinities and the dynamics of family life among men with different family trajectories (e.g. Wall, Aboim and Marinho 2007). The comparative strategy of this research permitted a deeper understanding of the varied links between men, masculinity and family life, at the same time revealing the significance of this relationship. The second study, which was carried out some time after the first, adopted an intergenerational methodological design. Its results are partially described in Chapter 6. In total, 30 men were interviewed according to a narrative method aimed at exploring social change in men’s discourses on sexuality, intimate relationships and their most significant life events. Ten three-generational male family lineages were covered by the research – grandfathers, fathers and grandsons, who live, at present, in urban Lisbon and rural, semi-industrialized Mondim de Basto (northern Portugal) and belong to families from different class backgrounds. Although these are genealogical generations (Manheim 1956), each generation of interviewees also experienced their adolescence and youth in â•… This research was funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation, a public entity, and, at the time, was coordinated by Karin Wall, in the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon. â•… The research on male family lineages was also funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation. Interviews with family lineages were carried out using a snowball sampling method, in two regional settings, from September 2007 to May 2008. Families were selected according to the educational attainment of the younger generation: basic, secondary or higher education.

Introduction

˘

different historical times (Viegas and Costa 2000). The grandfathers lived under the right-wing authoritarian and colonialist regime of the Estado Novo (19261974). They were privileged witnesses of the country’s gradual transition from a profoundly rural society, generally illiterate and poor, to an increasingly urban society. In the late 1950s and the 1960s, Portugal started industrializing and developing a modern service sector, though, at the same time, it was enduring the limitations of a long-lasting dictatorship involved in a colonial war on three fronts. In the 1960s, women were compelled to enter the labour market en masse due to the lack of men in the workforce: the men had either emigrated to richer European countries or were fighting in the colonial war in Africa. The fathers’ generation represents the country of the revolutionary changes of 1974 and after: the overthrow of the authoritarian regime in a left-wing military coup, which brought about the destruction of the economic elites and nationalization of the main productive activities; the establishment of the rule of law in a democratic system with universal and equal civil rights; and the development of a European Union oriented policy from the outset. The grandsons, in their turn, represent those born and raised in the Portugal of the European Union, who benefited from the massive developments achieved over the last few decades in an increasingly modern and urban society, They are much more highly qualified, work in a modern and globalized market economy, and already live under the banner of gender-egalitarian ideologies. Regional diversity was also a criterion in the choice of family lineages, since Portugal has developed at a highly asymmetric pace, with the predictable rise in sharp territorial differences. Although the empirical data used in this book focuses on the Portuguese case, I would argue strongly that the research carried out in Portugal may account for more than just a specific southern European reality. Clearly, the exact degree of inter-applicability of the conclusions with other national scenarios would have to be the subject of further study. But, in all cases, the main conclusions of both the studies described above can help us advance our understanding of the plural ways in which men live their lives and (re)construct their identities. Chapter Outline From the point of view of internal organization, the book is divided into six main chapters. The first three are theoretical. The last three are empirical. The first chapter intends to connect the scholarship on men and masculinities with feminist theorizations of gender. The concern with men as gendered subjects and the theorization about masculinities can only be fully understood when placed in the broader history of feminism and its relationship with essentialism, reification and categorization in gender analysis. My main purpose is to go beyond the â•… In the 1940s and 1950s, more than half the labour force worked in agriculture and 97 per cent of individuals were illiterate or had a maximum of four years’ primary education.

10


simple statement that masculinities are empirically plural, thus engaging in a more thorough discussion of the theoretical move from gender dualism to pluralism, as a generative principle of society and individuality. In Chapter 2, I address some of the virtues and difficulties emerging from the theorization of hegemonic masculinity and male plurality. To a great extent, these are reflections that resulted from my analysis of ‘complicit masculinities’, which appear in the last chapters of the book. First of all, I argue for the need to develop the dialogue between structuralist and discursive approaches to power. Reasoning about issues of multiplicity and difference implies setting a wider range of male configurations of practice, rather than limiting them, a priori, to a fixed structure of opposing, even if varied, positions, however tentative and tricky this may be. The bricolage of masculinities is seen as resulting from processes of material and cultural appropriation that underlie the hybrid character of any masculinity. This assumption ties in with the overall argument of the book and proposes that male power is dependent not only on its ability to dominate the dominated, but also stems from ongoing inner struggles between different forms of domination. In this line of reasoning, Chapter 3 addresses the making of masculinities in the private sphere, proposing that only through a genealogy of the public/private distinction will we be able to understand many of the tensions and hybridisms that constitute masculinities and are closely related to the historical construction of the modern family. The first empirical chapter (Chapter 4) intends to provide the reader with a broad cross-national view of the attitudes and practices regarding the division of labour among contemporary couples. I explore the ways in which men and women relate to cultural aspects of gender in different Western societies, via a comparison of the US and the European countries included in the module of the 2002 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) on Family and Changing Gender Roles. In the light of the transformations occurring in the gender division of labour at many levels it is important to discover the extent to which individuals, men and women living in different national contexts, value the ideal of a ‘dual earner/dual carer couple’ to the detriment of the male breadwinner model. Chapters 5 and 6 focus specifically on Portugal. The aim of Chapter 5 is to show how contemporary heterosexual masculinities are built, in private life, upon an array of symbolic models and are enacted through men’s ongoing appropriation of different features. Patchwork and ‘bricolage’ characterize masculinities to the extent that these are processes inherent to the constitution of the self (Lash 1999). As argued above, men’s different routes to change involve tensions between different, historically anchored, archetypes of masculinity: the ‘sexual predator’, the ‘family provider’, the ‘respectable public man’. Finally, Chapter 6 focuses on the importance of (hetero)sexuality to the enactment of masculinity, offering the reader a view of the generational changes that, among Portuguese men, have occurred in the discourses about sex and sexuality.

Introduction

11

Each chapter ends with a brief summary and discussion of the main arguments and results. The conclusion of the book intends to move the debate on the pluralization of men and masculinities a step forward, thus presenting some thought-provoking reflections on the meanings of the plural changes that are currently taking place in men’s lives.


Chapter 1

From Dualism to Pluralism: The Power of Categories and the Making of Gender One of the most common assumptions about masculinity is to recognize its plurality and, therefore, to address it as masculinities. After so much writing and discussion on the subject, to say that masculinity and men are plural seems rather a plain and even obvious conclusion. However, this verbal construct is far more powerful than it appears to be at first glance, as J.L. Austin, an influential ordinary language philosopher in the 1950s, would certainly agree. In his famous book, How to Do Things with Words (1962), Austin was essentially concerned with the use of language within social contexts or, in other words, with its sociological grounding. In this sense, ‘things are done with words’: they are transformed and legitimized through the performative character of language, an assumption that complies with the poststructuralist emphasis on culture and discourses as the primary sources of differentiation (e.g. Scott 1986, Butler 1991). Encompassing contemporary feminisms, this cultural turn, which envisages gender as a main discursive metaphor for exercising power, is nowadays associated with what a variety of authors, following the developments in feminist theory, label as an emerging third wave in approaches to men and masculinities (Whitehead 2002, Edwards 2006, Haywood and Mac an Ghail 2003, Garlick 2003, among others). In this perspective, masculinities must no longer be confined to the limited, though multiple, positions and ideologies that may be derived from material and structural relations. Quite the opposite, their polymorphous reality (which the French sociologist Christine Castelain Meunier [2005] calls the ‘polyculture of masculinity’) should be based on the unlimited proliferation of discourses and symbolic references that construct fluid difference rather than fixed identity. Hence, categories that name ‘men as men’ and ‘women as women’ should be considered suspicious and ultimately dismissed. The critical discussion around the cleavage between structural and discursive approaches to gender and masculinities will be critically readdressed in the course of this chapter, with consideration being given to its importance to the current state of the art. However, at this moment, my purpose is more modest and simply intends to invite the reader to reflect upon the forces immanent in words and their use. In this sense, the act of stating that â•… For an illuminating discussion of the problem of naming men as men see Hearn, 1999 and 2004.

14


masculinities are plural is not merely descriptive of a given empirical reality but rather reinforces a particular way of theoretical doing which, in short, embraces at least two paradigmatic revolutions in a Kuhnian sense (Kuhn 1996). In the struggle against Cartesian dualisms, which resiliently divided the world and its actors into binary and normally symmetrical forms and categories, a philosophical language of multiplicity was born, unveiling the complexity of social processes and social selves, whether plurality was emerging from multiple materially anchored positions in the social world or from the cultural multiplicity of discourses. Secondly, ever since Marx (1988 [1844]) presented historical configurations as resulting from class struggles for power, social theory – and, later on, critical feminist, gender and masculinity theories – developed an ongoing reflection on issues of domination, as both an omnipresent and insidious phenomenon. In this chapter, my purpose is therefore to go beyond the simple statement that masculinities are empirically plural, although maintaining their dominant and dominating force in the social world. A more thorough discussion of the meanings of plurality, as a generative principle of society and individuality, while linked to particular visions of power and the self, is needed in order to understand how men and gender relations are changing and becoming visibly more complex in contemporary societies. More importantly, the concern with men as gendered subjects and the theorization about masculinities can only be fully understood when placed in the broader history of feminism and of its relationship with essentialism, reification and categorization in gender analysis. A Trap for the Mind: Constructing a World of Dichotomies In daily life we are used to naming things and persons using categories, which are most often dichotomized, with unreflexive naturalness. It is precisely because the permanent naming of things is historically constructed upon hierarchical principles that the French feminist anthropologist Françoise Héritier remains pessimistic about the real possibility of gender equality. According to her, ‘to think is above all to classify’. As such, the order of gender may change, but the simple act of giving things a name always implies renewed, even if different, forms of differentiation (Héritier 2005). When we think of the general categories of men and women, we tend to imagine two discrete groupings, even if in a second step we are capable of breaking up the â•… This statement is taken from an interview Héritier gave to the French newspaper La Croix on 9 November 1998, where she was discussing the legal viability of same-sex marriage in France. A neat critique of this ‘defence of cultural difference’ is provided by Judith Butler (2002: 29), when she states: ‘The belief is that culture itself requires that a man and a woman produce a child and that the child have this dual point of reference for its own initiation into the symbolic order, where the symbolic order consists of a set of rules that order and support our sense of reality and cultural intelligibility.’

From Dualism to Pluralism

15

false uniformity that is primarily given by the fact that names serve the purpose of making reality intelligible to our cognition. So men or women may be black or white, young or old, African or Asian, heterosexual or gay, but these are always sub-categories of a major category, in this case, gender. Once babies are born, they are transformed into social beings only because a certain gender category is imposed upon them, thereby giving them an identity (e.g. Vasconcelos 2004). The recognition of this difference, always an act of symbolic violence according to Bourdieu (2001), is immediately expressed in the naming: being called Mary or John encapsulates, from the start, a principle of differentiation that accompanies individuals, at least the great majority of them, throughout their lives. In the simple and common act of naming – the basic mental device through which we make sense of the world – we use forms of dichotomous thinking deeply rooted in history. Every day we engage in what, when defining reification processes, Axel Honneth calls the ‘forgetfulness of recognition’. As he writes: ‘Unlike a category mistake, reification refers to something that is not simply epistemic, but a habit or form of behaviour’ (Honneth 2008: 52-3). Systems of conviction, whether racism, machismo or any other form of fundamentalism, contribute to blocking, through simplification, what he believes to be the initial recognition of the other. As in the view of de Beauvoir (1972 [1949]), the other is excluded from the general norm, even stripped of her creative power in Marxist terms (Marx 1988 [1844]). When we talk of men and women as discrete opposites we are, therefore, engaging in a reductionism that deprives individuals of their full complexity, at the same time as diminishing our ability to grasp diversity. As Ann Oakley (1992: xi) argues, ‘the habit of thinking in dichotomies’ puts ‘an embargo on both/sometimes-the-one, sometimes-the other, possibilities’. Such an everyday process of dichotomization has, however, a very long history. In the seventeenth century, Descartes (1984 [1637-1647]) built his philosophy of knowledge upon the primary distinction between mind and body. This ‘Cartesian dualism’ of substance, though challenged from the outset, is widely regarded as having had a major influence on the development of Western scientific thought, where dualistic principles have been of crucial importance. In fact, they are still exerting influence in spite of a paradigmatic change towards pluralism, i.e. the view that there are many kinds or categories rather than just two opposite â•… For a thorough discussion of de Beauvoir’s work in the light of feminist theory, see Margaret A. Simons (1995) and Debra Bergoffen (1997). â•… The classical emphasis originates in Plato’s Phaedo. Plato believed that true substances are not physical bodies, which are ephemeral, but the eternal Forms of which bodies are imperfect copies (Broadie 2001). â•… One of Descartes’ first opponents was Spinoza (1632-1677), who, even though supporting the same differentiation, discarded the opposition between body and soul in favour of a double-aspect theory, where both terms are simply aspects of the same substance (God, in this case). Mind and body exist in pre-established coordination, since the same divine essence forms their connections (Wozniak 1995).

16


poles. Quite often, reality is still understood through specific sets of dichotomous pairings, such as reason/emotion, normal/deviant, culture/nature, public/private, structure/agency, objectivity/subjectivity, traditional/modern or post-modern, hard/soft and, of course, male/female, men/women or masculinity/femininity. Binary oppositions have long been linked to the conception of man and woman and we can certainly agree with Derrida’s assumption (1972) that dualisms are normally implicated in discrete relationships of power and privilege. The power of men is far from being a modern invention, though modern science has transformed religious justification into scientific argumentation and regulation, as Foucault explains in The History of Sexuality (1979). In the religious thought of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) the Aristotelian dualism between matter and spirit appeared clearly associated with male superiority over imperfect female bodies, creating a system of hierarchical difference difficult to elude within Christianity (Bebel 1879): In perfect animals, generated by coition, the active force is in the semen of the male; but the foetal matter is provided by the female … And after the sensitive soul, by the power of the active principle in the semen, has been produced in one of the principal parts of the thing generated, then it is that the sensitive soul of the offspring [the foetus] begins to work towards the perfection of its own body, by nourishment and growth. (St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II, q. 18, art. 1, ad 4.)

The cultural embeddedness of dualist thinking has strong roots in history, from Plato to sociological functionalism in the 1950s. Tentative new theoretical insights, such as that of Shadworth Holloway Hodgson (1832-1912), who in the nineteenth century proposed a Theory of Practice (1870) in which the mind was conceived as an epiphenomenon of interaction, did not succeed in overcoming dualistic frameworks: they survived almost untouched until a few decades ago. The truth is that Pierre Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice, published in 1972, which aimed to display a form of constructivist structuralism capable of moving beyond the classical agency/structure dualism, appeared as a novelty in the field, at least to some extent. Dichotomies may have changed with the development of scientific discourses, but their strength has been particularly relevant with regard to gender differentiation. Women are soft and men hard, women are natural and men cultural, women are private and men public, women are emotional and men rational and instrumental. A great part, if not the whole, of gender history reflects the naturalization of socially constructed differentiation, as a major form of symbolic violence, as Bourdieu (1977, 2002) notes. Examining the nature of the mind/body dualism in the earlier philosophies of Aristotle, Hegel or Descartes, the feminist philosopher Susan Bordo (1993) claims that this founding dichotomy has contributed to solidifying the division between male and female as the transmutation of the opposition between mind/active and body/passive, thus reifying gender characteristics as


17

fixed categories. The fact is that while men have been associated with the mind or the soul (St. Thomas Aquinas’ superior form), women have been imprisoned in the body (the inferior matter subordinated to form). In her feminist critique of dichotomies, Raia Prokhovnik (2003) identifies four key features of binary thinking, which apply perfectly to processes of gender dualism: the enlargement of difference so that it can be viewed as an opposition, each part being defined by its not being the other; the hierarchical sorting of pairs according to principles of domination/subordination; the belief that the pair contains the whole range of potential variation; finally, the principle that the subordinate element of the pair can only gain value by becoming like the dominant part of the dichotomy. Each tenet describes a specific form of reductionism that marks its presence, to a greater or lesser extent, in the forms through which gender difference has been approached and discussed. The Exaggeration of Difference The exaggeration of hierarchically constructed difference has been centre-stage to modern imaginaries of gender. One of the main fields for this process was eighteenth and nineteenth century biology, where a unified vision of the body was substituted by sexual dimorphism, whose ‘obviousness’ is more recent than is usually imagined, in the common sense. As the historian Thomas Laqueur (1992) points out, before the eighteenth century, a unisex model seems to have dominated philosophical and medical thought in Europe. In this model, ‘men and women were arrayed according to their degree of metaphysical perfection, their vital heat, along an axis whose telos was male’ (Laqueur 1992: 5-6). A woman was basically an imperfect man. However, with the development of medical science, instead of an imperfect male, the woman became a sexual being in herself, above all a uterus whose difference from the ‘universal male form’ ought to be further investigated, precisely because it was a difference, a mystery to be unveiled (Berriot-Salvadore 1993, St-Hilaire 1998). The history of sex as biologically defined, more than â•… An example of the institutionalization of medically legitimated difference is, for instance, the medical history of hysteria, a disease only diagnosed in women, which became quite ‘widespread’ in the nineteenth century. At the time, physicians believed that nearly a quarter of women suffered from hysteria, particularly when in conditions of sexual abstinence. Rachael P. Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria’, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (1999), observes that, due to the huge number of possible symptoms, almost every woman could suffer from this deviant condition. Ironically, hysteria was the reason behind the development of vibrators, designed to substitute the pelvic massage that doctors performed as the most common treatment of the disease. Interestingly, hysteria was also diagnosed in men, notwithstanding the female nature of the disease. The Portuguese poet Antero de Quental (1842-1891), who suffered from a long-lasting nervous breakdown, was one of the first to be diagnosed by Charcot, who declared, ‘You have a woman’s disease, you are carrying it in your masculine body’ (Carreiro 1981).

18


a ‘natural’ outcome of scientific discovery, is also the result of a deeply rooted ideological construction. Feminist biologists such as Hélène Rouch (2004) or Anne Fausto-Sterling (1993, 1995, 2000) invite us to denaturalize male/female differences, given that biological sex is more a continuum than it is a dichotomy. Fausto-Sterling asserts that 1.7 per cent of human births are intersex. In her book Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (FaustoSterling 2000), she continues to sustain her earlier findings regarding intersex conditions (e.g. Fausto-Sterling 1993), thus advocating that human sexuality should be conceived not as a dichotomy but as a continuum. Such a denaturalizing conception is certainly thought-provoking and even threatening to the common orthodoxy. Evolutionary biologists (those who Stephen Jay Gould [1997] normally refers to as ‘Darwinian fundamentalists’) often react negatively to it, profiting from media popularity to disseminate reifying and fatalist ideas about sex differences. Desmond Morris’ Naked Ape (1967) is exemplary in its defence of sex differences as determined by biological evolution. Polygamy or infidelity are mainly male behaviours, while female lips or hips are cleverly designed to capture the attraction of drifting males. Designed over the last ten thousand years, sex differences would thus meet the challenges of pre-historic life as a hunter-gatherer, where men hunted and women were in charge of collecting berries and seeds. In 2004, Morris published The Naked Woman. A Study of the Female Body, whose chapters describe parts of the body from an evolutionary point of view ultimately based on the omnipresence of inherited and geneticallyinscribed dynamics of supremacy and subordination, which fit a naturalized view of women as nurturers, communicational beings and child-rearers. Despite decades of critical reaction and all the feminist (and pro-feminist) scholarship, the reproduction of beliefs about the scientific character of sex differences remains a popular strategy with the media. Stamped with the mark of science, documentaries such as John Stossel’s Boys and Girls Are Different: Men, Women and the Sex Difference, broadcast by the television channel ABC in 1998, still have a major impact in forming common beliefs. The exaggeration of difference remains strong at present and is resisting, sometimes clearly in its death throes, the critical deconstruction of the masculine status quo. From the eighties onwards, the proliferating discourses about the ‘crisis of masculinity’ have been, in great part, a result of the inability to cope with change and the loss of unquestioned supremacy in a patriarchal gender order. As Lynne Segal writes in the introduction of the third edition of Slow Motion (Segal â•… Intersex births refer to a variety of situations. Occasionally a child is born with genitalia which cannot be classified as female or male. A genetically female child (i.e. with XX chromosomes) may be born with external genitalia that appear to be those of a male. Or a genetically male child (XY chromosomes) may be born with apparently female external genitalia. In very rare cases, a child may be born with both female and male genitalia. Because these conditions are in some sense ‘in between ‘the two sexes, they are collectively referred to as intersex situations.


19

2007: xviii-xix), first published in 1990: ‘After feminism, it would seem, things have never been the same for men.’ Groups have been formed and books published in order to defend the masculine essence, a certain kind of ‘macho mystique’ of the lost wild warrior. An illustration is Robert Bly’s Iron John (1990), where John Wayne appears as the protagonist of an ideal masculinity, mobilized by a variety of conservative groups (e.g. Lienesch 2004). In the US, Bly’s influence on the conservative backlash against feminism and the rising critical approach towards men and masculinities led the Wall Street Journal’s journalist Susan Faludi to carry out a thorough investigation of this ‘war’ against feminism and women (Faludi 1991). She describes the activism of Bly and his aggressive position towards women in these terms (Faludi 1991: 311): A woman in the audience asks if he’s saying that the women’ movement is to blame. ‘The men’s movement is not a response to the women’s movement’, he says. A few moments later, though, he is back warning men in the audience to beware of ‘the force-field of women’. When another woman in the crowd points out the contradiction, he gets mad. He picks up the microphone and marches over to the troublemaker, a frail elderly woman clutching a flowered tote bag. He sticks his face in hers and yells into the microphone, ‘It’s women like you who are turning men into yogurt-eaters.’ Embarrassed, the woman tries to appease the fuming poet: in a quavery voice, she asks if he has ‘any suggestions’ about how she can improve her relationship with her emotionally distant husband. ‘Why don’t you stop making demands and leave him alone?’ Bly shouts. ‘Just leave him alone.’

Out of Fear: Resisting Femininity Alongside this bluntly sexist definition of the crisis, a range of discourses has recently portrayed the growing tendency towards the feminization of masculinity, a process through which men have lost their traditional guiding symbols: strength, sexual virility, the breadwinning capacity – in short, their phalocentric power, as Göran Therborn (2004) stresses when he refers to the erosion of patriarchy as a major transformation occurring in the course of the last century. While the fallacy of the supremacy of masculinity is recognized, in giving men the role of the victim, a certain form of reversed dualism is, perhaps unwillingly, being produced. In this sense, it is as if men had lost their bearings in the game (Bourdieu’s illusio) through which they were dominant, even if unconsciously or complicitly (to use Connell’s terminology). What follows is confusion and even psychological trauma, an idea well expressed in films such as Forrest Gump (1994), Fight Club (1999), Magnolia or Mystic River (2003). In each of these films, the instability of the â•… For an overview of the debate around the alleged ‘crisis of masculinity’, see Heartfield (2000).

20


masculine condition and the weaknesses of its founding fictions were emphasized in one way or the other. The feminization of masculinity is above all connected with what has been interpreted as an ‘emotionalization’ of society (Lupton 1998, Yates 2007), a historical movement identified by family historians such as Edward Shorter (1975) and Philipe Ariès (1965) or the sociologist Anthony Giddens (1992), and one that some theoreticians, like Richard Sennett (1986), see as negatively narcissistic. Making society more feminine, if this were in fact true, would lead, in this view, to an egotistic culture driven by unregulated emotions and an overwhelming obsession with the body and beauty. Important things such as democracy and the public sphere, where men were and still are dominant, would lose their vigour in face of this new world of stereotypically feminine emotionalism. As a result, consumer culture, originally designed for women, imposes its values upon men (Bocock 1993, Lury 1996). An extreme example is the ‘creation’ of the figure of the metrosexual, an expression increasingly popular to describe men’s concern with bodily beauty. The term was coined by Mark Simpson in the article ‘Here come the mirror men’, published in 1994 (The Independent, 15 November 1994), and was made iconic by men like the British footballer David Beckham. A metrosexual represents the perfect intersection between narcissism and consumer culture in a context where men are being invited to identify with the imagery of sexualized objects (Faludi 1999, Bordo 1999, Gill, Henwood and McLean 2005). It has been argued that consumer concern with the body has created new sets of insecurities about measuring up to the male body images projected. As Faludi argues: ‘The gaze that hounds men is the very gaze that women have been trying to escape’ (1999: 5). In a way, in her book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, Faludi (1999) has turned from the backlash against feminism to the backlash against the American male. At the core of her argumentation is the idea that the average man has been forced to develop feminine features, which makes him more vulnerable. The irony of these recent developments is that they seem more concerned with men’s frailty than with men’s power and domination. Susan Bordo’s book, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private (1999), also pictures men as vulnerable and victimized, even brutalized by mass culture, as contemporary societies no longer value the traditional codes of manhood. Even the phallus, enduringly symbolic of masculine domination but denounced by a range of feminist scholars (e.g. MacKinnon 1983, Segal 2007: 174), has become a source of anxiety for men. Today, Bordo writes: ‘The humongous penis, like the idealized female body, is a “cultural fantasy”, one that metaphorically turns the penis into a useful tool, more like a dildo than anything made of flesh’ (1999: 71). Over-worried with things such as penis size, men suffer greatly from this growing â•… According to the 2007 Global Gender Gap Report the gap between women and men in economic participation and political empowerment remains wide: only 58 per cent of the economic outcomes gap and only 14 per cent of the political outcomes gap has been closed.


21

objectification, almost as if women have always been keener on accepting the pressures of subordination. The recognition of men’s frailty has of course quite positive effects in deconstructing the myths of masculine invulnerability. Nowadays, even the belief that men’s sexuality constitutes the key variable in their domination over women is shaken by the discovery that many men are unable to meet the ideal models. As Segal puts it, one must not take symbols as real things, ‘So the question remains: to what extent does the actual reality of men’s sexual lives, the deployment of the penis, give men power and control over women?’ (Segal 2007: 177). And at a later point she adds: ‘Heterosexual performance may be viewed as the mainstay of masculine identity, but its enactment does not in itself give men power over women’ (Segal 2007: 178).10 The universal character of masculinity is obviously questioned, when a plurality of competing models, most of them unattainable to the average man, imposes itself upon the myth of a single modern form of man and masculinity (Whitehead 2002). Instead, there are too many media-inspired images of ‘perfect masculinity’, and most of them emphasize the bodily configuration of men (Pope, Philips and Olivardia 2000). Athletes and super-heroes, models and actors represent the key traits of ideal masculinity, despite the fragmentary and ambivalent character of these highly valued and regularly unattainable features, which generate anxiety and frustration among many men (Donaldson 1993). However, it is important not to forget that, alongside these developments, men remain not only the dominant actors in politics and business, but are also the main perpetrators of violence against women and children (e.g. Hearn 1998a; Websdale and Chesney-Lind 1998, Welzer-Lang 1991). Furthermore, there is a residual dualism hidden in this concern with the ‘feminization’ of men. Not only have men felt disoriented because they have lost their unquestioned social superiority, but they also feel disoriented because they are incorporating traces of femininity. Instead of fitting into the popular androgynous ideal of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Bem 1974), femininity ends up, so it seems, by confusing those who embrace it, willingly or not. In a way, this happens, or is said to happen, because men ‘lose their gender’ as it was defined traditionally. If we recall de Beauvoir’s writings, it does not appear to be enough to be presented as a man, at least not anymore. Even if there is some truth in this view, it can still be an extremely short-sighted manoeuvre to forget about the strength of masculine domination. The Fallacy of Sex Roles: The Scienti.cation of Differ ence As noted earlier, dichotomies are imagined to contain all possible variations within them. In this perspective, an individual is either a man or a woman and is expected to behave as such whether biological or social determinism is the criterion. The 10â•… The issue of male sexuality is addressed from an empirical standpoint in Chapter 6.

22


rigidity of fixed gender identities has been strongly questioned by poststructuralist feminisms, and in their critical analyses of both traditional sex-role theory and gender categoricalism (Connell 1987). In spite of its importance in the recognition of the socially constructed character of adult personality, the concept of gender can be critically viewed as a trap of dualist thinking as it tends to reproduce the dichotomy between nature/sex and culture/gender. In fact, the concept ‘gender’ – more precisely that of ‘gender role’ – was used for the first time in the 1950s by the sexologist John Money11 (Money and Ehrhardt 1972) in a discourse meant to legitimize sex change (Hausman 1995). It began to be employed in the social sciences from the late 1960s onwards (Unger 1979). When it was first presented, the distinction between sex and gender was meant to emphasize the fact that the differences between women and men are not a natural outcome of biological difference (Unger and Crawford 1993), though they are built upon sex. But the history of the concept of gender then reflects the second-wave feminist struggle against the hegemony of sex-role theory, which was predominant in the 1950s. Betty Friedan’s classic of liberal feminism The Feminine Mystique (1963) strongly criticizes sex-role theory but ends up falling into a similar theoretical trap. Departing from an individualistic perspective on women’s ability to change their identities and expectations, Friedan neglects issues of power at the societal level and ultimately seems to be blaming women for their subordination to the ‘nurturer mystique’ of the housewife/mother figure promoted by the patriarchal system (Whelehan 1996: 36). Established as paradigmatic under the influence of functionalism theory, promoted by Talcott Parsons (Parsons 1949, Parsons and Bales 1955), sex roles were seen as the result of proper socialization though also as an indispensable factor in the functioning of society as a whole. In 1974, the publication of The Psychology of Sex Differences by Maccoby and Jacklin was highly influential with regard to the importance of socialization to the formation of sex differences between girls and boys, even though Maccoby has more recently (1998) abandoned the restrictive view of socialization-driven theories. Although not biologically determined, different social roles were, almost naturally, ascribed to men and women: men were supposed to be the breadwinners and women mainly the nurturers. Sexual difference provided the initial matter upon which culture would also act differently. According to Sigmund Freud, whose work was a landmark in the rise of nonbiological accounts of gender behaviour, differences between men and women emerged ultimately from ‘penis envy’, the female counterpart of male castration

11â•… In 1955, Money adopted the term gender (a word hitherto used to designate whether nouns are feminine, masculine, or neuter) in order to distinguish femaleness and maleness from biological sex. By reworking the idea of gender in this way, Money opened a whole new field of research.


23

anxiety.12 In a text that Freud wrote in 1925, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction between the Sexes’, he claims (Freud 1925: 253): After a woman has become aware of the wound to her narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority. When she has passed beyond her first attempt at explaining her lack of a penis as being a punishment personal to herself and has realized that that sexual character is a universal one, she begins to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is the lesser in so important a respect, and, at least in holding that opinion, insists on being like a man.

Women’s inferiority was ironically the result of a biological difference: the lack of a penis. However, Freud ultimately admitted a few years later, in 1933, that his understanding of women was quite limited. ‘That is all I have to say to you about femininity’, he wrote (Jones 1961: 362). Though the product of developmental processes, the differences between men and women were a pattern that was thought of as universal, or at least almost universal: exceptions (homosexuality for instance) were normally considered deviant forms of behaviour. Well-fitted to maintaining heterosexual men’s dominance, the sex/gender role perspective prevailed over other efforts, such as those put forward by the psychoanalyst Robert Stoller (1968), who defied Freud’s conception of a biologically based bisexuality. According to Stoller, it was rather the collective imaginary that formed behaviour and sexual difference, a conclusion quite similar to the position of second-wave feminist criticism. It was, however, within the paradigm of sex-roles that masculinity became an object of research. In 1976, Joseph Pleck published, in the Journal of Social Issues, a set of studies concerned with male sex-role identity, which had suffered profound transformations from a traditional to a modern style. The quick pace of change probably produced a gap between the ideal roles of masculinity and the lives of real men; therefore, following one of the central tenets of sex-role theory, Pleck advocated that, in identity formation, this gap would be problematic for the majority of men. In 1981, he published The Myth of Masculinity, presenting a position that was now critical of sex-role theory, which he accused of rigid normativity and the incapacity to cope with social change. In short, Pleck argued even at that point that the male sex role was unsuitable for describing the whole range of men’s experiences. The major problem with sex role theory, which still survives in certain fields today as the outcome of a particular form of gender politics (Connell 1995), was that it suffered from yet another kind of dualism. Not only had it legitimized a 12â•… Freud proposed that during the phallic stage (around ages 3-5) girls realized that they did not have a penis and therefore devoted their affection to their father. While Freud believed that his discovery of the oedipal complex and related theories such as castration anxiety and penis envy were his greatest accomplishments, these theories are perhaps his most criticized, particularly by feminist scholarship (e.g. Karen Horney 1993 [1922]).

24


hierarchical dichotomy between men and women, but had also put a distance between roles and mind or, in other words, between society and individual, thus undermining every possibility, unless under the stigma of deviance, of approaching gender plurality, whether women or men were being analysed.13 But then in the 1970s everything started to change. With the appearance of feminism and gay liberation a revolution was in the making. A Revolution in the Making: Naming the Oppressor Even if paradigmatically revolutionary, the theoretical proposals of feminism did not fully bring down gender dichotomies. ‘To make the personal political’, a slogan coined by Carol Hanisch (2007 [1967]) and destined to become synonymous with second-wave feminism, implied a generous dose of category reification as a weapon in the struggle against oppression.14 As argued by Anne Oakley (1985 [1972]), one of the first scholars to make use of the concept of gender, the conceptualization of gender is the main cornerstone of second-wave feminism and also its most profound strength in resisting the lasting effects of sex-role theory. This ‘gendering’ of the categories ‘men’ and ‘women’ was a necessary first step towards emancipation. People, in this case women, had to have an ‘identity’ in order to be mobilized for political struggle. To put it simply, the mark of dichotomous thinking was still imprinted on second-wave feminisms, either because women and femininity moved upwards in the hierarchy of gender as a result of their particular character, a strategy most common to certain developments in radical feminist scholarship, or because, as Raia Prokhovnik (2003) noted, the end of subordination implied that women became more like men, the dominant part of the dichotomous pair, an argument mostly applied to liberal feminism. ‘In short, the political significance of dichotomous thinking is that it maintains inequalities of power’, notes Judith Squires (1999: 127). The important issue was that categories were now being erected to reverse the traditional order of masculine domination. Joan Scott (1988: 38) clearly summarizes this theoretical discussion as an ‘equality-versusdifference’ division: In the past few years, ‘equality-versus-difference’ has been used as a shorthand to characterize conflicting feminist positions and political strategies. Those who argue that sexual difference ought to be an irrelevant consideration in schools, 13â•… Today the idea of gender roles is part of the common imaginary as a well-rooted cultural construction. Chapter 5 will address the extent to which male discourses measure the distance (almost similarly to Goffman’s (1959, 1971) concept of ‘role distance’) between their behaviour in daily life and the ideal roles they believe it is their function to fulfil. 14â•… For a critique of this perspective, see John Macinnes’s The End of Masculinity (1998), in which the author inverts this formulation and argues that it is the personal that enables the political.


25

employment, the courts, and the legislature are put in the equality category. Those who insist that appeals on behalf of women ought to be made in terms of the needs, interests, and characteristics common to women as a group are placed in the difference category. In the clashes over the superiority of one or another of these strategies, feminists have invoked history, philosophy, and morality and have devised new classificatory labels: cultural feminism, liberal feminism, feminist separatism, and so on.

It is difficult, if not unfeasible, to summarize the complex pathways of feminist scholarships in just a few words or paragraphs.15 And to engage in such a discussion is not the intention of this book, either. Even so, the tensions between gender dualism and pluralism can only be understood through feminism(s). It is within feminist critical scholarship that the contemporary history of the gender categories of man and woman was greatly rebuilt in academic and political terms as an issue of domination. But whether categories take binary or multiple forms, they are one of the main problems for anyone who wants to find a way through in dealing with plurality without falling into the complete fragmentation of the subject, on the one hand, or a one-dimensional deterministic view of the relations between men and women, whether materially or culturally based, on the other. In short, feminist approaches have not been immune to the long-lasting effects of the dualist epistemological constitution of the social sciences, which are so often permeated by an array of divisions structured around binary oppositions. Nevertheless, they have been, and still are, deeply engaged in different theoretical traditions. According to Connell (1987: 57), ‘Categoricalism came from a number of sources: structuralism, biologism and the sheer rhetorical appeal of large plain categories for mobilizing political action. It has remained important because it met the need for a clear cut alternative to liberal individualism and role theory.’ Expressing the classical opposition between collectivism and individualism, liberal feminism drew on the liberal concept of autonomy to develop a positive account of power as a distributable resource. Thus, following the Hobbesian idea that rights of liberty and property can be transferred from one person to another by means of a legal contract (Clegg 1989), liberal feminism saw the enlargement of individually attributed social rights as the key move in the fight against the subordination of women. For liberal feminists, such as Betty Friedan, all women are capable of asserting their ability to achieve equality, thus allowing for change to happen without really altering the structure of society. Implicit in this view is the assumption that power is ‘a kind of stuff that can be possessed by individuals in greater or lesser amounts’ (Young 1990a: 31). As a result, dualistic gender categories are not really deconstructed, but, quite the opposite, they are almost ignored as a locus of power and difference. Remembering de Beauvoir’s discussion on women as the immanent, permanently excluded, Other, the model of self 15â•… An excellent historical overview and discussion can be found in Imelda Whelehan’s book Modern Feminist Thought (1996).

26


underlying this proposition remains ultimately masculine. If it was just a matter of giving women the rights that are morally theirs and that men already have, then men would continue to be constructed as the universal neutral form of being. Granting women the right to vote, receive equal compensation for paid work and control their bodies and reproductive abilities, although of extreme importance for women’s citizenship, did not put an end to masculine domination nor did it root out patriarchy from western societies. This point is critically argued, for instance, by Nancy Fraser (1989, 1994). Achievements attained under the flag of equality, though of extreme and undeniable importance, have not completely eroded the power differential between men and women – in part, it may be argued, because it was simply supposed that women would in many ways be made equal to men as a result of their progressive autonomy as individuals (Whelehan 1996). A radically contrasting view to the liberal contractualist vision of women’s emancipation makes its case by advocating the suppression of all known institutions of gender oppression. An example can be found in Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), where the author claims that the only way to end the oppression of women would imply breaking down the biological bond between mother and child. Women should free themselves from biological reproduction, which she considered their fundamental weakness. Patriarchy, that is to say men, have exploited this feminine capacity in order to subjugate women. To reverse this state of affairs the monogamous nuclear family should be substituted by communes, and technological means, such as in vitro fertilization, should allow women to avoid biological pregnancy, which Firestone described as ‘barbaric’. Other examples of such a radical view of a ‘world without men’ are Mary Daly’s crusade for the defence of ‘elemental femininity’, which she defines as a superior inner or essential power that only women have. From the beginning of her work and the publication of Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978), Daly was never concerned with men, which she identifies one-dimensionally as oppressors. On the contrary, liberating women from long-lasting patriarchal oppression is only possible if a feminine space can be created. In an interview given to the Christian magazine Enlightenment in 1999, Daly clearly states: … I don’t think about men. I really don’t care about them. I’m concerned with women’s capacities, which have been infinitely diminished under patriarchy. Not that they’ve disappeared, but they’ve been made subliminal. I’m concerned with women enlarging our capacities, actualizing them. So that takes all my energy. I’m not interested in the differences between women and men. I really am totally uninterested in men’s capacities.16 16â•… This radical positioning was generally put forward by lesbian feminisms in the 1970s and early 1980s out of dissatisfaction with second-wave feminism and the gay liberation movement. In the works of Sheila Jeffreys, Marilyn Frye and Mary Daly, among others, the key common criticism is directed at heterosexuality as an institution that is meant to oppress women.


27

The work of the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin is also an example. In 1979, she published Pornography: Men Possessing Women, a book where she offers an extensive critique of pornography as a means to women’s dehumanization. She argues that pornography is a result and a consequence of the violence perpetrated against women: its consumption ultimately encourages men to eroticize the humiliation and abuse of women. Almost a decade later, in 1987, Dworkin extended her analysis to sexual intercourse, arguing that all heterosexual sex is coercive and degrading to women. The sexual act of penetration symbolizes and reproduces all women’s submission to a coercive patriarchal order, transforming them into passive beings. Thus, departing from these examples, it may be argued that – in contrast to liberal feminism – socialist, Marxist or radical feminisms have often fallen into what Connell (1987) labels categoricalism, setting men and women in opposition as if they were homogeneous blocks rather than heterogeneous groups of individuals. From this perspective, all women are equally oppressed and all have common interests and a common enemy to fight against: men. Unlike liberal feminists, for whom power is a positive social resource that should be fairly distributed, Marxist and radical feminists tend to understand power as a relation of dominance and subordination, often compared with the relationship between master and slave. Furthermore, alongside categoricalism, one-dimensional factors of oppression tend to be responsible for women’s collective subordination to men (Haywood and Mac an Ghail 2003). Nonetheless, it can be argued that the materially-based power of Marxism has yielded wider possibilities for exposing the domination of women, even if many feminists have criticized Marx’s model of class exploitation for being gender blind and ignoring the ways in which class exploitation and gender subordination are intertwined realities (e.g. Firestone 1970, Hartmann 1980, Hartsock 1983, Rubin 1975). Marx failed to notice women’s reproductive work and the exploitation of this work in capitalist modes of production. Hence, the main aim of Marxist feminists was to theorize class and gender domination in a single theory. In this line of reasoning, the French materialist feminist Christine Delphy, author of The Main Enemy (1977, 1984), considered domestic work as the key link between women’s experiences in daily life and the economic structures of capitalism. Men take advantage of women’s unpaid domestic labour. As such, society is produced in the intertwining of two major dynamics: the capitalist and the patriarchal modes of production. Women’s main rival is patriarchy, which guarantees male supremacy and the subordination of women at work and in the home as well as men’s control of women’s bodies through sexuality and violence (Brownmiller 1975). Eventually, the family becomes the main sphere of women’s oppression in the patriarchal system, a concept that Kate Millett (1971) introduced into contemporary feminist scholarship. In these earlier views, patriarchy as a concept did not surpass categoricalism. Men and masculinity were defined as a unified force of oppression – even if the term was and is mobilized by an array of feminist approaches, ranging between those subordinating gender inequality

28


to class inequality and those engaged in what is called ‘dual system theory’, a perspective that, in many ways, represents the combining of Marxist and radical feminist views on gender relations. Patriarchy and capitalism are now independent systems, though they are united with regard to the explanation of women’s subordination (Hartmann 1980). Labour and Sex: Groundbreaking Developments Indeed, a variety of approaches and theoretical syntheses were built upon the notion of patriarchy, whose literal meaning is the ‘rule of the father’, a rule guaranteeing men’s supremacy over women and children. For instance, Juliet Mitchell (1974) sought to reconcile patriarchy and psychoanalysis, an endeavour considered impossible by many. But in fact, departing from a Marxist perspective, she considers that a world free of patriarchy is only possible if children are to be raised without the fallacy of romance and the traditional nuclear family. If children were allowed to be set free from the Oedipus complex in this way, penis envy would no longer lead women to accept the notion of their own inferiority. The feeling of being castrated would then fade and, with it, the roots of gender oppression would be undermined. Heterosexual sex, rather than work, has been seen as the main arena for producing inequality and reproducing patriarchy (Young 1990a). Similarly, for Catherine MacKinnon, heterosexual intercourse symbolizes the paradigm of male domination. As she puts it, ‘the social relation between the sexes is organized so that men may dominate and women must submit and this relation is sexual – in fact, is sex’ (McKinnon 1987: 3). As a result, she suggests a dyadic conception of domination, according to which individual women are subject to the will of individual men. And it is precisely this domination, based on the individual but applicable to all men and women, that constructs gender differences. Another interesting account is found in the work of Gayle Rubin, who published The Traf.c of Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex in 1975, in which, from a theoretical perspective, she juxtaposed Freud and Levi-Strauss. She argued that it was difficult to explain women’s oppression in capitalist societies only by the utility of women’s work to the reproduction of capitalism. Rather, it was in history and its moral elements that we should be seeking the underlying causes of gender differentiation. Drawing on the differentiation/distinction by Engels (1986 [1884]) between relations of production and relations of sexuality, she constructed the concept of the ‘sex/gender system’, which is, in fact, more or less equivalent to the notion of patriarchy, though it explicitly encompasses sexuality. As she says (1975: 179), ‘at the most general level, the social organization of sex rests upon gender, obligatory heterosexuality and the constraint of female sexuality’. For Rubin, there is an economy of sex and gender whose aim is to establish difference. Similarity between men and women would be taboo in the sense Levi-Strauss gave to this idea.


29

Later on, in her book Thinking Sex (1984), Rubin follows Foucault in arguing for the separation of sexuality from feminist theory. Instead of justifying women’s oppression, sexuality was now defined as a system that cannot be reduced to sex or gender roles and cannot treat women and men as homogeneous groups. On the contrary, sexual oppression intersects with other forms of privilege and subordination (e.g. a gay man). Firstly used to reinforce the awareness of patriarchal oppression through the entrenchment of individuals in strictly defined gender categories, sexuality also constituted a major breakthrough in theorizing against binary models of gender ruled by heterosexuality. As soon as we distance ourselves from the heteronorm, binaries and linear oppositions can no longer make reality intelligible. Conversely, domination processes become more complex and categories often multiply exponentially, even if they do not completely fade (Plummer 1981). ‘One is not born a woman’, wrote Monique Wittig in an article published in the journal Feminist Issues (Wittig 1981). According to her, the category sex is neither natural nor invariable. Rather, it has a specific political use aiming at maintaining the heterosexual pattern of reproductive sexuality, an idea which is also defended by Rubin. The masculine/feminine dichotomy serves no other interests than those of heterosexual sexuality, reproduction and the traditional family. Hence, in contrast to de Beauvoir, Wittig considers that the distinction between sex and gender is false and only designed to serve the political interests related to heterosexuality. Being a woman is only conceivable within an equilibrium of powers between men and women, that is, within the power relations of normative heterosexuality. In this perspective, as she says, ‘a lesbian is not a woman’ (Wittig 1981: 153). In a relationship between women there is no female part nor is femininity constructed in the absence of men. Indeed, at least three very important criticisms of patriarchy, as it was defined by Marxist and radical feminisms, impelled theoretical developments which were crucial to the conceptualization of plurality. On the one hand, one-dimensional and universal accounts of patriarchy were strongly criticized for reducing the explanation to one or two factors, whether capitalism, the family or sexuality were considered (Rowbotham 1979). On the other, a certain lack of agency was seen as a consequence of this being a structurally driven approach. Furthermore, patriarchy theories tended to ignore the full complexity of gender relations and the dynamics of gender power, which are beyond the heterosexual definition of male and female (Pilcher and Whelehan 2004: 93-95). The intense critical debate around the subjects of patriarchy and gender complexity has fuelled groundbreaking theoretical developments which greatly advanced our understanding of plurality. How can we succeed in formulating a pluralistic approach to gender and, in this case, masculinities? A point to be noted when asking this question is that recognition of the multiplicity of differences in the gender arena played a part in the re-creation of theoretical cleavages, e.g. structuralist v. poststructuralist, material v. cultural and identities v. discourses. I will evoke two of the most challenging discussions, which are directly linked to my argument in this chapter.

30


Of great importance has been the effort to take the concept of patriarchy to a higher level of complexity, which has meant reformulating the proper notion of gender without leaving behind a definition that conceives of it as being materially determined by structural inequalities. Sylvia Walby’s influential work on the development of a complexity theory (Walby 2004) is top class; it offers a perspective for reconciling structure and agency and escaping onedimensionality. Walby (1990, 1997) breaks the uniformity of patriarchy as a singlebase superstructural system and identifies six partially independent structures (household production, paid work, the state, male violence, sexuality, culture) that work together interconnectedly to foment women’s subordination at a variety of levels. Rather than universalistic and a-historical, Walby’s theorization draws upon history, expressing a concern with historical variation and change. Using this line of reasoning, she suggests that patriarchy was transformed from a private form, in which the family was the centre of the exploitation of individual women by individual men, to a public form, where women have to face inequality in the public realm. Although women have made important conquests that allow them to have a place in the public sphere, patriarchy remains important. As she puts it, rather than being restricted to the private, women now have ‘the whole of society in which to roam and be exploited’ (Walby 1990: 201). The transition from private to public patriarchies, a term which should be used in the plural form, is also extensively conceptualized by Jeff Hearn (1992) who presents a more complex picture of patriarchy, maintaining that gender relations are multidimensional and can only be explained if the diversity of lived experiences is taken into account and related to the historical context where they emerged. Hearn argues that men’s power in the private domain did not disappear, but rather that, accompanying the flow of modernity, the power of ‘public men’, growing from the nineteenth century onwards, became the major base for understanding inequality and oppression. Rather than yesterday’s rule of the father, patriarchies developed into complex forms of power that ought to be analysed without ignoring their structural dynamics and outputs – which contribute to perpetuating men’s power. In defending a material foundation for gendered power, Hearn contends (1992: 13): Gender always remains a cultural, practical accomplishment […]. To see gender as cultural formation is not to subscribe to a cultural explanation of gender. Gender is culture, which is itself historically and materially formed. This involves transforming matter to matters of interest. Men and gender are produced in the conflicts and struggles of history and politics.

Focusing on the complexity of patriarchies, which operate through a set of dimensions and in a variety of social arenas rather than being the product of onedimensional dynamics, allows us to avoid a simple transposition from material to ideological inequalities, without losing a definition of power as structurally and materially grounded. Thus, men can be men in multiple forms, as they may


31

subscribe to a variety of normative sources, hold power quite differently and have different identities. However, these differences do not alter the fact that power is held and exercised by men. Connell’s landmark theorizing about men and masculinities, which I will approach in Chapter 2, may also be seen as defending, through a theory of practice, the material foundations of power, although these take the form of a variegated set of uneven positions rather than constituting binary oppositions. As in Marx, Connell’s account of plurality is grounded on social relations, though these are viewed more sophisticatedly as configurations of practice. Above all, gender is relational (Kimmel 1987: 14-16). But, before we advance to Connell’s theoretical contribution, let me turn to the second theoretical insight mentioned earlier. From Gendering to Ungendering: Categories Unmasked A second major development was linked to discontent with the reductionist coupling of sex and gender that rests upon the biology/culture dualism. It emerged, in great part, from the theorizing of sexuality as an autonomous arena in which the duo male/men and female/women left a significant branch of reality uncovered, as justly argued by gay and lesbian scholarship. The work of the philosopher Judith Butler (1993, 1997, 1999) is at the forefront of efforts to reject dichotomous thinking, particularly in relation to the distinction between gender and sex. For Butler, the material (nature, the body, sex) is seen as being interrelated with the discursive (culture, embodiment, gender). One of Butler’s key points is that sex itself is a social construction, because of the ways cultural values and practices interrelate with ‘natural’ biology, and so inherently construct the classification of bodies as either ‘male’ or ‘female’. She writes that gender (1999: 11), … ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre-given sex; gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established. As a result, gender is not to culture as sex is to nature; gender is also the discursive/cultural means by which ‘sexed nature’, a ‘natural sex’ is produced and established as ‘prediscursive’, ‘prior to culture’.

Consequently, Judith Butler, whose work has been highly influential in erasing categoricalism from gender analysis, alongside other queer theory17 scholars such 17â•… Queer theory is meant to go beyond the boundaries of heteronormativity. See, for instance, the work of Eve K. Segwick, who argues that the central classifying device of the nineteenth and twentieth century revolves around the hetero/homo divide. For Butler, for instance, the most important concern was to deconstruct the sex/gender divide. As Ken Plummer notes (2004:42), ‘Queer theory is really post-structuralism (and postmodernism) applied to sexuality and gender’.

32


as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990) or David Halperin (2002), harshly criticizes the universalistic views of the category ‘women’ and the ‘woman-to-woman’ strategy so often mobilized by feminist emancipation politics. In Gender Trouble she is quite clear about the perils of this reification process (1999: 19): ‘In other words, the insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social and political intersections in which the concrete array of “women” are constructed.’ Further on she adds (1999: 194): ‘The feminist “we” is always and only a phantasmatic construction, one that had its purposes, but which denies the internal complexity and indeterminacy of the term and constitutes itself only through the exclusion of some part of the constituency that it simultaneously seeks to represent.’ For Butler it is far more important to see how gender norms always fail to some extent in producing conformity and how gender subjects are permanently being done and undone. Everything is unstable, unfixed, performative. This ‘ungendering’ of categories that we so clearly see in the work of Butler is mainly related to the emergence of poststructuralist feminism and queer theory, whose developments are deeply indebted to French poststructuralists, Derrida, Lacan and principally Foucault.18 Just as binary thinking can be imputed to structuralism, poststructuralism emerged from the will to shatter any reminiscence of falsely structural oppositions reproduced through discourse, as occurs in the simple act of naming, for instance, men as men and women as women. One fundamental idea that served to deconstruct gender as the cultural transmutation of sex, is the rejection of any fixed identities as defining elements of the subject. Difference becomes the main concern, not identity.19 However, though there is no essential self, its manifestation may be deceiving to the extent that it makes use of language to perform as if the self were a coherent entity. Without discourses this imagery would not exist, because effective difference emerges more from language than material positions. The purpose of poststructuralism is therefore that of deconstructing all categories discursively created. Derrida’s ‘deconstructive strategy’ (Derrida 1978) does not adopt another grand narrative, or theory about the nature of the world and the self, but rather restricts itself to analysing existing narratives and revealing the dualistic hierarchies they conceal. From this perspective, the concept of discourse, central in the theoretical edifice of Foucault, who adopted Nietzsche’s ideas about the connection between knowledge and power, refers to something even stronger than putting forward a 18â•… With regard to gender, the work inspired by French poststructuralism and particularly by Foucault’s analysis of power is quite extensive and varied. See, for example, Allen (1999), Bartky (1990), Bordo (1993), Butler (1990, 1993, 1997), Diamond and Quinby (1988), Fraser (1989), Hekman (1996), McNay (1992) and McWhorter (1999). 19â•… According to Derrida, Western metaphysics has ignored the issue of difference, favouring a philosophical vocabulary of universal subjectivity, which is imposed upon others. For an overview, see David Wood and Robert Bernasconi (1985) and Chris Weedon (1999).


33

definition. It refers to the organizing principles of social institutions and particularly to the ways in which they shape and regulate our knowledge of things. That is to say, the ways in which we come to know or define anything at all, including ourselves. Accordingly, gender must be deconstructed, firstly because it occurs most commonly in a dualistic categorization that is concealed by the apparent truth of sexual difference, thus excluding those who are neither man nor woman (e.g. transsexuals or transgender people), and secondly because men and women do not form homogeneous categories either, nor are they connected by linear strings of power. According to Foucault, whose concern was primarily the subject, as he states in the Afterword of Dreyfus and Rabinow’s book (1983: 208-209), power is not extrinsic or possessed but intrinsic and creative in relation to social life, a force operating in the form of a matrix that starts by creating ‘docile bodies’. As Foucault argues in The History of Sexuality (1979: 93), ‘Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere’. Thus, Butler’s reasoning draws directly upon Foucault’s theorization of power, where regulatory discourses, for instance that of psychoanalysis, are seen as nourishing falsely constructed ‘truths’. For Foucault, ‘power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth’ (1977a: 194). Rather than negative, power is productive. It produces knowledge, and most importantly, it produces bodies, subjects. In The History of Sexuality (1979), Foucault describes sexuality and the body as a particular transfer point for the relations of power (Gordon 1980). In this case, medicine, whose ‘truths’ were erected upon the defeat of the regulatory discourses of religion, is more an instrument of surveillance than a source of truth about sexuality. If domination exists, and if men are dominant, it is because, like women, they are also created by power, rather than because they hold or exert power. For Foucault, individuals are created as subjects only because they are subjected to power. Even if various feminists have criticized Foucault for ignoring gender (for instance, Bartky 1990) or having failed to properly conceptualize the notion of power as resistance, which is central to feminist political mobilization (Fraser 1989, Jeffreys 1996), the fact is that under his influence several crucial contributions were made towards a conceptualization of plurality. Foucault’s notion of power may be rejected for not covering the material grounding of power or accounting for explicit forms of subjugation between dominant and dominated social groups, between master and slave, for instance (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). Even so, it allowed us to go beyond gender dichotomies without leaving behind the issue of power. A power that now forms the subject as much as the subjected. The subject is first of all subjected to regulatory discourses which pervade his or her social body. A man is only a man if created, that is subjugated, by masculinity as it was historically constructed. Domination exists, but power is also exercised over the rulers. As a result, the first subjugation occurs when a sex is ascribed to an individual. This brief description of Foucault’s importance to the ‘ungendering’ of categories in contemporary scholarship, particularly queer theory, allows us to

34


identify some of the major challenges when it comes to advocating plurality. In my view, the fundamental problem is not new, even if the terms in which it is described at present point to new questions related to gender and sexuality as constituent forces of social reality and the self. Reconciling structure and agency, which is still the issue, to put it simply, has been an everlasting and extremely difficult quest within the social sciences. In the contemporary gender arena, material accounts of power stemming from Marxist concepts (patriarchies for instance) are seldom seen as reducing the possibilities for the plurality of agency and individual distinctiveness in a world where multiculturalism has become part of the poststructuralist theoretical orthodoxy. Connell’s theory of the gender order, which presupposes plurality by placing men and masculinities in a relational system of four key hierarchicallybased positions, has not been immune to this criticism. In fact, the discursive approach embraced by poststructuralist feminism, while linked to a fluid and decentred conception of power, has been considered a new challenge by some men and masculinities scholars, who often advocate the need for a third-wave approach in the field. The reason is to be able to do away once and for all with categories and an excessive structuralist accent. The structuralist perspective makes it difficult to conceptualize more than a limited set of material positions (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2003). As Stephen M. Whitehead (2002: 16) states in defending the importance of this development, ‘notions of “men and masculinities” are always likely to remain, to some extent, idealized products, representative of both the social conditions of the time and dominant ideological or discursive “truths”’. However, while this position, which I will discuss in the coming chapter, seems attractive and appears to point to certain solutions to the problem of plurality, it also has its perils. If describing structural positions and material-based power can enclose us in a world of fixed categories, the reduction of domination to discourse can also lead us into the trap of dissolution, from where we lose the ability to see the persisting material inequalities of gender, which do not fade once multiple sets of difference are recognized. As Hearn and Collinson (1994: 115) point out, ‘the powers and dominations of men over women persist in many diverse ways, partly through these differences’. It is not my intention to find a solution to such an intricate problem, which embodies some of the most difficult issues to resolve in the social sciences. Nonetheless, it is my intention to share with the reader the conceptual difficulties that have pervaded my research on the plurality of masculinities among men in ‘complicit positions’. It is also my belief that the challenge of describing empirical plurality calls for reconciliation rather than entrenchment. Unity and difference are not and cannot be irreconcilable, just as they exist in social reality (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2003). In defence of this, Bob Pease (2000: 24) argues for a kind of ‘weak post-modernism’ where critical awareness of the myriad differences among men must not lead us to lose sight of patriarchy. This reconciling position is harshly criticized, for instance, by Whitehead (2002: 103), who states: ‘It is not possible to hold on to both a structuralist and poststructuralist position, and any attempt to do so is untenable,


35

not least to the quite different understandings of power and the self that each position speaks to.’ To a large extent, perhaps, the problem rests with the dubious character of categories, which are both reductionist and necessary, not only for reasons of intelligibility but also for the pursuit of justice through the politics of identity. But whenever one deconstructs, the most probable outcome is the multiplication of the categorical inroads to diversity. From the start, the process of breaking falsely constructed homogeneities is tense and unfinished. Ken Plummer resumes this difficulty quite neatly (1981: 29): The root issue is to grasp the way in which the world is simultaneously necessarily contingent upon orderly categories through which we may grasp it and how simultaneously such categories inevitably restrict our experiences and serve material forces of domination and control. We cannot live without them but living with them is a horror! Categorization is paradoxical: it aids and destroys.


Chapter 2

Domination, Hegemony and Hybrid Selves: Rethinking the Plural Dynamics of Masculinity As Jeff Hearn (1999: 148) wrote, ‘Recent years have seen the naming of men as men.’ In fact, men have become gendered subjects so rapidly that an overwhelming production of theoretical and empirical approaches to men and masculinities has flourished in the field. Nonetheless, ‘men were always there’, whether as universal subjects or, most importantly, as the source of women’s oppression and the bearers of the dominant heteronorm (Hostetler and Cohler 1997). I certainly agree with Haywood and Mac an Ghail (2003: 8), when they claim that ‘It is a misnomer to suggest that early sociology wasn’t interested in men.’ The main problem is that in early theorizations there was no interest in deconstructing men. However, from the 1970s onwards something new was emerging, and this novelty undoubtedly had a strong connection with the awareness that men were plural, rather than a homogeneous bloc or ultimately the ‘main enemy’ (Delphy 1977). Indeed, after the first developments made under the paradigm of gender-role theory, the work of Pleck, The Myth of Masculinity (1981), or Komorovsky’s Dilemmas of Masculinity (1976) were followed by trailblazing works by many others and the notion of plurality was established as a central tenet of masculinity (e.g. Tolson 1979, Snodgrass 1977, Cockburn 1983, Connell 1983, Kimmel 1987, Weeks 1989, Hearn and Morgan 1990, Segal 2007 [1990] and Collier 1995). However, this groundbreaking theoretical advance, which is well reflected in a vast range of empirical studies, has not been achieved easily or consensually, as I argued in the previous chapter. The journey across feminisms and gender theories, and their relationship not only with dualist and pluralist thinking but also material and cultural notions of power, was meant to characterize the context from which we can begin to understand the difficulties surrounding the apparently simple notion that people (and men are people) are different from one another, depending on an array of entangled factors. The development of theorization about masculinities has thrived upon these debates and expanded, bringing theoretical achievements along with it – as well as structural difficulties. However, as David Morgan (1992) argued, recognizing plural masculinities was a way of starting to build a critique of dominant masculinities, thus allowing us to conceive that men can change, and are in fact changing, in many directions. In this chapter, I will address some of â•… On how scholarship about men and masculinities focuses on fighting male domination and is thereby a natural ally of feminist theory, see, for instance, Judith Kegan Gardiner (ed.) (2002).

38


the virtues and difficulties emerging from the theorization of masculinities and men’s plurality, on the basis of three central arguments. To a great extent, these are reflections that resulted from my analysis of ‘complicit masculinities’, which will appear in the coming chapters of the book. When tentatively ‘unpacking’ the large array of average, not so powerful or bluntly resistant men, I was especially confronted with a number of questions that are directly tied up with the notion of plurality. Let me start by summarizing these key problems. Firstly, and most importantly, it is worth reconciling, or at least developing the dialogue between material and discursive approaches to power, simultaneously avoiding reification and dissolution. In other words, although masculinities are multiple and multiplying in the contemporary globalized world, and it is therefore reductionist to speak of men or masculinity as uniform categories, it would be an error to forget that men’s power is structural and thus forms a consistent set of societal patterns – a hegemonic system, to put it in Gramscian terms (Gramsci 1979 [1947]) – at the same time as it is variegated, culturally shifting, and individually embodied in complex and flexible ways. I do not intend to present solutions to such a difficult problem, which many have already critically addressed (e.g. Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, Hearn 2004), but simply, and more modestly, to call attention to what I consider is still one of the main theoretical challenges in the field of masculinities and gender. Advocating such a theoretical and methodological strategy implies keeping abreast of concepts such as patriarchy or hegemonic masculinity, yet without losing sight of domination as a process operating fluidly at multiple levels and as ultimately constitutive of the subject (Foucault 1977a). A discussion of Raewyn Connell’s definition of masculinities as hierarchically organized multiple configurations of practice forming a hegemony (e.g. Connell 1987, 1995, in addition to Howson 2005, Demetriou 2001) will help me to critically address this problem: I shall propose a heuristic distinction between hegemony, as ‘the historical snapshot’ of what in a given moment – to a greater or lesser extent – lies at the core of the ideological field upholding the power of men, and domination, as a social process stemming from the practices of all men, in all material positions and cultural frameworks. Reasoning about the question of difference in men and masculinities implies setting a wider range of ‘configurations of practice’– or to put it differently, practices in configuration – rather than limiting them, a priori, to a fixed structure of opposing, even if multiple, positions, however tentative and tricky this may be. Secondly, if we place the processes of masculine domination at the centre of gender relations we still have to find theoretical tools to grasp domination as structure, discourse and agency-related. My second argument derives from this challenging problem. In this respect, I believe that reworking Marx’s (1988 [1844]) notion of ‘appropriation’ may be an important step, if we are able to go beyond a materially driven definition (such as that operating in Marxist feminisms) and extend the concept of appropriation to culture and symbolic goods as well as agency and embodiment. As Marx (1988 [1844]): 79) said: ‘… Appropriation appears as estrangement, as alienation; and alienation appears as appropriation.’ The process

Domination, Hegemony and Hybrid Selves

39

of incorporation (see, for instance, Bourdieu 1977) implies appropriation, and this appropriation is always a power-based process. Drawing upon Homi Bhabha’s (1994) work on appropriation and mimicry as principles creating a third space which enables a variety of other positions to emerge, Demetriou (2001), among others, has argued for masculinities – particularly hegemonic masculinity – to be conceived as appropriating traces of non-hegemonic masculinities (the heterosexualization of gay culture, for instance). However, as I will argue, I believe this argument may be taken a long way in research by being directly tied up with the masculine ‘doing’ of power, even if it is outside the canons of hegemonic masculinity. If men, or some men, appropriate some features and goods – whether dominant or marginal, masculine or even feminine and effeminate – they are alienating the other, that is to say, blocking the possibility for these features and goods being part of that other. In this sense, masculinities (as well as femininities) are socially constituted through complex struggles for the acquisition and reallocation of certain symbols and material positions. The embodying and performing of gender, while linked to power differentials, implies processes of appropriation, I argue, that must be viewed as dynamic and flexible. Lastly, following this train of thought, the final part of this chapter intends to develop a reflection on power and hegemony by relating them to the hybrid character of masculinity (e.g. Demetriou 2001). The notion of hybridism and its application to gender relations has emerged closely connected to postcolonial debates, poststructuralism and contemporary feminisms. However, by viewing it as the result of appropriation processes at several levels, I propose a slightly different use for this powerful conceptual and analytical tool. This assumption ties in with the overall argument of the book and proposes that masculine power (and change) is dependent not only on its ability to oppress the dominated, but also stems from ongoing inner struggles between different forms of domination. In their practices men permanently use various references, but not exactly through the most peaceful negotiations. As such, hegemonic masculinity – or dominant forms of masculinity – is not just a symbol of domination over women and other forms of masculinity, but rather it is at the outset particularly dependent on conflict and tension within it. Indeed, the ‘masculinities’ alliance’ (Gramsci 1979 [1947]) presupposes not just cultural dominance over ‘other masculinities’ but is built upon contingent connections between different forms of domination. In other words, hegemonic masculinity ought to be understood as plural in itself, to the extent that it comprises diverse symbolic models and practices. The Power of Men: Towards a Relational Approach to Masculinities Without a doubt, Connell’s theoretical contribution, starting with the landmark article published in 1985 in co-authorship with Carrigan and Lee, has deeply influenced the study of men and masculinities and had a similar influence on the

40


formation of the pro-feminist Critical Studies about Men and Masculinities in opposing the more ‘masculinist’ orientation of men’s studies, in which the focus on men tends to disregard their domination of and violence against women (see Hearn 1998b). The 1980s and 1990s saw the growth of scholarship focused on men, a kind of ‘masculinity turn’ in the arena of gender (Segal 2007), which, despite being predominantly linked to Anglo-Saxon developments, became important in other countries, from Western Europe (for instance, France or even Portugal) to the post-colonial world. Both the contextual and global character of masculinity became part of the gender agenda. In many of these developments the idea of a hegemonic masculinity, firstly proposed by Connell, was used as a framework, even a kind of panacea, for describing all sorts of practices and processes through which men and masculinities (and also femininities) can be understood and broken down into a variety of patterns and uneven relations. Ultimately, this means that, although plurality is a central feature of gender relations, which no longer conform to monolithic models, there still exists, as Connell argued (Carrigan, Connell and Lee 1985, Connell 1995, Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), one form of masculinity that, on all other forms of masculinity (and femininities), imposes meanings regarding their own position and identity. Therefore, our understanding of contemporary gender relations is largely dependent on our grasp of the ways through which hegemonic masculinity operates, not only as a process of men’s domination over women but also that of some men over other subordinated and marginalized men.

â•… Differently from men’s studies, this critical perspective emerging from pro-feminist circles does not intend to mirror women’s studies (for instance, by excessively focusing on men and how they are negatively affected by patriarchy) but rather to make use of the feminist inheritance to construct a new range of theoretical insights into the problem of domination, at all costs avoiding reification of the term masculinity. The emphasis is on the relationality of the concept and men’s practices ought to be at the centre of research. Alongside the theorization of other prominent figures in this theoretical and politicallyengaged movement, e.g. Jeff Hearn, Keith Pringle and David Morgan, that of Connell on hegemonic masculinity has been highly influential in setting the agenda of critical studies about men and masculinities. â•… See the Introduction. â•… On this count we must acknowledge the growing link between masculinity studies and globalization theories, with the focus on non-western masculinities and, broadly, on post-colonial gender issues. Several recent publications deal with this contemporary issue. See Morrell 2001, Hodgson 2001, Lindsay and Miescher 2003, Kimmel, Hearn and Connell 2005, Ouzgane and Morrell 2005. â•… The hierarchical distancing between men and women has been addressed by numerous scholars. See, for instance, the book edited by Beverley Clack in 1998, where the idea that the differential features attributed to each gender are neither accidental nor sporadic but deeply embedded in the misogynist principles of Western thought is explored.


41

Indeed, as is well known, Connell’s model of hegemonic masculinity resulting from an inspiring tie-up between Gramsci’s (1979 [1947]) approach to power and a theory of practice, proposes that hegemonic masculinity is accompanied by three other related positions of practice. Complicit masculinities are not at the core of hegemony but take advantage of what Connell entitles the ‘patriarchal dividend’ (Connell 1987). Complicit masculinities are therefore ‘masculinities constructed in ways that realize the patriarchal dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the front-line troops of patriarchy …’ (Connell 1995: 79). In this view, only a few men are in fact enacting hegemonic masculinity, while the great majority simply comply with it, thereby benefiting from it on some level. In Portugal, the almost unattainable model of the ‘hegemonic male’ was seen by Vale de Almeida (1996) as haunting the lives of many men incapable of meeting its standards of performance, although being ideologically dominated by it. Most men just contribute through consent to legitimizing a certain ideal of manhood. The notion of complicity, the standpoint from where I started this book, has been often overlooked in research by comparison with the much more extensive use of the label hegemonic masculinity. But it constitutes, in my view, a very important contribution that Connell put forward, even though her development of this configuration of masculine practice still lacks more profound reasoning. Complicit men are part of the alliance that supports hegemony, but exactly how is this situation produced and sustained? The main difficulty is perhaps to find a heuristic way of distinguishing between what is hegemonic and what is not. Furthermore, we also need to know how men consent to comply with hegemonic ideology, whatever it may be defined as from a historical and contextual viewpoint. Let me further exemplify this point. If hegemonic masculinity is to be found within and enacted by certain groups of powerful men, that is to say, those who hold political and economic power in their hands, then we would be perhaps dealing with a classical Weberian definition of power, where domination represents the capacity

â•… Etymologically, hegemony is a word of Greek origin derived from hegestai, which means ‘to be the leader’, and from hegemoneuein, which means ‘to lead’, ‘to dominate’, ‘to command’. Hegemonia, in ancient Greek was a designation for the supreme command of the Armed Forces. For Gramsci, hegemony refers particularly to the cultural and ideological rule of one class over the others, although it may also include situations of coercion, of explicit domination of one group over others. Interestingly, the constitution of a hegemony tends to be a very long historical process, which may be enacted by a class dominating a historic bloc (that is a large and lasting class alliance). Thus, hegemony is not a formal, closed system, built upon perfect homogeneity and articulation. Conversely, it is seldom a contradictory, incomplete and diffuse process. See Ives (2004), Anderson (1976), Forgacs (1988). â•… Among the great number of studies demonstrating the tensions men experience in performing manhood, see also Boyd (1991). â•… See the Introduction.

42


to be obeyed (Weber 1978 [1922]), rather than with a Marxist approach to power based on the capacity to appropriate the labour-power of others, as Marx proposed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx 1988 [1844]). The argument is fundamentally that, under capitalism, the more the workers consent to the demands of capital, the more they become a commodity and the more they are alienated from their essential nature as creative beings. I will return to this point, arguing for the utility of reworking the notion of appropriation in the analysis of masculinities and gender power. For now, let me turn to the second argument. On the other hand, if hegemony refers to the ideological domination enacted by the historical alliance, in the Gramscian sense, between those who are powerful and those who are complicit, a greater role is granted to cultural domination, which is an important point made by Connell. For this reason, Gramsci’s (1979 [1947]) definition of hegemony was taken as a solution for the aforementioned problem. As he suggested, rejecting Marx’s materialist determinism, control is maintained not just through violence or coercion, but mainly ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the ruling class became the common values of all. Any class that wishes to dominate in modern conditions has to move beyond its own narrow ‘economic and corporate’ interests, to exert intellectual and moral leadership and make alliances and compromises with a variety of forces, thus constituting a ‘historic bloc’. In Connell’s view, complicit masculinities are therefore the central allies of those holding power, which makes them a strong pillar of the patriarchal gender order. The ways in which this process of ideological conformity occurs are, however, often unclear and deceptive when we shift from theory to the empirical world. The main problem is that we still have to identify which groups under what circumstances define what can be considered hegemonic and what cannot. Furthermore, the definition of hegemonic masculinity may be too broad, and therefore fragile, as Donaldson (1993) notes when providing us with an excellent and thorough explanation (1993: 645): A culturally idealized form, it is both a personal and a collective project, and is the common sense about breadwinning and manhood. It is exclusive, anxietyprovoking, internally and hierarchically differentiated, brutal, and violent. It is pseudo-natural, tough, contradictory, crisis-prone, rich, and socially sustained. While centrally connected with the institutions of male dominance, not all men practise it, though most benefit from it. Although cross-class, it often excludes â•… Giving continuity to the Hobbesian tradition, in which power represents a position of will that subordinates the wills of others, Weber also sees power as dependent on an individual will that imposes itself on others, making use of certain mechanisms of legitimation (the charismatic, the traditional and the rational-legal). This view has several followers (Clegg 1989), including Robert Dahl (1961), who develops Weber’s approach, also attributing power to a human factor active in the context of a community, or Steven Lukes (1974), who added a third dimension of power, latent power. In short, power is the product of obedience.


43

working class and black men. It is a lived experience, and an economic and cultural force, and dependent on social arrangements. It is constructed through difficult negotiation over a life-time. Fragile it may be, but it constructs the most dangerous things we live with. Resilient, it incorporates its own critiques, but it is, nonetheless, ‘unravelling’.

Also considering the problem of defining the difficult and broad notion of hegemonic masculinity, Hearn has stressed that men are in fact more hegemonic than masculinity. He notes (Hearn 2004: 59): I do not conclude that the notion of hegemony is not useful in critically analysing men. Rather, I argue that the concept has generally been employed in too restricted a way; the focus on masculinity is too narrow. Instead, it is time to go back from masculinity to men, to examine the hegemony of men and about men. The hegemony of men seeks to address the double complexity that men are both a social category formed by the gender system and dominant collective and individual agents of social practices.

By focusing on men rather than masculinities we could perhaps more easily avoid the trap of reification, into which we can easily fall whenever we couple general principles of power with particular groupings. On the other hand, we could also be at risk of ignoring the plurality of men and masculinities, a plurality that makes it difficult to operate either with the notion of masculinities or the category of men. Considering that hegemonic models have ‘feet of clay’, Donaldson (1993: 647) alludes to the same difficulty. Hegemonic masculinity may simultaneously refer to mythical figures, to the heroes that are introduced to us through the modern industry of the mass-media, through sports, literature, films, and so on, or may be found among politicians and capitalist managers, as Connell argues in her text ‘Masculinities and Globalization’ (1998: 16), where she identifies a ‘transnational business masculinity’. About the latter, Donaldson claims, ‘A sociology of ruling class men is long overdue’ (1993: 655). However, even if masculinities may be diverse and it is therefore difficult to imagine one dominant form of masculinity (Jefferson 2002), men remain at the centre of power. Arthur Brittan, who has approached masculinity from a poststructuralist standpoint, also makes an interesting point when considering this question (Brittan 1989: 2): ‘While it is apparent that styles of masculinity alter in relatively short time-spans, the substance of male power does not’, he states. An additional difficulty therefore emerges whenever we aim to trace out the main traits of hegemony, without really disposing of a conceptual apparatus that allows them to be identified in different contexts and historical settings. In other words, all too often we need a theory that conceptualizes domination as a centre-stage process of gender hegemony, instead of applying the label hegemonic masculinity to an array of practices and values that it is difficult to consider as part of a historically constituted alliance or hegemony, as Gramsci originally defines

44


it (e.g. Howson 2005). I will address this problem below but, for the moment, let me briefly define the remaining two configurational masculinities in Connell’s model. Subordinate masculinities, of which the paradigmatic example is homosexuality, may still uphold hegemonic masculinity but are deemed inferior, even antithetical to the dominant heteronormative definition of sexuality. As Connell claims, the subordination of homosexual men is at the centre of the gender order supporting the power of heterosexual men. Without doubt, this is absolutely true but, even so, once again we face the perils of reifying opposite groups of men instead of looking at masculinities as fluid configurations of practice. How should we look at this multiplicity of men and masculinities? Should we, as researchers, identify different groups a priori, only then to characterize their practices, which may in the end result in an array of subcategories of a major group, or should we follow the reverse pathway? This is a very difficult question, but its intricacy must not prevent us from asking it. In a way, Connell does not present us with a solution and tends to jiggle between a practice-based approach and certain a priori definitions of groupings, a problem that she recognizes in the article co-authored with Messerschmidt and published in 2005. The same remark applies to marginalized masculinities, which refer, at this time, to forms of discrimination arising from racialized segmentation or even class inequality. Black men or those from the bottom of the class structure are often placed in a marginal position in relation to the core of masculine power in the gender order. These hierarchically formed positions exist within, and give shape to, the ‘gender order’, a global pattern of configurations of practice which Connell divided into three main structures: labour, power and cathexis (that is, the relations occurring in the field of emotions and sexuality). More recently (Connell 2002), she added production and symbolic relations to this model, following a route of theoretical complexification that we have already seen in Walby’s or Hearn’s patriarchy models (see Chapter 1). The systemic approach has been pursuing, as already argued, higher levels of complexity by identifying a variety of relational structures of which each is a generative part of a larger gender order or system.10 The pluralization of systemic configurations for gender relations is thus a common development among those for whom power must be materially defined, rather than reduced to discourses or culture. As Richard Howson (2005: 57) describes it, ‘Thus, gender at any particular historical moment can only represent the configurations of practice emergent from the milieu of social relations that incorporate and organize power.’ In this brief description, we may find two main elements of Connell’s theorization on power, which are central components of her contribution. The first argument I want to highlight is related to the definition of power that underlies hegemonic 10â•… This line of reasoning and the variety of approaches that developed into complex structural configurations is presented and discussed in Chapter 4, where I seek to identify and compare different gender cultures and regimes across Europe and the US.


45

masculinity and the hegemony of men. In Gender and Power (1987: 107), Connell gives us the following definition, ‘The ability to impose a definition of the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and issues discussed, to formulate ideals and define morality, in short to assert hegemony, is also an essential part of social power’. In this sense some men and one masculinity (or some masculinities?) are hegemonic because they are able to set the terms on which the gender order is produced through material patterns of inequality. This material order is imposed through culture, which allows us to think that the model of hegemony is meant to capture the ideological structures (or, to put it differently, the superstructure) of gender relations, in the sense Gramsci gave to the term. Secondly, Connell also asserts that the gender order is heterogeneous and marked by a variety of different interrelated power relations. If there is a ‘patriarchal core complex’ that is at the centre of men’s power (for instance, in politics or the economy), other spheres (for instance, the family and the private sphere)11 are somewhat peripheral to this centre of dominance. As Connell (1987: 109) notes, ‘The power structure is not homogeneous, it has a centre for instance in institutions that centralize male power, and it’s more diffuse or contested in the periphery.’ Therefore, we can conclude that men’s power and the unequal distribution of this power among different men is dependent on both systemic differentiation (power is unevenly distributed across institutions and social settings) and a conception of masculinities as configurations of historically generated and embodied practice. In this aspect, Connell shares with Bourdieu (1977) the same constructivist structuralism that does not see structures or action as separate elements but rather interprets agency and ideology as emerging from the force relations (often invisible to the majority of individuals) that constitute both social reality and social selves. Thus, ‘“Masculinity” is simultaneously a place in gender relations, the practices through which men and women engage that place in gender, and the effects of these practices in bodily experience, personality and culture’ (Connell 1995: 71). Connell is well engaged in the quest for overcoming the dualism between structure and agency, at the same time constructing a model for portraying the masculine plurality that emerges from the intersection between different principles of power and subordination. Subordinated masculinities arise from sexuality as the result of heteronormativity, and marginalized masculinities are built upon racialized or class discrimination. Hence, the gender order is not an autonomous system – a point on which Donaldson (1993) also expresses criticism – but rather one that is erected upon a variety of power differentials and that, at any moment, is in the process of being shaped by these complex interconnections. This perspective may therefore be interpreted as a move ahead in relation to the idea of sexual classes (e.g. Hearn 1987, Hearn and Collinson 1994) or the notion that men’s plurality would be simply reflecting class differences (Tolson 1979). Quite the

11â•… For a discussion of this aspect of Connell’s theory, see Chapters 3 and 5.

46


opposite idea, intersectionality,12 a popular concept nowadays, is at the core of Connell’s assumptions, imposing itself as a key principle for studying men and masculinities. Accordingly, Hearn and Collinson point out that masculinities and social divisions should be seen as coexisting, as ‘simultaneously and reciprocally referring to each other’ (1994: 111). Hegemony evokes both material and sexual supremacy, to put it very simply. Hegemony and Domination: Theoretical Challenges around Plurality However, the conceptualization of plurality within such a framework may once again come up against important problems, as has been widely and feverishly discussed by a variety of authors in the field (e.g. Donaldson 1993, Collier 1998, Wetherell and Edley 1999, Whitehead 1999, Hearn 1998b, 2004, Jefferson 2002). Subordinating Women and the Ongoing Struggle against Dualism As a start, the first difficulty brings us back to the discussion of the most basic gender dualism, which sets men against women. In fact, as Haywood and Mac an Ghail (2003) assert, the conflation of men’s consistent domination over women and the diversity of masculinities and men’s behaviour may imply a certain degree of contradiction. In spite of advocating plurality, Connell clearly stated, ‘It is the global subordination of women to men that provides an essential basis of differentiation’ (1987: 113). Hegemonic masculinity is precisely what allows this subordination to take place and patriarchy to be maintained. This assumption was put forward by Connell (1987: 77) when, back in 1987, she defined hegemonic masculinity as ‘… the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’. In a later revaluation of the concept of hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 846-7), which is the centrepiece of Connell’s theorization, it is recognized that the model of global dominance is too simple and ‘clearly inadequate to our understanding of relations among groups of men and forms of masculinity and of women’s relation with dominant masculinities’. On the one 12â•… The criticism of third-wave feminists, particularly black feminism and revisionist feminist theory, emphasizing inequalities that are beyond sex differences, was crucial. As bell hooks (1984) noted, these developments ‘challenged the notion that “gender” was the primary factor determining a woman’s fate’. Hence, intersectionality, rather than binary categorization, privileges the mutually constitutive relations of social identities, examining the ways in which various socially and culturally constructed categories interact on multiple levels to manifest themselves as inequality. The importance of these theoretical developments (see Patricia Hill Collins [2000] and Collins and Anderson [2004]) is recognized by Connell and Messerschmidt in their 2005 article.


47

hand, this is because gender dominance involves dealing with the costs and benefits arising from the challenges to hegemonic masculinity and, on the other, Connell and Messerschmidt argue, because bourgeois women may have been appropriating aspects of hegemonic masculinity in constructing corporate or professional careers. In the face of these developments, the authors acknowledge (2005: 847), ‘Clearly, better ways of understanding gender hierarchy are required.’ A further reason underlying this consideration is related to the under-conceptualization of the diversity of femininities (see Howson 2005; Schippers 2007). It is not only men that are complex – women, too, are a ‘false category’, as neatly claimed by poststructuralist feminism (e.g. Butler, among others) and queer theory scholarship (e.g. Seidman 1996). The latent dualist universalism of Connell’s model, which emerges from the tying up of relations between genders and within genders, has been harshly criticized by a variety of authors who have thoroughly discussed the concept of hegemonic masculinity (see Donaldson 1993, Collier 1998, Wetherell and Edley 1999, Whitehead 1999, Hearn 2004, Jefferson 2002). In fact, if we see all men’s practices in relation to a model of hegemonic masculinity, which presupposes an alliance between the dominant – a white middle or upper class grouping – and the complicit against subordinate and marginal masculinities, we may have some difficulties in dealing with plurality and end up reproducing some of the common dualist premises. At most, we end up with limited pluralism, given that we tend to define different groups of men, and thus draw barriers. A reason for this atavism is commonly attributed to the resilience of gender ideologies, which make it difficult to escape the ‘naturalization’ or even the ‘social universalization’ of masculinity, as Arthur Brittan argues, occupying a poststructuralist position. For Brittan, this ideology is ‘masculinism’, something ‘that justifies and naturalizes male domination’ and it depends on a falsely constructed dichotomy of man/woman or masculine/feminine (1989: 147-8). It is this opposition, at once accepted and unexamined, that sustains the ‘masculinism’ of domination. Brittan discusses the necessity of hierarchy, domination, and competitiveness in this definition of masculinity, which above all requires a femininity that exists in binary opposition to it. When this duality collapses, masculinism starts failing as well. Without a subordinate, dominated, oppositional femininity, masculinity cannot be defined as ‘naturally’ superior and dominating. In Bourdieu’s structuralist terms this would be the result of a ‘historical work of dehistorization’ (Bourdieu 2001: 90), aimed at hiding the arbitrariness of masculine domination. For Connell, the ideological prevalence of hegemonic masculinity serves the same purpose; it is designed, as in Gramsci, to maintain consensus. At the other end of the spectrum, emphasized femininity is characterized by acceptance, which may lead us to think of this ‘dominant femininity’ as also complicit with the hegemonic system. Demetriou (2001: 341) focuses on this problem of gender division, proposing a distinction between external and internal hegemony. The first refers to power relations between men and women and the second to power relations among men. Although this is an important distinction,

48


Demetriou still leaves us without a real conceptualization of how these two dynamics of domination relate to one another, that is, how external hegemony is influenced by internal hegemony and vice-versa or, in summary, how different men and masculinities relate to different women and femininities. In my view, this constitutes a problem that demands further research and development, in that it concerns a major issue. The question is, how can we fruitfully combine men’s power, whether it is given by the ideology of masculinity or by other institutional and material processes, as Hearn (2004) suggests, with the plurality of both men and masculinities, whether we conflate or separate the two terms? Men and Masculinities: Equal or Different? This question raises at least two fundamental problems that deserve to be addressed. The first is linked to the distinction between men and masculinities. Are these terms the same or are we talking of different things? There is a certain redundancy in proposing such a question but, even so, it is an important aspect of the overall problem of plurality. In a way, masculinities may be more plural than men, but the inverse can also be true (see Hearn 2004). Secondly, we still have to discuss how domination and hegemony are achieved and sustained materially and culturally as the product of the relations between men and women and among different men. My argument, as noted earlier, is that it is perhaps more heuristic not to use masculine domination and hegemonic masculinity as if they were equivalent terms. Such a distinction may be helpful if our aim is to put ‘matter and discourses’ together. But, let me start by addressing the first topic. The complex relationship between men and masculinities has served as the backdrop for a wide range of criticism of the notion of hegemonic masculinity, based on the common acknowledgement that the lives of ‘real men’ would have difficulty fitting into this model. In accordance with the view of masculinity as practice, all forms of practice are constitutive of masculinity and it is through practice, from daily interaction to institutional frameworks, that masculinity comes to organize social life, upholding a patriarchal gender order. Theories of practice (e.g. Bourdieu 1977, Giddens 1986) have been constructed to overcome the structure/agency, matter/culture dualisms by insisting on how the individual is both structured by and structures social life. In this perspective, masculinity could certainly be defined as simultaneously practice, place and effect (Connell 1995). Individuals embody masculinity from a particular place, enact masculinity as it is embodied and live with the effects of the masculinity they contribute to reproducing and shaping at the interactional and structural levels of society. Hegemonic masculinity would then apply to both the ideological imagery of manhood and the material power held and exercised by men. In so far as one thing implies the other, the act of distinguishing between the two levels of reality may be conceived of as simply an analytical task. However, even if we agree with this theoretical positioning that places power relations in the material world, it is still theoretically useful to work with the distinction between


49

masculinity and men. It is true that masculinity is what men do, in the sense West and Zimmerman (1987) gave to the notion of ‘doing gender’ in and through interaction. Nevertheless, by holding to such a definition we may end up with the simple fact that masculinity and men (and femininity and women) overlap, with two probable and opposite outcomes: a situation of entrenchment into categorical definitions of men or, on the other hand, the dilution of the category of men. The former assumption may generate reification and reductionism and lead us to see black men as performing black masculinity, gay men as enactors of gay masculinity, white men as bearers of the dominant white masculinity, and so on. In this respect, the work of Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (1998), broke new ground and presented a challenging and compelling thesis that dissociates men from masculinity, while also fomenting the links between feminism and queer theory. Rather than assuming that white masculinity is foundational, Halberstam puts forward the significant proposition that it is possible to study masculinity without men. In fact, Halberstam concludes, masculinity is most complicated and transgressive when it is not tied to the male body, especially the straight, white male body. Bearing in mind the will ‘to make my own female masculinity plausible, credible, and real’ (1998: xi), Halberstam argues that female masculinity – that she found among a variety of women from butch lesbians and tomboys to the drag kings she studied ethnographically – is not merely a perverse supplement to dominant configurations of gender. Rather, masculinity itself cannot be fully understood unless female masculinity is taken into account. Likewise, Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) also recognize that professional ‘bourgeois women’ are appropriating masculinity nowadays. In this line of reasoning, masculinity and men are different things, which is a compelling thesis. But, even so, we have to ask: what is masculinity? Its dissociation from the material power of men is able to shift masculinities away from a practice-based definition. In this sense, masculinity is not, after all, what men do. Instead, norms and ideologies become more important, an idea which ultimately fits the Gramscian notion of hegemony. Once again, however, we encounter the same problem. What ideologies are dominant in a given context and how are they related to and created by men’s practices? An answer to this question can be found in poststructuralist approaches to masculinity, where discourses are power and the emphasis is placed upon the complexity and plasticity of masculinities, when defined as discursive practices (e.g. Wetherell and Edley 1999). Following Foucault, the embodying subject, as the centre of productive power, now becomes the key problem and object of theorization. The main concern is placed on the plurality of meanings associated with the masculinity that men can manage, enact and assemble according to their interactional needs. Men cannot be conflated with masculinity in so far as there is no essential subject. But masculinity does not exist without men since it is performed through discourse. Ultimately, this perspective brings in an individualistic approach in tune with the idea that masculinities may vary just as much as men’s practices can explode into an endless diversity. I exaggerate

50


perhaps, but it is important to retain this idea, so often defended in poststructuralist terms, particularly when emphasizing psychological complexity and diversity rather than the idea of hegemonic masculinity (see, for instance, Jefferson 2002, Wetherell and Edley 1999). Jefferson stresses this point quite clearly, when he points out (Jefferson 2002: 73) ‘Yet, the idea of a range of masculinities – subordinate, marginalized and complicit – constantly competing with hegemonic masculinity would seem to make unavoidable the question of how actual men, with their unique biographies and particular psychic formations, relate to these various masculinities.’ Similarly, from the standpoint of discursive psychology, Wetherell and Edley (1999: 337) provide a critical analysis of the singularity of hegemonic masculinity. Why not hegemonic masculinities? It is doubtful whether a single strategy for hegemony is operating, they reason. And Collier (1998) argues that ‘The argument that “real men” (that which is ascribed the status of “hegemonic masculinity”) are inherently oppressive continues to override any investigation of the complexity of the behaviour of men in their everyday relations with women and other men’ (1998: 22). In his view, this is a consequence of hegemonic masculinity being systematically confused with stereotypical masculinity. The argument that men’s lives are more complex than may be grasped when they are seen through the lens of hegemonic masculinity is also put forward by Whitehead (2002). Thus, he argues (Whitehead 2002: 92-3) that the concept of hegemony has certain weaknesses. As he puts it (Whitehead 2002: 93): ‘Hegemonic masculinity is, then, as reductionist a term as patriarchy. It is not deterministic because hegemonic masculinity takes great care precisely not to predict men’s behaviours. Indeed, proponents of the term hegemonic masculinity suggest that only a minority of men express and perform to its pattern’. Most importantly, it still polarizes competing groups, despite the emphasis placed on the transformational potential of masculinity. Moreover, it is calculated that individuals and groups will act in accordance with interests, a telos, a specific end that ought to be pursued. This implies a degree of consciousness and political organization that excludes many individuals, at the same time as it conveys a degree of uniformity in the identities of different groups, as implied in the transition from a ‘class in itself’ to a ‘class for itself’ (Lukacs 1968 [1920]). In 1987, Carrigan, Connell and Lee defined hegemony as a ‘political technique of a patriarchal social order’ (1985: 181). Following Hall (1997), Whitehead argues that hegemony can be better understood through a Foucaultian model of power, where power is circulatory rather than hierarchical. For him, only a discursive understanding of gender power – which is different from ideology (Whitehead 2002: 99) – would be able to back the agency that lacks hegemonic masculinity or the gender order. Instead, the main concern ought to be with the ‘masculine subject’ – a Foucault-inspired concept that Whitehead (2002: 111) introduces. Thus, an appropriate recognition of plurality implies dismissing a structuralist approach to power and shifting alternatively into a discursive definition of power. In this view, the coupling of men’s power with the ideological supremacy of a certain form of


51

masculinity would no longer be a relevant question. As in Foucault, identifying those who possess power and locating power is of no importance, firstly, because the existence of an ordered and regulating rational agency is firmly rejected and, furthermore, because there is no source from which actions are generated, only a series of practices. I can certainly agree that power is circulatory and operates as a matrix, a dense network where everyone is involved. However, as Foucault also asserted (1977a), even if power is not all about domination, domination and rule exist (see Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). For instance, prison guards have certain advantages over prisoners, although they are submitted to the same set of rules and surveillance. Similarly, men do not exercise, practice or perform power without submitting to a set of rules, discourses or norms, whatever expressions are preferred. Continuing with the problem of the ‘dissolution’ of the category of men highlighted earlier, as an opposite outcome to reification, we see that the move towards a plurality of men derives from embracing plurality and may follow different theoretical routes. The ‘poststructuralist turn’ that I described has the merit of prioritizing the masculine subject and addressing the complexity of men’s lives and discourses. However, it may also obfuscate men’s structural power in favour of diversity (see Connell and Messerschmidt 2005: 843, Bourdieu 2001: 110). Plurality can, nonetheless, be uncovered following a different route. The wide range of empirical research grounded on a definition of masculinities as configurations of practice may have also been promoting the multiplication of forms and sub-forms of men and masculinities, while offering fundamental insights into the ‘real’ variability of the ‘masculine’ in different regions of the world. The ‘macho’ and the ‘gentleman’ are categories used, for instance, by Arciniega, Anderson, Tovar-Blank, et al. (2008) in their research on MexicanAmerican masculinities. Gutmann (1996) and Mirandé (1997) also depart from the category of ‘macho’ in advocating the complexity and diversity of contemporary Mexican masculinities. Similarly in Brazil, Arilha, Unbehaum and Medrado (2001) set traditional macho men against young, urban or upper-class masculinities, making use of a series of criteria. Kam Louie, when theorizing about Chinese masculinity, argues that there are two basic historical archetypes that contrast wen and wu masculinities. Wen portrays the ‘gentleman-scholar’ promoted by Confucius, emphasizing the maintenance of civil order and the promotion of vertical hierarchical bonds. Wu is associated with martial masculinity and emphasizes the horizontal bonds of brotherhood formed in a space beyond the law. Louie suggests that these archetypes work together, though, contrary to the models promoted in the West, in Chinese culture it was wen masculinity that was given precedence. Although this assumption may easily be challenged, the author makes a very good point when stating that these different archetypes exist and have evolved in a certain tension with one another, rather than remaining mutually exclusive. In my own research in Portugal (Aboim 2009), the conflict and tension between different symbolic models of being a man has shown itself to be an important dynamic of constructing and performing masculinity. I could go

52


on providing examples almost endlessly, but these suffice to highlight my initial assumption. That is, not only are we dealing with a variety of labels that tackle the notion of a ‘white upper-class masculinity’ being the example of hegemonic masculinity, but we are also, it can be argued, consistently dissociating norms from practices or, in other words, masculinity, particularly hegemonic masculinity, from men. Hegemonic masculinity, or masculinities, tend(s) to be identified with archetypical masculinity, whereas men are performing and creating masculinities that are differently related to this normative dimension, even if the structural power of men continues, almost everywhere, to dominate, to be hegemonic. Making Distinctions around Power Returning to my initial argument, it is now a good time to ask: can the dissociation between domination and hegemonic masculinity help us to grasp how men’s power is achieved and sustained materially and culturally? Of course, it can be argued that hegemonic masculinity, like any other masculinity, results from processes of domination (e.g. Bourdieu 2001), which take place in face-to-face interaction and individual practices. From these, masculinity crystallizes itself into institutional forms, social representations and values as well as embodied ethos and hexis. At each moment, processes of domination are (re)producing hegemony at the ideological and material levels. Hegemony may thus be seen as compounding multiple and entangled domination actions. Thus, the distinction between hegemony, as the crystallization of what in a given space and time is at the centre of the ideological field (ultimately holding the material power of men, while being produced by men in an array of powerful or at least influential positions), and domination, as a social process existing in practices, is important to comprehend plurality in the lives of real men, who may combine contradictory references when relating themselves to models of masculinity. Moreover, some of these references may comply with hegemonic masculinity while others may not. In the reconstruction of masculinity, domination takes place, altering the balance between power and subordination in the relations between men and women, and between men in different social positions. The truth is that domination takes place in everyday interaction, even if it is unrelated either to ideological hegemony or to the structural hegemony of some men (e.g. Whitehead 2002). One must not forget that there are also particular forms of hegemony within specific subgroups. Among subordinated or marginal masculinities there are permanent struggles for supremacy, as happens within the gay world or with black masculinities, to recall two paradigmatic examples. We can easily see black men dominating women and gay culture being more valued than lesbian culture. In a way, we can think of domination as a central process through which a stable, even though contingent, hegemony is achieved. However, it can be argued that it is also more than that. Domination, in my view, is a larger concept than hegemony, since it allows us to think about power beyond the boundaries between groups or ascendant ideologies.


53

Although Bourdieu’s definition of power and domination can be seen as too narrow to allow for the possibility of autonomous agency or an emancipatory political praxis, his contribution is not negligible (Bourdieu 1977, 1990). For Bourdieu domination is inherently symbolic, although materially based. Power, described as symbolic capital, depends on class positions, affording the prestige associated with social position. Moreover, using symbolic power implies exerting symbolic violence, such as that of men over women or other ‘inferior’ men. Ultimately, in capitalist societies power is class power, since the dominant classes are the beneficiaries of the economic, social and symbolic power that is reproduced both by institutions – or fields – and practices. Material things and minds are two sides of the same coin. Thus, Bourdieu’s theory of practice in terms of the symbolically mediated interaction between the habitus and social structure connects relations of domination both to identifiable social agents and to the institutions of the modern state. Masculine domination is an application of these principles to the historically constituted supremacy of men over women, two identifiable groups that permanently embody and enact power. This consideration is diametrically opposite to Foucault’s conception of power, as he seeks to displace any focal point of determinism, whether economic or social, in favour of multiple dominations (or governments) that intersect, strengthening or eroding each other, to create plural and decentralized power (Foucault 1977b). According to Foucault (1977b: 69), a dominant class (or dominant men) is (are) neither an abstraction nor a previous construct. For a class to reproduce dominative power, the effects of a certain number of practices must result in a reciprocally constituted productive relationship between the dominant and the dominated, rather than be imposed unilaterally. Individuals may reverse their positions at any moment by means of changeable alliances and confrontations. Differently from Bourdieu or Gramsci, the flexible moves of power here conceptualized envisage a more complex, though slippery, notion of power. As Cronin (1996) points out, Foucault’s critique of the subject is so radical that it makes it impossible to identify any fixed social location of the exercise of power or of resistance to its operations. Notwithstanding, although constructivist structuralism and poststructuralism are different, certain authors, such as Sarup (1993), claim that there is a possibility for dialogue. Both approaches have been critical of the established order. Furthermore, both approaches have engaged in the task of deconstructing the subject and have strived against a-historicism and universalism. If we want to use domination as a tool for reaching an understanding of men and masculinities, it may be proposed that the two approaches can be combined. Foucault’s conception of power undoubtedly provides insights for the analysis of power and the ways in which it is exerted and resisted, at a micro-level. This power is not necessarily part of the hegemonic system, nor does it comply with it or resist it. It can be thought of as creative and flexible. However, this power – masculine domination – is not performed on an empty stage. It occurs within a delimited field of power, a concept I take from Bourdieu (1990). In this field, power relations

54


develop and may be perceived by different agents in their interacting relationship with the field structures. Why, then, is this helpful in relation to hegemonic masculinity? To anyone for whom the difficulty of dealing with the plurality of masculinities has emerged from contact with an empirical field, the most important answer to the question I ask is to be found in the distinction between different levels of reality (the micro and the macro, agency and structure). These distinctions prevent us from reifying hegemonic masculinity whenever we seek to understand the plurality of masculinities through its lens. By no means do I wish to discard the concept of hegemony, but simply to tentatively argue that it is necessary to look at domination as the process through which hegemonic masculinity can be understood as a potentially organized – though changeable – ‘historic bloc’ (see Demetriou 2001). Masculinity as Appropriation: Constructing Hybrid Selves Having said that, I will now tackle my last question and argue for a vision of masculinity as appropriation, a process through which both men and masculinities – including hegemonic masculinity – may be conceptualized as hybrid and contingent constructions weaving diverse symbolic models and practices. Embodying the Other, Taking from the Other The term appropriation has often been used to characterize the making of gender and masculinities in accordance with a perspective of gender as performative (Butler 1999, Deutscher 1997, Plummer 1996). If it is true that it is the continual performance of traditional binary perceptions that materializes gender (and also sex) as seemingly natural and not socially constructed (Butler 1993: 2), it is also a fact that individuals may enact and perform different gender codes by appropriating their features. Drag kings or queens are good examples of this performative subversion, which results from an appropriation process that draws attention to the subordinated masculinities which are blocked and erased by the dominant culture (Bode 2003). Masculinity, at least its dominative form, is, as Halberstam (1998) notes, constructed through the appropriation and suppression of other masculinities. However, as Butler writes, ‘hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations’ (Butler 1993: 125). Hence, not only do minorities and those who are subordinated appropriate what is stereotypical of the dominant, but the latter also ‘beg, borrow or steal’ (Cuthbert 1998) from the ‘other’. Let us think of cross-dressing as an extreme example. As Bullough and Bullough (1993) have shown, in contemporary American culture, cross-dressing has become most common among heterosexual men, although in the past it was mostly practised by women. The development of male-to-female cross-


55

dressing constitutes, according to the authors, a phenomenon implicated in the changes of gender relations across the past century. The fact is that cross-dressing is not necessarily related to homosexuality, transsexuality or transgenderism.13 As Amy Bloom (2002: 59) has described in her book Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, heterosexual crossdressers are most commonly, … straight men who have not only a wish but a need to wear women’s clothes and accessories – manage to be marginal among heterosexual men, marginal among other men who wear women’s clothes, marginal in the community of sexual minorities, and completely acceptable only to fetishists, who accept anyone who says they belong.

Cross-dressers may become marginalized once they are discovered, but they may seem quite average when their practice is well hidden. Hence, their practice can be complicit with hegemonic masculinity to a certain extent, at the same time as it subverts the canon of masculinity through the appropriation of femininity’s features. Other examples of such a logic – metrosexuality for instance (see Simpson 2003) – are definitely less subversive, but even so our attention is drawn to the dynamics of appropriation through which gendered selves are constructed. The metrosexual has become a cultural figure of dubious character. On the on hand, it challenges the existing masculine orthodoxy by presenting an alternative style to the traditional paradigm of heterosexual masculinity based on roughness and contempt for beauty and bodily care. On the other hand, it may also contribute to reducing the visibility of gay culture in the public arena, as long as heteronormativity is able to sustain its hegemonic position through appropriating the other (Yaksich 2005). As Featherstone (1991) argues, rather than accepting gay culture, lifestyles display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the assemblage they design of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily disposition, regardless of stereotypes. Furthermore, commodification allows the dominant culture to utilize ‘marginal or subordinate’ stereotypes in constructing consumable lifestyles. The argument of appropriation is neatly and insightfully discussed by Demetriou (2001). As he argues (Demetriou 2001: 350-51), taking the example of the heterosexualization of gay culture, ‘… the attempt to incorporate fragments of gay culture is also a strategy for the legitimation and reproduction of patriarchy’. He adds, ‘By making gay culture more visible, capitalism makes it possible for many men to appropriate bits and pieces of this alternative culture and produce new, hybrid configurations of gender practice that enable them to reproduce their dominance over women in historically novel ways.’ For him, 13â•… One of the claims of the Chameleon Society, a support group for cross-dressers, transgender people and transsexuals, is precisely that cross-dressing is most often enacted by heterosexual men. See http://www.chameleonswa.com/chameleons/info.html.

56


hegemonic masculinity implies a ‘dialectic of appropriation/marginalization’ (Demetriou 2001: 346). Such a process is also quite identifiable, for instance, in studies of men practising stereotypical female professions – such as nursing, primary teaching, social work, the occupation of a librarian (see Williams 1995). The research carried out by Fisher and Connell (2004) on male nurses has shown how the men interviewed had to perform masculinity as ‘chameleons’, beyond any fixed dualities, in order to overcome the gendered ideals of nursing. Each act was described as situational, tailored to meet the needs of the moment or of particular individuals in their care. As the authors note, they were mostly ‘“playing the man” vis-à-vis a “soft” masculinity’. Not only are men invading traditional female occupations, but the reverse is also occurring. The inclusion of women in male-dominated professions, ranging from surgery to engineering and corporate management, has been widely documented (Spencer and Podmore 1986, Greed 1990, Witz 1992), as have the consequences of these practices on women’s gender identities, often characterized by a kind of masculinization process (e.g. Amâncio 1997). Many women appropriate stereotypical traces of masculinity so as to realize their hopes of a successful career in a male dominated environment. Though facing very different challenges, men and women alike are getting involved in the dynamics of appropriation: they are taking from the ‘other’ what they ‘need’ to adapt and recreate their gendered selves. The discussion of ‘ethnic appropriation’ offers us perhaps an even wider field for examining the complex making of masculinities. In western societies, black and other ethnic minority men are encapsulated in what Connell (1995) considers marginal masculinities,14 even though research has shown considerable diversity within these ‘marginal’ assemblages. I can mention a few specific examples. Cazenave (1984) demonstrated that among black men the experience of ‘race’ was mediated by other factors (age, socioeconomic status etc.). Dawsey’s research (1996) revealed that young black men have quite diverse life experiences while, in common, reasoning about the theme of the struggle against racism. Mirandé (1997) found great diversity in the perceptions of machismo among Mexican men. In sum, as Messner (1997) has pointed out, as a whole, men of colour are only collectively united when they are contrasted with white men. However, our main point here is related to the ways in which ‘black culture’ – from stereotypical hyper-masculine toughness to the hip hop cultural style – has been said to have become an object of appropriation by ‘white’ men, for instance, in the US (e.g. Best and Kellner 1999). Among boys, teenagers and young men this has become quite a common phenomenon, as also argued by O’Donnell and Sharpe (2000). In contemporary 14â•… For articles and books that address these racialized constructions of masculinity, see Richard Fung (1991) and Frantz Fanon (1967). See also Kimmel (1995) on The Politics of Manhood, where the author argues that conservative male groups such as the mythopoetic movement have appropriated Native American rituals, which, as a result, allows privileged white men access to that set of emotions.


57

Britain, young masculinities have become more and more uncertain, that is to say, hybrid and multiple as well as discursively and performatively manipulated (Pascoe 2003). In Portugal, the works of Simões (2002) about the spread of an urban hip hop culture among white young men and of Ferreira (2008) on the normalization of marginal symbols, nowadays transformed into commodities on offer to a wide range of individuals (e.g. tattooing or body piercing), have also drawn attention to the appropriation processes occurring at present. Rather than being part of an identifiable group, certain symbols, once the reserve of a minority group, are being embodied by a wide range of individuals and therefore incorporated into the dominant mass-culture. The codes of style for enacting masculinity are, thus, changeable and mixed in so far as they tend to mimetize the other, thus recreating something different that is neither the one original nor the other. But these mixed codes, through which different configurations of practice are able to emerge, are also centre-stage in terms of the power equilibrium between different individuals and groups of individuals. Appropriation as Domination: Uneven Hybridisms Mimicry, as Homi Bhabha conceptualizes, is always an act of appropriation and, he adds, ‘one of the most elusive and effective strategies of colonial power and knowledge’ (Bhabha 1994: 86). Even if mimicry is not necessarily intentionally appropriative of the ‘other’, it normally refers to an action that takes a term or idea out of its former context and integrates it into one’s own horizon, or narrative.15 In short, mimicry involves a double articulation that implies a complex strategy for handling change, but also regulation and discipline, through the appropriation of the other. Demetriou’s criticism of hegemonic masculinity, as described earlier, has drawn upon a similar argument. As he says (Demetriou 2001: 348), ‘It is its constant hybridization, its constant appropriation of diverse elements from various masculinities that makes the hegemonic bloc capable of reconfiguring itself and adapting to the specificities of new historical conjunctures’. Demetriou supports his theoretical reasoning by showing how some elements of gay masculinities have become part of contemporary hegemonic masculinity, a masculinity that is still capable of reproducing patriarchy. I agree with Demetriou on this point, which I believe brings about crucial advances that allow us to grasp masculinities as complex constructions, as the product of a kind of DIY kit (do-it-yourself) of masculinities, a kind of bricolage masculinities (e.g. Beynon 2002). In order to maintain its dominant position in changing times, hegemonic masculinity has to incorporate the other. However, in my view, this line of reasoning may be further developed. Let me explain. First of all, this argument can only be sufficiently convincing if we think of hegemonic masculinity as being culturally hybrid, which is a very interesting point to start with. Even so, if hegemonic masculinity interweaves dominant and 15â•… On cultural exchange and appropriation, see also Shmuel Eisenstadt (1987).

58


non-dominant cultural symbols, slowly incorporating the second into the first, Demetriou does not offer us an in-depth explanation of how the alliance between hegemonic and non-hegemonic masculinities is achieved, and furthermore, of how the second might offer resistance to and protestation against the first, beyond cultural alienation. Even if we understand masculinities – all masculinities – as being permeated with contradiction and conflict,16 this does not necessarily mean that the ‘other’ (for instance, gay men or men from ethnic minorities) is included at the hegemonic centre. As Demetriou recognizes (2001: 355), straight men may be using perfume, wearing stylish clothes or listening to hip hop music, but even so gay men and black men and women are still not fully entitled to equal civil rights and discrimination has not been eliminated. The effects of what we could call a kind of aesthetic appropriation transform symbols of and the equilibrium between masculine identities, yet do not produce the immediate inclusion of dominated positions or groups. In sum, cultural hybridism, while intrinsic to hegemonic masculinity (or any other masculinities), does not eliminate power relations, whether domination is exerted upon women or other men. Furthermore, it does not efface the struggles between what is or has become part of hegemony and what is or continues to be counter-hegemonic. Following Marx’s definition of appropriation, it can be said that taking from the other contributes to alienating that other from its identity, from the features that symbolize the creative power of appropriated subjects. Marx developed this notion essentially to argue that under the economic and political conditions of capitalism, the more workers accept the demands of capital, the more they are transformed into commodities and the more they become deprived of their creative capacity. As Marx wrote, ‘So much does the appropriation of the object appear as estrangement, the more objects a worker produces, the less he can possess’ (Marx 1988 [1844]: 68). The power of workers is transferred to the objects they produce, which are then taken from them (Ollman 1971). In fact, as Ashley and Plesch (2002) note: ‘… “appropriation” emphasizes the act of taking; it is understood to be “active, subjective, and motivated” … The fundamentally active nature of appropriation is manifest in its etymology, from the Latin verb appropriare, “to make one’s own”, a combination of “ad”, meaning “to”, with the notion of “rendering to”, and proprius, “owned or personal”. Beyond the simple acknowledgment of borrowing or influence, what the concept of appropriation stresses is, above all, the motivation for the appropriation: to gain power’ (Ashley and Plesch 2002: 2-3). By ‘taking something away’, power is gained to the extent that the other is deprived of what was his or hers in the first place. Symbolic goods are in this sense as appropriable as material goods or labour. If second-wave feminists considered that men were

16â•… An interesting perspective about hegemony is that of Laclau and Moufee who through their criticism of essentialism within Marxism developed a more discursively constructed understanding of hegemony. They see society as a complex, if not convoluted, field replete with antagonistic struggles. See Laclau and Mouffe (1985).


59

appropriating women’s domestic labour, we can extend this reasoning, for instance, to the symbolic features of femininity.17 However, through the constant processes of appropriation – where, for instance, straight men appropriate gay culture and femininity while women may be appropriating masculinity and so on – the gender order underpinning hegemonic masculinity is also transformed. Although men continue to be structurally dominative, the cultural expression of masculinity is compelled to change. The fact is that women as well as marginal and subordinated men may also be appropriating certain features intrinsic to those who are dominant. A good example of this process, among a range of others possible, has been studied in Brazil and Portugal. Vala, Lopes and Lima (2008) have identified a strategy of the ‘whitening of blackness’ that is linked to the educational and professional mobility of black populations: the more they are able to live up to a certain pattern of social achievement, the more their blackness becomes irrelevant and unseen by others. Blackness is, to a certain extent, eroded by the possession of stereotypical white symbols – material and cultural – of power. As such, it is important to clarify what is understood by hegemony and hegemonic masculinity. If individuals appropriate symbolic goods and recreate hybrid identities, this means that, due to a growing flexibilization of frontiers, it might be difficult to distinguish what is hegemonic and what is not, a problem that I already mentioned in the first pages of this chapter. In the aforementioned example, these black but powerful men could be considered as occupiers of an in-between position, sandwiched between racialized subordination and socio-economic power. In sum, processes of appropriation, while enablers of multiple forms of hybridism, may sustain hegemonic masculinity and patriarchal domination but, even so, they also bring in change, flexibilization and resistance among a variety of social actors. In this respect, one important problem is pointed out by Richard Howson (2005). Howson discusses the inaccuracy of the concept of hegemonic masculinity in relation to the Gramscian notion on which it is based. Thus, the proposal advocated by Howson is to reformulate the concept by making it more in tune with the original hegemony put forward by Gramsci in order to accomplish an ‘aspirational hegemony’ born of radical pluralism. As Richard Howson (2005) argues, if we want to understand hegemony, it is also important to understand the notion of power that it operates with and what the contexts are in which hegemony is able to change. Howson explores the difference made by Gramsci between regressive (based on force) and progressive (based on leadership) hegemony, stressing that: ‘Hegemony is unstable equilibrium’ (Howson 2005: 26). The meanings of Gramsci’s hegemony when applied to masculinities are diffuse because there has been a tendency to reify it as a negative form of masculinity, most commonly associated with the dominative oppressive configuration of traditional masculinities (Howson 2005: 21-4). 17â•… This argument will serve as a backdrop for the analysis of men’s discourses about caring fatherhood and gender equality in family relations in Chapter 5.

60


Nowadays, cultural dominance is far more complex and polymorphic than a single patriarchal stereotype is able to represent. It also operates through a variety of means and at various levels, from the local to the global. Furthermore, identities have considerably multiplied and so has their visibility in the public arena. As a result, the alliances of domination are probably becoming more diffuse, even if men continue to occupy the leading role in almost all spheres of society. In this line of reasoning, it is arguable that hegemony (even if at a distance from Howson’s radical pluralism) ought to be conceived as representing a contingent equilibrium of power: individuals may have different places and thus enact different masculinities at different times and in different contexts. In a way, both masculinity and men are hegemonic as they take more from others, thereby suppressing those individuals’ full ability to perform and exert power. Nonetheless, hegemonic men and hegemonic masculinity tend to become detached, in so far as those who hold societal power do not cover the whole range of exemplary, even mythical, models of masculinity. Amidst these inroads to power, ordinary men certainly exert domination. However, as I will argue in the coming chapters, they are most commonly placed in diffuse locations, recreating their hybrid identities at the crossroads of diverse references. Furthermore, if we take in the history of private life, it is arguable that the ideal model of manhood has been built upon the difficult reconciliation of the material power of the father and the sexual power of the predator. In order to disentangle these processes in a multicultural and rapidly changing world, it is necessary to bring domination to the centre of gender power, conceptualizing it not only as something that forms the subject, as in Foucault, but also as something that is appropriated, lost and reappropriated.

Chapter 3

Masculinities and Private Life: Power Behind the Scenes An important part of the genealogy of masculinity was and is still constructed in private life, in the family and in kinship relations. Hence, these are not ‘soft institutions’ in terms of the patriarchal core complex of gender, as Connell suggests, when she states (1987: 110), ‘It has become clear that household and kinship relations are not a test-tube case of pure patriarchy. The family as an institution might best be regarded now as part of the periphery rather than the core complex.’ Quite the opposite, it is in the historically privatized contexts of reproduction and sexuality that key processes of domination occur, materially and discursively. The gendered self is greatly formed and reconstituted in the space that modernity fallaciously constructed as private, and also through the tensions between private and public. This is indeed a chief argument in this book. In order to grasp the power of men, and how this power is symbolically uphold by masculinity, the subtle operation of domination occurring within family life is still a matter of great importance. Even more so, because the family, at least the so called ‘modern family’, was built upon the complex divide between private and public. Modern masculinities and femininities were erected upon this dichotomy (e.g. Adams and Coltrane 2005). Thus, every change concerning men and masculinities must be equated through this historical divide. Although this division is plastic from the onset, the latter term, I argue, is yet still centre-stage to the reproduction of masculine domination. Today, less and less there are hidden powers. As Hearn (1992: 20) notes, patriarchies are public because everything, or almost everything, became object of public scrutiny. However, what we have been accustomed to refer as private, par excellence the family, is as yet a privileged set for patriarchal domination to be exerted, even if the veil of love and affection overshadows the dynamics of inequality and oppression. As Eva Illouz points out modernity is also a history of emotional cultures, including those separating men from women. As she says (Illouz 2007: 4), ‘the making of capitalism went hand in hand with the making of an intensely specialized emotional culture …’ The resilient seeds of difference are, for known historical reasons, well embedded in the domestic sphere of life. Simultaneously, the ‘private’ has been a stage for the transformation of the older orders of gender into renewed forms of differentiation and struggle, for both men and women. But, as radical, Marxist and socialist feminists argued in the 1970s, the family has not ceased to be a key site of power.

62


Most importantly, the intrinsic plurality of masculinity, which I defended in the previous chapter, has been constructed and supported by the public/private divide in many ways (see, for example, Collier 1995, Coltrane 1996, Adams and Coltrane 2005). The tensions between the predator and the provider, the dangerous and the familial, the citizen and the father prevail until today. Men dominate in the public realm and are supposedly more affectionate in the private, but it is also in the private that long lasting inequalities are reproduced through labour and sexuality. Additionally, the domination of subordinated men over women also happens more in private than in public, we may argue. The public citizenship of men has held their private power, but it was also their private power that supported their public primacy. In a way, the private was built upon the historical connection between patriarchy and the expansion of capitalism, which resulted in the modern architecture of gender differentiation. Thus, to understand the multiple inroads into men’s change it is important to tackle the fragile equilibrium between public and private, starting with a brief overview of the historical construction of this dichotomy. The Modern (Re)Construction of a Founding Dichotomy Historically variable and indefinite in its boundaries, the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in no way indicates a singular phenomenon: rather, it reflects various processes in the organization of society in Western modernity (Weintraub 1997: 1-2). ‘Public’ and ‘private’ represent the poles of one of the great dichotomies in Western thinking, one that has generated significant debate in contemporary social theory. In his book State, Government and Society, Norberto Bobbio (1988: 13) calls it the ‘great dichotomy’ as it is a fundamental split that subsumes many others and has boundaries that are diffuse and interchangeable. In fields ranging from political philosophy, economics and feminism to sociology and history, various concerns have arisen around this fragile, even imaginary, division, while at the same time the definitions of what is public and what is private are discussed, not always with consensus (Okin 2008: 307). As happens in the liberal economic tradition, the public is sometimes restricted to the political and may include the civil sphere or just the state; on the other hand, the private is associated with the market, individual interest and the non-collective. At other times, a broader distinction becomes evident, one that sets civil society, the market and the political against the family, the domestic sphere and intimacy. At yet other times, the private is understood as an expression of the self, in opposition to a public order of interaction, as Goffman (1971) noted. Most certainly, the relationship of tension or complicity between the public and private is a subject of debate today, as is the social transformation of the boundaries between the two, with various interpretations based on different perspectives being proposed. The terms constituting this binomial are given many different senses, which need to be distinguished analytically. As Weintraub (1997: 4 et seq.) proposes,

Masculinities and Private Life

63

there are at least four common meanings. The first arises from the liberal economic model that associates the public/private division with the distinction between the state and the market. Proposed by such founders of liberal theory as Locke (1960 [1689]) and Adam Smith (1976 [1791]), the public/private dichotomy has been one of liberalism’s key terms from the outset, reflecting the need to regulate the relationship between the state, the economy and the people (Duggan 2003: 4). It is the source of other important distinctions between the state, the economy, civil society, and the family, with the latter, in contrast to the first, representing the most private place of all. The second classical sense, which we find in authors such as de Tocqueville (2000 [1835-1840]), Arendt (1959) or Habermas (1989), envisages a model of the public sphere as a form of civil society that is distinct from the state and market but essential to the creation of an active citizen community capable of upholding a democratic society. In contrast to the space of the ‘polis’, where there is equality among citizens, the private is restricted to the domestic universe, the ‘oikos’, which has been understood since Aristotle as a space of natural relationships of inequality: between slave and master, man and woman, father and son. On the other hand, the third distinction, extensively theorized by authors such as Ariès (1965), Shorter (1975), Jacobs (1961), Elias (1978, 1991) or Sennett (1986), emerges from the definition of the public as not only political but also as a space of sociability that stands in opposition to the reclusion of the domestic and the family. In different ways, all these authors have stressed the erosion of collective public sociability, which can generate bonds of social cohesion in favour of private relationships based on emotion and individualism. Finally, by stating that the ‘personal is political’, the proposals advanced by second wave radical, marxist and socialist feminisms (see, for instance, Clark and Lange 1979, Elshtain 1981, Okin 1989) tend to expose the ideological functions of the private/public binary. They attempt to unveil the complicity between the patriarchal gender order, which is closely connected to the development of capitalism, and the construction of an ideological dichotomy that artificially legitimates women’s imprisonment in the domestic sphere, thus reproducing gender differences and excluding women from the public domain. These critical developments have led many feminist to see the family as the centre of oppression, the privileged space where women were put under the control of fathers and husbands, and patriarchy was held in its most primitive form (e.g. Firestone 1970, MacKinnon 1987, Daly 1978, Delphy and Leonard 1992, Barrett and McIntosh 1991, among others). â•… See Chapter 1. â•… However, the place given to the family has not been consensual. One example may be found in black feminists’ critical approach to the narrow ideal of a white bourgeois family. In this respect, as bell hooks (1982: 75-6) notes, in black African-American families women tended to be active providers and decision-makers in the home, therefore depriving ‘black men of their patriarchal status in the home’. Patricia Hill Collins (Collins 1990

64


Some of the main debates in the contemporary literature are clearly the heirs to these different ideas. When arguments in favour of economic neoliberalism and individual interest (which the theories of rational choice undoubtedly represent) are set against visions that, in defending the social state and collective well-being, criticize that neoliberalism, what is actually being discussed is the public/private relationship in the first sense, which may easily be expressed as the opposition between utilitarian individual interests and the common good. When commentators talk, as they frequently have since the 1970s, of the erosion of the public sphere of citizenship, or even sociability, to the advantage of the rise of the private and a selfish individualism, the discussion is about different perspectives of the ‘virtues’ of each sphere, sometimes with the tyrannies, other times the benefits of intimacy and individuality being glorified. For some, like Habermas or Sennett, the public sphere is, or should be, the principal place of citizenship and liberation; for others, it is a space of competition and inequality, the opposite of a family/place of refuge that is intimate and ideologically pictured as being free of the constraints imposed by differences of class, gender or ethnic group. Yet other currents of thought, in particular non-liberal feminisms, raise objections to the false divisions between public and private, denouncing the [2000]: 119) also advocates for the narrow conception of family life when she talks of the African-American extended family and existence of ‘sisterhood’ between mothers, who help out each other by sharing mothering responsibilities. â•… Rational choice theory is demonstrably symbiotic with neoliberalism as it poses the individual as entering all spheres of life as homo oeconomicus, a rational utility maximizer, and whose behaviour can be controlled by altering his environment. For the role of economic theory and neo-liberalism as utopia, see Pierre Bourdieu, The essence of neoliberalism, published in Le Monde diplomatique in December 1998. â•… In a recent book, Duggan (2003) develops an argument against the apparent neutrality of neoliberalism in the USA, on the basis of an example connected with gender questions. In describing the struggle between conservative Republicans, who defend the traditional family, and academic fields such as women’s studies, Duggan transfers the tension to a much broader area that is mined with neoliberal intolerance towards feminism and the struggle for human rights. In another recent book, the anthropologist Aihwa Ong (2006) describes neoliberalism as a malleable and transverse technology of government that is taken up in different ways by different systems, whether authoritarian, democratic or Communist. The creation of special economic areas in China is an example that she quotes. Ong shows how these neoliberal exceptions are reshaping the relationship between the governed and the governing, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality. However, she argues, as a more flexible but uneven kind of citizenship develops on the basis of market principles, as many people again are excluded. To those without skills acknowledged by the market, citizenship is denied. â•… Let us remember that a key contribution to the current understanding of the Social State may be found in T.H. Marshall (1975). For the author, the establishment of a social state was an integral part of, and even the final component in, the development of individual citizenship rights, which could only exist alongside a sense of collective responsibility on the part of the community.


65

inequalities and forms of oppression that are still evident in both the domestic and political domains (e.g. Pateman 1983 and Fraser 1997). In this chapter, I shall make use of the terms public and private in the last three senses, offering the reader a critical and gendered interpretation of the boundaries between the collective space of citizenship and sociability and the individual space of intimacy and gender inequality. I argue that the idealization of a private life, with connotations here of the family, intimacy, and the self, has been formed by the changes that have occurred in public life. However, to justify this argument, which will allow for a critical approach of men and masculinities as also being formed by the historical genealogy of this division, I must make use of the different definitions of public, without superimposing meanings. In brief, as traditional, essentially masculine, sociabilities – studied by Ariès, among others – were being eroded, the sense of intimacy was certainly growing, though the inclusion of the private in the public also increased through the broadening of citizenship as a result of the struggle mounted in the public sphere by various emancipation movements such as those of the workers and feminists (Duggan 2003, Therborn 2004). For this reason, the relationship between the individual and the group is at the heart of the discussion. In the shift anticipated by Ferdinand Tönnies (1957 [1887]) from a pre-modern Gemeinshaft (community) to a modern Gesellschaft (society) or in the transition between mechanical and organic solidarity proposed, with the greatest optimism, by Durkheim (1978 [1893]), people were withdrawn from the community, clan or family group, where inequalities were ‘natural’, in the Aristotelian sense of the term, to find themselves as individuals in a space that was private but increasingly affected by public regulatory mechanisms. For this reason, the words of Habermas (1998: 213), criticizing a liberal interpretation of the system of rights, are elucidative. For the author, the democratic process must simultaneously guarantee ‘private autonomy and public autonomy’, as ‘the private autonomy of citizens with equal rights can only be guaranteed if their civic autonomy is activated’. At a later stage, I shall return to this argument, to present it more explicitly. For the moment, it is important to review the historic process of the constitution of a private sphere equated, supremely, with the ‘modern family’ and the domain of the affections. Without a doubt, whatever the definition of public, the historical construction and reification of a private life ideologically distinguishable from public life is one of the fundamental dynamics of societies under the sign of Western modernity. The emergence – in defiance of the competitive and impersonal commercial logic of the production and decision-making spheres – of an ideology of the bourgeois family as a refuge, a privileged locus of feelings and intimacy, a space where a true identity is supposedly given and revealed, has indelibly (in keeping with the ‘myths of Romanticism’) shaped the history of the social relations of gender. The emotional has become the reserve of the private and, principally, the code par excellence of interpersonal communication (Luhmann 1998 [1982]). But the gender order, and the power of men (Connell 1995), falls within, indeed, goes to the core of the fallacious difference between private and public. The gendered

66


conjugal family theorized by Parsons (Parsons and Bales 1955) in the 1950s is a good example of this reasoning. For the author, gender differences were functional and essential as the effect of the structural difference inherent in the coming into being of Western modernity. Along the road to industrial society, as Pfau-Effinger (2004a) notes, women were progressively removed from productive activities. Only recently have they been re-incorporated into this sphere and, even so, on a fairly unequal footing. The separation between public and private, which burgeoned among the bourgeois strata of ninetieth century industrial cities (Ariés 1965, Shorter 1975), in fact, and above all, served to separate men and women, defining social functions and spaces for them. Whereas the qualities ontologically attributed to the private remained associated with the feminine side and its maternal and emotional characteristics, the public sphere – of industrial production and political citizenship – was connected with the masculine side, reproducing its supremacy and the place of men at the head of families. Over the twentieth century, this reality certainly changed. There were profound changes not only in the gender order, but also in the clear (if they ever were) divisions between the public and private as they had been traced out from the eighteenth century. Nowadays, we are far from the linear connection between men and the public space and women and the private space. In the Western world, the patriarchal system, which the ideal of the bourgeois family reproduced so well, has suffered persistent reverses (Therborn 2004), as women and men have broken through frontiers and made conquests in areas that beforehand, at least ideally, seemed out of bounds. In this first decade of the twenty-first century, the traditional gender order finds itself profoundly changed, even though men’s power is still a reality both in ‘public’ and in ‘private’. Women’s social rights in the public sphere have been progressively legitimated, while the social image of the man as the provider and figure of authority has fairly declined (Aboim 2009). At the same time as this was happening, as is often argued, a private life was revealed that was allegedly less regulated by outside forces and was seen as being based more on individual well-being and the emotions than on the reproduction of the family (e.g. Giddens 1992). Thus, from this perspective, in the extension of privatization or individualization – that were certainly favoured by the presence of individualizing conceptions of social rights (e.g. Esping-Anderson 1999), though legitimized above all in the private sphere of the feelings where the search for identity receives ideological support (e.g. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) – we would meet one of the most faithful accomplices of the fall of ancestral forms of differentiation, which gender inequalities are. Moreover, the search for oneself, established under the value of authenticity (Sayers 1999), would, in this perspective, largely answer for the self-accomplishing drift capable of demolishing traditional differences in favour of a language of affective exchange. Without doubt, as even Bourdieu tells us, only ‘love’ temporarily suspends masculine domination (2001: 117). Here, however, I suggest a somewhat different interpretation of the relationship between gender and the binomial public/private and present a critical discussion of two proposals.


67

In the alleged erosion of the public and the rise of the private (i.e., of intimacy and individualism), some important theses see one of the trends marking contemporary societies, associating both optimistic and pessimistic visions with it. I support a different argument, observing that, on the contrary, private life has been very heavily affected by mechanisms that belong to the public sphere, although this public sphere has historically appropriated the patriarchal order earlier seen as a private matter. As de Tocqueville (2000 [1840]: 585) mentioned in his Democracy in America, when writing about the influence of democracy on family relations: ‘There are certain great social principles that a people either introduces everywhere or tolerates nowhere.’ In fact, de Tocqueville was looking for a democratic solution to the impasse between equality and freedom. From this perspective, the modern division between public and private should find a resolution and, with the intervention of political science, a sociability that can educate selfishness should be recreated (Werneck-Vianna 1993: 170). To a large extent, the construction of a less unequal gender order was accomplished through the progressive invasion of the private (associated at the time with the nineteenth century bourgeois urban family model), as citizenship became more inclusive and, in addition to men, began to take in women and other groups that were initially excluded. Thus, I present a critical discussion of the idea (defended, among others, by Sennett [1986, 1998]) of a tyrannical intimacy that negatively contaminates public life and is more and more subordinated to the psychologization processes arising from individualism. From a gender perspective, unfortunately absent from the author’s theorizations, this vision would be critical of the alleged privatization of life because ultimately this process turns men into more ‘femininized beings’ moving away from traditional masculine citizenship. Equally, I provide a critical discussion of the theories that, on the contrary, have selected intimacy as the great driving force of social (and gender) change and, thus, praise the ‘virtues of the private’ in contrast to those associated with the public, from an Aristotelian viewpoint. Following this, I seek to defend a perspective that emphasizes the public construction (promoted by the interrelation between the state and public opinion) of the private in contemporary societies. The struggles for equality, which, historically, were to be seen in the public sphere, have had a fundamental impact on the gender relationship, altering the design of the public/private dichotomy. I begin with the idea that, outside this approach emphasizing the public character of patriarchies (see Hearn 1992), it is difficult to understand the changes that have occurred in the social place of women and, likewise, of men. The Rise of the Private and the ‘Domestication’ of the Masculine: One Thesis, Two Interpretations It is often argued that, at the present time, we are witnessing the progressive rise of the private. Various examples are used, from the rise in voter abstention in Western

68


democracies to the decline in the association movement and collective bodies, and on to the boom in television programmes that live from exhibiting the intimacy of individuals, e.g. the so-called real-life soaps or reality shows. Various factors are supposedly at the basis of this swing. On the one hand, the thematized erosion of the nation-state, which the principles of globalization have progressively submerged, the crisis in civil society (Putnam 1995) and the rise in private dependency in relation to the welfare state (which regulates and provides for the behaviours and needs of individuals, thus reducing community solidarity [Lasch 1980]) have helped to emphasize the importance of the private sphere and the rising preoccupation with the ‘individual’ to the detriment of the ‘collective’. In truth, the roots of individualism are far from recent: seventeenth century political philosophy, the tradition of utilitarianism and liberalism, and nineteenth century Romanticism contributed to a concentration on the individual as a social unit and a moral value. On the other hand, the shift from the image of a rational individual, with a Kantian ethic of transcendental origin, to that of an emotional individual with drives and desires, in a Freudian mould, has contributed to the development of a concern with the individual’s psychic life, ego and individuality (Schorske 1981). In this viewpoint, the dimensions of individual affective and emotional fulfilment become more and more important. It is the same as saying: love, family, friendship and private identity. As Gucht (1994) mentions, love has become the religion of modern times. Through it, and its many forms (conjugal, filial, brotherly …), happiness, individuality, personal independence and moral development are sought (Heinen 1997). However, the interpretations of this movement that promotes the private tend to fluctuate between the most pessimist and optimistic visions of the ‘tyrannies of intimacy’, the title that Richard Sennett gave to the last chapter of his book strikingly called The Fall of Public Man (1986 [1974]). For Sennett, the inability to reconcile public and private has advanced the selfish interests that de Tocqueville talked about. In this view, which I believe ultimately upholds the distinction between woman/ nature and man/culture, Sennett is one of the great theoreticians of the tyrannies of intimacy, for whom the private has been converted into a threat capable of corrupting the public forms of sociability that existed in past times and on which, in the final instance, the basis of citizenship depended. Victorian England is, moreover, the time and space used by the author as the term of comparison for the public/private relationship in the present day. Sennett reports the decline of Victorian society, describing how its organizational rigidity was replaced by a â•… The application of the term ‘public’ in accordance with a gender perspective contains a number of interesting paradoxes. The public man used to reflect the virtue of the citizen, the public woman the stigma of dishonour, in contrast to the pure and honourable private woman (Bullough and Bullough 1987). In fact, the traditional gender order depends on different definitions of ‘public’. Just as in the present day it is finally the pre-eminence of certain stereotypically feminine characteristics (the emotions, for example) that, purportedly, enclose men egocentrically in private life.


69

modern desire to break down barriers in every way and in every place and to communicate with everybody about everything, thus generating disorder and a lack of distinction between private life and public life. In Sennett’s vision, the relationship between the public/private dichotomy and the expansion of industrial capitalism in the cities (with, for example, the separation of production tasks from those of reproduction) is interpreted in a particular manner: whereas other authors (e.g. Ariès 1965) attribute the changes brought about by capitalism to the division between the two spheres, for Sennett the rapid changes in the nineteenth century produced, rather, the reverse effects. In this view, the process of privatization and of the erosion of the barriers between public and private began, in fact, in nineteenth century Europe, thanks precisely to the blossoming of urban capitalism, the catalyst in the expansion of excessive concern with personal life and feelings in strongly heteronormative bourgeois families, who were busy closing the doors on the outside community. This bourgeois privatization then began to operate as a constraint, even a colonizing element, on public life, which was formerly based on civic duty and exchanges between strangers, thus transforming the political into the psychological (Sennett 1986). The most serious consequence, in this view, came from the huge growth in an individualistic and narcissistic culture that was completely focused on the emotional self and oblivious to the collective. Thus, as with Arendt or Habermas, for Sennett, who juxtaposes sociability and civic encounters, more so than Ariès, the public sphere is, to the detriment of the private, the vital element whose effects may occasion pernicious results (Bailey 2000). Moreover, the negative vision of the private as a force eroding the public and the healthy distinctions between one and the other receives repeated justification in the work of these authors. Ultimately, I add, the so-called contemporary masculinity crisis would result from its stronger connection with the private, stereotypically a feminine realm. Hanna Arendt (1959) takes the public/private distinction back to ancient Greece. There, the home, the family, home life and their economic survival were clearly distinguished from the polis, the place where liberty and freedom, in contrast to necessity and constraint, were exercised. In this perspective, the home was only related to the maintenance of organic life and the organization of the resources necessary for natural functions. From early on, in fact, it was contrived to associate the natural with the private, as Aristotle proposed. This basic social categorization was later obscured, according to Arendt. During the Middle Ages â•… For Arendt, the erosion of the distinction between public and private goes back, historically, to classical Rome. The conceptions of the public were redefined: from a space of shared deliberation it became one of the absolute sovereignty of the pater familias, who had the power of life and death over the members of the household, according to ancient Roman law. Later, during the period of the Eastern Roman Empire, the private became ‘that which pertains to the interests of single individuals’ (taken from the Corpus Juris Civilis (534AD) of Justinian I, emperor of Byzantium, quoted in Weintraub, 1997: 11-12). In return, the emperor assumed the position of absolute monarch. This Roman conception

70


and feudalism, the public/private distinction lost its meaning and became indistinct, she tells us. Feudalism attached importance to kin, blood ties and alliance. So the distinction in the ancient world disappeared, within the framework of the home, of a patriarchal family under the ancien régime that represented the point of union between both spheres. It was only from the eighteenth century, with the advent the Enlightenment and, more specifically, the development of a bourgeois civil society, the expansion of capitalism and the extension of democracy (Habermas 1989), that ideas such as sovereignty, political society or the public sphere gained ground and profound changes took place in the content of the public and the private. The public was then transformed into a comprehensive category, a space of social integration that was separate from state power and the market economy. And also separate from what is private. In Habermas’s work, moreover, the private is a nebulous category generally equated with the family, i.e. the place where independent and rational individuals capable of acting in the public sphere are (re)produced. The author is essentially occupied with the task of justifying the foundations of the public sphere, as the arena where public opinion is collectively created, noting the way in which the latter is crucial to the legitimacy of the democratic political system. The private remains in obscurity, as a minor concept in relation to the importance of the public, thus reflecting the tension between citizenship and nature, or to say it differently between masculinity and femininity. Recently, however, the private has staged a theoretical come-back. In a certain sense, privatization, individualization and sentimentalization became central topics of contemporary life in the West (Kumar 1995: 170). When family historians and sociologists (e.g. Ariès 1965, Shorter 1975, Roussel 1989, Singly 1996) characterize the change in private life and the family using terms such as sentimentalization, privatization and de-institutionalization, they pick up the narrative thread of the modern construction of individuality in the West, in counterpoint to the former ascendancy of collective entities (the tribe, clan, extended group of family members, etc.) that attached little importance to the individual person. All these concepts produce descriptions of phenomena that fit into a broad process of social individualization (the ‘civilizing process’ as Elias (1978 [1939]) calls it), a process that, as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) note, gradually liberates people (at least partially, I must add) from traditional roles and constraints. To sum up, sentimentalization and the importance granted to the affections, according to the notion of ‘elective affinity’, which Goethe applied to conjugal and love relationships in his eponymous romance in 1809, presuppose the valuing of the individual and his or her choices and personal desires (e.g. Solé 1976, Chaumier 1999) as well as a transposition of the idea of the family as the vector of social of the public, and the insignificant vision of the private, was dominant in the absolute monarchies of the West until the eighteenth century. â•… In fact, founding concepts par excellence in the common understanding of the changes that have taken place in this sphere, we cannot be reminded too often.


71

reproduction to that of the family as the place of well-being and intimacy. The notion of privatization stresses exactly this act of cutting the moorings of the external regulation exercised by family members, neighbours and the community, without which affective intimacy and subjective exchange would be threatened by the constant presence and meddling of ‘others’. The ‘institution’ then has components of expressivity (which are usually associated with femininity, within a framework of gender inequality) that finds its symbol in the Parsonian (Parsons and Bales 1955) family, which is built around the harmony that the differentiation of gender roles is supposed to provide. Finally, the family would be de-institutionalized in an additional, even more individualized movement of privatization. The rejection of prefabricated roles, gender inequality, the prevailing rules, social control – whether the regulation is private or public – in short, the more institutional characteristics of marriage and the family. The crux of this process lies in the growing preoccupation with the self, with the identity of the individual (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, Castells 1997, Giddens 1992). The centring on the self is underpinned by the social individualization of contemporary societies, which are viewed as being more and more concerned with questions of identity, authenticity, reflexivity and intimacy (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 2003). In effect, the self discovered through a reflexive and revealing intimacy, which the relaxation of explicit normative social constraints is considered to have allowed, is becoming, to a certain extent, one of today’s central themes. However, is this centring on the self a consequence of narcissistic forms of individualism, as Lasch (1980) suggests? In sociological literature, an example often quoted as evidence of this reasoning can be found in Giddens’s The Transformation of Intimacy (1992). The author suggests that reflexive intimacy constitutes the pure relationship, a vital process in the search for oneself, the discovery of the self. Besides conforming to the motivations contained in the search for the self-determination of the self, since identity would depend more on alterity than forms of social ‘belonging’, the pure relationship seems to be sustained by the reciprocal gratifications that it offers individuals. Authors such as Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, whose theorizing mainly concentrates on the process of social individualization, try to eliminate possible errors. They make haste to distinguish individualization from individualism, defining the former in the sense of ‘institutionalized individualism’ that does not presuppose any collapse of order. For them, individualization refers, above all, to the fact that the central institutions of Western modern society – basic civil, social and political rights, but also paid employment and the training and mobility necessary for it – are geared to the individual and not to the group. However, despite the overall positive view of individualization as a kind of epic of human liberation, they ultimately add a fairly enlightening sentence that even seems to bring them close to Sennett’s view of the narcissistic individual; they write (2002: XXI-XXII): ‘Insofar as basic rights are internalized and everybody wants to or must be economically independent, the spiral of individualization destroys

72


the given foundations of social coexistence. Thus – in a simple definition – “individualization” means disembedding without reembedding.’ In reality, despite the tone of exaggeration used to specify the phenomenon, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim indicate very important changes in contemporary societies, starting, moreover, from similar assumptions to those that EspingAnderson (1999) use to identify contemporary ‘defamilialization’, a process whose main protagonists, in this view, are women. The rationale inherent in the labour market and in the development of the welfare state, with their forms of regulation and of the distribution of social benefits, have made a significant contribution to social individualization: in simple words, because they have allowed individuals to become economically independent of their families and gain the ability to make choices with greater autonomy. Thus, the importance of the individual in institutionalized forms of social organization support what Beck and Beck-Gernsheim postulate when they refer to ‘institutionalized individualism’. The term is not synonymous with ‘moral individualism’, but with the forms of organization in which the individual has become the basic unit of social life. The enormous importance of this process lies in the fact that individuals have been granted the chance to break with their belonging to the family, if they desire, as Elias (1978 [1939]) notes. It is on this recent power, to a great extent, that those forces depend which can destroy gender inequalities and, generally, the structural forms of domination resulting, to a certain point, from the absence of the public, democratic and egalitarian regulation of familialism, the system on which the bases of patriarchy were established. In present-day societies, intimacy would then presuppose democracy and equality, fundamental elements of the public conquests achieved with regard to the social rights of individuals. However, the greater importance attached to love and intimacy (on which the thesis of the rise of the private is based) is a long way from dismantling the web of gender inequality. In effect, intimacy and equality very often have their backs turned on each other (Jamieson 1998). Moreover, Giddens (1992) recognizes that the division of labour, which is still unequal between men and women, may be a hindrance to the pure relationship, which depends on equality between the partners. On this basis, the author presents homosexual couples as the vanguard in this type of relationship, precisely because, in the two-some, they are free of traditional gender constraints.

â•… For the author, individualization depends on enabling developments in defamilialization, i.e. the capacity to maintain the standard of living without having to depend on family support. Individualization becomes a reality in that resources and their use are individualized.


73

The Counter-thesis: The Private as a Space of Gender Inequality Thus, the criticism mounted by radical, Marxist and socialist feminisms has been particularly accurate and has left an indelible mark on contemporary debates surrounding inequalities in Western societies. In the first place, they have made a great contribution to deconstructing visions of the public and the private as neutral spheres. On the contrary, it has shown that it is in that relationship that gender inequalities are produced (e.g. Pateman 1983, Siltanen and Stanworth 1984, Smith 1987, Landes 1998, Okin 1979). In the second place, besides discovering the gendered character of the binomial public/private, one of the strong points of feminist argumentation consists of calling attention to the way in which the private has been devalued in the political construction of societies. Consequently, turning the private – a privileged domain of a patriarchal gender order – into a public matter has been an essential task in the process of struggling against patriarchy. For this reason, Carole Pateman (1988) forcefully argues that the Western notion of citizenship was constructed on the basis of a masculine point of reference, since the models of social relationships on which it was built – firstly a form of paternal patriarchate and then another extenuated and contemporary form, the fraternal patriarchate – exclude visions of femininity and women as social beings. If, for Hobbes or Locke, the citizen was merely an owner, nowadays, in the vision of Pateman, the citizen, or individual, is still a man. For this reason, the distinction between public and private (which is of central importance in a classical democracy and liberal democracy) is still a distinction of gender. Even when they choose to contract into marriage, women are still just women, not ‘individuals’. Pateman (1983: 110-113) uses the example of marriage to show how the social contract hides a sexual contract that excludes women from full citizenship. But, in brief, one of the great pluses that we may attribute to the feminist critique is the fact that, in a certain sense, it decomposed the distinction itself between public and private, destroying the category of the private (that is, the family, the domestic …) as a reality ontologically anterior to the public, which, with its rise, could generate – due to its femininization – disorder and an egocentric and narcissistic culture. Ideals of the family and the intimacy experienced within it, as a refuge against the public sphere, are also rejected, since certain harsh forms of oppression are often experienced in the private sphere (see, for instance, Dobash and Dobash 1979, Brownmiller 1975). From the outset, the association of the feminine with the private and the masculine with the public is seen as a source of inequality and injustice, because as Ortner (1974: 72) notes: … woman is being identified with – or, if you will, seems to be a symbol of – something that every culture devalues, something that every culture defines as being of a lower order of existence than itself. Now it seems that there is only one thing that would fit that description, and that is ‘nature’ in the most generalized sense.

74


Inequality, moreover, that may only be combated with the intrusion of the political, the public, into the private sphere, with the individual and not the collective being taken as the unit, as has indeed been noted by the theoreticians of individualization. It is, ultimately, through the progressive conquest of citizenship and the abandonment of a condition associated with nature, reproduction and maternity that women have obtained more extensive rights. Since the first wave that flourished in the United Kingdom and the USA at the end of the ninetieth century,10 feminist scholarship and activism have been of great importance in this process. The relative erosion of the patriarchal family is a consequence of the expansion of citizenship, equality and independence as moral values that, although constitutive of Western modernity, have been – and are still – quite slow to embrace all individuals (Therborn 2004). For this reason, the unquestionable effects of the public on the private, which present-day feminists have sought to report (e.g. Rabinovitch 2001), have been remitted by both pessimistic and optimistic visions of the rise of the private to a more obscure plane. Following this train of thought, the possible erosion of the frontiers between private and public may be interpreted in different ways. If it is certain that the privatization and individualization movements offered individuals greater personal freedom, breaking the ties that subjected them to the domination of the group, clan, community and family, and thus weakening the traditional forms of sociability of which Ariès speaks, this process is, nonetheless, incompatible with a less radical vision of the ‘tyrannies of intimacy’. The so-called strengthening of the domain of the private in public life and political deliberation could betray not only the possible erosion of the public but also, and furthermore, an increase in the public regulation of private life about which de Tocqueville already talked in presupposing the extension of democracy to the private sphere, though, at the time, with the exclusion of women. Finally, the contemporary family – as well as contemporary masculinities – is very much the reflection of a public and state understanding of what family and private life should be: the public political and legal discourses on the family, the policies aimed at reconciling work and family, and the social protection of maternity, paternity, children and old people are flagrant examples of this process (Duncan 1995). Even if the law has served to support masculine domination (Collier 1995: 61-63), an abstract norm of gender equality that became sooner law than social reality is today a relatively common trend among Western democracies. In effect, the individualization or privatization of the family does not, however, cancel out forms of social control. For example, Donzelot (1977) sees in privatization the installation of a new kind of relationship between private 10â•… Actually, it was Mary Wollstonecraft who published the first feminist treatise, entitled A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in 1792. She defended principles of moral and social equality between the sexes. In fact, this first wave of feminism, which already began in the 18th century, would only come to an end in 1920 when, in the USA, the Constitution gave women the vote.


75

and public, produced by the process of industrialization that, above all, aims at reproducing the workforce in the isolated family group, so as to control the division of labour, thus challenging Ariès’s (1965) thesis of affective hypertrophy. In a fair part of the Western world, the process of political democratization has brought considerable change to private life, extending individual freedom and the equality inherent in the universal principle of citizenship to the inner preserve of the private sphere, thereby destroying not all but some of the legal basis of masculine domination (Therborn 2004). However, new forms of social control of the individual’s behaviour in private life have been set up and have established not only new legal frameworks but also new social norms, for which the state is also the vehicle and legitimator. In other words, the more patriarchy becomes a public matter, the more certain forms of control are effective (Hearn 1992). In general terms, we are talking about affirmation of the values of equality between spouses, the protection of children’s interests, and the establishment (directly or indirectly) of certain behaviours for families. Ultimately, the public control of the domain of the private does not contradict the existence of greater relative possibilities for inventing and negotiating behaviours. Rather the opposite. In a complex and uneven way, it has been largely the logic of political democracy that allowed ancestral inequalities to be deconstructed, despite the fact that social relations are still seldom pervaded with patriarchal inequality. In this respect, the family, where affection meets labour division and sexuality, continues to be an important centre of gender power, as I will illustrate in the last three chapters of the book. For now, let me consider the issue of equality in greater detail. Equality is, after all, an ideologically controversial term often used by individuals, including men, to express social and personal change in terms of gender. Gender, Normative Equality and the Public (Re)Construction of the (Di)Visions Since the American and French Revolutions, equality has represented one of the key ideals of classic liberal political philosophy, though it has encompassed certain fundamental controversies. It has many definitions itself and there is even more complexity in the discussion of topics such as the relationship between equality and the ideals of justice, the material fulfilment of the ideal of equality and the extension of equality to certain, if not all, social groups. In truth, besides its definition as a formal concept, which describes the qualitative relationship between a group of different objects or people that share one similar quality but not all (Gosepath 2007), equality before the law and political equality may take on different meanings, depending on the point in history and the ideological framework. The relationship of equality with morality and justice, in particular

76


distributive justice,11 is a contingent relationship, depending on what is socially considered as inequality.12 The distinction between formal equality and proportional and moral equality goes back to Aristotle, with the latter two relating to the way in which equality is applied and distributed. This distinction is fundamental to an interpretation of developments in recent centuries. Finally, the revolutionary vision of equality that emerged with the Enlightenment – and which, despite the revolution, was limited in its extent – was only recently broadened to include equal rights among individuals of different genders, social classes, ethnic groups, sexual orientations or creeds. This is the reason why Alexander (1997: 123) criticizes Enlightenment universalism based on abstract notions such as reason or rights. One of the most common arguments points at the complex and unequal expansion of democracy (e.g. Duggan 2003).13 The concept of equality has been fundamental to the consolidation of a political conception of democracy as a system that aims at ensuring the equality of individuals. However, this process has not taken place without contradictions, since ‘all modern societies were highly hierarchical, at the same time as they were asserting the equality of civic rights’ (Touraine 1998: 11). In effect, the gap between equality according to the law and de facto inequality results from various processes of domination, from slavery to colonialism and from class inequality to masculine domination. In the Western world, equality as the basis of democracy and the expression of individual, not collective, rights has been significantly expanded in recent decades. With regard to gender, women’s conquest of the vote and legal equality in the family are, ultimately, recent victories that mark the strengthening of the individual’s independence as a citizen, above naturalized membership of unequal groups of origin; we are talking about the differences between aristocrats and commoners or between men and women (Therborn 2004). The historical expansion of equality, in particular in relation to gender, owes an enormous debt to the struggles of the emancipation movements mounted by women and feminism, but these developments have not occurred without problems. One problem, of course, is related to the fact hat inequalities still remain in present-day societies 11â•… In effect, the topic of justice, which it is not appropriate for us to develop at the moment, has been central to the discussion taking place in political philosophy, particularly in connection with the relationship between justice and equality and, similarly, to the discussion on how equality itself should be understood: as the equality of resources (Dworkin 1977) or basic goods (Rawls 1971), as the equality of opportunities to achieve well-being (Arneson 1989) or as the equality of capacities to function (Sen 1992). 12â•… One of the fundamental debates, from the perspective of multiculturalism and feminism, pitches those who defend absolute moral equality, in which gender differences, ethnic group etc should be irrelevant, against those who argue that equality should take differences into account. On this topic, see, for example, Taylor (1992). 13â•… The author argues on the basis of the example of the USA. She mentions, for example, that in the nineteenth century the property qualification for the right to vote gave place to other criteria, which still consolidated the white man’s citizenship. Only later, as we know, was the right to vote extended to women and the black population.


77

(see, for example, Fraser 1992). A second problem is perhaps more important and rests upon the proper notion of equality and its difficult coupling with the notion of difference, as a principle to support a real politics of emancipation beyond the liberal fallacy of a gender neutral equality.14 In fact, the prevalence of women’s oppression in today’s Western societies clearly defies the assumption that legal reform would be sufficient to guarantee the right of not being oppressed. Often, under the umbrella of normative equality discrimination continues to occur. In this respect, as Scott (1988) notes, when defending a principle of multiple difference, equality does not eliminate difference, nor difference is opposite to equality. The conquests made under the sign of gender equality are thus complex and unfinished to the extent that multiple identities are being brought to daylight and the notion of citizenship is being complexified (Rabinovitch 2001). Women’s inclusion in activities in the public sphere, from voting to paid labour, under the mantle of democratic equality has led to paths that are hardly monolithic when we consider the ways in which it has been put into effect in a Western context. The erosion of the bourgeois separation between public and private has been reflected in new ‘gender contracts’, to use Hirdman’s concept (1998). As certain feminist theoreticians argue (e.g. Pateman 1988, Fraser 1997), in Western societies a marriage contract is implicit in a work contract – that is, a gender contract. The development from a family with a male breadwinner to one with a double income, a situation on the increase at present, has not suppressed the differentiation on the basis of gender (Pfau-Effinger 2004a). An egalitarian contract (Hirdman’s expression) is still rather a question of chance, depending very particularly on the state’s vision of family life and, consequently, its political action to put certain measures into practice. This helps to explain the extensive theoretical discussion and vast comparative research on the gendered nature of the welfare state and family policies (e.g. Duncan 1995). In effect, in various contexts in the Western world, state policies have been having an effect on the family, promoting women’s rights to employment and public participation, though at different points in time and in different ways (e.g. Esping-Anderson 1990). On the European scene, the rise of communism in the East led to the fact that from the 1920s measures were taken to emancipate women. In most countries, including those of Scandinavia, this movement only began to impose itself from the 1960s. In other situations, if we take countries such as Germany, Switzerland or Austria as a reference, where equality between spouses was only recognized in the 1970s, we see how the model of the mother as a homemaker persisted (Therborn 2004). In Portugal change also began in the 1970s after the 1974 Revolution that initiated the process of democratization

14â•… For an overview of the problem see, for instance, Beyond Equality and Difference, a book edited by Gisela Bock and Susan James in 1992, where both terms are dissected from a historical perspective attentive to the vast range of meanings associated with equality and difference.

78


and the progressive inclusion of women in the labour market and public arenas (Fishman 2005). To sum up, I argue that the public regulation of the private takes place on two levels. One of them, of the greatest importance, has been moulded by both the expansion of moral equality, understood as a fundamental pillar of the rights of citizenship of which the democratic base is the individual, and the notion of difference arising from the non-liberal feminist critique to the universal masculine subject of liberal politics. Both movements contributed, in different ways, to dismantle a conception of patriarchal power as a private matter. The other refers to the regulations applied to give effect to a certain model of family life, in which certain forms of ‘equality and difference’, i.e. of distributive justice, are put into practice. Thus, the combinations between public and private are far from being merely a matter of the private forum. This consciousness results in a greater concern with the gender characteristics inherent in the various formats of the welfare state, in an attempt to reveal the essential role that it plays in promoting – both in terms of ideology and concrete measures – certain ideals regarding gender and the family, to the detriment of others. For example, Nancy Fraser takes highly critical positions in this respect, arguing that the universal breadwinner model (i.e. the egalitarian division of paid work), implicit in many family policies, prompts women to take part in the labour market on an unfair basis, since it maintains a system favouring men. Equally, the model promoting strategies of informality in the organization of family care, as a means of advancing parity, tends to overload women with the household and care-giving tasks. So, for Fraser, the ideal model would be that of the ‘universal caregiver’ in which men and women would be urged genuinely to share public and private responsibilities. For her, putting a genuine model of universal citizenship into practice would imply a political commitment to putting the ideals of gender equality into practice.15 Furthermore, many persistent gender inequalities also arise from different conceptions of equality, understood as distributive justice. These differences may be found not only at the level of the state and social policies but also in the ways in which the norm of equality is incorporated, on an individual basis. Some research on the subject has sought to demonstrate the difficult relationship between notions of equality and justice (e.g. Roux 1999, Rosenbluth et al. 1998). If we define equality as equivalence, parity between men and women will depend on the total sharing of duties and tasks inside and outside the home. If, on the contrary, we define equality as the division of work (paid and domestic) in such a way that neither the man nor the woman is overloaded, we are defining the concept using a criterion of proportionality: to each according to his or her tasks. This view of equality may also include the complementary nature of men and women’s

15â•… This assumption is further discussed in Chapter 4 where a cross-national analysis of gender cultures and their impact on the division of labour are presented.


79

‘ideal roles’, if it is understood as a fair situation (Lennon and Rosenfield 1994).16 Materialization of the idea of equality vis-à-vis the notion of difference is certainly a complex process that, from a gender point of view, requires redefinitions of the irregular boundaries between public and private. Bringing Men into the Family: Interpreting the Public Construction of ‘Private Masculinities’ Finally, I should like to stress some aspects that seem fundamental to an interpretation of the public construction of masculinities in private life. One of them, on which, moreover, there is relative consensus, lies in the historical importance of the public/private dichotomy as a codifying process for the modern gender order in the West. Ultimately, the association of men with public life and women with private life was created in a most unequivocal manner with the emergence of modernity, with capitalism and with the expansion of the industrial cities, thus imposing the nineteenth century bourgeois family model. From the outset, the construction of the public/private split reflected the expansion of the regulatory capacity of societies against the logic of family, clan and feudalism. Regulation encompassed men, social beings, leaving out the nature contained in femininity. But it was also a model that was supposed to familialize men, domesticating their sexual predatory compulsion and transforming them into respectable husbands and fathers, true political heads of the family (e.g. Collier 1995, Chapter 6). Through this process of public construction of ‘respectable masculinity’ men’s power was transferred, to a certain extent, to the domains of capitalist labour and politics whereas women stayed in the domestic sphere as symbols of affection. As breadwinners and fathers men lived in struggle to tame sexual compulsion in favour of family responsibility. This was the basis of the Parsonian family which prevailed almost unquestioned until the 1950s. It is, in a larger sense, in the history and change of family life that one finds empirical evidence to such an understanding of the dynamics of masculinities, which emphasizes the inner plurality of the dominant model of manhood as it was established from the nineteenth century. The breadwinner, the sexual predator and the contemporary figure of the caring father can be better understood through this genealogical perspective. 16â•… The authors indicate that, among American couples of the nineties, a significant portion of the women who were overloaded with household chores considered this unequal situation vis-a-vis their husbands as fair. On the basis of these findings, they discuss the notions of equality and justice, assessing the implications between both. They conclude, for example, that women with fewer resources and fewer alternatives to marriage tend to describe the situation of inequality in which they live as fair, whereas, in groups of more highly qualified women, there tends to be a greater juxtaposition between the ideas of equality and justice in the couple’s division of household work.

80


As we know, the gendered differentiated model sustaining this ‘familial masculinity’ has suffered countless reverses and transformations in the last few decades. The modern ideals that served to bring the power of men into the public realm (e.g. Hearn 1992) were also transformed into weapons for struggling against oppression and exclusion. It was largely the ideals of democracy and equality, established in the public sphere, that increasingly imposed themselves, demolishing the patriarchal and family-based mentality that subjugated women. In a certain sense, this process is fought against the old dilution of the feminine element in the family group, against a naturalized gender identity equated with maternal functions, even if it were these maternal functions that first, under the umbrella of first wave feminist movements, held the fight for women’s rights (e.g. Skocpol 1992). However, despite all the changes in gender relations and the organization of the family, these old associations largely prevail. Women’s participation in public activity is, finally, less than that of men, and the inverse association is still more of a fact. As is known, the model of the egalitarian division of production and reproduction tasks is far from the prototype in contemporary Western societies, as I will argue in the coming chapter. A second relevant question to equate the connection between masculinities and private life relates to criticism of the thesis of the disproportionate ascent of the private, whose progression, it is suggested, is responsible for the erosion of the barriers between public and private and the development of an individualistic culture oriented towards personal well-being and free, unregulated intimacy. Greater individualization, sentimentalization and de-institutionalization must then, it is thought, destroy the gender differences emanating from the patriarchal family collective and finally give place to the expression of individual desires and purposes. On the contrary, as I have tried to argue, it is through the public reinforcement, whether political, legal or normative, of the philosophical principles of ‘equality and difference’ that, despite the reverses and obstacles, conquests have been achieved in the direction of making fairness, in terms of gender, a reality. The emergence of ideals of equalitarian and caring men is less as result of men’s appropriation of stereotypical feminine emotionality than it is the consequence of a public normativity, whether legal or symbolic. A final note, however, leads us to broach an important problem that lies in the many meanings themselves of the notion of public. It is one thing to define only the state as public, in opposition to all the rest, another to equate it with the public sphere of citizenship, and yet another to define it as a space of sociability. One circumstance is indisputably common to all these meanings: whatever the definition of public, for a long time women were excluded, like other social categories, from active participation in the world of politics and government, citizenship, and even the traditional sociabilities associated with the exercise of masculinity. The place for women was the ‘natural’ place in the family, in the domestic, constructed as the antithesis of the places for the men. However, the erosion of the world of sociabilities and traditional solidarities, which Ariès speaks about, is also the downfall of a patriarchal reality that subjugates women. In traditional societies,


81

or even nineteenth century cafés, the men are the protagonists of the interaction. A public sphere of citizenship founded on this world of male dialogue would not cancel out the characteristics of differentiation and ‘naturalized inequality’ of the private. It was, then, with the eruption of social movements such as those of the workers, feminists, black civil rights campaigners, and homosexuals, among others, that the public sphere itself changed, giving space to excluded voices, and thus began to operate as a mechanism for social pressure, a promoter of change in the law and the state. Political citizenship and political governance were gradually establishing historic confrontations that speeded up many changes at the level of a real application of the principles of equality. For this reason, it was necessary to tear down the old collectivisms, whose cohesion was based on a negation of individuality itself. So the consequences of modern individualism are not only narcissistic or selfish but also at the base of the recognition of the human person’s rights. So any thesis that praises or criticizes the ‘virtues of the private’, concerning itself with possible erosions of the public, will have to specify the various historical and theoretical meanings of the dichotomy public/private. Changes in the gender order can only be understood on the basis of these distinctions; let us speak of the progressive citizenship of women in the public world or the incorporation of a discourse of equality into the domestic sphere, which is increasingly permeated today by mechanisms regulating the fight against the ‘natural inequalities’ of the private. However, the private has not become soft by relation to the patriarchal core of men’s power in the public realm of economy or politics, as Connell argues. Even if men are no longer ‘private patriarchs’, the family and the domestic continue unsurprisingly to sustain men’s overall supremacy. In the chapter that follows I will approach this problem from an empirical perspective on the basis of a cross-national comparison of cultures, attitudes and practices of gender division of labour in several European countries and the US.


Chapter 4

Labour and Love: The Gender Division of Labour and Caring in a Cross-National Perspective While it has fuelled an intense debate around the meanings of gender equality (see, for example, Lewis 2002, Pascall and Lewis 2004, Pfau-Effinger 2002), the rise in women’s participation in the paid labour force over the past few decades has seldom been interpreted as signalling the decline of either male breadwinner families or breadwinner masculinities (Collier 1995: 217). In Western societies, the patriarchal family organization where men were assumed to provide for the family while women took responsibility for all the housework and childcare would be substituted by family arrangements built upon norms and practices that were more egalitarian in terms of the gender division of labour. As is often noted (e.g. Therborn 2004), men’s traditional positions (and traditional power) also changed in that men became increasingly deprived of their ascendancy as family providers. Likewise, the change men underwent was inseparable from the overall transformations related to women’s entry into paid labour and to family organization. Only with difficulty could masculinity be understood outside of its relationship with femininity. As Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) point out, this is a good reason for researching masculinities and femininities side by side. In the search for greater gender equality, women’s full-time work, alongside the full provision of public childcare, was often incorporated into political agendas as a key condition of citizenship (Orloff 1993, 1996, Gornick and Meyers 2001). Yet, this feminist liberal approach to equality has suffered harsh criticism, principally for neglecting unpaid work and caring tasks (Lewis 1998, 2001, Daly and Lewis 2000, among others), though also for promoting a gender-biased notion of fairness â•… Several developments regarding women’s social position provide evidence of indelible transformations. In the European Union (25 member states), female employment rates, which have been rising since the 1950s, stood at 56.3 per cent in 2005 (Eurostat 2005). In the same year the female share of managerial posts reached about a third and the proportion of young people (20-24) who had completed higher secondary education was higher among women (80 per cent) than men (only 74.6 per cent). Furthermore, among the younger generations of couples (partners aged 20-49), 45 per cent were fulltime dual-earners. From the men’s perspective, a major development has been the growing legislation directed at promoting their wider involvement in family responsibilities and roles, specifically as fathers (e.g. Björnberg and Kollind 1996).

84


that imposes on women a model of masculine citizenship defined by public participation. The modern dichotomy between private and public is taken as real while there is no fundamental effort to deconstruct it in a way that might be truly challenging to men. Hence, women have to face an unequal labour market where it is difficult to find equal opportunities or equal pay for equal work. Moreover, at the same time that women enter into the world of paid labour, which is still dominated by men (e.g. Eurostat 2008), they most often remain overloaded with domestic responsibilities (Lewis 1993, Crompton 2006, Morgan 2004, among others). In many cases only minor changes occur in a family’s internal organization and women end up with a ‘double work shift’ (Chaudron 1984) or a ‘second shift’ (Hochschild and Machung 1989). Nancy Fraser’s (1994) seminal critique of this ‘universal breadwinner model’, which fails to appreciate the importance of caring tasks and allows gender differentiation to persist in private and public life, proved to be a landmark in the critical interpretation of developments related to women’s employment and family change in Western societies. Alternatives to this model have been thoroughly discussed in feminist scholarship and gendered approaches to welfare regimes. However, solutions based on what Fraser labels the ‘caregiver parity model’ (that is, the one and a half breadwinner pattern where women are supposed to take on part-time jobs and continue to assume caring tasks) have also been seen as encouraging unequal positions for men and women to be maintained. Even if the difference between breadwinning and caring is made costless, traditional ideologies of men as main breadwinners and women as primary caregivers are not truly challenged. On the â•… A good example is the gender pay gap that in 2004 stood, on average, at 15 per cent in the European Union. In fact, though the gender gap in employment and education has narrowed, gender differences remain evident: in the European Union (EU25) the employment rate for men is higher (71.2 per cent in 2005), female unemployment is greater (9.6 per cent for women against 7.6 per cent for men, in 2006), and part-time work is strongly feminized (in 2005, 33 per cent of women in employment were working part-time as against only 7 per cent of men). â•… In many European countries, women’s inclusion in the labour force favours parttime employment, which has been discussed as a potential source of inequality. However, the cultural understanding of part-time work can vary a great deal. On the basis of a comparative study of 15 European countries, Bang et al. (2000) claim that it may have a positive or negative connotation depending on whether part-time employment is viewed as diminishing women’s possibilities of moving up the career ladder or as oriented specifically towards fulfilling women’s needs. In all cases, gender differences on this matter are quite clear: part-time work is strongly feminized. â•… Theda Skocpol (1992), among others, developed the notion of ‘maternalism’ to describe women’s political activities in the early twentieth century. Women’s rights were defended on the basis of ‘difference’ and their competences as mothers. This contrasts with mainstream contemporary notions of ‘women’s interests’, if they are defined as consisting mainly of women’s entry into paid labour and public development of the provision of care services. These perspectives still offer a model with which we can interpret contemporary

Labour and Love

85

other hand, notions such as the ‘dual earner/dual carer model’ (Lewis 1998, 2001, Pascall and Lewis 2004, Pfau-Effinger 2002, 2004a), the ‘equal-status contract’ (Hirdman 1998) or the ‘universal caregiver model’ (Fraser 1994) embody a different vision of gender relations. Although emerging from different theoretical viewpoints (e.g. Gornick and Meyers 2001), all these proposals imply flexible but equal sharing of both paid and unpaid work. Breadwinning and caring should be equally divided with the support of welfare measures. From this perspective, only a model capable of reconciling ‘labour’ and ‘love’ would breathe life into equality in real practices and politics, thereby supporting a deeper change in the gender division of labour. Only a societal model capable of deconstructing the old ideological gender division between private/feminine and public/masculine would challenge men to effectively undergo a more profound process of change. Yet, whether as practice or even as a norm, such an ideal is far from being dominant: it is impossible to speak of any pattern that cuts across Western societies (whether in ideology or practice) regarding the gender division of labour. Indeed, substantial national and regional variations have been shown to characterize the modes of the gender division of labour as well as the public policies that promote them (Lewis 1992, 1998, 2002, Sainsbury 1994, Walby 1994, Hirdman 1998, PfauEffinger 2004a, Duncan and Edwards 1999, Hearn et al. 2002). In this respect, the literature most often, and almost consensually, contrasts Scandinavian countries, which are viewed as exemplary in endorsing gender fairness, with southern Europe, where a male breadwinner model still appears to be more common. To some extent, the persistence of the provider-breadwinner model can be related to weak state support for a dual earner/dual carer model (e.g. Forsberg et al. 2000). However, I should add that, among a number of structural and historical factors, the ideology of traditional breadwinner masculinity, which still underpins genderdifferentiated practices, also contributes to maintaining the patriarchal order. In fact, a great deal of theoretical effort has been dedicated to gaining an understanding of differences in patterns of employment, family organization and welfare systems from a cross-national perspective. Some key developments have used the lens of gender, arguing in favour of a wider perspective that not only captures the structural frameworks of institutions and the macro socio-economic factors but also the cultural aspects of gender differentiation. As argued, among others, by Pfau-Effinger (2000, 2004b), if we want to understand the deeper reasons that help to perpetuate gender inequalities, and the particular systems that generate specific arrangements supporting differentiation, we must, inevitably, incorporate gender cultures into our analysis. That is to say, ‘the values and models that people use as orientation for their behaviour’ (Pfau-Effinger 2004b: 1). Without doubt, ideals of masculinity and femininity underpin policymaking, labour markets and individual practices while, at the same time, they are permanently being changed by them in one way or the other. Cultural globalization as well as differences in welfare systems from a comparative perspective, whether women are encouraged to be primarily ‘mothers’ or ‘workers’ (Pfau-Effinger 1999).

86


transnational capitalism are major examples of those dynamics that Jeff Hearn (1992) labels transnational patriarchies. For better and for worse, the gender order has become global (Connell 1998, 2005). Certainly, ‘local cultures’ and ‘local gender orders’ do not vanish. They are simply transformed into stages that invite hybridizing processes to occur, as a result of the different appropriation of cultural norms, whether formal (the judicial and legal system, for example) or informal (the mass media and global consumer culture, for example). Consequently, a specific gender culture (or a specific form of symbolizing hegemonic masculinity and its relationship with emphasized femininity [Connell 1987]) may embody an array of contradictions and tensions, depending on the different historical experience of gender relations. There are several reasons for normative contradictions to emerge (e.g. Hill 1987). Firstly, informal norms existing in a given local or even national culture (a strong patriarchal family system, for instance) may contradict those put forward by the welfare state or the labour market. These different visions may therefore conflict with each other, thus, in turn, creating an amount of pressure for social change within the gender order. Furthermore, as the cultural definition of mainstream masculinities and femininities can be quite changeable in certain historical environments (for instance, due to globalization processes, ambiguous legal requirements or even class and generational differences), normative plurality may be widened to welcome heterogeneous visions of the ideal gender division of labour within a given society. Each dimension of the gender order, from production to cathexis (Connell 1987: 2003), can have its own set of norms, whose juxtaposition may promote plurality, and even reconciliation, difficult though it may be. A good example would be the different systems stereotypically organizing family life and the labour market. Secondly, further complexity arises from the appropriation of these gender norms on an individual scale (see, for instance, Becker 1982), as people may combine elements that are apparently opposed to each other. For example, individuals may simultaneously emphasize the role of women as full-time mothers and as full-time workers (Hays 1996) or at the same time accentuate the importance of male breadwinning alongside the notion of caring fatherhood (Aboim 2009). In this chapter, I would like to explore the ways in which men and women relate to cultural aspects of gender in different Western societies, via a comparison of the US and the European countries included in the module of the 2002 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) on Family and Changing Gender Roles. In the light of the transformations occurring in the gender division of labour at many levels it is important to discover the extent to which individuals, men and women â•… As the author notes, taking a philosophical view, normative conflicts arise when one norm interferes with the intended functioning of another. â•… The 2002 ISSP survey was carried out in 34 countries and was fielded between 2001 and 2003. More information is available at http://www.gesis.org/en/data_service/issp/ data/2002_Family_III.htm.

Labour and Love

87

living in different national contexts, value the ideal of a ‘dual earner/dual carer couple’ to the detriment of the male breadwinner model. However, as argued above, I do not expect any society to be normatively homogeneous. Quite the reverse, ‘national gender cultures’ probably encompass a certain amount of plurality, which allows individuals to make their own mix of values by simultaneously appropriating different gender norms, ranging from those of which the institutional vehicle is the state to those assembling traditional and informal rules and regulations. Men and women’s attitudes – which I will be measuring at the individual level through a set of indicators related to the ideal gender division of labour – are expected to reflect plurality, whether they are aligned with the dominant cultural model (or models) or express resistance to it. Of course, individual attitudes must not be confused with gender cultures, which represent precisely a set of crystallized societal norms orienting individuals’ discourses about gender. However, plurality in individual attitudes can operate as a rough measure of the compounded norms operating in and across societies. The ways in which gender cultures have evolved, as well as individual attitudes towards them, have been considered highly dependent on structural developments related to welfare systems and labour market patterns. From a cross-national perspective, as Pfau-Effinger (2004a) notes, it is certain that the ‘dual earner, dual carer’ norm, though reliant on the overall history of a given society, has become strongly rooted in gender arrangements (gender orders if we prefer to use Connell’s terminology) that have promoted welfare policies ideologically oriented towards an ‘equal gender contract’ (Hirdman’s expression). Cross-national differences in women’s employment, which are most often viewed as the outcome of the historical development of welfare systems, are also a key factor in an analysis of the modes of gendered labour division. Furthermore, women’s employment has been considered to exert influence on both the forms of family organization and the cultural aspects of gender (see, for instance, Oppenheimer 1982). However, despite their transformative power, the effects produced by different patterns of female employment are perhaps less consensual when considered as a motor of gender change. A comparison of attitudes towards gender equality in the division of labour in Hungary and the US, carried out by Panatoya and Brayfield (1997), showed that among Hungarian women, with their high employment rate, support for equality was lower than in the US, where the female employment rate was not as high in 1988. Women’s employment has not produced dramatic changes in the division of domestic labour, either (Sullivan 2000). A probable explanation lies in the resilience of hegemonic masculinity as an ideological constraint both on change in men and rebellion in women. Gender cultures, in the sense Pfau-Effinger gives to the concept, may hinder individual and societal change. In addition, we must not forget that the gender contract models emerging from the division of labour reflect ideals of masculinity and femininity that are profoundly inter-related. Following this line of reasoning, I will also explore the gaps between individual attitudes and the gender models that couples are putting into practice in their own division of paid and unpaid labour. In accordance with the emphasis on gender

88


cultures, I depart from the hypothesis that support for an ‘egalitarian gender contract’ will encourage couples to engage in more equal sharing of paid and, particularly, unpaid work. Individuals’ attitudes must function, to some extent, as a mediator between culture and practice. In the section that follows, I establish a theoretical framework for the crossnational analysis that will be carried out. Gender as Culture: Outline of a Comparative Analysis Gender cultures have been approached as key subjects for comparative analysis. It is true, however, that in some cross-national studies, including analyses of welfare regimes (Esping-Andersen 1999) or gender regimes supported by the state, culture has not been set apart from other structural aspects of social contexts, such as welfare policies or economic factors. Nevertheless, cultural dimensions have captured the attention of a growing body of researchers. Many are addressing the gendered aspects of welfare policies, labour markets and family organization, whether taking the concept of a welfare system as a starting point or establishing alternative criteria – most commonly based on the gender division of labour in families (Pfau-Effinger 2000, 2004a, Duncan and Pfau-Effinger 2000, Hirdman 1991, 1998, Lewis 1992, 1998, Orloff 1993, among others). However, cultural aspects have been approached from different perspectives. Let me briefly summarize some of the key developments in the analysis of family and gender models. The first important example is Hirdman’s pioneering theory of the gender contract, a notion that has frequently attracted the critical eye of feminist theory for emphasizing consensus and devaluing difference. However, Hirdman advances this metaphorical concept, built upon the contractualist tradition, seeking to combine it with a structuralist approach to gender differentiation across societies and historical time. From this perspective, the cultural principles of hierarchy and difference underlying the gender contract allowed her to explain how the normative family model in Sweden evolved from a housewife-based arrangement to an egalitarian contract during the twentieth century. For Hirdman, the ideal-types of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ play a central role in the processes of gender and power. Social structures, institutions and gender policies reflect these ideals. Indeed, ideologically dominant visions of masculinity and femininity are, par excellence, the organizing principles upholding the normative gender contract. Traditionally, this contract embodies a ‘male norm’ that generates a pattern of segregation directed towards the subordination of women. Although lacking detailed explanation of how these cultural norms were developed and became institutionalized, Hirdman’s approach still offers an interesting account of individual action. For Hirdman, the â•… For a critical overview of Esping-Anderson’s typology, see Arts and Gelissen (2002) and Jordan (2006), for instance.

Labour and Love

89

normative gender contract can be challenged in certain historical circumstances; it is not unquestionably imposed on individuals. Women and men normally have a certain leeway for negotiation and may even act against it, thus creating increased possibilities for social change. The emphasis placed on gender negotiation distinguishes Hirdman’s gender contract from Pateman’s (1988) landmark notion of a sexual contract where men simply dominate without the further participation of women in the negotiation processes. For Hirdman and, in a different way, for Connell (1987), gender power is strongly dependent on the ideological complicity of femininity and masculinity, which the real practices of men and women in specific settings reflect and reinforce or challenge and transform. Culture and ideology do not cover the whole range of the forms of materially-grounded masculine domination but constitute an important dimension with which we can grasp its social reproduction. In this respect, Connell’s concepts of hegemonic masculinity and gender order (of which the symbolical dimension also became part [Connell 2003]) certainly have a wider reach, but even so Hirdman’s theorization calls attention to a number of important processes. Walby’s multidimensional proposal, as we saw in Chapter 1, also emphasizes cultural aspects, though in a quite different way. Drawing on the concept of patriarchy, which stresses the material grounding of differentiation, Walby (2001) defines gender relations as consisting of a set of inter-related domains or gender regimes: employment, unpaid work, the state, male violence, sexuality and, last but not least, culture. The inclusion of culture as a constituent of a specific gender regime integrated into a larger gender order helps us to understand the variations observed in gender relations, without either reducing the analysis of gender to structural factors (such as the economy or welfare policies) or solely focusing on culture. In this respect, Pfau-Effinger’s (2000, 2004a) concern with the historical transformation of gender arrangements (for her a term synonymous with Connell’s gender order) has led her to move the basis of comparative research forward. The theoretical differentiation between the gender culture system and the ‘material’ gender system is essential if we are to analyse the pathways of social change in terms of gender. All too often, she argues, transformations at the cultural and the institutional levels are unevenly related because they occur at different speeds and with contradictions. Bearing this in mind, Pfau-Effinger explores the historical emergence of different cultural models, which function, as in the classical sociological definition of culture, as guiding norms for the gendered division of labour and the relationships between generations (e.g. between mother and child). These models are the ‘typical societal ideal representations, norms, and values regarding the family and the societal integration of women and men’ (PfauEffinger 2004a: 382). From this perspective, she is able to distinguish five different cultural models in Western European history (Pfau-Effinger 1999: 62-63). The family economic gender model, which relies on the cooperation of women and men in family businesses. The male breadwinner/female home-carer model, in which men and women have differentiated roles. The male breadwinner/female

90


part-time carer model, which portrays a modernized version of the latter. The dual breadwinner/state carer model, where both men and women are employed fulltime and delegate care to the state. The dual breadwinner/dual carer model, which reflects the equal gender division of public and private responsibilities. These cultural models exhibit specific gender contracts, or gender arrangements as she labels them, that are unequally distributed across Western societies. For instance, the family economic gender model, which was traditionally important in Finland, still characterizes several parts of Greece, Italy and Spain – as well as Portugal, I may add (Barreto 2000). In fact, it is argued that cultural models have an independent effect in explaining societal differences where institutional or economic factors are unable to provide sufficient explanation. Institutional and individual actors operate within these cultural frameworks, which, at the same time, they can challenge and change (Duncan and Pfau-Effinger 2000). Accordingly, gender relations are always undergoing transformation due to economic change, developments on a state and welfare level, or individual action (Crompton 2001). A major transformation propelled by modernity was related to the social strength of the urban bourgeoisie, Pfau-Effinger (2004a) concludes, on the basis of a sociohistorical comparison of Finland, Germany and the Netherlands,. The social and ideological ascent of the bourgeoisie was a determining factor in the cultural consolidation of a housewife/male breadwinner contract that endured almost untouched until the 1950s. The paths towards the modernization of gender arrangements must therefore bring cultural models into the analysis. Without culture, it would be difficult to grasp why, even today, there are such different developments in women’s participation in the labour force and, furthermore, why the organization of family life has responded so differently to women’s entry into the paid labour force. In this respect, under the umbrella of the growing dual breadwinner model, Pfau-Effinger identifies three cultural developments. The dual breadwinner/state carer model, common in Scandinavian countries, e.g. Sweden – or Finland, which switched from a family economic model to this one due to the strong influence of welfare state policies. Here, caring for children is primarily seen as the responsibility of the welfare state rather than the family. The dual breadwinner/dual carer model, which is substituting the traditional male breadwinner model in Germany and the Netherlands. In this model, childcare is mainly the responsibility of the family, which ought to be organized around a fair distribution of paid and unpaid work between men and women, with the help of a family wage or a state transfer system. The dual breadwinner/marketized female caregiver model, in which (as in the US and UK) the family is seen as responsible for organizing and paying for market childcare. These different cultural models for the gender division of labour have effects on a number of levels. Not only do they underpin welfare policies on gender but they also exert influence on people’s real practices (Bang et al. 2000). Of course, culture is not a static element, as poststructuralist analyses were keen to point out. Ideological discourses are reconstituted through performative action and are therefore permanently being rebuilt (see Chapters 1 and 2).

Labour and Love

91

In a cross-national analysis of the gender division of labour, culture may have been conceptualized and integrated in different ways. A common point, however, is the analytical emphasis on the patterning of the gender division of labour. A variety of authors have developed theoretical and empirical work from this perspective. A major example is the work of Lewis and Ostner (1994). They have taken the male breadwinner model as the point of departure to construct a typology analysis that distinguishes between the weak, moderate or strong male breadwinner model and the dual breadwinner model (Lewis and Ostner 1994, Lewis 1992). More recently, Lewis (1998, 2001) has stressed the importance of care regimes and argued for an analysis of how unpaid work is valued and how it is shared between women and men. Also emphasizing the work-family dimension, Walby (2001) claims that Western countries are distributed along a continuum stretching between the domestic gender regime, in which women are excluded from the labour market and the state, and the public gender regime, in which women are included in these public domains, though not on equal terms with men. From a male perspective, this means that men in each of these models have a different relationship with the male breadwinner ideal (Hearn et al. 2002). Sainsbury (1994), on the other hand, constructed two ideal-types of gendered social policy: the male breadwinner and the individual models, where women (and men, I must add) are entitled to individual rights. She also emphasizes the importance of gender and family ideologies as key sources of variation. Drawing on the research mentioned above, I will also take the ‘breadwinner’ criteria as a starting point for comparing different countries in relation to the gender division of paid and unpaid work. However, if we wish to interpret individual attitudes and practices as being closely linked to a certain gender culture, at least three other aspects must be considered. Let me summarize. First, the relationship of the welfare state with the male breadwinner model is of great importance in the institutionalization of an ideal gender contract. The different routes by which ‘labour and love’ have met and evolved in each society greatly depend on the public vision of masculinity and femininity. Secondly, the inclusion of care in the analysis is fundamental to an understanding of the ‘gendered’ character of change involving gender. As a result, and lastly, the tensions arising from the connections between employment and care ought to be considered. As Fraser has so well argued, neither the universal breadwinner model nor the caregiver parity model allow for real equality. The former induces women to follow a male-oriented labour culture while the latter tends to continue assigning women and men to different spheres. Analysing Attitudes from a Cross-national Perspective Drawing on data from the ISSP survey carried out in 2002, the cross-national analysis of the 26 countries selected (all the available European states, including the Russian Federation, plus the US) was built upon attitudinal indicators concerning the ideal gender division of labour (Table 4.1). From the perspective

92


of family and employment patterns, these countries represent a range of different gender arrangements, as is acknowledged in the vast literature on welfare regimes, gender cultures and gendered family models. However, rather then settling for an aprioristic clustering of countries based on the existing literature, I used what I may call a mixed method of selection. I started with an exploratory factor analysis of the available attitudinal indicators – only at a later stage were the countries grouped according to their main characteristics in terms of female employment and welfare policies concerning the gender division of labour. This initial procedure thus enabled me not only to identify suitable attitudinal dimensions regarding gender norms, but also helped me to select the countries at the first analytical stage. In fact, given the tentative character of the analysis, I initially selected all the European countries included in the ISSP 2002 survey, plus the United States. I then used the pooled data set to carry out an exploratory factor analysis, by which I could inductively determine the most significant attitudinal dimensions of the ideal gender division of labour cutting across those countries. These empirically constructed dimensions reflect, as we will see, well-known key theoretical axes of gender differentiation between ideal masculinity and femininity. There are, nonetheless, some limitations on this analytical strategy that should be mentioned. The most important is, of course, the focus on the national level, which disregards important regional disparities within national contexts and also neglects the structuring forces of globalization. However, as Forsberg et al. (2000) argue, the significance at national level still exists because it is there that the political and institutional framework for gender negotiations is set. A second limitation concerns attitudinal scales (in this case, the five-point Likert scale, varying from 1-strongly agree to 5-strongly disagree), which often create false homogeneity and make it difficult to interpret individual meaning. However, with the available data we can roughly capture certain attitudinal dimensions of the stereotypical gender contract. Therefore, to develop an analytical strategy that might help us to identify different attitudinal dimensions, I selected, among those available, items related to the relationship between women’s employment and motherhood; the gender division of paid work; the woman’s ideal role (homemaker or professionally independent woman); and the man’s participation in housework and parenting (Table 4.1). The data analyses carried out on the 10 items selected resulted in three â•… Germany (East and West), UK (Great Britain and Northern Ireland), the Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia, France, Spain, Portugal, Flanders (Belgium), the Czech Republic, Ireland, Austria, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Russia and the US. To respect intra-national specificities, I analysed Great Britain and Northern Ireland separately and, similarly, East and West Germany. â•… All the items selected (see Table 4.1) are ordinal variables on the same scale (the five-point Likert scale). The direction of some of the variables was changed so that all had the same social meaning, varying on a scale from 1 to 5 (weak to strong emphasis), so that

Labour and Love

Table 4.1

93

Principal component analysis of the 26 selected countries included in the ISSP survey, 2002 Component

A pre-school child is likely to suffer if the mother has a full-time job A working mother can establish just as warm and secure a relationship with her children as a mother who does not work All in all, family life suffers when the woman has a full-time job A man’s job is to earn money; a woman’s job is to look after the home and family A job is all right but what most women want is a home and children Household satisfies as much as a paid job Men ought to do a larger share of the household work than they do now Men ought to do a larger share of childcare than they do now The best way for a woman to be independent is through having a job Both the husband and the wife should contribute to family income % of variance explained Alpha (α)

Working mother

Men’s domestic participation

Dual breadwinner

Independent woman

0.775

0.036

0.256

0.099

-0.739

0.051

-0.143

0.277

0.771

0.028

0.289

0.033

0.349

-0.144

0.689

0.003

0.356

-0.032

0.684

0.138

-0.073

0.046

0.806

-0.242

-0.034

0.896

-0.062

0.111

0.027

0.894

0.011

0.140

0.039

0.102

-0.070

0.793

-0.104

0.133

-0.022

0.782

27.093 0.71

19.346 0.79

11.215 0.62

10.656 0.51

statistically significant factors, each of which draws together items that represent a specific attitudinal dimension. The first dimension, which I called the working mother factor (α=0.71), aggregates statements related to the impact of a mother’s full-time employment on young children. Individual attitudes range from support for a mother’s employment to full disapproval. The second dimension assembles two items related to men’s participation in housework and childcare – the male domestic participation factor (α=0.79). Finally, the third dimension, which I labelled the dual breadwinner factor (α=0.62), presents the couple’s division of paid and unpaid labour and shows the line of variation related to the rejection of the male breadwinner norm (men provide for the family and women remain in the

an exploratory factor analysis could be carried out. However, though principal component analysis and varimax rotations resulted in four factors, only three revealed internal statistical congruence. The three factors all have loadings greater than 0.60.

94


domestic sphere), at one pole, and the agreement with this norm, at the other. For the cross-national analysis that followed, I constructed three indexes, which sum up men’s and women’s statements, varying on a scale from 1 (weak emphasis on that aspect) to 5 (strong emphasis). These statistical procedures led me to the second phase of country selection. From the initial 26, I arrived at the 17 countries in which the factor structure revealed statistical congruence.10 The final sample includes very different gender arrangements (to use Pfau-Effinger’s expression), ranging from a strong dual breadwinner culture in Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland)11 to a still-strong male breadwinner contract in some of the Southern European countries (e.g. Spain). Portugal, where levels of women’s employment are significantly higher and state support for a dual earner model has been on the political agenda since the 1970s, constitutes an exception to this pattern (Wall 2008), although the dominant gender culture still emphasizes the primacy of women as nurturers and child-rearers (Wall, Aboim and Marinho 2007). Even if the role of men as the main breadwinners has been eroded, the long survival of a strong patriarchal ideology during the five decades of the Estado Novo, a right-wing dictatorial regime that a military coup overthrew in 1974, has left an ideological mark that still prevails, to some extent, in the cultural importance of the mother-child bond. In a way, Portugal is an example of the conflict between a public gender culture where the defence of equality in employment and care has become stronger over the past years12 and a traditional culture of gendered familism, still quite extensive among older, non-urban and low-skilled populations.

10â•… The overall factor structure does not imply that all countries have identical structures. The methodology of testing for construct equivalence requires comparisons of the factor structure of each country with the overall structure. Tucker’s phi was employed as the coefficient of agreement to estimate factor equivalence. Principal component analyses with varimax rotation were then carried out for each of the 26 countries, but only in 19 of these was congruence revealed (Tucker’s phi > 0.95). Additionally, I carried out identical procedures to measure the comparability of men and women with the overall factor structure. For both groups, Tuckers’ phi-coefficients were above 0.95. Ireland and the Netherlands were excluded due to the lack of indicators. 11â•… The Nordic countries were closest to a dual breadwinner model, although there are also important differences in the discourses and policies towards gender equality in the five Nordic countries (Bergqvist 1999). 12â•… The increase in the legal protection of paternity constitutes a major example. From the late 1990s onwards fatherhood has been one of the main subjects of policy-making. Since 2000 (Law No. 142/99 of 31 August) 5 days’ leave (paternity leave) has been granted to fathers immediately after childbirth. Fathers can also share the paid leave of 120 days with mothers and gain the right to 15 days’ paid leave at the end of maternity leave. The spirit of family policies relies on reconciling family and work obligations, but not in a random or conservative manner; the clear orientation towards a model of an egalitarian couple and an involved father becomes evident in this period (see Wall 2008).

Labour and Love

95

Portugal, and Southern Europe in general, were left out of Esping-Anderson’s (1990) model of welfare regimes, although they have been analysed by other authors. Trifiletti (1999), for example, argued that Southern European welfare regimes (what Siaroff [1994] calls the ‘late female mobilization welfare state regime’) are not in fact more sexist than those in Northern and Western Europe, even if a kind of familism has left a deep cultural imprint (Moreno 2002). Notwithstanding, there are significant differences in the developments in women’s employment that set it apart from the Euro-Mediterranean cluster. In spite of sharing certain common features, such as the lack of resources to offer stronger state support, a pattern of women’s inclusion in the labour market based on full-time employment and the importance of the family business, Portugal has a considerably higher female employment rate than Spain, Italy or Greece. An explanation offered by Fishman (2005), when comparing Portugal and Spain, relates these different historical paths to different processes of transition to a democratic regime. Since 1974, the left-wing orientation towards equality, alongside the heritage of familistic female work in agriculture and small businesses, has encouraged women to enter the labour force in accordance with a model that Fraser labelled as a ‘universal breadwinner model’. On the other hand, following Pfau-Effinger (2004a), West Germany, Switzerland and Flanders fall broadly within the transition movement between the traditional male breadwinner and the one and a half earner model, strongly based on women’s part-time employment. The cultural understanding that it is harmful for pre-school children to be away from home all day justifies the limited hours of public daycare institutions (Pfau-Effinger 2000). The UK (here only Great Britain) and the US are also included in the cluster Lewis identifies as strong breadwinner models, although there is a rising culture favourable to women’s employment. On the other hand, countries such as France that have a tradition of women working full-time, orientated to the adult worker model, showed an increase in women’s part-time work during the 1990s (DauneRichard 2000). Lewis (1992) has described France as a modified male breadwinner state in which women have benefited from the care and support directed at children. Finally, I also analyse five post-socialist countries (Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Slovakia and the Russian Federation), where the strong dual breadwinner culture promoted during communism has been eroded, to some extent, by a certain revival of traditionalism (Hearn at al. 2002). The Gender Division of Labour: Constructing Attitudinal Patterns Overall, the variation in the three attitudinal dimensions resulting from the factor analysis shows that individuals put a medium amount of emphasis on the dual breadwinner ideal (3.16 on a scale from 1 to 5), while simultaneously displaying a moderately positive view of mother’s employment (3.19). Interestingly, both women and men emphasize men’s participation in household tasks and childcare (3.78) more strongly, thereby demonstrating the popularity of a participating male


96

figure who should share responsibilities within the private sphere. However, this portrait follows quite uneven patterns if we look more carefully at cross-country variations (Figure 4.1).13 Attitudes towards gender norms, even though deduced from these three rough measures, are reasonably varied, especially if we consider the emphasis placed upon the dual breadwinner and the working mother ideals. Taken as a whole, the empirical findings appear to be fairly adjusted to the cleavages discussed in the literature, reproducing the differentiation between Scandinavian countries, where people more frequently reject traditional gender norms, and Southern Europe or the post-socialist countries, where these are largely perpetuated. Here, the emphasis placed upon the dual breadwinner model or the paid work of mothers is considerably lower. Interestingly, in both these contexts respondents put greater emphasis on men’s participation in domestic life, thus combining relative support for the traditional gender division of labour with the wish for male cooperation in the domestic sphere. The Portuguese case shows the strongest ambiguity between the two items. This empirical finding leaves us with a number of unanswered questions. What are the real meanings of such an evident aspiration for male cooperation? To some degree, we may argue that across Western societies men are being challenged to become more involved in private tasks, which is an important development in contemporary gender cultures (Hobson 2002) and welfare policies (Wall 2008). However, in the overall reckoning, that does not necessarily mean that people really want an equal division of labour. Men ought to participate more in housework and childcare, even though their inclusion in family dynamics does 4,5 4 3,5 3 2,5 2 Total

Slovakia

Hungary

Russia

Poland

Latvia

Portugal

Dual breadwinner

Flanders

USA

Finland

Switzerland

France

Figure 4.1

Spain

Great Britain

West Germany

Sweden

Denmark

Norway

East Germany

Working mother

Men’s domestic participation

Average scores on the working mother, dual breadwinner and men’s domestic participation indexes, by country (n=42582)

Note: Scale: 1-weak to 5-strong emphasis.

13â•… Variance analysis revealed country variations to be statistically significant on motherhood (F(17, 42112)=228.36; p

Plural Masculinities

Masculinities

Islamic Masculinities (Global Masculinities)

Plural Predication

Young Masculinities

UNDERSTANDING MASCULINITIES

Medicalized Masculinities

UNDERSTANDING MASCULINITIES

Being Singular Plural

Erste Person Plural Kap.1

Chinese Masculinities: A Reader

Masculinities: Second Edition

Masculinities (Second Edition)

Masculinities in mathematics

Erste Person Plural Kap. 1

Men and Masculinities

Queer Masculinities, 1550-1800

Masculinities in Mathematics

Progressive Black Masculinities?

The Plural States of Recognition

Plural Policing: A Comparative Study

Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction

American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia

Masculinities in Text and Teaching

Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000

Erste Person Plural Kap.16-23

O Homem Plural: os determinantes da ação

Erste Person Plural Kap. 34-40

Plural Descriptions and Many-valued Functions

Erste Person Plural Kap.40-47

Plural Masculinities

Masculinities

Islamic Masculinities (Global Masculinities)

Plural Predication

Young Masculinities

UNDERSTANDING MASCULINITIES

Medicalized Masculinities

UNDERSTANDING MASCULINITIES

Being Singular Plural

Erste Person Plural Kap.1

Chinese Masculinities: A Reader

Masculinities: Second Edition

Masculinities (Second Edition)

Masculinities in mathematics

Erste Person Plural Kap. 1

Men and Masculinities

Queer Masculinities, 1550-1800

Masculinities in Mathematics

Progressive Black Masculinities?

The Plural States of Recognition

Plural Policing: A Comparative Study

Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction

American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia

Masculinities in Text and Teaching

Plural Medicine, Tradition and Modernity, 1800-2000

Erste Person Plural Kap.16-23

O Homem Plural: os determinantes da ação

Erste Person Plural Kap. 34-40

Plural Descriptions and Many-valued Functions

Erste Person Plural Kap.40-47

Recommend Documents