Abstract
The so called crisis of masculinity first surfaced in the late 1990s as a result of the Iron John (Bly, 1990) fraternity seeking to reclaim and celebrate masculinity for men. At this time many men felt that they had been emasculated by feminist challenges to their power and status and by unemployment as a result of declining jobs in manufacturing and their displacement by service work with predominantly female employees. Gill (Undated) argues that little of this ‘“crisis talk” was based on sound empirical research’ and doubts the very existence of a crisis. Her view is that we just need more ‘feminist-inspired, critical men’s studies’ that seek to problematize rather than just commiserate or celebrate masculinity.
Although largely based on secondary material, this book provides precisely such an analysis and thus is a refreshing treatment of the ‘crisis of masculinity’ in Western society at the turn of the Millennium. Informed by a range of cultural, literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic and feminist literatures, it generates an analysis that in terms of the continuum between heteronormative heterosexuality and queer theory, is more sympathetic to the latter but not uncritically so. Drawing on Judith Butler and other feminists, it begins by developing an argument about the performative nature of the ‘crisis’ in masculinity. Following the Iron John ‘call to arms’, a considerable literature emerged discussing the ‘crisis’ and much of it of a ‘hand wringing’ nature (Chapman and Rutherford, 1987; Seidler, 1989, 1993), but little has been written on the way in which some men have engaged in (melo)dramatic performances often of an extreme nature in response to what they see as a threatened, emasculated or victimized masculine identity.
By way of illustration, the author provides an illuminating discussion of psychoanalytic theory as it relates to the development of masculine or sexual identities. For those unfamiliar with Lacanian psychoanalysis or have found it too foreboding, Walsh provides a welcome and readily understandable introduction as it relates to issues of masculinity. This is of particular importance as it fills in a number of theoretical lacunae existing within the sociological and organization analysis literature on masculinity (e.g. Brittan, 1989; Collinson and Hearn, 1996; Connell, 1995; Hearn and Morgan, 1990; Kerfoot and Knights, 1998; Peterson, 1998). While feminism, literary theory, film studies and philosophy have routinely drawn on psychoanalysis, theorists of masculinity have been more reluctant to engage with its insights. This is a pity, as we can see from Walsh’s analysis of the crisis of masculinity, as he sees it represented in the work of various performance artists, playwrights and exhibitionists.
At the core of his thesis is the view that subjectivities either of normativity or transgression equally depend psychologically on the Other that they oppose or seek to exclude. This insight can be traced to Hegel’s master-slave relationship but is reflected in the work of Foucault when he talks of the dividing practices, Derrida in talking about marginality or Butler in describing how heteronormal subjects depend on the existence of abject beings whose lives are outside Lacan’s notion of Symbolic Law. This has its psychoanalytic roots in gender identification; a situation, for example, where the lost loved object (the mother for boys) is psychically internalized as prohibition or repressed desire. Subjectivity is continually haunted by this loss and the more stable the gender affinity, Butler (1990) argues, the less the loss has been resolved and the more rigid are the gender boundaries constructed to conceal it. This would be the source of homophobic violence against homosexuality.
Afterwards he illustrates the performative nature of the crisis in masculinity through a series of chapters focussing on the crisis as performative in art, endurance performances, film, literature and theatre. Overall he sees ‘overlapping positions of abjection, emasculation, masochism, sacrifice, victimisation and corporeal im/permeability’ working to articulate/negotiate male trouble (p.10).
Chapter 2 examines the performance of sacrifice that is seen as central to the law of heteronormativity in the film The Passion of the Christ (2004). Although the film was criticized as anti-Semitic in that its Director Mel Gibson portrayed the killing of Jesus as principally the work of the Jews, Walsh focuses on the way in which the film depicts Satan as an androgynous figure whereas Jesus is portrayed in terms of eroticized masculinity. In effect the message is that alternative sexualities are an evil threat to heteronormative family life.
In the third chapter, Walsh draws on the play Made in China and the film Intermission to illustrate how ‘masculinity is performed around positions of impotency, abjection and victimisation’ (p. 59). The chapter depicts the hypermasculinity of the characters in Made in China as evidence of masculinity’s ‘performative ambition and conceptual instability rather than ontological authority’ (p. 60).
Chapter 4 analyses two plays by Mark Ravenhill—Shopping and Fucking and Faust is Dead. The first is about consumerism and sex and their relationship to capitalist culture. The characters—four homosexuals named after the members of Take That and Lulu—are dysfunctional manifestations of social alienation that Walsh likens to Jameson’s schizophrenic condition where there is a breakdown in the chain of significations (free-floating, impersonal) and the homosexual is the ‘site on which late capitalist symptoms of “isolation”, “discontinuity” and “disorder” conflate and intensify’ (p. 88). These gays are depicted as abject figures— agents of violence and social pollution. Ravenhill links this homosexual pollution to consumerist culture. A heterosexual character then enters the scene as the drug dealer for Lulu who the gays exploit. He becomes the ‘normative benchmark against which the gays gauge their masculinity complexes’ (p. 91). The play then turns to focus on Gary, who is only 14-years-old but was sexually abused by his stepfather and seeks masochistic repetition of this castrating experience of being owned and abused. This all coincides with Butler’s reinterpretation of Freud to argue that male homosexuality is damaged by desire for and identification with the father. Walsh interprets the self-harm, self-destruction and masochism of these men as a form of symbolic punishment for failing to remain compliant with the heteronormative demands of the father or having a secret desire to be subjected to such laws as a way of masculinising ‘unruly homosexual subjectivity’ (p. 13). In these plays, the heteronormative fantasies represent ‘homosexuality as a problem of appetite, satisfaction and consumption’ unable to comply with paternal law but seeking satisfaction through the pursuit of substitute objects and then responding to the law through the sacrificial yet ‘eroticised male-male violence on the body’ (p. 108). While disavowing the Law they are compelled to act it out through cannibalistic-like rituals of self-mutilation.
Chapter 5 follows a not dissimilar path of exploring self-harm as an aspect of gay subjectivity but through the works of the live performance art of Ron Athey and Franko B, the latter providing Walsh with his jacket cover of a head and face oozing blood from such presumed self-mutilation. While some have suggested that the self-mutilation performances of these artists are intended as a ‘gender parody’ and assault on patriarchal society, Walsh takes a different line of argument. Deriving from Athey’s biography of early childhood and the ‘maternal abuse of his identity’, Walsh detects in these performances a deep misogyny. He sees Athey reliving the traumatic experiences of his life dominated by his mother’s involvement with a ‘female collective and a fanatical Church’ (p. 112). These performances by homosexuals of bodily self-mutilation may be intended to challenge conventional homophobic responses to AIDS sufferers. However, Walsh thinks that they also reflect a reified male authority on the part of their authors.
In chapter 6 there is a discussion of heroic masculinity through examining the performance spectacles of David Blaine and the Fathers 4 Justice. David Blaine began his career as a magician but wanted to create public spectacles of the self by engaging in high risk endurance tests on the body (e.g. Frozen in Time—64 hours in a block of ice; Vertigo—35 hours standing on a 27-metre pillar; Above the below—44 days in a Plexiglass case without food). Fathers 4 Justice was a father’s rights pressure group that, in order to get media attention, carried out theatrical street performances through fantasies of empowerment by dressing up as comic book heroes such as Batman, Spiderman and Superman. Both these sets of performers of spectacles, Walsh argues, are not endangered by their supposedly high-risk behaviour. Blaine always had medical assistance on hand and his status as a victim is questionable since his starvation was preventable. Basically Blaine was simply ‘engaging the public in questions surrounding mastery, bodily integrity and masculine authenticity’ (p.146). Nor is Fathers 4 Justice really challenging the patriarchal status quo since their performances involve a reassertion and celebration of heroic masculinity.
The final chapter, exemplifying his thesis of male trouble and masculine crisis taking diverse public performances designed to retrieve and promote their masculinity, examines laddism in its different forms. It stimulated a variety of TV programmes such as Dirty Sanchez, Viva La Bam, Wildboyz and Jackass, the latter of which was turned into a film that is the main focus of the chapter. These involved a range of laddish performances designed to ‘secure the “normative” masculinity of associated subjects’ (p. 161). The performances are all conveying a ‘hardness’ and willingness to take risks with the body but the outcome is almost always an assertion of the indestructibility of the male subject. Some have argued that these performances are comedic parodies of everyday life and a triumph of ‘low’ over ‘high’ culture. Walsh challenges this view suggesting that it is simply a reflection of a troubled masculinity resulting from challenges to heteronormativity from feminist and alternative sexualities. Many of the performances take the form of tests to bodily endurance through, for example, ingesting abject and dangerous substances or penetrating the body—often the anus—with objects of various kinds such as a model car. Insofar as the body resists or recovers from these violations and remains a coherent unity, the performance constitutes a ritual of celebratory masculine omnipotence.
Alongside Butler and Žižek, Walsh seeks to challenge the domination of heteronormative practices and values. So, for example, he subscribes to Žižek’s view that male trouble is largely a result of the decline of paternal authority that is partly a function of resistance to, but also a secret desire for, the strict symbolic demands of the father. This reflects the performative power of masculine discourses particularly at the point of sexual formation of the male subject. Žižek and Butler would appear to believe that abject performances can disrupt established norms surrounding subjectivity and sexuality. However, Walsh’s analysis of the heterosexual and homosexual performances and representations of emasculation, masochism, sacrifice, victimization, corporeal penetratability or impenetratability throughout these chapters are seen to stabilize rather than threaten male subjectivity. In so doing, they support the regulatory conditions that sustain heteronormativity.
Overall the book is concerned to provide a psychoanalytically informed narrative of male troubles around masculine subjectivities. While the performances described in the book would appear to confront and disturb taken for granted norms around both homosexual and heterosexual masculinities, Walsh suggests that they are actually focused on securing and sustaining masculine identities in conditions of anxiety, uncertainty and threats to homosocial, male hegemony.
Ever since Freud, psychoanalysis has recognized the gender ambiguity of sexuality and indeed the polymorphous perversity that entry to the Symbolic or Law of the Father through symbolic castration must eliminate. Butler argues that this loss of a homosexual identity haunts the heterosexual even though this must be denied: indeed, she suggests that the more stable the gender affinity the less resolved is the loss (p. 28). Walsh does not feel comfortable with what he terms these hostile narratives on gender but thinks they help us to understand the sacrificial bond that secures subjectivity in our cultural imaginary. He also recognizes that this psychoanalytic way of thinking is embellished in other literatures concerning male identity constructed through sacrifice and subjection. However, his own position is quite different—he draws on Bracha Ettinger (2006) to argue for a rejection of the sacrificial model of subjectivity and to replace it with an ethic of fragilization where the ‘fragile subject is characterized by an unfolding multiplicity’ (p. 186). This ethic can only be realized by encountering the feminine (Keenan King, 2005); indeed, Ettinger’s ethic of fragilization is predicated on rethinking the womb. By contrast with Lacan and Kristeva who view the womb as unthinkable and psychotic because it cannot pass through the castration process into the Symbolic, Ettinger contends that the womb as a matrixial space is a fragile, fragmented and dispersed mode of co-becoming. She insists that the womb as abject must be rejected.
I believe this book provides an original and insightful account and analysis of some performance artists and playwrights’ extreme responses to the so-called crisis of masculinity. It certainly deconstructs and debunks any notion that these performances and narratives are radical challenges to masculine power whether homosexual or heterosexual. Moreover, far from challenging the dominance of heteronormative values as might be expected when many of the artists are gay men, these performances reproduce the very masculine-feminine binary that sustains them (Linstead and Brewis, 2004). If I have a criticism it is that there is rather too much in the book—almost as if the author is seeking to prove his intellectual credentials by covering almost all possible interpretations of the narratives that he studies from psychoanalysis to feminism and from Foucault to postmodernism. As a consequence, he fails to speak sufficiently with his own voice. In this regard I would have liked to see an expansion of the final arguments of the book where Walsh challenges Butler and Žižek and offers an alternative through Ettinger’s ethic of fragilization.
Finally, why should this book be of interest to readers of Organization? I believe there are several reasons—first of all, although the author is located in film and performance studies, he is multidisciplinary in his analyses drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, literary studies, femininsm and sociology. He could have drawn on organization studies since the performances that are his focus clearly have taken a great deal of organizing. Despite not doing this, the analysis is important for students of organization as dominant heteronormative values in the workplace represent obstacles for managers in complying with, let alone embracing, anti-discriminatory laws around gender and sexuality as well as other diversities. Finally, many of the theorists that Walsh draws upon from Lacan to Foucault and from Butler to Žižek have become increasingly a central part of organizational discourse.