In this chapter, I provide some resources for thinking about how masculinity is learnt, through examining the ways boyhood is conceived both explicitly and implicitly in Deleuze and Guattari’s work. I then turn to my attention the impact that their thought has had on contemporary studies of masculinity and youth, particularly in relation to work emerging within the field of the sociology of education. Drawing on empirical data from ethnographic fieldwork with young boys in South East London, I model some new ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts might be employed to think about young masculine identity, embodiment and relationships with the human and more than human world. Through the concepts of striation, minor and molar, I examine boys’ geographically embedded and affectively expressed production of their masculine identity. As such, this chapter is a thematic collection of material on boyhood, youthful masculinity and Deleuze/Deleuze and Guattari’s related concepts. I specifically do not offer a totalising position on a ‘Deleuzoguattarian theory of boyhoods’; rather, I examine why their theories might be useful for thinking about youthful masculinity. This is, firstly, because Deleuze and Guattari’s respective positions on boyhood, articulated through their writing on Freud’s study of “Little Hans”, and their writing on Spinoza and childhood, run contra to each other. These different parts of their work advance almost oppositional models for reading childhood, and at no point do they discuss (let alone reconcile) the conflicting aspects of these ideas. The point I see as most significant in the first half of the chapter is the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s work on boys is not entirely antithetical to psychoanalytic perspectives. While much of their theoretical work is grounded in a critique of psychoanalysis, there is some utility in bringing together the different perspectives brought to light through psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas. Secondly, my review of the emerging field of Deleuze and masculinity in education shows the diverse and expanding ways Deleuze’s thought is of use in thinking through masculinity in the sociology of education. When it comes to understanding empirical experience and the ‘lived’ world of children who identify as boys, as presented in my empirical data, neither Deleuze and Guattari’s work on Freud’s Hans nor their writing on Spinoza and childhood prove to be the most fruitful. Respectively, these positions either present a psychoanalytic subject with a heterosexual orientation as a primary model for subjectivity, or unintentionally devalue what childhood is worth (or capable of) and remove the capacity for children to have reason or intuition. I read the take-up of theoretical work in the sociology of education as testimony to the utility of their ideas, which shows that Deleuze and Guattari’s broader catalogue of concepts, rather than their work on childhood and the little boy, are actually the most useful resources they offer to those thinking about the lived experiences of boys. Developing my own model for thinking through youth and masculinity with Deleuze and Guattari, I extend existing work being undertaken in sociology, and in the sociology of education, in examining lived experiences of young masculinity in relation to theoretical ideas that further animate the data. But firstly, I begin by recounting the very different things that Deleuze and Guattari say about little boys and the child.
The Psychoanalytic Boy
The psychoanalytic model for subjectivity that Deleuze and Guattari critique is important for their readers to understand. Deleuze and Guattari’s concern with psychoanalysis finds a specific focus in their attachment to Freud’s study of Hans, and their repeated engagement with him as a figure for thought. Anti-Oedipus is a text that demonstrates substantial interest in disrupting the psychoanalytic model of subjectivity that has been developed in relation to Freud and which has become central to capitalist economies. Although Anti-Oedipus does not engage directly with Hans, it does take the Oedipal subject that Hans was seen as representing as a focus of substantive critique, and Deleuze and Guattari directly discuss Hans repeatedly in later works. The point I make in engaging with this work is that both Freud and Deleuze and Guattari’s methods are more similar than one might anticipate. To my mind, they respectively suffer from a case of what they characterize as “interpretosis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 114); namely, they largely ignore the empirical experiences of young boys in an attempt to justify their theoretical ideas. The discursive analysis I undertake here is not in any way intended to be critical of the clinical utility of Freud’s thought, but rather, I question the ethics of including Hans’ experience in the development of Freud’s ideas. Freud did not actually see Hans during the time of the case study, he analysed Hans’ actions as relayed by Hans’ father. In undertaking the following critique of the case study of Hans as model for thinking the psychoanalytic boy, the text with which I am primarily concerned is Freud’s “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year Old Boy”, although prior to the publication of this text, “Little Hans” was written about by Freud in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” and “The Sexual Enlightenment of Children (An Open Letter to Dr. M. Fürst)” in 1907.1
Hans (Herbert Graff aka Little Hans), a little boy living in a middle-class family in Vienna, was a subject of Freud’s theoretical analysis. During the course of his analysis, Hans was getting to know his newly born younger sister and, until the age of 3.5, he was seemingly happy enough. At this point, Hans developed anxiety around a number of issues, including an extreme fear of going outside. His father and mother began talking to Freud about Hans. Hans’ mother was Freud’s patient and his father was a member of Freud’s weekly study-group. Freud saw Hans just once across the course of his “treatment” and, as I have suggested, the majority of the “analysis” Freud conducted was undertaken through correspondence with Max, the father. Freud suggested topics of conversion and possible readings of Hans’ statements to Max. This very mediated method is not an accepted clinical practice (and has been broadly critiqued by many, notably Wolpe and Rachman in 1964, then Edel in 1968). The general consensus in scholarship is that Freud worked to justify his existing theories through his discussions with Hans’ father, rather than actually engaging with Hans.
Theorists who continue to fit pragmatic data into exclusive conceptual modes might profitably pause over little Han’s comment to his father after his visit to Freud: ‘Does the Professor [Freud] talk to God, … as he can tell all that beforehand’. (1968, p. 203)
Freud’s case study itself leads to quite peculiar readings of childhood. It radically separates Hans from the psychosocial world of his parents and the geography of his everyday life. To show exactly how Freud seemingly missed some notable aspects of Hans’ life that arguably were articulated in his subjectivity, I briefly discuss Hans’ family and daily routines.
Hans’ mother was Freud’s patient in the first instance. Olga suffered from acute agoraphobia (the same condition that Hans became gripped by as his analysis progressed). In addition to Olga being Freud’s patient, Hans’ father, Max Graff, was part of Freud’s “Wednesday group”, a regular informal education event organised by Freud and billed as a weekly meeting of people interested in psychoanalysis. Members of the meeting group were Freud’s informal students and their attention gave Freud a space in which to test his ideas. Olga and Max, Freud’s patient and student, were encouraged to marry by Freud. This alone would suggest the Freud was not well positioned to offer an independent analysis of Hans and it also limits the possible ways Hans’ experiences can be interpreted. Furthermore, it is clear from both the parents’ history with Freud that the domestic and psychosocial world that made up Hans’ everyday was thick with his mother’s neurosis and his father’s desire for psychoanalytic interpretation, or what Deleuze and Guattari (1983, p. 114) have called “interpretosis”: interpretation that is more concerned with itself than the empirical event being interpreted. Both factors substantially detract from the roles that Hans’ empirical experiences and psychic world were ever able to play in his own “analysis”.
It is clear that Hans’ parents did not have a happy marriage. There were intense conflicts inside the relationship. Max reported his wife Olga’s aggressive outbursts and bouts of depression following sexual relations to Freud. Clinically, depression following sexual relations can be a symptom of sexual abuse in childhood although this possibility does not seem to have been considered by Freud, despite the fact Olga’s depression caused significant disruption to her household. She suffered from agoraphobia and ‘rejected’ the daughter (Hans’ little sister) after she was born. Extracting Hans from this very provocative environment, Freud’s theories relate to his own interest in the development of heterosexuality, incest and intra-family relations more than Hans’ direct experience. I will briefly discuss aspects of the case that became sites for Freud’s “analysis”.
Freud takes interest in the fact that Hans asks his parents if he can sleep over at his female friend, Maridel’s house and he then later shows particular interest in a bourgeois girl in a restaurant. While Freud draws a link between these two incidents, they are not necessarily related, and are not necessarily ‘proof’ of a developing heterosexuality. Maridel is Hans’ landlord’s daughter. Sleepovers with friends are common for children. Bourgeois girls can be interesting: their dress, their smell, their manner of engagement. There are numerous reasons why Hans might have shown interest in the girl in the restaurant. Freud not only assumes the events are linked and are proof of a heterosexual identification, he argues that Hans’ interest in these people is repressed sexual desire for his own mother, Olga, and that: “Desire for Maridel must be an avatar of a supposedly primary desire for the mother” ( Deleuze, Guattari, Parnet, & Scala, 2007, p. 90).
The other peculiar territorialisation undertaken by Freud in his work with Hans was to suggest that Hans’ fear of horses was actually a fear of his father and of being castrated by the father. To be more specific, Hans’ fear of horses was attributed both to sexual arousal by the mother and then a subsequent fear of being castrated by the father. Horses and horse drawn carts were an everyday mode of transportation in Vienna in the early 1900s and Hans’ family lived opposite a coaching inn. During the course of his “analysis” Hans saw an overworked horse collapse in the street, a spectacle that could lead anyone to develop a paralysing fear of horses, particularly as the horse is clearly much larger than little Hans. However, as this phobia of horses became more pronounced, it was given various sexual interpretations by Freud. He alternatively claims that Hans’ phobia of horses is an expression of too much sexual attention from his mother, and also that Hans thinks the horse is his father, and he is scared of the horse because he thinks it might castrate him. While these respective interpretations may have been correct, Hans may also have also simply feared horses because they are very large, and hooved.
Koyuncu (2017, p. 72), drawing on Ross (2007), argues that “Little Hans’ fear of horses cannot be associated exclusively with his Oedipal complex, but is also a ‘communication of the traumatic abuse in the home’ (Ross, 2007, p. 779) … the case itself involves Little Hans’ reports of his little sister being beaten by his mother”. I contend that this is a far more accurate reading of the case than Freud provides, which is surprising, seeing as Freud was already involved in the very unhappy marriage, should have known Olga’s potential history of sexual abuse, definitely knew about her depression, anxiety and agoraphobia, and her mistreatment of her youngest child, which was extensive. The younger child, Hans’ sister, eventually took her own life.
I know a delightful little boy, now four years old, whose understanding parents abstain from forcibly suppressing one part of the child’s development. Little Hans has certainly not been exposed to anything in the nature of seduction by a nurse, yet he has already for some time shown the liveliest interest in the part of the body which he calls his ‘widdler’. When he was only three he asked his mother: ‘Mummy, have you got a widdler too?’ His mother answered: ‘Of course. What did you think?’ He also asked his father the same question repeatedly. At the same age he was taken to a cow-shed for the first time and saw a cow being milked. ‘Oh look!’ he said, in surprise, ‘there’s milk coming out of its widdler!’ At the age of three and three quarters he was on the way to making an independent discovery of correct categories by means of his observations. He saw some water being let out of an engine and said ‘Oh, look, the engine’s widdling. Where’s it got its widdler?’ He added afterwards in reflective tones: ‘A dog and a horse have widdlers; a table and a chair haven’t.’ Recently he was watching his seven-day-old little sister being given a bath. ‘But her widdler’s still quite small’, he remarked; ‘when she grows up it’ll get bigger all right.’ (I have been told of this same attitude towards the problem of sex distinction in other boys of similar age.) I should like to say explicitly that little Hans is not a sensual child or at all pathologically disposed. The fact is simply, I think, that, not having been intimidated or oppressed with a sense of guilt, he gives expression quite ingenuously to what he thinks. (Freud, 2002, p. 4)
Considering the case now from the point of view of interpersonal psychoanalytic theory, it is particularly noteworthy that neither the Freudian approach nor a recent psychoanalytic summary of the case questions Hans’s fearfulness beyond its classical Oedipal implications. Yet it is clear from the data that a great deal was going on besides Hans’ interesting dialogues with his father. It is Hans’s mother who has threatened him about masturbation; it is also his mother who threatened to beat him with a carpet beater. It is presumably with his mother that he ‘used to stamp his feet in a rage, and kick about, and sometimes throw himself about when he was out of the chamber.’ These data are not brought into the foreground by either the father or Freud, apparently because they are irrelevant to the drama of biological incest which Hans is supposed to be enacting. Yet such data certainly qualify the mother for symbolic transformation into a phobic object as much or more than the father. (Edel, 1968, p. 199)
Look at what happened to Little Hans already, an example of child psycho-analysis at its purest: they kept on BREAKING HIS RHIZOME and BLOTCHING HIS MAP, setting it straight for him, blocking his every way out, until he began to desire his own shame and guilt, until they had rooted shame and guilt in him, PHOBIA (they barred him from the rhizome of the building, then from the rhizome of the street, they rooted him in his parents’ bed, they radicled him to his own body, they fixated him on Professor Freud). Freud explicitly takes Little Hans’s cartography into account, but always and only in order to project it back onto a family photo. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 4)
The details of Freud’s analysis of Hans versus other possible interpretations could form the focus of an entire chapter, and I have specifically chosen not to devote so much space to this largely because of the problematic ethics of both Freud’s analysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. Both largely appropriate Hans’ biography as a means of justifying their theoretical ideas. As engaging as both Freud and Deleuze and Guattari’s theories are, they both fail to acknowledge and respond to the lived phobia and distress of Hans’ life, which clearly needed empirical treatment that was not provided. Deleuze and Guattari show us the ways in which psychoanalysis can “overcode” and “territorialise” experiences, through their discussion of Hans both in A Thousand Plateaus and The Interpretation of Utterances, but they follow Freud in appropriating Hans’ experience to support their theoretical development. In so doing, they ignore the fact that Hans was gripped by terror and agoraphobia to such an extent that, for example, he would not likely have been cured by a sleep over at a friend’s house.
In the case of Little Hans, studying the unconscious would be to show how he tries to build a rhizome, with the family house but also with the line of flight of the building, the street, etc.: then how Professor Freud’s intervention assures a power takeover by the signifier, a subjectification of affects; how the only escape route left to the child is a becoming-animal perceived as shameful and guilty (the becoming-horse of Little Hans, a truly political option). But these impasses must always be resituated on the map, thereby opening them up to possible lines of flight. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 14)
Hans’ supposed becoming-horse is a questionable interpretation of his empirical experience, as Hans is terrified of horses. Becoming is a matter of affective resonance, of emulating similar refrains and developing shared capacities. Hans does not produce affects akin to those of the horse, he does not feel, act or look like a horse. He does not imagine he is a horse. Hans is terrified of horses and fears they will invade even his bedroom. How is this fear, then, a becoming?
In some respects, Deleuze and Guattari’s scholarly enthusiasm for Hans, while exploitative, is easily understood. Little Hans was the first famous scholarly consideration of sexuality in childhood. Yet, Deleuze and Guattari are not particularly interested in childhood sexuality and are critical of psychoanalysis broadly. Freud, too, infers a range of sometimes contradictory and often unassimilated theories of childhood sexuality. But if each of these theorists’ work cannot fairly be reconciled into a single monolithic story of child sexuality, Little Hans is as close to a general theory of child sexuality as Freud comes, which is why the Hans case study is a foundational figure for the development of Freud’s Oedipus complex.
Through Freud, the Oedipus myth detailing the repression of incestuous desire came to be the dominant discourse about child development, and also the story about ‘normal’ sexual development in children rather than the experience of a particular child (Hickey-Moody, 2018). The stage-by-stage operation of the supposed repression of incest is mapped out in the following schema: all boys aged 3.5 want to kill their father so they can sexually possess their mother, a desire that becomes nullified when they realise their father has the power to castrate them. Fearing castration, boys acquiesce to their father’s power and project their sexual desire for their mother on to women other than their mother (such as a playdate or girl at a café). Oedipal psychoanalytic ideas about both phobia and “normal” (hetero)sexual development became the templates on which child sexual activity was discussed and these ideas were premised both on a linear developmental subject and the redundancy of polymorphous perversity2 (Freud, 1963, p. 87; Hickey-Moody, 2018, pp. 135–145) after the Oedipal phase.
In Little Hans , sexuality is both constructed and defined as the named-as-hidden core of the modern subject. Hans is also the most extended account of the child subject in Freud, melding the speakably sexual child subject with a model for heterosexual psychological development (Hickey-Moody, 2018). Freud’s basic premise was that all neurotic behaviours in adulthood stemmed from repressed sexual feelings in childhood, keeping in mind that here, “sexual” should be interpreted in the broadest possible way to include sensual pleasure from sucking (on mother’s breast) and sensation in the anus, as well as non-sexual touching of parts of the body, thumb sucking and so on (Freud, 1965, p. 74). The drive behind these unconscious desires is supposedly a child’s longing for their parent of the opposite sex. Furthermore, this process of the boy child having desire for his mother and unconsciously fearing his father’s revenge through castration also leads to the phenomena of “identification with the aggressor”, or the boy’s active efforts to master his anxiety by taking on his father’s qualities and becoming like his father in order to prevent such retribution. It is therefore seen by Freud as a process that is central to the becoming of a boy child’s ‘maleness’.
This process of mother-desire, father-fear, and father-identification, is seen as the key in boys becoming like their fathers and, further, this is seen as being essential to the development of their gender identity and sexuality. By understanding these issues in the developing child, and by the provision of an unrepressed and open environment where sexual anxieties can be expressed, Freud suggests that neurosis in later life can be avoided. Freud hypothesises that, if it is accepted and recognised for what it is while it is occurring, then childhood sexual neuroses can be worked through, leading to “normal” sexual development in later life. While this organisation of power and pleasure within Freud’s model of subjectivity is interrogated by some of Deleuze and Guattari’s attempts to disrupt presumptions that the subject is, or should be, a unified social organism, they take up the figure of Little Hans quite willingly as a site for analysis. Before moving on to briefly discuss Deleuze and Guattari’s other model for childhood, which I call the Spinozist child (Hickey-Moody, 2013), I briefly examine some impacts that the Hans case study has had on masculinity studies as a field.
… is a theory that continues to stand as the canonical psychological narrative of masculinity: we have known a boy to be a boy through his phallic preoccupations and castration fears, enacted alongside and through his desire for his mother and his rivalry with his father, which in time resolve via the boy’s separation from his mother and his identification with his father. (2009, p. 19)
… the analysis of repression becomes Freud’s mark. It is noteworthy that as Freud turns toward his analysis of repression, he presumes adequate or untroubled attachment to security: the object (the mother) in this case, according to Freud, was secure. (2009, p. 23)
As early as 1968 Edel showed that Olga was the likely cause of Hans’ anxiety. Regardless, as I have shown, Olga was not in any position to provide her son with a secure attachment, as she was experiencing both depression and agoraphobia. Gerome Wakefield, Professor of Social Work and Psychiatry at NY University suggests (14 December 2008) that John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth’s theory of infant attachment and maternal deprivation illuminates the parent-child interactions recorded in the “Little Hans” study, and once again point towards some quite different interpretations to those Freud made at the time. John Bowlby was a child psychiatrist and analyst, practising from the 1940s to the 1970s. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1928 with a degree in psychology and pre-clinical sciences. Later he completed a medical degree and finished his training as a psychoanalyst in 1936 (aged 30). Bowlby went on to research the nature of the relationship between mothers and infants from the earliest age (Bowlby, 1990). His findings, which were grounded in longitudinal studies of bonding behaviours in animals, led him to a 1948 study of the hospitalisation of children and disruption of the mother/infant bond (Bretherton, 1992, p. 761). Based on his research, Bowlby came to the understanding that a child’s tie to its mother is not based on sensuous oral gratification, which was the Freudian premise (Brown, 1961, p. 21), but rather, on the evolutionary function of protecting the child from danger and preserving its life (Bretherton, 1992, p. 766).
It is to this end that the complex behavioural system of infants (sucking, crying, eye contact, etc.), and the mother’s responses to these, closely tie the mother and infant together with varying degrees of security depending on the consistency of the maternal response. From this perspective, a child’s attachment behaviours go hand in hand with the parental response; those infants experiencing the most responsive maternal attention being the most securely attached and those experiencing the most unpredictable maternal response as the most anxiously attached. This perspective also demands that events in the whole family are taken into account, not the libidinal longings of the infant alone. Bowlby “… came to believe that actual family experiences were much more important, if not the basic cause of emotional disturbance” (Bretherton, 1992, p. 760). Bowlby saw the parents, their own behaviour and their own childhood experiences, as essential in the treatment of a child’s distress.
An ‘attachment’ is affectional bond, and hence an attachment figure is never wholly interchangeable or replaceable by another, even though there may be others to whom one is also attached. In attachments, as in other affectional bonds, there is a need to maintain proximity, distress upon inexplicable separation, pleasure or joy upon reunion and grief at loss. (Ainsworth, 1989, p. 711)
In the light of these clinically applied, and empirically useful, theories of Bowlby, Ainsworth, and now many others—including Brazelton (1983), Klaus and Kennell (1976) and those cited above—the “Little Hans” case study as it was recorded by Freud and Max Graff clearly lacks contextual recognition of the family trauma amidst which Hans lived, and the impact this will have had on Hans’ attachment to his mother. Let us first return to the comments of psychoanalyst David Abrams, and Jerome Wakefield (14 December 2008), following access to original interviews from the Freud Archive in New York which were released relatively recently. They point out many aspects of the case study that are crucial to the outcomes, but which are overlooked in the study itself. Firstly, as I have noted, and they remind their reader, the case study of Hans was recorded by Hans’ father, Max Graf, who was not a qualified psychoanalyst but a musicologist who reported his ‘findings’ to Freud quite second hand. Reading the case study itself, I am struck and disturbed by how often Max makes sexual interpretations of his son’s comments, particularly about horses, and as such, it is hardly surprising that this way of gaining positive attention from his father becomes something of a habit for the boy. Edel makes a similar point, when she observes that
Hans is a most cooperative and responsive student of his father’s ideas. He enjoys dictating letters to Freud: ‘I say, I am glad. I’m always so glad when I can write to the Professor. He discerns that his father is pleased at certain responses to his questions:
- Father:
… A good boy doesn’t wish that sort of thing, though.
- Hans:
But he may think it.
- Father:
But that isn’t good.
- Hans:
If he thinks it, it is good all the same, because you can write it to the Professor.’ (Edel, 1968, p. 201)
The psychic states called ‘masculinity’ originate, according to Freud, through ‘biological function’, and for the boy are constituted through the penis: ‘In contrast to the alter period of maturity, this period is marked not by a genital primacy but a primacy of the phallus.’ (Corbett, 2009, p. 24)
The phallus is the penis internalised, the symbolic reality of the father, and the father’s authority in a child’s life. It is this point that Deleuze and Guattari are the most critical of, as it is indeed an impoverished model for thinking about male subjectivity. On this I agree with them but would add that their re-reading of the case study of Little Hans does little to repair the lack of attention that Freud paid to Hans. They too think about Hans in relation to ideas rather than Hans’ experience. In A Thousand Plateaus and also in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, Deleuze with Guattari and also writing alone, imagine finding a kind of child that differs from Hans. By definition, Hans remains the ‘universal’ template, or the molar child, against which this other child is defined. This ‘other’ child is quite a romantic figure but is effectively a methodology for explaining affect and naivety. It is to a brief examination of this figure I now turn.
The Spinozist Child
Children are Spinozists. When Little Hans talks about a ‘peepee-maker’, he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but basically to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the different individuated assemblages it enters. … Children’s questions are poorly understood … they are not understood as question-machines; that is why indefinite articles play so important a role in their questions (a belly, a child, a horse, a chair, “how is a person made?”). Spinozism is the becoming-child of the philosopher. (1988, p. 256)
Childhood, says Spinoza, is a state of impotence and slavery, a state of foolishness in which we depend in the highest degree on external causes, and in which we necessarily have more of sadness than of joy; we are never more cut off from our power of action. The first man, Adam, corresponds to the childhood of humanity. (Deleuze, 1990, pp. 262–263)
Here childhood is read primarily in terms of dependency and the possibility that comes with childhood is omitted. In contrast to the ‘Spinozist children’ of A Thousand Plateaus , Spinoza’s child in Expressionism in Philosophy is to be pitied, rather than emulated, because it is the articulation of a state that takes away our capacity to know our own mind. Deleuze restates, and seemingly cannot emphasize enough, Spinoza’s “remarks that childhood is an abject state, but one common to all of us, in which we ‘depend very heavily on external causes’” (1990, p. 219). While in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari suggest we should ‘turn to children’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1988, p. 257) in order to understand affective logic, Deleuze (1990, p. 219) also realises the vulnerability of childhood. So while in his earlier writing on Spinoza, Deleuze warns against losing one’s own mind or being too easily affected by the outside world, the affectivity of childhood is later cast as being positive, as a way of opening up to new experiences and sensitising oneself to others.
One could read the meta-position being advanced across these texts as the fact that a marriage of both childhood affectivity and strength of character is important, however the problem of “interpretosis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 114), the academic habit of making life fit ideas, rather than developing ideas that adequately express life, remains as the working model that has been employed. Children are used as a means for thought, but not engaged with in the empirical sense. While empirical work with children does not automatically bypass the risk of “interpretosis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 114), as one can of course lay theory on top of experience in ways that are perhaps exploitative, there are many unexplored possibilities for ethical and innovative theoretical developments through empirical research with young people who identify as male. In the final part of this chapter I turn my attention to theorising the identity work of two boys in South East London.
Schooling Masculinity After Deleuze: Protest, Striation and Minor Refrains
The sociology of education has led the uptake of Deleuze’s work in the social sciences (Harwood, Hickey-Moody, McMahon, & O’Shea, 2016; Hickey-Moody, 2009, 2013; MacLure, 2016, 2018; Ringrose, 2018; Ringrose & Coleman, 2013; Renold, Ringrose & Danielle, 2016). This enthusiasm for Deleuze’s thought has articulated across the field in more ways than I am able to consider in this chapter. Suffice to say, while much of the work on Deleuze and education is not focused on gender specifically, there is a significant collection of sociology of education scholars concerned with feminism and education, represented in some ways by the “PhEmaterialist” collection of scholars who converge in London (see Ringrose, Warfield, & Zarabadi, 2018), exploring intersections between Deleuze’s philosophy and feminist new materialisms. This expanded field is worthy of a book-length survey and analysis in its own right. Much less attention has been paid to Deleuze and masculinity as articulated in the lives of bodies that are sex marked ‘male’ in the sociology of education, however there is some existing literature bringing these fields together which I canvass in what is to follow.
I begin by examining some fairly recent contributions to scholarship that undertake conceptual development opening out how we might think of young masculinities. In engaging with this literature I want to provide a caveat: I am not meaning to suggest that empirical research is devoid of the fascination with the concept that we find in Deleuze and Guattari. For example, generally Freud’s clinical practice involved engaging with people, even though this was not the case in his “study” of Hans. One cannot say that Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on children relate to the lived experiences of children, or that the work to which I now turn always accurately represents the experiences of the people involved in empirical research. Sociology of education may as much be a glut of “interpretosis” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 114) at times as Deleuze and Guattari’s work clearly often is. This said, the ethical ethnographic idea of understanding culture and experience from the inside, knowing through lived experience and then thinking about the knowing, is the broad scholarly sensibility informing much of the empirical work being undertaken in the sociology of education, and I want to position this as an important methodological and theoretical orientation.
Of particular significance for my work here is Farrell’s (2015) piece “‘We’re the mature people’: a study of masculine subjectivity and its relationship to key stage four Religious Studies”. Farrell draws from both poststructural theory and masculinities theory to explore the ways in which Stage 4 boys enrolled in religious studies in the UK draw on the subject as a discursive resource for the constitution of the self, and “negotiate socially successful identities through their relationship to the dominant masculinising forces of sport, physicality and authority and engage with Religious Studies” (Farrell, 2015, p. 19). A few concepts offered by Deleuze and Guattari (as well as others) are drawn on in Farrell’s discussion of how the boys are negotiating masculine subjectivity. He explains that “although the boys’ identity work was fashioned through their relationship to vortices of masculinity (Connell, 2000), most notably through their successful involvement in competitive sport, the Milltown boys were able to negotiate a range of subject positions … The boys narrated their disillusionment with what Nick called ‘clockwork subjects’, maths and science with their masculine subject meanings … The boys’ openness to questions points to ways in which RE can create new territory, epistemologically open ‘nomadic’ spaces in the curriculum which can begin to disrupt dominant ‘molar’ masculine subjectivity” (Farrell, 2015, p. 32). Part of the point Farrell is making here is often argued in the sociology of education. It is well known that critical thinking is central to reflexive gender and sexuality identity construction (e.g. Harwood & Rasmussen, 2004). The production of gendered identity in and through curriculum is also a focus of the field, although seeing curriculum discourses as ‘striated’ spaces that machine (or produce) identities in specific ways is an apposite site for theoretical analysis that has obvious implications for sociology of gender and education. Boys can become a different kind of boy through thinking about religion and being called to interpolate often quite contradictory narratives on life and death. Social belief systems are indeed an ultimate striating force that cuts across subjectivity and shapes social relationships in very particular ways. Deleuze and Guattari characterize this through saying “the classical image of thought, and the situating of mental space it effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two ‘universals’, the whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon and the Subject as the principal that converts being into being-for-us. Imperium and republic. Between the two, all of the varieties of the real and the true find their place in a striated mental space, from the double point of view of Being and Subject, under the direction of a ‘universal method’” (1983, p. 379).
These boys elude the reductive categories of cool guy, swot, wimp, or poofter (Martino 1999). Through their choices and their reciprocal, reflexive relationship to the potent technology of parresia [free speech] offered through the discourse of RE, they showed themselves to be active, self-constituting subjects. (Farrell, 2015, p. 33)
Critical, independent thinking is a way of smoothing the striated space of gendered identity, or of becoming other-than the cool guy, swot, or other litany of schoolboy masculinities. Deleuze and Guattari characterize this smooth space as filled with possibility, saying: “smooth space is filled by events of haecceitites, far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties … it is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties” (1983, p. 479). Smooth space, as Farrell’s research shows us, offers a space of feeling, relationality, and possibility. This is held in opposition or contract to the striated nature of curriculum focused on content acquisition rather than critical thinking. Curriculum focused on rote learning and/or content acquisition is a hierarchical space, which operates in relation to existing systems of power and, indeed, organizes systems of power: “The striated is that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, organizes horizontal … lines with vertical … planes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 141).
Learning within straited spaces is a process of acquiring the right answer, whereas learning within smooth spaces is a process of becoming in relation to experience. Farrell offers us the most specific engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s thought and young masculine identities, yet other work in the sociology of education maps onto the experiences of childhood and youth in ways that seem important when working to better understand forms of gender in young boys’ everyday lives.
Mindy Blaise’s (2013) piece, titled “Charting New Territories: Re-assembling Childhood Sexuality in the Early Years’ Classroom”, begins from the standpoint that children’s early meaning-making in relation to gender and sexuality has been shut down by moral panic. In order to offer an approach to understanding childhood sexuality that does not striate subjective development as a linear process that occurs across time, Blaise characterises Deleuze and Guattari’s work on childhood as offering a useful ‘postdevelopmental logic’. She does not offer an explicit discussion of masculinity using a postdevelopmental framework, yet this concept of postdevelopmental childhood sexuality is a critical resource for all wishing to undertake an analysis of how children do gender and sexuality in ways that extend beyond the Oedipal (heterosexual and necessarily developmental) model offered by Freud. We don’t start as sensually amorphous beings and then become sexualized, these two stages are enfolded in the experience of being human and one can often interrupt the other. The concept of postdevelopmental childhood sexuality contextualises the affective becoming of the Spinozist child as a form of experience that is not bound to one time of life (Hickey-Moody, 2013). A bloc of childhood affects can fold into the teleological experience of a life in a non-chronological manner. Childhood affects are a way of smoothing space and time, of uncrumpling the rigid rules of gender that are often part of sexual and gendered aspects of children’s everyday lives. This capacity to be in the world in ways that crack molar discourses of gender, creating smooth striations of identity politics and subjective belief, is a theme that researchers engaged with empirical experiences of children are drawn back to when reconciling their experiences in the field with theoretical frameworks.
Thinking through embodied performances of gender, in their piece “Girls in Primary School Science Classrooms: Theorising Beyond Dominant Discourses of Gender”, Cervoni and Ivinson (2011) consider masculinity as part of the ways girls understand and ‘appropriate’ gender. They draw on Deleuze and Guattari as part of their analysis of gender at the micro-level—specifically through exploring the ‘lines of flight’ available to the girls in their study. Girls perform masculinity as a way of freeing themselves from overly feminized striations of their identity. Masculinity is also addressed at the semiotic level, in terms of the historical coding of particular subjects or practices as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. This focus on the gendered production of subjects activates Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts in relation to young gendered bodies in ways that remain attentive to the lived experiences of children and young people.
You lift with the boys. You inhabit the molar masculine field house with your expanded body, your body that is hyperdifferentiated. You cherish this derelict space, this zone of indeterminacy. You use the same equipment as the boys; sometimes you press as much weight as they do. You spot their heavy lifting; they trust you. You crack open the existing order of the molar masculine field house to make it your own, forcing it to expand to fit you. Your becoming is in- between. You are in-between molar femininity and molar masculinity, inhabiting neither fully – sidling, straddling, sidestepping. You transform both, in the threshold. You are supermolecularity. (Jackson, 2010, p. 586)
Moving between embodying popular tropes of the feminine and the masculine, the weightlifting girl changes both masculinity and femininity through embodying them in new ways. This example shows how Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts help both the researcher, the reader and possibly the research participant to understand the experience of being and becoming gendered.
During the course of the analysis, I have been inspired by a materialistic understanding … of the investigated subjects, but also more and more by Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, 1994) and Braidotti’s (2010) work. From my point of view, the process of becoming is a physical (material) and mental process. (2016, p. 108)
Accordingly, the women academics in this study are seen as in constant processes of becoming, changing and mediating levels of power and desires, and as searching for recognition and appreciation. Being in transit is not a target in itself for these academic lecturers: on the one hand, it is a strategy for using and gaining various kinds of resources. On the other hand, it is an expression of ambivalence and the uncertainty of existence. (2016, p. 108)
There is a relationship here between gendered (and, in this instance, professional) change and Deleuze and Guattari’s thought that stands out. Based on the ways in which researchers take up Deleuze and Guattari’s work in relation to empirical experiences, their concepts offer ways of better understanding social change and gendered changes when applied with a focus on understanding lived experiences.
As my broad engagement with literature from the sociology of education above makes plain, there is not simply one concept or one way in which Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is of use when engaging with human subjects. While one can identify broad orientations, there is no ‘molar’, defining model. Indeed, perhaps the most obvious thing about how their writing has been used is the unifying presumption in all these works that the empirical needs to guide how we engage with theory. Taking this attention to the empirical as my own methodology, with an eye for what Maggie MacLure has characterised as data that glows, or generates wonder (2013), I now turn to a case study of my empirical data, examining the gender and identity work of two boys in a primary school in South East London. As I noted in the introduction, the case study below is drawn from a larger data set generated through ethnographic work with children and their parents across the UK and Australia.3 Identities have been anonymised.
David is a black British boy, six years old and full of energy. This zest for absolutely everything that captures his imagination is matched by his friend Declan, a white British six year old boy. These two boys are an ongoing part of fieldwork in this primary school. The school is in a lower socioeconomic part of London, but, being London, there are signs of gentrification springing up across some neighbouring streets. The school culture is explicitly inclusive of cultural difference, and the children are encouraged to value their heritage and culture through the ways curriculum is employed and through the approach the school takes to community engagement. There is an obvious attempt being made to focus on social and cultural wealth and not to reproduce deficit discourses of disadvantage that are embedded in the local high-rise housing areas and surrounding community.
The narratives that emerged from interviews with these men revealed an ability and privilege among them to maneuver in and out of varying masculine expressions and behaviors depending on the context or requirement. They could move into, within, between and out of spaces and iterations of privilege, difference, progressiveness and traditionality. This privilege of movement reflected the autonomy of these participants as masculine subjects. As Bridges and Pascoe (2014: 249) state, the documentation of masculinities in transformation among white, heterosexual young men ‘evidences the flexibility of identity afforded privileged groups.’ (Elliott, 2018, p. 7)
Through a case study of the geographical reach and location of these young men’s lives, we demonstrate the ways in which the associations between particular places and a version of protest masculinity act to restrict their opportunities, not only through rising material inequality but through a discursive association with ‘dangerous’ spaces and unregulated bodies. (McDowell & Harris, 2019, p. 420)
Identities may be relational and performative but they are not free floating or indefinitely changeable. Nevertheless, if young men are repeatedly told that they are undeserving, bad or dangerous, they are not only constructed within these discourses as ‘other’ but may also begin to see themselves through the eyes of others. (McDowell & Harris, 2019, p. 422)
It is seeing two boys undertake exactly this practice of acting out as ‘other’, indeed, it is their experiences of seeing themselves as ‘other’ that shone through the process of asking a class to engage in a collaborative process of exploring shared values and beliefs. Two boys could not collaborate, and this was because they felt themselves as different from the rest of their class.
Protest Masculinity for a New Millennium
David and Declan are two of four boys in a class of 10, but as our individual work on identity pictures begins they move away from the large table where everyone is sitting and work on the floor. Spatially, they separate themselves from the community of children. They draw racing cars as their self-portraits. Each of them asks me to project an image of a racing car on the wall for them to look at and copy. I am struck by the gendered nature of the images they choose for their identity pictures. The racing cars ooze masculine appeal: they are light, fast, high performance, ‘sports model’ cars. The pictures they look at in thinking about how they will create their car-identity picture are the hegemonic man’s ideal accessory. While having empathy for, and some appreciation of, the boys’ choice here, I also feel they may not ever drive one of the cars at which they are looking so longingly. They are certainly not the kinds of vehicles that populate the streets of their neighbourhood.
We talk about culture and identity while the boys are drawing. David tells me he is Muslim and Declan says he isn’t sure about his religion. In our fairly safe group of three, I ask what religion means to them and also ask the boys if their parents are religious and David says yes, and being Muslim is very important to him, and Declan says he doesn’t know. I try to encourage the boys to express their cultural and religious identities in their pictures, but feel fairly confident the images are articulations of their gender identity more than anything else. The sports car seems an ideal induction into the world of hegemonic gender identity. When it is time for the group to finish identity pictures and begin working on a collaborative painting, the boys refuse. They keep colouring in their sports cars. They carefully cut the cars out and mount them on coloured card so they can take them home and stick them up in their bedrooms.
David’s car
Declan’s identity picture
The Porsche 911 – the most overwhelmingly male passenger car – has an “Index Male to Total” of 214.3 … That’s more than double the average. The car’s “Index Female to Total,” on the other hand, is just 14.3. It’s surprising the 911 doesn’t grow hair on its hood and eat Krispy Kreme for breakfast. Other cars at the top of the masculinity dial include the exotic Ford GT supercar, Maserati Spyder, Jaguar XK8 sports car and the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution. You get the idea: If it’s very fast, awfully fast, terribly fast or way, way too fast, guys like it. Also, they tend to be expensive. (Valdes-Dapena, 2006)
Both the boys’ cars look like they are supposed to be fast. Terribly fast. And arguably, the bright colours of the cars are a youthful version of the ‘hairy chest’ and ‘krispy crème for breakfast’ that CNN equates with masculine identity: a vernacular semiotic of youthful masculinity. Even once the ‘identity’ pictures have been completed, the boys will not join in the group project. They want to show me the playground and so I let them take me outside. I am carried into their refrain, their embodied song of belonging. This embodied song of belonging is a way of marking out a territory. As Deleuze and Guattari remind us: Everyone, at every age, in the smallest things as in the greatest challenges, seeks a territory, tolerates or carries out deterritorializations, and is reterritorialized on almost anything—memory, fetish, or dream. Ritornellos express these powerful dynamisms (1983, pp. 310–350). The two boys have a series of practices that they repeat in space, which clearly mark out their territory and also claim their identity as a molar form of masculinity, as being a centre of power.
We run across the asphalt to their ‘secret tunnel’ which tracks through the middle of the hedges along the school border. As I crouch down to get inside, the boys tell me “this is our secret place. No grown-ups know about it”. This secret place is their territory. Their running through their secret place is like Deleuze’s ‘hum’, carving pathways in space and time. Deleuze reflects: “When do I tralala? When do I hum? I hum in three various occasions. I hum when I go around my territory … and that I clean up my furniture with a radiophonic background … meaning when I am at home. I also hum when I am not at home and that I am trying to reach back my home …. I look for my way and I give myself some courage by singing tralala. I go toward home. And, I hum when I say ‘Farewell, I am leaving and in my heart I will bring…’ . ….. In other words, the ritournelle (refrain), for me, is absolutely linked to the problem of territory, and of processes of entrance or exit of the territory” (Deleuze, 1996).
Like the hum soothes the weary traveller, or performs delight in the home, the boys skip through their well-worn pathways, their bouncing steps a refrain of joy. I am loathe to point out that I am in fact one of the forbidden ‘grown-ups’ from whom they believe they are hiding, I concur that it is indeed an excellent tunnel and run along (still crouching) behind the boys until they reach a tall part of the hedge where they can climb up and “look out over the whole school”. This geography is their place, their bodies in this place sing with happiness, temporarily free from the striations of the schoolyard.
I join in with them in surveilling the asphalt but wonder exactly how hidden I am from those having their sports lesson. Kumm and Johnson agree that identity and spatiality are enmeshed in ways we are only beginning to understand. They explain that: “more often than not, … scholarship tends to locate identity politics within ideological struggles and disciplinary discourses of hegemony. We ask you to consider whether it is even possible to think ‘identity’ outside spatiality. The term we often use to describe our identities – ‘positionality’ – is one of spatial arrangements” (Kumm & Johnson, 2017, p. 903). For these two boys, their position in the school space and their close observation of the school space was central to how they performed their masculinity, which was affirmed through their superior knowledge of the other children’s activities (indeed, even adults’ activities) in the schoolyard.
The three of us play ‘tag’ in the yard for the last half an hour until it is home time, the boys squealing as we run as fast as we can, trying to catch each other. When David’s mum comes to get him, I go out to meet her and show her his beautiful car picture. She is nursing a new baby, David’s infant sister. I introduce myself and we chat, and in an attempt to open up discussion about culture and identity, I ask “So, you are Muslim?”. David’s mum looks at me as if I had just said something very surprising. “No, what gives you that idea?” she asks, seemingly disturbed. Embarrassed, I quickly double-check my notes. David had definitely told us he was Muslim, and my notes and confirm this. “Oh, I’m sorry, is your partner Muslim?” I ask, genuinely apologetic. “No, we are Liberal Christian Lesbians” the mother replies, “where did all this being Muslim come from?”. I rather awkwardly explain that David had told me he was Muslim and I had believed him. I immediately realise that pretending to be Muslim is a protest against the striations of living with the Christian religion at home. For David, religion is lived as “that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, organizes horizontal…lines with vertical…planes” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 478). Religion is a striating force that binds his home together and organizes it, giving form and shape to life. It provides a striated structure against which he wants to rebel. David’s playing at being Muslim is a form of subversion and critique (Nash & Penney, 2015, p. 5). It is a form of play that “produces excess upon excess, …[and] allows us to assert that the productivity of play is radical” (Nash & Penney, 2015, p. 8).
David, his mother and I go inside to look at the drawings and group paintings made across the course of the afternoon. The mother, clearly a very engaged and self-reflexive person, is puzzled by my story about David being Muslim and she asks David “What religion are you, David?”. And David enthusiastically replies “Muslim!”. “Do you want to be Muslim, David?” the mother asks. “I think I should take you to a mosque and church”, she suggests to her son. “Would you like to visit the mosque and the church?” she asks him. The mother goes on to tell me that her and her partner are actually very Christian and she is the youth minister for her congregation. Turning to David, she tries a new approach to getting him thinking about his religion. “Who do we worship at home, David?” she asks. “You, mummy” David yells, pointing his finger at his mother, who is cradling and rocking her newborn while looking rather exasperated. Clearly, David’s “Muslim” identity is, in fact, a form of protest masculinity: “protest masculinity represents an unconscious defensive manoeuvre on the part of males who are in conflict about or who are insecure about their identities as males” (Broude, 1990, p. 103). David is not simply insecure about his gender identity—the intersectionality of race, class, religion and gender is clearly shaping his experience of subjectivity. Being the only male and the only black person in his family, as well as being the older child at a time when his mother is clearly utterly besotted with her youngest, has left David feeling like an outsider. The mother held her six-month-old baby in her arms throughout our conversation, and David jumped off chairs and ran around crying out while we chatted.
I realise that David is not only resentful of his parents’ focus on the church and the children in their congregation, he is jealous of the attention his new sister receives. Over the course of our conversation I learn that both David’s parents are white, which he would be beginning to notice acutely at this stage of his development. Little wonder he is trying to develop identity narratives that separate him from his family, as he feels separated already. He not only feels like the older child who gets less attention, he is also a child who is a different colour from his mummies, and who (hopefully temporarily) feels he plays second best not just to his baby sister but to his mother’s congregation. The choice ‘not to fit in’ by opting out of the group activities makes a lot more sense now. So too does David’s insistent focus on creating his very masculine identity portrait. It was, perhaps, a way of affirming himself as a legitimate male subject, despite his feeling otherwise. This story sticks. Across countries, across years, I think about David as I meet dozens of very different Muslim boys.
there is, I suggest, another potentiality associated with data, beyond and beside their capacity for mute surrender to the colonialist administrations of social science. This potentiality can be felt on occasions where something – perhaps a comment in an interview, a fragment in a field note, an anecdote, an object, or a strange facial expression – seems to reach out from the inert corpus (corpse) of the data, to grasp us. … they exert a kind of fascination, and have capacity to animate further thought. (MacLure, 2013, p. 228)
What interests us in operations of striation and smoothing are precisely the passages or combinations: how the forces at work within space continually striate it, and how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces. … Movements, speed and slowness, are sometimes enough to reconstruct a smooth space. Of course, smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them, and life reconstitutes its stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new paces, switches adversaries. Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983, p. 500)
David responds to the struggles of his life by smoothing space, by running away from class and from adults, running through the tunnels in the hedges that border the school, watching out at others so that he does not feel like the object of attention, but rather, observes others at last, with his friend, safe from scrutiny. David’s smooth space of phantasy is created partly by his mother’s striations of religious identity. David is clearly not saved by his smoothing of space. His sports car is an affiliation of desire rather than an actual means of escape. His Muslim identity, too, is an imagined way of belonging to a minoritarian and racialised culture, a culture which feels like it is a more apposite site of identification for him than his white parents’ Christian community. His imaginative play in the classroom and in the secret tunnels of the hedges are a minor refrain. He clearly feels he belongs to a minority,4 and it seems to me that indeed he does.
Conclusion
This chapter has canvassed the different ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s work characterises boyhood, and alternatively, can be seen to be of use in better understanding experiences of boyhood. Contemporary experiences of learning masculinity while growing up as a boy are striated by psychoanalytic ideas about sexual and psychological development. These are ideas that are a core part of the social and cultural fabric of contemporary cultures. While scholarly studies of ‘the root cause’ of psychoanalytic constructions of gender are numerous, I am not looking to make a significant contribution to this field as much as provide an understanding of the impact of Hans on both Deleuze and Guattari’s work and contemporary landscapes of masculinity studies. Such an understanding, however, can only offer one aspect or reading or the lived experience of contemporary experience of boyhood, or indeed gender. As I have shown, work in the sociology of education maps the lived experience of gender in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s work in ways that suggest the psychoanalytic boy is not necessarily central to lived social and cultural experiences of gender in everyday life. This work suggests that space, time, language, the body, curriculum are all significant for boys’ identity. My ethnographic vignette articulates protest masculinity as a practice of smoothing space, of using imaginative play and visual art to develop a gendered identity that responds to lived experiences of marginalisation and imagines a molar subjectivity. Here, Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is a resource that helps navigate the expanded social field of lived cultural and gender identity, rather than a model for how gender unfolds. As this chapter has shown, Deleuze’s work clearly offers useful methods for understanding children’s experiences of learning gender and identity, even if it is not his work on childhood that proves most useful when thinking about children’s lives. I now turn my attention to intersections of masculinity and disability, in an attempt to explicate some of the ways in which disability is produced as gendered.