18 Studying Masculinity: Studying New Literatures in English

Prof. Ipshita Chanda

In the introductory module of this course we have considered the different aspects of ‘newness’ on the basis of which ‘new’ “English’ literatures may be defined. Location, transmission and composition and the voicing of hitherto silenced social identities were some of these aspects considered there. Under the category of location, we may include the former British colonies such as: parts of Africa, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Canada, Caribbean countries, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, islands in the South Pacific to mention a few. What binds this literary output together and form the body of New literatures in English is, of course, the language. However, beneath this apparently simple unifying factor, lies a much deeper and complex field of reasoning, classifying, theorising and debating which deconstructed the possibility of one language-one literature.

Masculinity Studies emerged in United States of America in the 1960s and 1970s following the liberating ethos of the contemporary Gay Liberation movement, Civil Rights movement, Feminist movement. Beginning with the quest to interrogate the self, the hegemonic structure prevalent in the society and literary spaces, this sphere of study went on to explore the links and moorings of the hegemony. Eventually, the study emerged as a strong critical tool to challenge the exclusive nature of the contemporary literary standards and often normative acceptance of such exclusivity. It was an exclusion based on identification social roles as corresponding to their respective biological sex. In other words, what Masculinity Studies brought forth was the design of Patriarchal power structure that operates in the society through imposing certain gender specific roles, such as that of a ‘good woman/sister/daughter/housewife’, or through identifying the deviants. A good woman in such patriarchal set up, is supposed to engage her energy, time and labour to take care of the household affairs and maintain its wellbeing. However, feminist movement which came a long way since the suffragette movement and has started voicing their demands of equal wage as their male co-workers in the Dagenham, UK since the beginning of the twentieth century, could not but realise the patriarchal design of a healthy household to be exploitative. The arbitrary hierarchy of labour, such as outside home and within and all moral, religious justifications of such division, rigidity and hierarchisation of labour were challenged. Masculinity Studies, in a post war world started taking stock of each and every such exploitative structures and threatened the long domesticated normativity. A second wave of challenge was ushered on this normative power structure during the Gay Liberation movement. The patriarchal social structure which was yet to accommodate the rising challenges of the feminist movement was left bereft of its ordained, normative gender ideals by the Gay Liberation Movement. The age old practise of denial, of shaming and branding ‘other’ sexual identities and vigilanting their assertion no longer remained unquestionable.

Masculinity Studies took careful notes of the contemporary heteronormative views of exclusion and acts of silencing all assertions of sexual orientation based identities and came up with sharp questions to be answered. Championing such cause was not easy and it endangered the lives of many. One of the contemporary leading voices, Harvey Milk was assassinated in 1978. It needs to be noted at this point that Masculinity Studies posed unsettling questions to the normative, the accepted decorum. And align itself in various degrees with the feminist voices which questioned the similar dominance of hierarchical sexual identity. Publications like Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Frantz Fenon’s Black Skin White Masks (1967), Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970), Susan Guber and Sandra Gilbert’s The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979), Bell Hooks’ AIN’T I A WOMAN? (1982), John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (1983), Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) appeared in regular intervals. The exploitative designs of heteronormativity, its patriarchal linkages, exploitation of labour through the exclusive- differential structures of race, gender nothing remained untouched by these significant publications. By documenting and analysing the specific nature of a range of exploitations under patriarchal social laws, these publications, on the one hand resisted the onslaught of the conservationist masculine voices and on the other, strengthened the voice of the excluded by providing them the blue print of their exploitation, by taking their voices and demands to the far corners of the world. The emergence of the socially construed notion of gender in place of the prevalent idea of biological division of sexes owes to this unsettling spirit of Masculinity Studies. And that creates a scope for readers to assimilate the theoretical paradigms into an area of literary scholarship which will take cues from masculinity studies on the one hand and reflect upon the New Literatures in English. However, this may also result in producing an essentialised form of theoretical understanding and reduce such attempts to plucking and grafting similar questions across the literatures produced in various languages, locations and by various groups with varying concerns, while doing away the local specificities. This may lead the readers to a direction of literary understanding which is homogenous, seamless and that is strongly opposed by the vernacularising tendencies of new literatures. In this context, this module aims the following:

1. To introduce the debates that unsettled the dominant one language-one literature norm of literary studies.
2. To introduce the theoretical paradigms of Masculinity Studies to the readers and familiarise them with the key facets of this study.
3. To perceive the possibilities of exchanges and debates that could emerge from an attempt to study masculinity in the frame of New Literatures.
4. And to make the readers aware of the essentialising process that might ensue from such theoretical undertaking which have the potential breed newer power structures instead of questioning them.

Introducing Masculinity Studies: History, Origin and Terminology The Beginning:

Masculinity studies originated in the United States of America following the gay liberation movement of the 1960s. Taking cues from the contemporary socio-political movements, the study attempted to question the ‘self’ that is constructed in the literary platform. Relating this to the theories of Otherness studied in the module on Otherness and Literature in this course, we will attempt to unearth the linkages of such hegemony and the patriarchal notions prevalent in the late capitalist or globalised society. We hope that a systematic study of the Heterosexual/Hegemonic Masculinity will thus emerge to be applied as a critical literary tool to analyse the objectification of the exploited subject.

Methodology:

Angels Carabi in the project titled, “Constructing New Masculinities: The Representation of Masculinity in U.S. Literature and Cinema (1980-2003)”(University of Barcelona,2008), summarised the key methodological underpinnings of Masculinity Studies as following:

1. Masculinity defines itself through binary oppositions. This theoretical position entails that being a man would mean not being a woman, an ethnic or a queer. And further definitions of manliness will ensue from an opposition to the definitions of a woman, an ethnic or a queer.
2. Hegemonic Masculinity reaffirms itself through rampant and normative application of sexism, racism and homophobia.
3. Masculinity, since it works in binary opposition, to form its local frame of reference is necessarily socially constructed. Therefore, it is possible to socially deconstruct various forms of masculinity, as well as propose alternatives.
4. The concept of masculinity therefore, is not a fixed concept but a mobile one. a highly movable one. At least its fixity is not ensured even by its hegemonic nature. To retain the hegemonic structure it needs to take into account other socially constructed notions of differences, such as – class, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity and so on.
5. Disciplinary studies such as that of anthropological explorations could substantiate the constituted nature of hegemonic masculinity by locating the range of cultural codes of masculinity across space and time.

Masculinity studies, thus, based on the aforementioned methodological tools presents the readers with a theoretical understanding of socially and historically located power structures and the modes of their dominance. It further helps a reader to perceive such power structures which function by defining an ‘other’, and engages that ‘other’ in an exploitative, often violent relationship.

The reading of ‘new ‘literatures in English may be inflected with the theoretical underpinnings of Masculinity Studies to present scholars with numerous mutual linkages. The tendency to challenge the normative by unsettling the easily accepted code of hegemony makes the theories of Masculinity Studies amenable to challenging given dominant power structure, and ‘new’ literatures may emerge as a result of this challenge. As we have seen in the opening module of this course, i.e. “New” “Literatures” and ‘English”, questioning and complication of fixed gender identity is one of the themes that render literatures ‘new’. Whereas the history of evolution of Masculinity Studies tell us that ethnicity, class or sexual orientation may be used to deconstruct the hegemonic power structure, literary works literary works introduce us to existential conditions which result from living, enduring and challenging the realities of class, caste, race, gender and sexuality in society. These themes result from not only the consciousness of the artist but also her awareness of the complexities of living in a milieu circumscribed by the politics of identity. It is no surprise that  Masculinity Studies provides the scholars of New Literatures significant theoretical openings. Poetry coming from the North Eastern part of India, for example that of Temsula Ao’s Songs from Here and There (2003) and Songs from the Other Life (2007); voices emerging from the untouchable sections of the Indian society such as that of Meena Kandasamy’s Touch, or Nalini Jameela’s The Autobiography of Sex Worker (Tr. 2007) give themselves readily to be studied under the theoretical rubrics of Masculinity Studies. Temsula Ao’s poetry depicts the life under militancy and gunbattle. In resisting the state oppression, though her subjects find solidarity within the society, but at the cost of what Temsula Ao has called ‘benevolent subordination’. She explicates in her writings that patriarchal ideology finds expression even in the churches. She points out that in Nagaland one can find only very few women reverends; and women are known as ‘Associate’ Pastors, not Pastors like the men1. She further develops her argument and showed how such patriarchal norms breed a culture where many men tend to protect women not necessarily out of love, but because they consider women as weak and vulnerable. Temsula Ao proposes to revolutionize this by landing up and going against our own fathers, brothers and uncles.The home where generations of women wait and toil, in her craft turned into a space of revolution. She calls for a protest against the ‘terror  of  this  rogue protector and his malevolent maleness’ and suggests never to submit to this (The Edge, Three Poems). On the other hand Meena Kandaswamy and Nalini Jameela focusses on the body of the exploited subject. Their poetic interventions question the normative idea of labourless reproduction where the virtue or value of a woman is decided in a socially controlled selective monogamous frame or through stigmatised recognition of a sex worker’s necessary existence. Through the pages of her poetry, Meena Kandasamy depicts the brutal face of of this exploitation which turns blue, violet, black in a high color symphony of everyday domestic assualt (My Lover Speaks of Rape, Touch). Patriarchal norms that bind women under layers of restraints and normalise the difference of sexes were found guilty of hypocrisy in the works of Meena and Jameela.

Challenges:

Any theoretical exercise to chalk out newer nuances by juxtaposing two different streams of thought, particularly which are distanced by time and locale, is often prone to essentialisation and anachronism. In such contexts, terminological exchanges could lead to inaccurate impositions and further flourishing of vague and complex terms. It is no wonder that in our contemporary criticism we find many such terms, for instance Brahminical Patriarchy (Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste). Uma Chakravarti in her article, “Conceptualising Brahminical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class, State” (1993), asserted that, “Caste hierarchy and gender hierarchy are the organising principles of the brahminical social order and are closely interconnected.” Substantiating her arguments by taking cues from the ancient Indian texts, Uma Chakravarti brought forth the interconnected nature of gender and caste much akin to the black feminist critique of exploitative labour roles. However, her conceptualisation came along with significant markers of time and space, namely, ‘early India’ and left ample space for further investigation before such concept could be readily applied across time and space. Unfortunately, the relentless application of the term following 1993 tells us that such precaution was not enough. Consequently, a new array of critiques came forward drawing their strength from Partha Chatterjee’s “Nationalist Resolution of the Woman’s Question” (1987), Tanika Sarkar’s, Women and Social Reform in Modern India: A Reader (2008) and showed how the concept of Brahminical Patriarchy strengthened and reformulated patriarchal power structure since the ushering of colonial modernity in the nineteenth century. Tanika Sarkar argued that the reformulated patriarchy was premised on a discourse of rights and the judicial language of ‘consent’ that was unavailable even to the colonialized elites. Pointing squarely to the hidden power structures and the replication of older structures within, such critique provided the scholars of New Literatures and Masculinity Studies with a strong reminder regarding the risk of terminological obsession, its use and abuses.

New Literatures, as its evolution testifies, have rendered the metropole-centic conception of English literature defunct. Canonical standards, generic patterns, even grammatical structures of metropolitan literature has been mimicked (Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1994) relentlessly. What such evolutionary trajectory of New Literatures tells us is that of an untiring attack against the set literary standard, of negation and subversion of those standards by the colonised whose literary potentials were once frequently negated. In this context, if the study of ‘New’ literatures has to give in to newer theoretical paradigms coming from the metropolis such as Masculinity Studies, there will always remain a chance of creating newer power structures within. In other words, resisting hegemony by using the dominant parlance can be historically possible only through subversion and not by easy acceptances or exchanges. To elucidate, studies of New Literatures needs to make sure that it does not replicate but rather analyse and assimilate only what could be applied locally. For example, Chandra Mohanty Talpade in her article, “Under Western Eyes: feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse’ explains how subtly layered power structures can be even within a platform of solidarity. She argued, “that assumptions of privilege and ethnocentric universality on the one hand, and inadequate self-consciousness about the effect of Western scholarship on the “third world” in the context of a world system dominated by the West on the other, characterize a sizable extent of Western feminist work on women in the third world. An analysis of “sexual difference” in the form of a cross-culturally singular, monolithic notion of patriarchy or male dominance leads to the construction of a similarly reductive and homogeneous notion of what I call the “Third World Difference”—that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all the women in these countries. Sic.” And she warns if such power structures are not checked in their inception, it could lead to multiple replications of similar power structures.

Therefore, studying New Literatures using the tropes of Masculinity Studies would be a fruitful exercise only if these precautions are duly noted. However, apart from these subtle challenges there remains another very obvious set of hindrances to overcome. How do we take care of the local versus global paradigms in such theoretical manipulations? One could expect Masculinity Studies to enrich our understanding of New Literatures in English only when these challenges are taken care of.

Few steps towards a methodological innovation:

How do we do Masculinity Studies and New Literatures together? The thematic tropes of Masculinity Studies can give us a clue in this regard. Angels Carabi in the project titled, “Constructing New Masculinities: The Representation of Masculinity in U.S. Literature and Cinema (1980-2003)” presented the readers with the following themes of Masculinity Studies

1) Warfare and Masculinity:

Fictional Work –

In Country, Bobbie Ann Mason, (1985):

In Country is the story of a young girl who comes to terms with her father’s death in Vietnam two decades earlier. In the summer of 1984, the war in Vietnam came home to Sam Hughes, whose father was killed there before she was born. The soldier-boy in the picture never changed. In a way that made him dependable. But he seemed so innocent. This novel captures the dilemma of a girl who finds herself torn apart by the innocence of her father’s picture and the gruesome stories of Vietnam war, war crimes. Capturing the critiques of warfare and placing it within a very intimate circle of judgement, In Country manages to show how warfare and our commonplace morals, emotions tussle with each other in quest of bitter- happy answers.

Machine Dreams, Jayne Anne Phillips (1984):

In her first novel, Machine Dreams, Jayne Anne Philips examines the intersection of public and private experience in America during the last four decades. The subject of the novel is history and the passage of time – as mirrored in the fortunes of the Hampson family, whose own dissolution reflects the dislocations suffered by this country in the wake of the 1960’s and Vietnam. This is a testimony of realisation where signs of the old certainties are fading out but longed after. The characters, looking for love, end up in dissonant marriages and improvised relationships; wanting safety, they settle for the consolation of familiar habits. They look out at the landscape of West Virginia, where they grew up, and see strip mines and developments where once there were farms and trees; and the words ”now” and ”then” haunt their nightmares and their dreams. They even discover that family – the mystical blood bond shared by mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, brothers and sisters – is not for keeps, that it, too, is susceptible to time and death.

Non-fictional Work –

The Remasculinization of America. Gender and the Vietnam War, Susan Jeffords, (1989):

In this work Susan Jeffords argues that the popular representations of the Vietnam war, both during and after, demonstrate the pervasiveness of patriarchal values in the US. This work attempts to show the primacy of gender, rather than class or race, in defining social relations. Draws on speeches, books, movies, and other war literature.

2) Ethnicity and Masculinity:

Fictional Work –

The Color Purple, Alice Walker (1982):

Written in the form of Epistolary novel, The Color Purple unlocks a number of extremely intimate emotional sphere of a coloured household and portrays how layers of oppression look, talk and express themselves within the everyday relationship between sisters, parent-child. Alice Walker’s poignant depiction of her subjects’ physical and mental numbness and rage, documents the unpleasant and real forms of racist, sexist exploitation and its reflection upon our everyday life.

Non-fictional Work –

National Abjection, Karen Shimakawa (2002):

National Abjection by Karen Shimakawa provides critical analysis of a number of Asian American “performed texts” since the 1970s by applying current theories of culture, race, and performance. The primary theoretical framework of the book is  Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, which Shimakawa rearticulates to examine the tensions between “Asian Americanness” and “Americanness.” Shimakawa posits that Asian Americanness functions as abject in relation to Americanness because the two occupy the “seemingly contradictory, yet functionally essential, position of constituent element and radical other”. Shimakawa is interested in the function and efficacy of performance as it contributes to the productions of Asian Americanness. And she pays particular attention to the negotiation between “the poles of abject visibility/stereotype/foreigner and invisibility/assimilation (to whiteness)”. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/179597

3) Re-reading Classics:

Fictional Work –

Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund (1999):

Sena Jeter Naslund, Ahab’s Wife rewrites Captain Ahab’s character from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and spins the readers imagination and perception through divulging untold stories about the character, through voicing and acknowledging the presence of a neglected, absent character from the past. This style helps the readers to perceive the novel from a different point of view and attempts to bring in the idea of agency and its many facets that are often neutralised under the patriarchal exploitative set up of our society.

Non-fictional Work –

Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (1970):

Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics is often seen as one of the key publications to politicise sex. Heavily influenced by Simone De Beauvoir’s Second Sex, this work interrogates the depiction of sex and discussions about it in the novels of D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer and attempts to locate a difference of tone which should be judged as a patriarchal hegemonic dominance.

4) Women in Detective fictions:

Fictional Work –

Walter Moseley’s Easy Rawlins Mysteries:

Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), A Red Death (1991):

These two are the first two editions of Walter Moseley’s long crime series with the black detective protagonist Easy Rawlins. Hailed as an important contribution to African-American and ethnic detective fiction, the series intriguingly captures the interconnectedness of the profession decorum and the identity of a black detective. that often comes along with it both his own. Moseley’s use of African-American English and the counselling Voice for characterising Easy Rowlins posits this literary work to the scholars of ethnic detective fiction work with multiple methodological tools of genre study, masculinity study and gender study.

Non-fictional Work –

Murdering Masculinities by George Forter (2000):

Though American crime novels are often derided for containing misogynistic attitudes and limiting ideas of masculinity, Greg Forter maintains that they are instead psychologically complex and sophisticated works that demand closer attention. Eschewing the synthetic methodologies of earlier work on crime fiction, Murdering Masculinities argues that the crime novel does not provide a consolidated and stable notion of masculinity. Rather, it demands that male readers take responsibility for the desires they project on to these novels. Forter examines  the  narrative  strategies  of  five  novels–Hammett’s The  Glass  Key,  Cain’s Serenade, Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Thompson’s Pop. 1280, and Himes’s Blind Man with a Pistol–in conjunction with their treatment of bodily metaphors of smell, vision, and voice. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/7821

Detective Agency by Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones (1999):

Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones focus on the explosion of women centric crime fiction in the popular Americal fiction market post 1970s. This is the first book-length study of the historical and societal changes that fuelled this popularity. Walton and Jones place the genre within its aesthetic, social, and economic contexts, reading it as an index of cultural beliefs The authors show how the male hard-boiled tradition has been challenged and transformed and issues of child, spousal, and sexual abuse are more likely to surface in women’s detective novels. (http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520215085)

Though it is undoubtedly necessary for us to come up with similar thematic tropes, we need to look into their applicability as well. However, that is only possible once a thorough survey of similar nature is undertaken involving New Literatures. In the Indian scenario for example, warfare, ethnicity, re-reading of classics or women in the professional space are powerful cues to follow up but these do not comprehensively present the whole scenario. Warfare in the life of a colony or a post- colony like India appeared in many forms. It was once against the colonisers, then sometimes between the international neighbours and even within. On the other hand, the trope of ethnicity is not only attached with the idea of race alone as is the case in the United States of America. Caste, race and tribal origin all are intrinsic part of the idea of ethnicity in India. Therefore, we need to have our own, localised tropes of study in every geographical locale from where New Literatures in English emerge. In the Indian context, these could perhaps be the following –

1) Nation, State and Religion

1. Nation as mother and masculinity
2. Communal dignity and masculinity
3. Partition and masculinity
4. Occupation and masculinity

2) Ethnicity, Caste, Class

1. Dalit feminism and masculinity
2. Tribes and masculinity
3. Regional stereotypes and masculinity

3) Sexual Orientation