Masculinity studies has developed as an inherently interdisciplinary project since beginning in the 1970s. As part of broader growth, scholarship has devoted much time and energy to understanding and questioning the concept that boys are in crisis. Some scholars argue that masculinity has been synonymous with discourses of crisis since the 1700s, as a focus on unattainable ideals lead to anxiety about failure. These discourses persist; but are certainly not the dominant way in which masculinity is learnt in cultural pedagogies of gender. To a great extent, masculinity is largely taught and learnt through embodied and symbolic sets of practices that take place in a range of places and are distributed across often quite complex networks. Online and offline, between generations, cultures and classes, the gender performance that is popularly recognized as ‘masculinity’ is fluid in the different ways it can embody or represent courage, leadership, protectiveness, strength, power, control and command. This book is written from an appreciation of the complexities of the lives of men, and with a view to increasing the resources available for understanding experiences of lives of men. There are two parts of such a project. Firstly, this entails translating or re-reading Deleuze’s ideas in ways that align with existing agendas of Masculinity studies. Secondly, this involves critical engagement with cultures of masculinity that need to be challenged and changed in order to free existing experiences of masculinity from spectres of failure and crisis.
Men’s culture, and products marketed at men, have started responding to, and trying to change, configurations of toxic masculinity. For example, a popular shaving product recently released a digital advertisement that opens with a montage of news reports on bullying, #MeToo and toxic masculinity as the reversed question is asked by a narrator over images of men self-reflecting while staring into their bathroom mirrors. Recognizing the potential for change, the advertisement calls men to speak back to toxic gender performances, to be the change they want to see in the world. This popular cultural example is one of many existing attempts to change instances in which toxic masculinity is polluting social formations, and causing physical, emotional and psychological harm to boys, men and women who live gendered identities that do not align with the ideals espoused by aggressive men. As the book unfolds, I will also argue that some configurations of toxic masculinity are leading to the continued exploitation of our natural resources and the increasing degradation of our environment. Capitalist economies rely on the production and consumption of specific ideas about gender in order to maintain economic power through global assets such as the carbon market. This imbricated system of power articulates across many realms. The fossil fuel industry, the carbon futures trading market, carbon heavy car culture, and indeed, the disciplinary construction of ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ knowledges of ‘what matters’ when it comes to considering environmental science and thinking about carbon are all shaped directly and indirectly by ideas about gender. There are myriad ways in which masculinity is culturally valued, produced and consumed, however, the fossil fuel industry is a male dominated profession that valorises certain kinds of performances of masculinity, the carbon futures trading market is largely run by men, and most car cultures are male oriented. These are just three examples I choose to explore in detail in Chapter 5, but they are of significance in introducing this book because they map out just some of the many ways in which problematic gender configurations have become part of the status quo of late capitalist life and need to be rethought. Deleuze’s philosophy offers us rich resources for rethinking and expanding contemporary configurations of masculinity studies scholarship. Indeed, Deleuze’s thought is only sporadically being taken up in masculinity studies and this book is intended as a resource to support the translation and application of philosophy into the more applied experiences of masculinity.
With a view to challenging and changing negative cultures of masculinity in order to free existing experiences of masculinity from spectres of failure and crisis, I want to examine the #MeToo movement as an example of why we need a richer array of ways of thinking about, and doing, masculinity. The “#MeToo” crisis has shown that toxic configurations of masculinity still need to be shifted, and I argue that Deleuze’s thought offers us resources that help us to think beyond/in addition to binaries, hierarchies and to complexify power dynamics. Perhaps surprisingly, the “#MeToo” movement, as it is now known within popular consciousness, has taken many years to reach the level of visibility it is currently afforded. It began in 2006 when the North American civil rights activist Tarana Burke founded the “Me Too” movement to raise awareness of sexual assault and abuse. It was not until October 2017 that the New York Times picked up the issues that Burke had raised by publishing an article about the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, alleging that he ‘paid off’ his sexual assault and rape victims. Following this, the actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women to say “#MeToo” if they had experienced sexual harassment or assault and the “#MeToo” hashtag became viral on social media. By December 2017 Tarana Burke was one of a number of women named “person of the year” by Time magazine. This very contemporary timeline shows us that women have been deprived of basic human rights such as personal safety across history and into contemporary times. Redresses are only beginning to be made in some areas, and reconfiguring ideas of masculinity is part of these changes. Indeed, the fantastic backlash to #MeToo made by misogynistic white, North American men (and led by the current American president, who says he fears for the plight of white men in North America) shows us that even the small redresses that are being achieved as a result of the movement are causing significant repercussions. Changes that have been effected as a result of the movement include the fact that in North America nine male members of Congress either resigned or declined to run for re-election after facing substantiated charges of sexual misconduct. Two White House officials left after being accused of spousal abuse and three congressional candidates lost or quit their campaigns. These changes have occurred despite the fact that “Trump is quietly making it harder to report Sexual Harassment and Discrimination” (Peck, 2017, online), through changing legislation but also through modelling and valuing cultures of misogyny, racism and exploitation. For example, Trump reversed an order made by Obama that forbade federal contractors from keeping sexual harassment discrimination cases secret. Obama’s 2014 rule prevented companies from settling such disputes silently through arbitration and out of the public eye. “This … [is] a clear sign of the administration silencing women”, said Jessica Stender (Peck, 2017, online), senior staff attorney for Equal Rights Advocates, and a women’s rights non-profit. “In this atmosphere, (of MeToo fall-out for Harvey Weinstein) … Trump’s administration actions look remarkably like a real-time backlash to the growing assertion of female power” (Peck, 2017, online).
The culture surrounding these performances of toxic masculinity is imbricated in State and institutional power. For example, in January 2017 Trump signed what is called his “gag rule”, that is meant to prevent health clinics from talking about abortion. Such state power is thought about by Deleuze in his work with Guattari as a form of machinic enslavement, through which social relations and desires, such as the woman’s right to choose and free access to good quality health care, is rendered subordinate to a despotic signifier. In this instance, Trump’s doctrine acts as statist thought, which is the particular signifier that is raised up to the status of standing for the whole, in order to create a despotic signifier. The despotic signifier overshadows or silences all others, so that the other of this signifier (in this case a woman’s right to choose) is defined as radically excluded. Deleuze and Guattari contrast state power against what they call ‘the War Machine’ which is a process through which capture and overcoding can be avoided. Deleuze and Guattari choose the name War Machine because war is the “surest mechanism directed against the formation of the State” (1987, p. 357). In contrast to the potential of the War Machine to escape coding and despotic signification, Deleuze and Guattari view the ‘state’ as a particular kind of institutional process that is produced through social relations that arise from believing in fixities and representation. The state exists primarily as a process, and there are three particular kinds of state form within Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, although the differences between them are not of relevance for our discussion here. What matters to me, in terms of understanding how translating misogynistic sentiment into state legislation can, for example, silence and also dictate woman’s experiences, is that the state-form is defined by the practices of ‘overcoding’, ‘despotic signification’ and ‘machinic enslavement’. These three practices are forms of control that shape expression and desire so that it aligns with state interests and will. The concept of despotic signification explains the fact that in statist thought, a particular signifier (such as Trump’s word) is taken to stand in for ‘the whole’ (e.g. the complexity of North American women’s experiences of early pregnancy), and also the ‘other’ of this signifier (e.g. the desire for abortion) is radically excluded. Despotic signification is a system of radical silencing and it is carried into systems and cultures through practices that Deleuze and Guattari call ‘overcoding’. Practices of overcoding impose meanings arising from despotic signification on to the various processes through which social life and desire operate. In contrast to the libidinal, or foundational and psychic overcoding which occurs through capitalism, states often overcode through policy and rhetoric rather than capitalism’s preferred tools of desire and affect. Overcoding also destroys that which cannot be encoded. Thirdly, ‘Machinic enslavement’ occurs when groups of social relations and desires, which Deleuze calls ‘machines’, are rendered subordinate to the regulatory function of the despotic signifier and incorporated in an overarching statist totality.
The three forms of state power combined together are persuasive, as shown by the recent struggles of the #MeToo movement to be recognized in Parliament, despite an increasing archive of evidence proving institutionalised and enduring male sexual harassment of women in professional circumstances. For example, in looking to substantiate claims against Weinstein that were a foundational part of the #MeToo movement, Jodi Kentor and Megan Twohey located sexual harassment allegations against Mr Weinstein dating back to 1990. Weinstein resigned from his company’s board as a result. Shortly after this, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie said they too had been harassed. Even being able to make this claim to being harassed required a certain amount of symbolic work to be undertaken—the invention of harassment in state law required a process politically very different from state ‘overcoding’, but which similarly made a word signify experience, thus legitimating the experience. Teaching at Cornell university in the 1970s, Lin Farley developed the term ‘sexual harassment’. Eleanor Holmes-Norton was the first woman to head the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission in North America and she supported the 1981 development and publication of “Guidelines for Responding to Sexual Harassment in the Workplace”. In 1986 the United States supreme court ruled that sexual harassment was an “issue” for which people may be held legally accountable (Victor, 2017, online). This process of enshrining experience in law illustrates the kinds of validation that occur through developing legislation. After the recent Hollywood revelations made as part of the #MeToo movement, countless women outside Hollywood said they had experienced similar harassment in their own industries. The hashtag #MeToo, quickly spread through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as popular culture and popular consciousness added affect and individuation to the experience that had been made valid by women’s work.
However, the state has responded to the #MeToo movement as if it were an attack on state power disguised as critique of the misogyny that lies at the heart of Trump’s responses to the movement. Trump himself denies any wrongdoing in relation to sexual harassment, even though more than a dozen women have accused him of explicit sexual harassment. Trump adopts a position of being immune to these allegations, and flatly denies them (Westneat, 2017, online). The #MeToo movement only works as a war machine, or a space of decoding state power, if the accused are susceptible to shame. Trump is still in office despite the allegations against him, and his senators. Jeremy Diamond (2018) maps some of Trumps’ attacks on women starting with him being accused of lewd behaviour in the wake of a Hollywood tape. Drawing on a press release from October 2016, Diamond quotes Trump saying: “when you are a star, they [women] let you do it. You can do anything….grab them [women] by the pussy. You can do anything.” While asserting that it was a “scary time for young men”, Trump said “Young women are going great”. While several men have been accused of sexual harassment of women, “Trump has focussed on backing up the accused. He has offered few words to women.” When asked if he was afraid for his sons or his daughters Trump Jnr said “Right now I’d say my sons. I’ve got girls and I’ve got boys and when I see what’s going on right now it’s scary [for boys]”. Much resistance, or “deterritorialization” intended by the #MeToo movement is overcoded again by state power.
Australia has also felt waves of response in relation to #MeToo, with dynamics of the state against the war machine illustrated in similar ways. In 2016, The Sydney Theatre Company says it received a complaint at the end of the run of “King Lear” that alleged misconduct by the actor Geoffrey Rush has occurred and went on for several months. However, this was not held up in court and the enduringly patriarchal apparatuses of state and industrial law remain the primary processes through which such experiences can be validated. Women and children are marginalised and mistrusted within these systems. Attempts to speak out are silenced, or punished, for example, the Australian actor Craig McLaughlan was charged with a number of sexual assault offences and he responded by suing media outlets reporting the cases for defamation. One might say while the #MeToo movement has tried to create changes in the gender dynamics of contemporary culture, more is needed. As Deleuze and Guattari explain; “war maintains the dispersal and segmentarity of groups, and the warrior himself is caught in a process of accumulating exploits leading him to solitude and a prestigious but powerless death” (1987, p. 357). War machines attack the state, yes, but the soldier still dies alone and without power. In opposition to the war machine, state structures work through relation or what Deleuze and Guattari call filiation. This is an arboreal or tree-like system that breaks apart or “deterritorializes” differential skills in order to root them; or legitimize them as ways of becoming and forces of production. Here, we can start to develop a sense of the embedded and processual ways in which state power legitimates and disavows experience in ways that are specific to gender and which also co-constitute gender. Further work in this space is urgently needed.
Situating the Empirical Data
the world is … textured in quite different ways … academic methods of inquiry don’t really catch these … parts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories and our statistics. But other parts are not, or if they are this is because they have been distorted into clarity. (p. 2)
Such a distortion into clarity invents clarity as much as it subjugates mess. Mess is not just generative, it is inherently creative. Gender is messy and is always already an ongoing act of creation. Australian researcher Stephen Muecke characterizes his “ethnographic approach to postcolonial study” as necessarily involving fieldwork “including mistakes and observations of other organizations tripping up or taking zigzag routes” (2018, p. 219). Here, ethnography is a method through which one tries “with difficulty – to follow and understand various other ways of knowing and maintaining knowledge” (2018, p. 219). Such ways of knowing and maintaining knowledge include non-verbal, embodied, aesthetic practices that communicate complex ways of belonging and being. The empirical data that informs Chapter 3, and which I draw on in the introduction below, is the result of being with communities, in places that belong to communities and sharing experiences with boys and men in ways that change in relation to the research participants. The stories I tell are those that have stuck with me, like burrs to a cloth, pricking at me, reminding me they are there and have a purpose.
Why Deleuze and Masculinity?
This project has an empirical imperative. While undertaking fieldwork in Manchester in May 2017, a friend’s daughter made the offhand suggestion that we might go out to a concert. Ariana Grande from North America was playing: it was going to be a great night. Her friends from college were going. I had terrible jetlag, as I was not long off the plane from Australia. I really couldn’t face a concert. We settled for watching RuPaul’s drag race on television and going to bed early. I still felt the world was spinning. The next morning, I joined a very sombre mood at the primary school in which I was undertaking my ethnography. The concert to which I had almost been taken had been the site of what was being framed as a terrorist attack. An angry man had blown up the Manchester Arena stadium, a stadium that was largely filled with young girls and their parents. The children with whom I was working were profoundly upset. Their classmates had been at the concert. They drew multiple images of Manchester bees and Union Jack flags in attempts to recreate their own sense of safe emplaced identity. These acts of communicating through icons suggested to me they wanted to hold on to what they saw as something solid, having had the frailty of our existence laid bare. There was clearly a gender agenda framing this. The shrine to bomb victims looked like a tweenage girl’s bedroom, assembled in the middle of Manchester city. A sea of pink ribbons, balloons, flowers and candles filled a street allocated for the memorialization of the bombing and the memorial affectively communicated the fact that the majority of victims were girls. Twenty-three people were killed, including the attacker, and 139 were wounded, more than half of them children. The bomber, Salman Ramadan Abedi, was a 22-year-old British Sunni Muslim of Libyan ancestry. His story exemplifies the moral panic discourses that have risen to characterise discussions of Muslim religion in mainstream media. While radicalization is indeed terrifying and unjust, it is also very rare. It is sexist and racist to characterise an entire religion based on the acts of a very small percent of men who claim identification with the religion.
Only a few weeks later, I had an alarmingly similar experience while undertaking fieldwork in a primary school in South East London. A man had driven his car through pedestrians walking on the footpath. The attack undertaken on civilians and killing 4 people at Westminster was carried out by Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old Muslim convert born in Britain under the name Adrian Russell Ajao. Again, this act was framed as an attempt, according to police, to carry out “Islamist-related terrorism” that was “inspired” by Islamist militant groups overseas. What was left out of this characterization was the fact that these are very specific cultures of masculinity, more than they are cultures of religion. Muslim culture is global and complex, articulating in myriad ways, yet, as a religion, remaining concerned with service, love and loyalty. These two incidents that shaped my very early fieldwork were concerned with protest masculinity, a concept I discuss further as this book develops. Men’s violent assertion of their power is not a religion. It is a gendered performance of anger.
The school children I was working with couldn’t understand why someone might do such a thing. I realised the urgency with which we need to reconsider ideas of legitimate masculinity. Through terrorist attacks, gun shootings, domestic violence, and political bigotry, toxic masculinity that is prone to violent forms of protest has become an increasingly urgent social issue that needs to be rethought. More than this, the terms on which masculinity is constituted need to be rethought.
The more I pondered these two attacks as examples of toxic masculinity rather than performances of “religious extremism”, I came to see that there are many ways in which toxic masculinity, as it is currently configured, is killing us: women and men, girls and boys alike. As the two bombing attacks make plain, this murder is literal, not symbolic. Through mass shootings, bombings, war, and terrorism, toxic configurations of masculinity take lives. However, toxic masculinity is also damaging the environment, perhaps beyond repair, through gendered understandings of natural resources, social roles and political hierarchies. It is for these reasons, as well as to open up the ways in which masculinity can be lived and loved, that we need to think about masculinity differently. Deleuze offers resources for seeing and valuing ways of doing masculinity ‘differently’. The points that inform this call to arms have been made in various ways, and across various registers in Masculinity Studies for many years now. Most importantly we need to realise that of course very few forms of masculinity are toxic, and while the critical approaches I develop here focus in part on changing toxic masculinity with a view to creating sustainable social and environmental futures, this focus is not supposed to imply that masculinity is necessarily synonymous with toxicity. It is not.
Masculinity and toxicity can, indeed, be radically different things and hegemonic constructions of masculinity often are just that: constructions, with no political, emotional or psychic power. As I show, Deleuze’s work offers methods for understanding what I call cultural pedagogies of gender and analysing masculinity in terms of what it does, how its operates, and what its affects are. I am a scholar who is engaged with the project of creating social change for gender justice. In this respect, I am looking to shift amalgamations, or assemblages of, toxicity and masculinity. I see little merit in the project of paying further attention to existing configurations of masculinity that, while not necessarily ‘toxic’, either clearly or implicitly enjoy the privileges arising from the patriarchal organizations of power and in attempts broaden conversations about masculinity have written on male plus sized models (Hickey-Moody, 2016), masculinity and disability (Hickey-Moody, 2009) and masculinity and refugee youth (Hickey-Moody, 2013; Savage & Hickey-Moody, 2010). In 2009 I began teaching Masculinity Studies, having researched the field prior to this time in my postdoctoral work (Kenway, Kraack, & Hickey-Moody, 2006). Both ventures: teaching core concepts and substantive areas of scholarly interest in Masculinity Studies, and also my more specifically focused research work, have made me acutely aware of the importance of conceptual and methodological frameworks for masculinity. Ways of thinking open up possibilities for ways of seeing, and sometimes, ways of being. This working history has also taught me that frameworks and methods for thinking can change what is conceived of as possible in gendered terms. Deleuze offers us a method for reading gender in terms of how it is produced and what it does, he offers us an empirical method for seeing the production of gender and its associated cultural politics. There is a growing body of work on Deleuze and masculinity that foreshadows and, of course, informs the arguments developed here. Some of the earliest work includes Katherine O’Donnell’s (2009) work on Spinoza, Massumi, affect and masculinity and Torkild Thanem and Louise Wallenburg’s work (2010) bringing Freud and Marx together to ‘bugger’ a theory of masochism in a manner inspired by Deleuze. These two papers, amongst others, can chronologically be considered the beginning of a now much more developed dialogue between Deleuze Studies and Masculinity Studies. Particular concepts in Deleuze’s oeuvre demonstrate more significance in this field than others and I offer accounts of these ideas across the course of the book. A newer issue for consideration is how the work of Deleuze, and his collaboration with Guattari, might provide resources that assist with reconfiguring toxic patterns and performances of masculinity, and I also think through what such a process of reconfiguration might look like. Broadly, the book begins discussions of Deleuze’s thought as a method for understanding cultural pedagogies of masculinity, and I very much hope this methodological focus is of use to future Deleuze scholars. This monograph is, of course, by no means exhaustive or a complete catalogue of possible readings of Deleuze in relation to masculinity. It is a book of beginnings. In investigating masculinity and methodology, this book responds to the questions: What does masculinity look like after an encounter with Deleuze’s thought? What methods does Deleuze offer us for thinking about what masculinity ‘does’ rather than what it ‘is’?
There is no single answer to these provocations, and there are many possible ways in which these questions could be answered. I have adopted a pragmatic approach in responding to these questions, shaping the first two chapters around Deleuzian concepts that have proved generative in masculinity studies and then presenting case studies of themes and discipline areas that have applied Deleuze’s work to the study of men’s lives. To be more specific, I begin in Chapter 2 by discussing how the concepts of affect and assemblage have contributed to and, in some instances transformed, the work undertaken by the foundational concept of performativity in gender studies. Performativity is a term that describes gender as an embodied practice of citation, an unconscious ‘copying’ of other examples of gender that have already been performed. Affect is different from performativity, affect is a change in one’s capacity to act, an increase or decrease in bodily limit. However, one’s performativity is affectively conveyed and affectively learnt and taught. They are words that characterise the politics of visceral possibility and action. Assemblage, the second Deleuzian concept I mention in relation to Chapter 2, is the French term for ‘arrangement’. In Deleuze’s ontology the term assemblage refers to the importance of context and highlights the fact that all acts/objects/bodies are, in fact, assemblages themselves and are extensions of context as much as they can also be singularized and seen to have individual agency. As I show in Chapter 2, these two ideas of affect and agency have extended the use of Judith Butlers’ work on the performance of gender significantly in masculinity studies (for example Butler (1990)).
Chess is a game of the State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: “It” makes a move. “It” could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 352)
In this quote Deleuze and Guattari are trying to explain the subjectifying effects of smooth and striated spaces. Smooth spaces create non-subjectified moving objects and striated spaces create subjectified moving objects with a specified “form of interiority”. I would argue that the tasks I ask the boys to perform, and against which (in the data reported in Chapter 3) they rebel, are striating lines. These boys don’t want to fit in, join in, belong. They see themselves as not fitting any existing script, mould, or striation. They dislike rules and popular uses of space: striations that tell them how to use their time and where their bodies should be. Rather than conform to the striations of the school yard that maps out the place to play as the ‘playground’, these boys have found their own play spaces. These secret play-scapes are the boy’s own refrain of the schoolyard. The places where they can do their own thing and express themselves as they choose.
The refrain is a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari, and it offers a way of understanding these boys’ rebellion that extends the reading of protest masculinity. The concept of the refrain is named after a bird song. Like birds sing out into their territory to find a mate, to voice their presence and to mark their space, a refrain is a practice of place-making, a ritual or set of habits that embed people, animals or things in place. The boy’s refrain is a physical pathway they have built through the hedges that border the schoolyard, they have a well-worn and carefully hidden route around the yard that they show me, that leads to a play place which they see as their own. Just as a bird has a song that it sings in its nest, to mark home as a home, the boys have a game they like to play in their space. These examples help us understand how boys’ protests can also be quite creative acts; and show that boys learning to be boys and performing their gender identity are complex processes of rebellion, invention and embodiment. This chapter also shows that psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s thought are not mutually exclusive. The two can sit side by side.
In Chapter 4, I turn my focus to a subfield of masculinity studies, one in which Deleuze and Guattari’s work has had a notable, sustained and continuing impact. Disability is a politically contentious issue and the ways in which disability is read are very gendered. The field of disability and masculinity studies has taken up the work of Deleuze and Guattari in a fashion that is almost unparalleled save, perhaps, for the take up of Deleuze and Guattari in the field of sociology of education. I examine the gendered nature of disability and I canvass some of the substantive scholarly contributions that have been made to this interdisciplinary space before turning my attention to a case study of the work of North American photographer Michael Stokes and his photographs of amputee war veterans, which I read in terms of affect and attempts to recuperate masculinity. I then turn my attention to the popular Hollywood film Me Before You , which offers a parallel representation of disability as emasculating, indeed, as so emasculating that the disabled protagonist chooses death over life as a man with a disability. Both these texts are constructed in light of the culturally gendered (feminized) readings of disability that dominate popular cultures. Stokes’ photography and Me Before You are, I argue, gendered public pedagogies of disability. They also call a particular public to attention and, in so doing, they perform feminised ideas about disability in public. To put this another way, both texts suggest that disability is something that needs to be ‘made up for’ if one is to succeed as a disabled man. This chapter shows us that Deleuze and Guattari’s work on affect offers a new dimension to existing discussions of public culture. As I have shown elsewhere ( Hickey-Moody, 2015a, 2015b), pack logic is indeed at play in the affective formation of public culture.
Chapters 5 and 6 of this book is a provocation, both to the field of masculinity studies and to those working with Deleuze. I move from working to acknowledge how Deleuze’s work has (and can) shift masculinity studies, to ask scholars to take up Deleuze’s thought to re-shape gendered economies of knowledge and matter that support and contribute to systems of patriarchal domination which are mediated through environmental exploitation. This chapter draws on my earlier work (Hickey-Moody, 2015a, 2015b; Hickey-Moody & Laurie, 2015) showing us that Deleuze’s work on the surface from The Logic of Sense can help to show up the gendered politics of ‘things’, or surfaces. All surfaces have a depth that co-constitutes the surface, and the surface itself is made to make sense through the construction of knowledges that generate sense. This interrelationship between knowledge and matter helps us to see the relationship between gender and materiality, and to understand the very gendered ways in which knowledge and matter come to exist. I consider the gendered production of carbon, from the feminized, environmentally friendly ‘carbon rich’ soaked soils produced by the feminized ‘Mother Earth’, to the masculine frontiers of the carbon futures trading market. I argue that the extraction of carbon masculinizes it. Its circulation in capitalist economy has become so central to the workings of capitalism that it is unlikely we will see carbon free futures unless we address the politics of masculine performativity that are embedded in contemporary capitalist arenas such as the carbon futures trading markets, Formula 1 racing cars, and other carbon built vehicles for homosocial masculine intimacy. More than this, we need to reconsider the gendered nature of knowledges surrounding the environment and the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. A carbon neutral future is a matter of redressing current configurations of toxic masculinity.
In preparation for chapters to come I now canvas some methodological issues, which are important because the ways in which Deleuze conceptualizes social and material worlds do not map neatly onto existing discourses of masculinity studies. Rather, they offer a new method for approaching the core concerns at the centre of studies of masculinity. My discussion necessarily begins with the concept of hegemony, which is central to Masculinity Studies, although as I have intimated, is it an idea that does not translate directly into Deleuze’s thought. Rather, Deleuze offers us new ways of thinking about this important idea. I outline the importance of hegemony for masculinity studies before suggesting some other ways we might explore similar themes through Deleuze’s work.
Hegemonic Masculinity
R. W. Connell is an Australian sociologist who is also considered a founding thinker in masculinity studies. Her work challenges us to think about masculinity in terms of social power as well as individual agency. Many scholars have found her ideas useful, especially her concept of a dominant, or hegemonic masculinity amongst a range of alternative kinds of masculinities. There is an extensive literature on hegemonic masculinity, developed by Connell and other theorists, who have made subsequent revisions of the concept. Here, I detail four key points arising from Connell’s work that are central to the ways hegemonic masculinity has been taken up in the field. This is by no means an exhaustive survey of Connell’s influence or impact; I discuss some aspects of the concept of hegemonic masculinity that have been particularly popular. I explain Connell’s argument that there are multiple masculinities, outline the concept of hegemonic masculinity and discuss the fact that both these theoretical positions draw our attention to the socially constructed nature of masculinity and contend that practices and meanings of masculinity are complex and embodied.
One of the earliest pieces of Connell’s work in masculinity studies is “Men’s Bodies”, an essay written in 1979 and published in her 1983 book, Which Way is Up? Essays on Sex, Class and Culture. Here, Connell suggests that masculinity is an imaginary ideal against which all men compare themselves. Key points introduced in this early piece include the fact that gender is socially constructed, that sexual difference should not be assumed as a given and that masculinity is learnt as something that can be achieved. These positions, while refined and reworked, can be identified in much work in masculinity studies today. “Men’s Bodies” contains Connell’s earliest attempt at theorising how hegemonic masculinity is formed as an imaginary ideal against which all men compare themselves. She explains that hegemonic masculinity is interested in the connections between the biological and social, in the individual male body and in the prevailing norms about masculinity, which she sees as expressed most obviously in sport. Beginning with psychoanalytic accounts of the development of male heterosexuality and dominance of the family structure, Connell draws on feminist object relations theory to claim that the individual’s creation of ‘masculinity’ depends on separation from the mother, the feminine. She then moves from the familial and domestic to the social and institutional, arguing that our society privileges the masculine at the expense of the feminine. Building on this early work, in Which Way is Up? hegemonic masculinity is a term used to refer to an idealised masculinity, one that contains no evidence of femininity. Hegemonic masculinity identifies a vision of a ‘pure’ masculinity, a fantasy, founded on qualities such as force, competence, strength and skill. The language of sport, especially the language used to describe competitive, contact sport, closely mirrors many ideals of the hegemonic man. Men are, in Connell’s vision, trained to dominate, just as a boxer must train if he wants to dominate his opponent. It is easy to find evidence for this in popular descriptions of sport: boxing and football were for a long time described as not being games for girls or women, and a popular derogatory description of a male player’s ability still is that he is hitting or throwing like a girl.
The hegemonic form need not be the most common form of masculinity, let alone the most comfortable. Indeed, many men live in a state of some tension with, or distance from, the hegemonic masculinity of their culture or community. Other men, such as sporting heroes, are taken as exemplars of hegemonic masculinity and are required to live up to it strenuously – at what may be severe cost, in terms of injury, ill health, and other constraints on life. The dominance of hegemonic masculinity over other forms may be quiet and implicit, but may also be vehement and violent, as in the case of homophobic violence. (Connell, 2000, pp. 10–11)
the astonishing thing is not that some people steal or that others occasionally go out on strike, but rather that all those who are starving do not steal as a regular practice, and all those who are exploited are not continually out on strike: after centuries of exploitation, why do people still tolerate being humiliated and enslaved, to such a point, indeed, that they actually want humiliation and slavery not only for others but for themselves? (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 29)
They go on, in the same passage, to further argue that: “that is why the fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered: ‘why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it was their salvation?’ ‘How can people possibly reach the point of shouting: More taxes! Less bread!’” (1983, p. 29).
The example of the UK’s Brexit vote seems an apposite case in point here. This appetite for, and acquiescence to, a dominant power system aligns with the ways in which hegemonic masculinity remains a repressive gendered style and practice. This unconscious acquiescence is how hegemonic power maintains currency and is given power in gendered cultural economies.
‘Hegemony’ is a concept that the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci took up and developed in a particular way, mobilizing a Marxist epistemology to argue that modes of possessing power are developed in order to retain power. Powerful men behave in ways that ensure their power is retained. While Deleuze does not write about hegemony per se, he does discuss social power and the political work that is involved in maintaining social power. In particular, Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of molar and molecular, and major and minor examine formations of social power. Molar is a term Deleuze and Guattari use to refer to large social formations, ‘molar’ aggregates are things like social classes, genders, races. Molecular is, as the word suggests, much smaller scale, it is about lived experiences and is the perspective adopted when we want to see the ways in which life can complicate ‘molar’, or categorical ways of seeing the world. Both these words offer critical resources for rethinking gender politics, in terms of molecular interventions in molar performances of hegemonic masculinity or developing critical perspectives on molar gender ideals taught by economic, cultural and social structures.
only a minority is capable of serving as the active medium of becoming, but under such conditions that is ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation to the majority. Becoming-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc. therefore imply two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another by which a term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority. (1987, p. 291)
The minor, then, is a political position representative of marginalized cultures and peoples.
When we say majority, we are referring not to a greater relative quantity but the determination of a state or standard in relation to which larger quantities, as well as the smallest, can be said to be minoritarian: white-man, adult-male, etc. Majority implies a state of domination, not the reverse. It is not a question of knowing whether there are more mosquitoes or flies than men, but of knowing how ‘man’ constituted a standard in the universe in relation to which men necessarily (analytically) form a majority. The majority in the universe assumes as a pregiven the right and power of man. (p. 291)
As this quote suggests, the majoritarian position is one which constitutes an analytic and political majority and which is assumed as a benchmark for the ‘power of man’ (1987, p. 291). This incorporeal body of power is the analytic position of ‘average’, ‘standardized’ and ‘normal’. The majoritarian standard of a ‘normal’ human is reflexively constructed through establishing borders between ‘man’ (as the average or normal) and his ‘other’. As I note above, Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 340) argue that social investments occur between two poles, the ‘molar pole’ (social consolidation) and the ‘molecular pole’ (dispersion/minoritarian becomings). Molar and molecular forms of masculinity can be found in popular articulations of masculinity and in sets of practices undertaken by men that might not align with popular expectations for gendered performance. Different types of libidinal investment pass between the two poles (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 340).
What emerges from this line of argument is the very important concept of hegemonic masculinity, not as “the male role”, but as a particular variety of masculinity to which others – among them young and effeminate as well as homosexual men – are subordinated. It is particular groups of men, not men in general, who are oppressed within sexual relations, and whose situations are related in different ways to the overall logic of the subordination of women to men. (Carrigan, Connell, & Lee, 1985, p. 86)
The practice of subordinating particular kinds of gendered identities connects hegemonic masculinity and majoritarian/molar discourses and cultures. The molar social position outlined by Deleuze and Guattari and quoted above details the accumulation of social power in a similar fashion to the way hegemonic masculinity functions. This relationship between Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and hegemonic masculinity as a foundational concept of masculinity studies has not been explored as comprehensively as it might, and certainly provides a rich avenue for consideration.
Deleuze does not write about masculinity explicitly, although in his work with Guattari he discusses the case study of Little Hans’ in Freud’s work in some detail. This case study has significance for masculinity studies as a field because it is the primary place where Freud developed his theory of castration and masculine sexual development. Psychoanalytic theory also provides a key resource for the work of Judith Butler, whose writing on gender performance is absolutely central to masculinity studies. As such, Butler’s work on gender performance, Freud’s work on Hans and Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of this work, form the respective foci of chapters one and two of this book. My discussion is but a beginning of the work that needs to be undertaken in relation to these rich resources for the field. Psychoanalysis, then, could be said to constitute a method that is central to masculinity studies and the field of gender studies more broadly. It is also a powerful discourse that Deleuze and Guattari examine in Anti-Oedipus and to which their collaborative work responds.
Alongside the importance of psychoanalysis for the field, sits the significance of empirical methods for researching masculinity. Such methods are diverse and are absolutely central to disciplines concerned with the study of masculinity, such as sociology, education, nursing, cultural studies, social work and other disciplines committed to social justice. Methods of engaging with the empirical vary greatly across the spectrum of qualitative and quantitative methods. Engaged discussion of the variations I refer to is outside the scope of this introduction. I do, however, need to outline my own methodological approach for undertaking empirical fieldwork with boys that I discuss in this book.
In undertaking ethnographic fieldwork with children, my research practices are shaped by a particular orientation to children. Ethnography is an embedded method for understanding systems of cultural value. While undertaking the ethnography drawn on in this book, I lived in the areas I was researching, I attended the schools in which I was undertaking research at additional times to those required to conduct the research and I developed a sense for the place and culture about which I write. Responsiveness to children, listening to them and reworking research objectives in relation to children’s attitudes and desires is central to my research practice. In the ethnographic excerpts in Chapter 3, I discuss an example that details two boys refusing to join in art making fieldwork activities. These activities are set as a way of eliciting indirect discourse from children, understanding what and how they think about issues through exploring the issues obliquely. The ‘data’ generated by this ethic of engagement is primarily led by the boy’s tastes and interests, and, as such, the boys’ friendship needs to be considered as central to the research methodology, as their enjoyment of playing together and their desire to keep playing together rather than join in with others is clearly central to how they express themselves. The case study at the heart of Chapter 3 is drawn from the larger data set I introduced above, generated through ethnographic work with children and their parents across the UK and Australia. Identities have been anonymized. As I have suggested, ethnography is an immersive cultural research method, through which the researcher becomes familiar with the culture being researched and is thus able to articulate systems of cultural value that are specific to the research context in question. My ethnographic methods include digital and creative practices as well as observation. The systems of social value expressed by two of the children form the focus for the second half of Chapter 3 and the knowledge presented here was developed in collaboration with the boys about whom I write.
The ethnographic practice used to generate data here features arts workshops for children and focus groups for their parents, alongside embedded engagement with school and community culture. In the arts workshops, the children begin by making ‘identity pictures’. These pictures can be self-portraits, or, if the children choose, they can be a less literal collection of favourite colours and textures, or images of things with which children identify. Often children draw objects or symbols such as mobile phones or flags. The ethnographic vignettes included in this book are a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973), or an embedded account of experience, written in the first person as part of my ethnographic field notes. I very much hope they offer a sense of the boys with whom I work, their energy, their humour and their attachment to each other.
It is with enthusiasm, then, that I turn to examine core concepts in contemporary Masculinity Studies that have been developed in direct response to Deleuze’s work. This discussion of assemblages and affect begins with an introductory treatment of Judith Butler’s work on performativity, as the central nature of this concept created the space for the kinds of theoretical work undertaken in various ways through the concepts of assemblage and affect in masculinity studies.
Acknowledgements
This work was funded through the Australian Research Council Grant, FT160100293. More information can be found at www.interfaithchildhoods.com.