21 Femininities And Masculinities

Ranjita Biswas

Introduction

Michael S Kimmel begins his introduction to The Gendered Society Reader (2004) by stating a well-known fact: gender happens to organize a major part of our social lives and our experiences of it. The meaning of gender can be interpreted in a number of ways. One meaning of gender denotes the manness and womanness that are attributed to each pole of the gender binary. Conventionally the terms femininity and masculinity refer to one’s gender identity or the extent to which one identifies with the social cultural meaning of what it means to be a man or a woman. These differences of signifying a man or a woman apply over a whole range of variables like personality traits, behaviors, roles, rights and rewards. These differences are also normative resulting in the creation of a cultural ideal (Krishnaraj 1996, WS 9). It is said that a child draws upon the social cultural understanding of what is meant by man or woman and is socialized to develop a particular expression of gender identity and gender role. The process of socialization in its turn is modeled on a presumed linearity between biology and psychology.

Sexual difference or the differences seen between men and women are said to be evident at three levels:

1. Primary sex characteristics borne by one’s chromosomes and sex organs – XX/XY; ovary/testis
2. Secondary sex characters i.e. differences associated with their reproductive functions like breast, voice, body hair said to be effects of specific hormones flowing in the male and female body
3. Tertiary sex differences expressed through differences in behavior – aggression, rationality, sexual activity being hallmarks of the masculine behavior and care, submission and sexual passivity being specific to femininity.

However, children also find themselves departing from the conventional gender identity and its corresponding gender role models to take on a different gender role and/or identity. In other words, a male child could grow up to be non-masculine to the extent of being feminine and a female child may develop a masculine/non-feminine gender identity.

Anthropologists and social scientists have found the meanings of masculinity and femininity to vary across cultures, across historical time, over individual lifespans as well as across genders. Men and women in different cultures embody different meanings and expressions of masculinity and femininity and these could vary over a very large spectrum across cultures. Second, masculinity and femininity could carry different connotations in the same culture at different times. So what it means to be a man today could very well be very different from what it meant in the last century, for example. Third, expressions of gender vary even in one individual over age. People are seen to undergo an evolving sense of gender identification at different stages of life. Fourth, men and women of the same culture have different perceptions of masculinity and femininity within their gender groups and live varied gender experiences. So within India there are differences in the perception of masculinity between heterosexual and homosexual men or differences in experiences of femininity between different ethnic groups. Femininity and masculinity are not universal essences constant over time and space; “rather, gender is an ever-changing fluid assemblage of meanings and behaviors” (Kimmel 2004, 3). Connell states in his book, Masculinities, “The terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ point beyond categorical sex difference to the ways men differ among themselves, and women differ among themselves, in matters of gender” (2005, 69).

So one needs to rethink masculinity and femininity as plural – they mean different things at different points of time and in different situations. The above discussion also demonstrates that femininity and masculinity are not innate but a result of social inputs, cultural expectations and psychic aspirations. To the extent that gender is a social construct there is also the possibility that a male person sees himself as feminine and a female bodied person sees herself as masculine. Such persons are known as transgender or transsexual people.

Today femininities and masculinities are terms that are spoken of in plural, variously theorized, contested and redefined by academics and activists alike. Central to these deliberations are attempts to unmoor them from conventional understandings of biological innateness and locate their meanings and significations historically, culturally, ideologically and discursively. Gender itself has been interpreted throughout feminist theory and politics in a number of ways. The introduction of the term gender into feminism was with the purpose of establishing the fact that women are not born as subordinate subjects but are socialized to be docile and subservient. This also brought into analysis the workings of a societal structure based on the domination and oppression of one sex by the other. Thus, gender served as a category of analysis (Scott 1996) to critique a system where differences between men and women came to be understood not as natural, rather as socially constructed. These differences were further organized socially, politically and epistemologically as homogeneous, exclusive and hierarchical in a system that favours men by privileging the male world view and masculine principles.

To understand and resist the workings of patriarchal oppression, unpacking the categories of femininity and masculinity prove to be useful. However normative definitions offer certain standards for these terms: masculinity is what men ought to be and femininity is what women ought to be. Biological, psychological as well as sociological theories narrow the scope of understanding how notions of masculinities and femininities are not natural, neutral dispositions but are processes of becoming that spill over outside the body and psyche to create circuits of power, submission and dominance. That masculinities and femininities will have to be imagined and examined outside bodies and psyches is reiterated by Connell and Messerschmidt: “Masculinity is not a fixed entity embedded in the body or personality traits of individuals. Masculinities are configurations of practice that are accomplished in social action and, therefore, can differ according to the gender relations in a particular setting” (2005, 836).

This module will map the contours of the categories of femininities and masculinities and how they are constructed. It will also explore the roles played by femininities and masculinities in the production of sex and gender. We will look at how (hetero)sexuality contributes to their production. The module will also discuss how femininities and masculinities are consolidated to take up different forms and what fractures them.

Section 1: The gender binary and the heterosexualization of desire

Feminism has over the decades challenged the belief that sex and gender are biologically given and anatomy is destiny. It has demonstrated that gender is constructed and that there are more sexes than male and female (Oakley 1997; Sterling 1993; 2000). The sex/gender distinction has served as a basic framework for a great deal of feminist theory as well as feminist politics. Before the emergence of the “second wave” of the feminist movement in the late 1960s, sex was a word seen strongly associated with biologism. Differences between men and women were seen and believed to be rooted in biology. Gender was believed to flow from sex and remained tied to it by relations of one-directional causality. Thus sex as a concept suggested the natural (by implication biological) immutable ground for gender differences and hence the near impossibility of radical change at this level. Women’s social position as inferior subjects was said to be an inevitability flowing from their biology, their reproductive physiology to be precise, which restricted them to certain activities. Moreover their sex-specific body characteristics, their organs, hormones and chromosomes were said to bear ample proof of their vulnerabilities.

At such a juncture it was perhaps important to question the impenetrable authenticity of this idea by bringing in notions of the material basis of self-identity and the social-cultural constitution of the sexed ‘human’. Feminists rightly identified such a principle as androcentric and constitutive of sexism-patriarchy. In English speaking countries, gender was brought in to explicate matters in this direction. Till then gender was a term used mostly in grammar to denote differences between masculine and feminine forms within language. Feminists extended the meaning of the term to refer also to differences between women and men in general, moreover to underline the constitutive role of society in the forging of such differences (Nicholson 1994). Linda Nicholson in her essay, Interpreting Gender, talks of two uses of the word ‘gender’ in feminist theorization. In the first usage gender is still used as it was when first developed as a contrasting term to sex, to refer to personality traits and behavior that is socially constructed in distinction to the body that is biologically given. On the other hand, gender is also used to refer to any social construction that brings forth the male/female distinction, including those that separate “female” bodies from “male” bodies. In her words “gender is the knowledge that establishes meanings for bodily differences”.

Connell (2005, 71, 72) explains gender as the process of organizing the conduct of everyday life “in relation to the reproductive arena, defined by the bodily structures and processes of human reproduction”. Such organized structures found almost all documented societies. Masculinity and femininity according to him constitute the process of configuring the gender practices related to this structure and generated through the dynamic interaction between people and groups in their historical locations.

Theories of constructing femininity and masculinity

Femininities and masculinities have always been understood in relation to each other, sometimes in a stark oppositional binary relation, sometimes through their charged negotiation and sometimes as a continuum of gender practices.

The human species is said to have two genders man and woman and a ‘third gender’ – trans – who are said to travel between the two. Most of the arguments about differences between men and women begin with biology. They are said to be separated by different biochemistries, physiologies and psyches. They are said to have different ways of knowing, working and even loving. Their characteristics are assumed to be oppositional (“opposite sexes”) and hierarchical. These two sexes of the human species with exclusive, well defined, nature-ordained characteristics are said to be perfect for evolution such that they can never meet except in heterosexual love. Both scientific and lay literatures claim that the two sexes are born with the biological (natural) attributes that provide the substratum for the subsequent process of socialization into two different gender (social) roles. The male sex is understood as naturally endowed (with the XY chromosome, the testosterone hormone, the sex-differentiated brain hemispheres) to be physically strong, intellectually ambitious and sexually charged, the hallmarks of a masculine gender role. The female quite complementarily (and one can say complimentarily as well) develops to be physically beautiful, intellectually intuitive and sexually desirable/seductive – the social markers of femininity. Both the assumed linearity of bodies (sex), beings (gender) and desires (sexuality) and the heteropolarity of the two groups of people are considered inevitable, culminating in a mutual attraction between them in accordance to the laws of nature and essential for the propagation of the human species.

Biological models of sex difference occupy the “nature” side of the age-old question about whether it is nature or nurture that determines our personalities. It is accepted that the meanings of masculinity and femininity vary across cultures, over historical time, among men and women within any one culture and over a single life course. And yet, accommodating such differences, the cultural and social meanings that accrue to the body one is born with, the experiences and institutional structures that are defined as appropriate for those males and females and the chain of relational signification between those males and females is held to be constant and treated as unproblematic.

Foucault (1976), Lacquer (1990) and Davidson’s (2001) work show that the binary of male/female as opposites in the biological sex model that has come to rule our sciences and our common sense is not as natural or pre-given as they are made out to be, but a product of a certain time and a certain structure of knowledge of that time. Before the eighteenth century women were considered different from men in terms of being an incomplete or inferior version of the more superior species – man (more a quantitative difference). But in and after nineteenth century men and women were defined as qualitatively different beings with exclusive characteristics, an ideology that had its germs in a capitalist industrialist growth in Europe and its emphasis on the public/private division of spheres.

To answer the question: how one becomes a man or a woman, the gender role socialization theory argues that though biology plays a role in determining the sex of an individual, through the chromosomes and the hormones, nurture or the environment has a major role in influencing the gender identity and the social role taken up in life. Their argument is that even if one is born with a certain sex what gender role one takes up in later life will depend on the environmental cues that are provided during the upbringing. The sex role theory made popular by Talcott Parsons in the mid-20th century rejected biological arguments for sex differentiation and located the differentiation of sex roles in the conjugal family (Carrigan et al 1987, 554). A strict public/private divide, a more or less tenable sexual division of labor and a regimen of parental stereotypes ensures the almost diametrically opposite gender training received by the boy and girl child in the family. To explain the social patterning of gender roles and their reproduction across generations, Parsons further took recourse to psychoanalysis. “In effect, sex role becomes part of the very constitution of the person, through the emotional dynamics of development in the nuclear family. … the notion provided Parsons then, as it provides role theorists still, with a powerful solution to the problem of how to link person with society”. This theory served to institutionalize masculinity and femininity as a product of different but complementary gender roles without in any way pointing to the overlaps, tensions and the power processes inherent within gender relations. Such arguments prevented questions on women’s oppression or subordination from being asked in a sociological framework. The question was no longer to explain it but to understand it.

The rigid adherence to the inculcation of masculine and feminine traits in the child combined with the scientific weight of an evolutionary “truth” about the heterosexual imperative leaves no space for any alternative or “unconventional” forms of behavior or desire without attracting the label of “pathological”. Moreover, the gender role theory creates sets of standardized and deviant behavior but do not indicate the lived experiences of gendered individuals in reality. By the 1970s, feminist sociologists strongly argued that the sex role theory was problematic for not only being vague but also that it failed to address questions of women’s oppression and inequality by virtue of being located in a framework of men and women being separate but equal. Carrigan et al argue that relations are interpreted as differences. “The greater social power of men and the sexual division of labor are interpreted as ‘sexual dimorphism’ in behavior” (557).

The Freudian Psychoanalytic theory of gender development grants importance to the role of the male organ for the ultimate evolution of one’s gender role, such that women are said to have a tortuous route to cross before their “regular development towards femininity” (Freud 1991 [1925], 336). In Freudian psychoanalysis, a successful resolution of the girl child’s Oedipus Complex and the acceptance of her castration makes room for the development of her femininity; the feminine as complementary to the masculine, the feminine in apparent complementary harmony with the masculine. Through the Oedipus Complex the girl is confronted with the fact of her castration. This leads her to give up on her attachment to the mother (who is similarly castrated), and shift her attachment to the father – the possessor of the penis and then to another man subsequently. This is normal femininity – one who can normally include herself in vaginal heterosexuality (1991[1905]: 142-144) and accommodate masculine sexuality. The process of the little girl turning into a woman is also accompanied by an act of repression, i.e., by giving up on a “piece of masculine sexuality” (1991[1905]: 143) symbolized by her clitoral excitability, such that she can gain accession to the vaginal sexual economy. This successful transfer of erotogenic susceptibility to stimulation that takes place at puberty is the precondition for her development of femininity (1991[1925]: 339). Masculinity complex results from the refusal of the girl-child to accept the fact of her castration and her inferiority; this complex develops when she considers herself phallic, when she considers herself part of the masculine sexual economy and refuses the transition into the normal feminine vaginal heterosexuality. Man, on the other hand, is able to retain his leading erotogenic zone unchanged from his childhood. Furthermore the fact that women have to give up on their pre-pubertal masculine sexuality and change to another erotogenic zone is said to make them susceptible to states of neurosis, specially hysteria. Thus these pathological states are seen as an inherent quality of (normal) femininity, something that women cannot escape (1991[1905]: 144). In other words, woman is normally pathological.

The male child on the other hand has a much easy path to the development of a normal masculinity. The boy has what she lacks. Her loss is his victory. Her lack in being creates and confirms him as phallic … as being her opposite as well as being superior to her. His journey is charted through the giving up of his attachment to the mother on realizing she is castrated and that he may suffer the same fate by his father if he continues with the attachment with the mother. So he easily identifies with the father and shifts his attention from the mother to desiring other women and is inculcated into the cult of masculinity.

In Freud’s scheme the gender positions of the masculine and the feminine are achieved and stabilized through a previously presumed heterosexual matrix. Feminists like Weeks (1985), Butler (1990) have critiqued psychoanalytic theories of psychosexual development that take the heterosexual matrix for granted and create rigid bipolar distinctions of sex identity and gender expressions. They have further demonstrated how the script of masculinity and femininity is enacted and sustained through interwoven discourses of gender and sexuality.

Section II: Masculinities: hegemonic, subordinate and complicit

Masculinity has long been interpreted as a synonym for men or maleness. However, there have been discussions about how masculinity needs to be prised apart from men or the male subject. Sometimes, an easy conflation is made between the two when everything pertaining to men is assumed to be masculinity and everything talked about masculinity is assumed to be referring to men. Connell reiterates (2005, 71) “Rather than attempting to define masculinity as an object (a natural character type, a behavioral average, a norm), we need to focus on the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives.”

Talking about masculinity invariably involves talking about the hierarchical power relation between men and women that is premised on a relation of domination and oppression. Working with the feminist insight that gender is a system of power and not just a set of stereotypes or observable differences between women and men” (Brod & Koffman1994, 4) masculinity studies emerged as the area of study of unequal power relations and their internalization and reiteration. On the one hand, the seventies saw the development of a wide spectrum of literature on the sociology of gender. Academic research on the women’s status and role in the family focused increasingly on the role of men as well. On the other hand, heterosexual men got together during this time to highlight their agenda of men’s liberation and the now popular gay movement quite inevitably called into question the notion of masculinity and what it is to be man (Carrigan et al).

R. W. Connell’s work on masculinity provides us with a description of how masculinities are constructed through gender and other social structures (eg. class, religion, race) and differentiated into hegemonic, subordinated and marginalized. Schippers (2007, 86) summarizes Connell’s arguments by suggesting masculinity to have three components: 1) a social location that individuals irrespective of gender occupy through their individual practices. 2) a set of identifiable practices and characteristics 3) individuals embodying these practices and performing masculinity have widespread social and cultural effects.

According to Connell the gender order is “a site of relations of domination and subordination, struggles for hegemony and practices of resistance” (1992, 735). As Connell and Messerschmidt argue that masculinities compete among themselves and thrive by creating boundaries among men and spreads its domination over women, and children. It expresses itself through actions that range from disciplining to punishing women and children, queer bashing, male gang fights to international wars and even ‘combatting terrorism’. This form of masculinity which is a certain psychic positioning in the social has been called hegemonic masculinity (Connell and Messerschmidt (2005).

Hegemonic masculinities: The concept of hegemonic masculinity was proposed to understand better the linkages between sociological models of gender, gender hierarchy, feminist critiques of patriarchy and popular anxieties about men and boys (Connell & Messerschmidt 2005, 830). The notion of hegemonic masculinity formulated in the 1990s follows from Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. It is described as the process of establishing and maintaining domination over the larger population through the manufacture of consent and social institutions like media, family that appear natural, inevitable. Heterosexuality and homophobia are the two pillars that prop up hegemonic masculinity (Donaldson 1993). A defining element of this hegemony is that women present themselves as objects of sexual fantasy to men who compete among themselves for this attention. This focus on heterosexuality excludes any sexual interest in men and creates necessarily a pattern of hostility towards homosexuality. In fact the heterosexual masculine hegemony is believed to be fed by structures of hatred and aversion towards gayness and effeminacy.

Connell argues that to talk about gender relations between men (and not just between men and women) is a step towards unpacking the intersections of class, race and other axes of marginalizations as well as to analyse the gender relations operating within them. Thus it becomes necessary to study the interfaces with other axes of discrimination like sexual division of labour, sexual politics at the workplace etc. However to talk about multiple masculinities is not to collapse them into a “character typology”. So it is not to talk about a working class masculinity or a dalit masculinity. Describing hegemonic masculinity as a dynamic process, Connell reiterates, “It is rather, the masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position always contestable” (2005, 76). These contestations will give rise to new groups with new cultural ideals and institutional powers that will erode the bases of the existing ones to produce new conditions of dominance.

Subordinate and gay masculinities: Some masculinities are placed at the bottom of the hierarchy and are equally suppressed, though these are dynamic negotiations. Carrigan et al suggest the study of relations between heterosexual and homosexual men in order to grasp the political hegemony of masculinity (535). Connell finds the experiences and practices of homosexual men important to understand the possibilities for change. “Research on masculinity must explore how gender operates for those men most vehemently defined as unmasculine; how masculinity is constructed for them, how homosexual and heterosexual masculinities interact, and how homosexual men experience and respond to change in the gender order” (1992, 736).

Complicit masculinities: Hegemonic masculinity does not need all members of the group to embody and practice all criteria of the hegemonic formation to be able to enjoy its benefits. The number of men inhabiting the social position of hegemonic masculinity may be small but the effects produced by these gender practices are reaped by a larger number of men who can be seen as supporting and disseminating the hegemony. Connell writes about this other relationship between men, “Masculinities constructed in ways that realize the patriarchal dividend, without the tensions or risks of being the frontline troops of patriarchy, are complicit in this sense” (2005, 79).

Section III: Femininities, female masculinities and transmasculinities

Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) suggests that studies in hegemonic masculinity need to pay attention to the emerging configuration of femininity and the historical interplay of femininities and masculinities. The understanding that masculinity is constructed helped situate it beyond male bodies. Judith Halberstam asks, “If masculinity is not the social and cultural and indeed political expression of maleness, then what is it?” (2002: 355). Drawing from the insight that “heroic masculinities” achieve their heroism through the subordination of alternative masculinities, Halberstam claims, “… far from being an imitation of maleness, female masculinity actually affords us a glimpse of how masculinity is constructed as masculinity” (2002, 355). Judith Halberstam’s module, “Female Masculinity” opens new ways to talk about gay masculinity, subordinate masculinity etc.

Emphasized femininity:

Emphasized femininity is discussed in relation to its role in maintaining gender hierarchy and compliance to patriarchy. Since the notion of hegemony is used to denote power and subordination, the term is not used in relation to femininities as it is in case of masculinities. This is because there are no femininities that are hegemonic; all femininities are constructed in the context of women’s subordination to men generally. So Connell refers to emphasized femininity to denote the production of set of gender practices enacted by collectives and communities over space and time. This repeated performance historically and culturally serves to produce and structure the gender hierarchy with its given distribution of power both at the level of material resources as well as at the level of meaning and signification (Schippers 2007, 86).

Female masculinities:

Judith Halberstam draws attention to what she calls “masculinity without men” i.e. varieties of masculinities in female bodies. Halberstam cites the example of tomboyism as that extended childhood period of female masculinity where female gender deviance is seen as desiring more freedom and mobility akin to boys. This indulgence is to the extent that it does not threaten the social cultural boundaries of gender conformity and is given up by the time adulthood is reached. Judith Halberstam argues that female masculinity is received variously by different ideological streams. To the hetero and homonormative culture it stands for the misidentification and longing for power that is “always out of reach”. To the lesbian community it stands for appropriated patriarchal values that reproduce male supremacy and misogyny within femaleness. To others it symboloizes social rebellion and challenging the norms of conventional femininity. Judith on the other hand wishes to chart out a cartography of female masculinity that stands away from a mere subverting or opposing of masculine power, rather produces a certain indifference to it through non-engagement. (2002, 360)

Transmasculinities:

Some female bodied persons’ self-identity does not conform to the assigned gender at birth. They go against convention to take up the masculine gender role and desire a change in their sex as well, to suit the masculine gender role. They are known as transmen and seek social, medical and legal transition to live as men. Scholars and activists have studied lives of transmen to critically evaluate men and masculinity. Experiences of transmasculinity show up the tensions between cis-men or male bodied masculine persons and trans-men or female to male transitioned masculine persons. Transmasculine experiences in a way provide us with a complex view of how gender identity is enmeshed with other social structures in a body that is not born with the male privilege but acquires it at a certain point in life.

Section IV: Femininities and masculinities in India

Masculinity in India is marked by its own unique discourse. A number of tropes have served to anchor these discussions, primary among them being the association of coloniality with effeminacy, celibacy with potent masculinity, and the strengthening of high Brahmanical Hinduism with the unfolding of modern masculinity. Mrinalini Sinha (1995) has written on the historico-geographical context of colonialism and colonial modernity where the notion of emasculated native men in respect to the more masculine, scientific Englishman, is said to have shaped much of the discourse between the colonizers and the colonized. Indira Chowdhury (Chowdhury 2001) talks of how the figure of Vivekananda became the mascot of masculinity through his motto of renouncement and celibacy. Disciplining the body and cultivating the soul were seen as the gate pass to a higher plane of spirituality as against the colonizer’s obsession with the body and penchant for physical strength and domination. This became the path to “reclaiming lost manhood”. While Gandhi also prescribed to the norm of celibacy, he took it further by suggesting a transcendence of the man-woman dichotomy to reach the ideal of androgyny. His idea of becoming an authentic man was by aspiring to become both sexes i.e. integrating the humanizing principle of femininity (Nandy 1983).

Uma Chakravarti (1998) discusses how the televised serial on the life of Chanakya, known for his shrewd political acumen and professed sexual celibacy, came to define aggressive Hindu masculinity in the post eighties. The careful containment of sexual potency embodied in the figure of Chanakya marked the distinctiveness of Hindu masculinity as opposed to “other” men and served to strengthen right wing Hindu fascism in the back drop of a political, social crisis aided by regionalism, casteism and middle class insecurities during that period. The “potent man” syndrome comes to be used recurrently to portray the male who preserves his sexual energy in order to use the reinvigorated strength in the service of building the nation whenever the call comes. Sanjay Srivastava however wishes to trace a separate trajectory of heterosexual masculinity that does not necessarily follow the subtext of ‘semen-loss anxiety’ and its links with spiritual potency, thought essential to sire a strong and virile nation. Drawing a link between post-colonial modernity and cultures of masculinity in a heterosexual framework his work (Srivastava 2004) stresses the need to explore the emerging culture of sexuality in India as the complex site for the overlapping narratives of modern subjectivity that encompass the metropolitan-provincial divide, the culture of urban spaces, the anxieties of masculine immigrant life in the metropolis, the relationship between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ knowledge systems, the rise of commodity cultures, and the creation of ‘subterranean’ civil society (Srivastava 2004, 176).

Contemporary articulations of masculinity in India can be mapped in two distinct directions –one that is steeped in Hindu nationalist ideology, and the other that subscribes to more globalized, dispersed and yet hegemonic formations. The pervasiveness of Hindu masculinity becomes apparent periodically in a mass expression through the unfolding of events that are believed to threaten the moral codes defining the sexuality of a more superior race, i.e. Hindus, predictably embodied by its women – chastity, domesticity and modesty being the three main coordinates. Be it the screening of a film with same-sex content, or a painting depicting a female Hindu deity in the nude, the Hindu right wing response seeks to retrieve and restore the “lost honor”. Such a campaign is argued to be necessary ostensibly to preserve the cultural (read high caste, moneyed) heritage of the “Hindu” nation, and prevent its decadence in the face of the “western” onslaught.

There is the other less crass, more sophisticated, subtly articulated brand of masculinity that owes allegiance to a globalized, socially ‘aware’, gender bending type of man. The new global/local man located in the changing contours of masculinity – the cultural avant-garde – has gone through an image make-over. Mapping the coordinates of a sober and controlled masculinity is the lithe muscular shaved body, the hairless beautiful young body reminiscent of the Greek heroes. Given the ways in which normative masculinity chooses to represent itself, there remains no difference between the ‘normal’ and its foes – homosexuals or ‘effeminate men’. A new cultural politics that invests in the rediscovery of body thus far imprisoned by respectability explores novel markers of masculinity such as the androgyne or the metrosexual man. These new and market friendly expressions of self however do not seek to question the basic economy of a heterosexual masculinity. Fashion statements that capitalize on the new-found culture of blurring gender distinctions however shy away from any radical questioning of gender and sexual norms. Meanwhile masculinity gets reorganized in our everyday lives – in our public spheres, in our private realms, in our political imagination as well as our ethical beings. Masculinity today is much more disaggregated, heterogeneous, complex, benevolent and perpetually mutating. Forms of masculinity co-exist and endlessly seep into each other to produce new configurations of power and social status.

Conclusion

It has been the argument of some that feminist struggle should aim to do away with sex difference (Jackson1998, 136). Today the categories of gender have been questioned not just by feminists but also by queer theorists and activists. Proliferating gender and sexual expressions have rendered the rigid binaries of masculinity and femininity inoperative in some contexts. Both femininities and masculinities have undergone redefinitions within the larger discourse of equality, autonomy and democracy. Men subscribing to the dilution of gender roles appear aware of women’s right to equality, heavily prescribing women’s growth, autonomy and freedom. The ‘new man’ thrives on ceding space and privilege to women, treating them as ‘almost equal’ at home and at workplace and creating niches of sensitivity, softness and understanding. However, such magnanimity is, almost always and ultimately, a mark of benevolent patriarchy where gender difference is dealt with through a protectionist approach. .

The media with its local-global mantra has on one hand, constructed images of empowered feminine selves, liberated androgyne and the metrosexual man; on the other hand, it has fed narratives of women’s sexual objectification, crass aggressive masculinity and the sissy homosexual. The neo-liberal ideology and open market economy has exploited both to its ends: the gender-neutral entrepreneur whose individual capacity to maximize happiness through the market is the only criterion (Connell 2005, 254) as well as individual and group propensity to exercise freedom of choice in gender-sexual expressions, lifestyles and identities. Neo-liberal ideology also contributes to the reconstruction of a bourgeois masculinity that thrives on the appropriation of market-driven resources. Femininity and masculinity also needs to be discussed in relation to violence. On the one hand, masculinity, especially hegemonic masculinity regards coercion and violence as an entitlement to power and authority. On the other hand, the social ideal of a “good woman”, the internalization of “normal femininity” often cause women to perceive violence as justified.

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