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Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical
Humanities
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CARBON FIBRE MASCULINITY
Anna Hickey-Moody
a
a
Centre for the Arts and Learning, Department of Educational
Studies Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14
6NW, UK
Published online: 16 Mar 2015.
To cite this article: Anna Hickey-Moody (2015) CARBON FIBRE MASCULINITY, Angelaki: Journal of
the Theoretical Humanities, 20:1, 139-153, DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2015.1017394
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1017394
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C
arbon fibre, or graphite fibre, is a material
made from fibres 5–10 micrometres in
width that are comprised of carbon particles
(Morgan). Carbon fibre has great commercial
value for its strength, light weight and its
capacity to resist heat. Contemporary cultural
economies of carbon fibre are, in part, a late
capitalist (Jameson) technology of hegemonic
(or dominant) masculinity (Connell, Masculi-
nities). As a technology of hegemonic masculi-
nity, carbon fibre extends the surfaces of
bodies and produces masculinity on and across
surfaces, male and female bodies. This article
is concerned with instances in which carbon
fibre extends performances of masculinity that
are attached to particular kinds of hegemonic
male bodies. In examining carbon fibre as a
prosthetic form of masculinity, I advance
three main arguments. Firstly, carbon fibre
can be a site of the supersession of disability
that is affected through masculinized techno l-
ogy. Disability can be “overcome” through
carbon fibre. Disability is often culturally
coded as feminine (Pedersen; Meeuf; Garland-
Thompson). Building on this cultural construc-
tion of disability as feminine, in and as a tech-
nology of masculine homosociality (Sedgwick),
carbon fibre reproduced disability as feminine
when carbon fibre prosthetic lower legs
allowed Oscar Pistorius
1
to compete in the
non-disabled Olympic Games. Secondly, I
argue that carbon fibre can be a homosocial
surface; that is, carbon fibre becomes both a
surface extension of the self and a third-party
mediator in homosocial relationships, a surface
that facilitates intimacy between men in ways
that devalue femininity in both male and
female bodies. I examine surfaces as material
extensions of subjectivity, and carbon fibre
surfaces as vectors of the cultural economies of
masculine competition to which I refer.
Thirdly, the case of Oscar Pistorius is exemp-
lary of the masculinization of carbon fibre, and
the associated binding of a psychic attitude of
misogyny and power to a form of violent and
competitive masculine subjectivity. In this
article I explore the affects, economies and sur-
faces of what I call “carbon fibre masculinity”
and discuss Pistorius’ use of carbon fibre, homo-
sociality and misogyny as forms of protest mas-
culinity through which he unconsciously
attempted to recuperate his gendered identity
from emasculating discourses of disability.
To produce carbon fibre, carbon atoms are
bonded in crystals that are aligned parallel
139
ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 20 number 1 march 2015
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/15/010139-15 © 2015 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2015.1017394
anna hickey-moody
CARBON FIBRE
MASCULINITY
disability and surfaces of
homosociality
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along the axis of the fibre. This crystal align-
ment gives the fibre a high strength-to-
volume ratio, making it exceptionally strong
for its size and weight. Several thousand
carbon fibres are brought together to form a
carbon fibre tow (or line), which is then
woven into a mesh or stiff fabric (Morgan).
This carbon fibre mesh is used to make
vehicles and accessories of many kinds, includ-
ing formula one cars, spaceships, bicycles,
rowing boats, oars and racquets. Harder,
faster, stronger and lighter, carbon fibre not
only allows men to bui ld more effective
machines; it constitutes machines within
which men can dominate other men in public
forms of mediated intimacy. Carbon fibre
also makes prosthetic extensions of the self
that transform or extend bodies in ways that
make them more competitive. Indeed, as
Norman and Moola have noted, through his
carbon fibre prosthetic legs, Pistorius, who
was popularly known as “blade runner,”
became a cyborg who traversed culturally con-
structed, and indeed fictitious, boundaries
between human and machine. Pistorius exem-
plifies the domi nant cultural value of carbon
fibre and predominant cultural constructions
of disability in a way that holds everyday cul-
tures in relief. Carbon fibre is masculinized
as a way of dominating space; as a technology
of all forms of frontier masculinity it can
make vehicles or accessories that allow peop le
to colonize spaces and better others. Indeed,
the speed and potential for covering ground
attributed to Pistorius’“Cheetah” carbon
fibre legs was deemed by Professor Gert-
Peter Bruggemann (Norman and Moola 1271)
as giving him an unfair advantage over other
athletes and in 2007 he was disqualified from
competing in the non-disabled Olympics.
Carbon fibre was seen as making Pistorius
too competitive. This marks an interesting
intersection of competitive cultures of masculi-
nity and cultures of disability, as carbon fibre
has become part of most performative, com-
petitive cultu res of masculinity, whereas
people with disabilities are often excluded
from such cultures, with the exception of
para-athletic competitive sports. Indeed,
carbon fibre is part of the fabric of contempor-
ary hegemonic masculinity, but not necessarily
part of everyday cultures of disability. Connell
explains that
hegemonic masculinity, [is not just…] “the
male role”, but [is] […] a particular variety
of masculinity to which others – among
them young and effeminate as well as homo-
sexual men – are subordinated. It is particu-
lar groups of men, not men in general, who
are oppressed within sexual relations, and
whose situations are related in different
ways to the overall logic of the subordination
of women to men. (Connell, Schools 86;
emphasis added)
In other words, not all men are hegemons and
some men fare much more successfu lly than
others in the competitive economy of gender
performance that is established through hege-
monic masculinity. In late modernity, which is
characterized by a focus on material possessions,
psycho-sexual economies of hegemonic masculi-
nity extend across material surfaces, which
include and indeed are exemplified by carbon
fibre surfaces. Within the hierarchy of masculi-
nity characterized above by Connell, disability is
arguably one of the most feminizing traits that
can be mapped onto a masculine body
(Meeuf). While Connell does not discuss disabil-
ity per se, disability theorists (Garland-Thomp-
son; Meeuf; Emmett and Alant) note and protest
the cultural inscription and reproduction of dis-
ability as feminine. To put this another way,
Connell suggests that culturally dominant (not
numerically frequent, but popular) forms of
masculinity are hegemonic, that such hegemo-
nic masculinity is a way of controlling others.
These forms of masculine embodiment are
sold within capitalist economies as being desir-
able. Disability is not usually seen as a way of
dominating and controlling others, and this is
one of a number of ways in which disability
has been feminized.
Hegemonic masculinity is a type of body and
personhood, a quality of a man’s power relations
with others: a way of effecting subordination.
Hegemonic men subordinate others through
their capacity to perform intellectually and
physically, a capacity to perform that carbon
carbon fibre masculinity
140
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fibre has become famous for enhancing. As
Connell also suggests:
in the case of men, the crucial division is
between hegemonic masculinity and various
subordinated masculinities […]Itis[…]a
question of how particular groups of men
inhabit positions of power and wealth, and
how they legitimate and reproduce the
social relationships that generate their domi-
nance. (Schools 90–92)
Hegemonic masculinity, then, is a descriptor of
a psycho-social and material power relationship
that produces one class of masculinity within a
typology of genders. Carbon fibre is hegemonic
in a number of respects, and these include its
capacity to effect Oscar Pistorius’ movement
from a subordinated “class” of masculinity
into the hegemonic area of non-disabled
Olympic competition. This intersection is also
a fault line in my argument that I think has
value. I am broadly critical of global technol-
ogies of masculini ty that articulate across sur-
faces as, after Sheller, I agree that these
surfaces are part of a very particular economy
and exploitative ecology of late capitalist
relations, which Sheller so astutely characterizes
in terms of valuing speed and lightness. As this
article goes on to show, while the case of Pistor-
ius exemplifies the misogynist nature of hege-
monic masculinity and carbon fibre’s capacity
to enhance this, the potential for carbon fibre
to bring new possibilities to the lives of people
with disabilities more broadly is of value and
can open out cultures of speed and lightness in
new ways.
heterosexual hierarchies
The cultural politics that are part of the process
of performing hegemonic masculinity entail the
domination of women through a kind of hetero-
sexuality that attaches very limited value to the
female body. Heterosexual economies of miso-
gyny that per form the socio-sexual dynamic
that Judith Butler (Gender Trouble; Bodies
That Matter 127, 239–40) calls “the heterosex-
ual matrix” articulate across surfaces of carbon
fibre. In Gender Trouble Butler argues that in
order for bodies to cohere and make sense
socially there must be a “stable” sex expressed
as a stable gender (89, 90). This stability is
popularly understood as expressing sexual
desire for the opposite gender. This desire is
sexually oppositional and hierarchically pro-
duced because of the cultural dominance of het-
erosexuality. Butler characterizes this
oppositional desire as the heterosexual matrix,
through explaining that
femininity becomes a mask that dominates/
resolves a masculine identification, for a mas-
culine identification would, within the pre-
sumed heterosexual matrix of desire,
produce a desire for the female object […]
hence the donning of femininity as a mask
may reveal a refusal of female homosexuality
and, at the same time, the hyperbolic incor-
poration of the other as the one who is
refused. (68)
For the most part, femininity becomes taught and
learnt as the repression of sexual desire for
women through incorporating and performing
“woman,” and masculinity becomes taught as
the sexual desire for women through learning
and performing “masculinity.” In other words,
we become what we are not allowed to have.
Taking the concept of the heterosexual matrix
as a dominant cultural fiction which we are
called to negotiate daily, I agree that popular tech-
nologies of gender that articulate through psycho-
social dynamics are most often developed to
support heterosexual hierarchies (Rubin). One
such popular technology of gender is homosocial-
ity, or a form of intimacy between men that dis-
avows the possibility of homosexual desire and
channels such desire through feminized conduits
such as shared sexual partners, cars, bikes, or
other carbon fibre objects. It is to this masculinist
and mediated intimacy I now turn and I will show
how carbon fibre surfaces mediate homosocial
intimacy in ways framed by heterosexual
hierarchies.
carbon bonding
Published in 1985, Eve Sedgwick’s book
Between Men: English Literature and Male
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Homosocial Desire has provided one of the most
useful concepts in attempting to understand the
particular ways in which heterosexual men in
Western culture value their social ties with
women and other men. Sedgwick asks how
men, individually and as a category, exercise
power over women, and for and against other
men. She considers how desire for social inter-
action and intimacy is coded through and
across gender. Sedgwick’s work is a literary
study of how forms of sociality between men
are imagined and represented. Her theorization
of homosociality looks at a specific historical lit-
erary period. While the cultural dynamics that
Sedgwick articulates are identifiable in contem-
porary contexts, the precise nature of homosoci-
ality today, as well as where and how it gets
produced and represented, is quite different
from the world that Sedgwick analyses.
This being the case, read alongside the cul-
tural value of surfaces of carbon fibre, Sedg-
wick’s work shows how intimacy between men
is facilitated across human–carbon-fibre-compo-
site assemblages. Sedgwick explains:
“Homosocial” is a word occasionally used in
history and the social sciences, where it
describes social bonds between persons of
the same sex. It is a neologism, obviously
formed by analogy with homosexual, and
just as obviously meant to be distinguished
from homosexual. (1)
To be clear, a homosocial relationship is an inti-
mate friendship between two (or more) men,
which is misogynist and which is based on the
disavowal of the possibility of their sexual
desire for one another. The men may or may
not reject homosexual desire cognitively as a
possibility, but rejection alone does not make
homosexual desire impossible. Desire remains
as something which is unconsciously possible,
and which constantly requires some kind of
negotiation. This notion of an impossible
repression links to Butler’s(Gender Trouble;
Bodies That Matter) work on the heterosexual
matrix as a social form of repression, as homoso-
ciality also suggests that some kinds of heter o-
sexuality are about repression. I think that
carbon fibre materially extends homosocial
technologies of masculinity as a way of mediat-
ing sexual intimacy between men and devaluing
culturally feminized performances.
Homosociality is triangular; the routing of
male homosocial desire and power occurs
through the bodies of women, bikes, cars, pros-
theses. In the triangle’s three points, men
occupy two and a woman/cars/bikes/carbon
fibre legs the third, but the sides of the triangle
are weighted with greater emphasis on the line
that forms the relationship between the two
men. Specifically, Sedgwick states:
In any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the
two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond
that links either of the rivals to the beloved
[…] the bonds of “rivalry” and “love”,
differently as they are experienced, are
equally powerful and in many senses equival-
ent. (21)
This leads Sedgwick to conclude that, in homo-
social relationships, what is important about a
man’s relationship with a woman, what is sub-
jectively valued by men, is the opportunity it
affords men to enter the world of real, socially
coded and sanctioned masculine relationships.
In his research on car cultures Fuller contextua-
lizes men’s mediation of intimacy and the use of
homosociality to gain status amongst other men.
Fuller shows that cars, amongst other things,
are a technology of homosocial ity:
modified-car culture […] [is] a homosocial
institution [that affects, or modulates] […]
difference[s] between affective relations and
affects experienced in the enthusiast body
[…] The motor vehicle and other attendant
technologies within the system of automobi-
lity together serve as the basis of an explicit
homosocial institution. The charismatic
enthusiast relation of modified-car culture
between car and enthusiast mediates and
sometimes even eclipses other important
affective relationships amongst masculine
enthusiasts. (50)
Just as cars give some men a way of being inti-
mately involved with each other, carbon fibre
was the material means through which the
athlete Oscar Pistorius took to the world stage
in the Olympic Games and performed the
carbon fibre masculinity
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homosocial libidinal desire to compete with, and
better, some other “non-disabled” men (“Oscar
Pistorius”).
In addition to being notable for his athletic
success, Pistorius has been the site of much
legal debate. As I noted above, he was ruled
ineligible to compete at the 2008 Beijing
Olympic Games because his carbon fibre pros-
thetic lower legs gave him a supposedly unfair
advantage over other runners. Pistorius success-
fully contested this ruling and was allowed to
compete at the 2008 Games (“Oscar Pistorius”).
More recently, Pistorius was also involved in a
court case over the death of his girlfriend
Reeva Steenkamp, a process that elicited
media reportage of text message conversations
between the couple that illustrated what
seemed to be misogynist and controlling behav-
iour. By policing the actions of his female
partner, Pistorius produced himself as a con-
trolling masculine subject. For example, in
2014 The Independent newspaper reported
text message exchanges between Pistorius and
Reeva Steenkamp as follows:
In a Whatsapp conversation sent on 27
January 2013, Ms Steenkamp wrote: “I ’ m
scared of you sometimes and how you snap
at me.” The model also wrote she felt
“picked on” and “attacked” by the one
person she “deserved protection from”–
referring to the athlete – and was upset by
his jealous tantrums. Ms Steenkamp also
wrote she was trying “her best” to make
him happy but felt he “didn’t treat her like
a lady” and recalled an incident where he
“criticised” her so “loudly everyone” could
hear it. The model and law graduate said
she tried to make him “proud” and present
herself “well” while he was busy chatting to
friends and fans at social events. (“Oscar Pis-
torius Trial”)
If this exchange has been reported correctly,
Pistorius’ concept of himself as visible to
others and his emphasis on how others see him
both appear to be valued above the feelings of
his female partner who is treated as an accessory.
This example of the male gaze having a competi-
tive and productive power and being misogynist
is core to the operation of homosociality.
Sedgwick argues that homosocial masculinity
involves entering into social relationships that
are based on nuanced codes of interaction.
Being a man involves learning appropriate
ways to exercise social, economic and cultural
power. Pistorius’ attempts to re-machine his
masculinity through controlling his partner
with mediated expressions of his power, and
adding to his bodily performance of speed
with carbon fibre, can be seen as a further testi-
mony to the economies of homosociality articu-
lating across surfaces. Pistorius also suggests
power operates across an entangled series of
relationships between humans and non-flesh
materials that are productive of power relations.
Relationships between men are intensifi ed
through the use of carbon fibre and the ways
in which carbon fibre is produced. As I have
suggested, for Sedgwick, homosocial relations
between men don’t automatically confer power
on men. The homos ocial relationship has to be
exercised competitively to confer power.
Subtle variations, nuances, slight but important
differences in the nature of men’s homosocial
relations have political significances that need
to be catalogued and considered. The substance
of homosocial relations varies, as homosociality
is a kind of power which produces men who fit –
and some who don’t fit – within a particular cul-
tural context. For example, owning a carbon
fibre bike does not make a person hegemonic
or homosocial. Riding a carbon fibre bike com-
petitively with other men and valuing this com-
petition above other intensive relationships does
make a man homosocial. Surfaces of carbon
fibre need to be mobilized and acted upon in
competitive ways to make homosocial subjects.
An example of another homosocial deployment
of carbon fibre can be found in the use of
carbon fibre frames for competitive road bike
racing. Obviously, and as I state above, owing
a carbon fibre bike does not make a person
homosocial, but cultural economies of mascu-
line competition that articulate through carbon
fibre can explicitly position it as an extension
of masculinity.
For example, the advertising image selling
bicycle helmets (Fig. 1) literally positions the
bicycle as the penis/phallus, the man
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triumphantly holding his hands in the air,
framing the object between his legs as the
centre of his own and others’ attention. The
man pictured is producing himself around the
object in between his legs. The semiotics of
the image suggests that the bike (like the
man’s penis?) is to be celebrated for helping
him dominate other men. This is a clear
example of power being produced by matter
(the light, fast nature of the carbon fibre) and
by bodies (the winning man) and through com-
petitive intimacy between men. Homosociality,
then, can be seen as way of inscribing power
on and across bodies, a practice which might
Fig. 1. Advertisement for the Lazer road helmet. Reproduced by kind permission of Madison.
carbon fibre masculinity
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be considered in relation to power as produced
by bodies but also as that which produces
bodies in certain ways. We all learn to live
while being watched and learning that we are
also all watchers. Masculinity is taught and
learnt as a performance and an art of critical,
competitive spectatorship and performance.
The idea that we are always both looker and
looked at is frequently used by advertisers
hoping to stoke a consumer desire in men, and
as a way of extending homosocial surfaces of
carbon fibre into visual semiotic cultures. Such
visual cultures of homosociality are exemplified
in Fig. 1. The same forms of visual semiotics can
be seen in many advertisements selling products
relating to cars and alcohol. Often the act of
“looking on” is presented as something
enabling. For men, having male friends
looking at you is depicted as something that
facilitates mateship, heterosexuality and voyeur-
istic pleasure. Homosocial mateship, then,
involves a specular code: a code of looking and
being looked at.
The visual image of the advert encodes and
rejoices in a particular kind of “power,” a homo-
social power of men communicating to other
men, which extends beyond material surfaces
of masculinity and carbon fibre into the visual
semiotics of advertising and cultural economies
of masculine performance. Carrying on these
cultural economies of homosocial masculine
performance, Pistorius’ athletic success and
his seemingly misogynist treatment of his
female partner show the multiple investments
that Pistorius carries with him as a combination
of jingoistic national hero, misogynistic partner,
technologized body, and disabled athlete.
Stepping ou tside the emasculating position of
being a disabled athlete through competing in
the non-disabled Olympics with carbon fibre
prosthetic legs, Oscar Pistorius’ performance
of masculinity with and across carbon fibre
offers an example of how hegemonic, homoso-
cial cultures extend across surfaces. It also
shows us that carbon fibre is a gendered
surface. In mobilizing and developing the
concept of the surface, I build on Deleuze’s
work in The Logic of Sense in which he con-
ceives surfaces as agentive extensions of
subjectivity. The surface is the site where
sense is made, sense as feeling and sense as
logic (266). Deleuze explains this critique of rep-
resentation through stating: “The surface is the
locus of sense: signs remain deprived of sense as
long as they do not enter into the surface organ-
ization” (ibid.). Events on the surface of life are
the results of mixtures made by bodies and
objects (8), a reading of the making of matter
with meaning that has parallels with Judith
Butler’s thesis that the way in which bodies
come to matter, cohere and make sense is inh er-
ently political and which I discuss above.
Deleuze also conceives surfaces as being sex-
ualized. For example, The Logic of Sense is
interwoven with discussions of phallic surfaces,
the creation of the phallus through projecting
images of the phallus on surfaces (236, 237).
As suggested by the bicycle helmet advert,
carbon fibre surfaces surely mirror or project
the phallus in many instances. Surfaces are
extensions of subjectivity and surfaces of
carbon
fibre
are late modern masculinist or
phallic surfaces. These surfaces are part of
what Sheller refers to as “global energy cultures
of speed and lightness”, cultures that are mascu-
linist, and are becoming hegemonic.
hegemonic matter(s)
The properties of carbon fibres, such as high
stiffness, workable stren gth, low weight, high
chemical resistance, high temperature tolerance
and low thermal expansion (Zheng and
Feldman), make the material very popular for
building spacecraft, military equipment, and
motorsports/formula one cars, civil engineering
construction and accessories for competition
sports. Carbon fibre is lauded for its lightness
and strength in competition sports. As a late
modern phallic signifier, carbon fibre offers a
material extension of the global competitive
sporting industry and engineering cultures of
performance. Indeed, the reason why carbon
fibre seems to be valued is that it helps men
move further, faster and bonds them in cultures
of performance across the globe. Oscar Pistorius
is connected to hegemonic cultures of sporting
masculinity through his athletic acts and his
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carbon fibre prostheses, a surface extension of
masculinity and a late capitalist technology of
masculinity.
Like the many other signifiers of the phallus
and the successful realization of male libido
that occupy the global capitalist cultural imagin-
ary and shape economies of relation in late capit-
alism, carbon fibre is the masculine prosthesis of
the decade. Oscar Pistorius’ biography extends
the surface of carbon fibre masculinity beyond
hegemony, into technology of homosociality
and misogyny. The Pistorius–carbon-fibre
assemblage overcame the feminizing position
of Pistorius being a “disabled” athlete. With
carbon fibre, Pistorius was able to dominate
non-disabled male athletes and recuperate the
feminized position of being a “disabled”
athlete. The text message exchanges with his
then girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, which I
quote above, suggest that in an aggressive per-
formance of homosocial relations Pistorius
may be keen to dominate women. Carbon fibre
is thus the homosocial technology that propelled
Pistorius beyond the socio-cultural politics of
disability (Rodan, Ellis, and Lebeck) and the
surface that connects him to global assemblages
of sporting mascul inity.
exploiting (for) the surface
Late capitalism is a term used by Jameson to
refer to capitalism from 1945 onwards, with
the implication that it is a historically limited
stage rather than an eternal feature of all
future human society. This period includes the
era termed the golden age of capitalism
(Jameson). Jameson argues that postmodernity
involves an emergence of a cultural dominant,
or mode of cultural production, which differs
markedly in its various manifestations (develop-
ments in literature, film, fine art, video, social
theory) from those of its predecessor, referred
to collectively and broadly as modernism, par-
ticularly in its treatment of subject position,
temporality and narrative. For Jameson
every position on postmodernism today –
whether apologia or stigmatization – is also
[…] necessarily an implicitly or explicitly
political stance on the nature of multinational
capitalism […] (16)
Carbon fibre technologies articulate this thesis
as they are mined and manufactured by multina-
tional corporations. They retail at expensive
prices, allowing men to materially extend domi-
nant masculine subject positions and modes of
cultural performance.
In our capitalist context, certain differences
come to matter more than others in contempor-
ary life. These hierarchies are performances of
historical connections in a culture’s prevailing
knowledges, because they are pertinent to the
struggle for hegemony. Gender, race, sexuality
and disability are perhaps the most pertinen t
ways in which difference has been made mean-
ingful in the history of capitalism, and often
they coincide – that is, disability and gender
and race coagulate or are co-constructed
(Puar). What it means to be a woman or a
man, how we name male and female – and the
distinctions between them – are sites of struggle
because these namings can be, and have been,
used to justify, legitimi ze, theorize, and
explain away the contradictions on which capi-
talist relations of production rely.
Despite the rationalizing of social inequities
provided by hegemonic ideology, peo ple persist-
ently make sense of their social relations
through cultural meanings that contest and
resist prevailing gender norms. Sense making
occurs across material surfaces that become
encoded with cultural values. Disability is one
set of discourses through which the human
capacity for sensation and affect and the
human need for social intercourse has histori-
cally been organized (Snyder and Mitchell).
My contention that the hegemo nic form of dis-
ability under capitalism is a culturally feminized
subject position is supported by the fact that
cultural meanings of disability have been
secured incrementally across modernity,
through discourses and social practices – insti-
tutions, asylums, medical knowledges, that
have been variously organized (Harwood) and
articulated depending on dominant modes of
social formation that materially separate dis-
abled from non-disabled men.
carbon fibre masculinity
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In the case of Oscar Pistorius, carbon fibre
intervenes in this late capitalist structure of
meaning, but in so doing brings another dama-
ging ecology and economy of relations to the
fore. Compared with steel and aluminium, the
production of carbon fibre is slow, requiring
huge amounts of energy, and costs and
wastage are high. The component sections of
each fabricated part are cut from a roll of
fibre, and even with computerized optimization,
the most economical layout wastage of around
30 per cent is expected. These offcuts are in,
fact the, largest source of carbon fibre waste.
Following production, wastage due to imperfec-
tions is typically 6 per cen t, compared to a figure
many thousand times smaller with steel or alu-
minium (Richerson and Urmil). Conversely,
costs can be ten times as much when compared
to pressed steel.
Carbon fibres are thus relatively expensive
when compared to similar fibres, such as glass
fibres or plastic fibres (ibid.). Strongest
demands come from aircraft and aerospace,
wind energy, as well as from the automotive
industry. Carbon fibre is a homosocial technol-
ogy for Pistorius in the respect that it allows
him competitive intimacy with other men, but
it is also a homosocial technology of late capital-
ism that exploits feminized “natural” resources
in inefficient and abusive ways. It is a toxic
surface.
beyond disability as a crisis of
masculinity
Ideologies surrounding the notion of disability
are dualistic, as they invoke a mind/body
binary and they appear to originate from medi-
calized social and cultu ral meanings. Elsewhere
(Unimaginable Bodies) I have identified these
“codings” of bodies as “products of despotic,
authoritarian assemblages of power” (13), and
argued that disab ility theory needs to move
away from “terms grounded in binary power
relations” (42) implied by the dualism between
ability and disability. In some respects, it
seems to me that the binary power system of
dis/ability aligns closely with the dualism that
informs Connell’s premise of hegemonic mascu-
linity (Connell, Gender Trouble), and the mar-
ginalised “other” forms of masculinity that
hegemonic masculinity necessarily subordi-
nates. Both dis/ability and hegemonic masculi-
nity are binary codes that require subordinatio n
in order to hold. I suggest that at the point
where these two ideologies of dis/ability and
hegemonic masculinity interconnect we find
the catalyst for an alternative discourse, and I
will explore this further in the section on gen-
dered surfaces.
If we are to flatten and connect the polarities
that shape our definition of able bodied and dis-
abled, masculine and feminine, we see that these
categories are produce d and inscribed and rely
on each other. If we deconstruct the dis/abled
binary that is informed by the Cartesian
premise of the body (vehicle for self) split
from the mind (self) we see that this imaginary
binary is shaped profoundly by our performa-
tive reiteration of intersections of gender and
power. However, what is expected of the hege-
monic male, and how those expectations are
embodied, shift dramatically when the male
subject proves to be only a physical represen-
tation of the concept of masculine dominance.
If this same corporeal ideal is unable to
respond in the assumed psychology of patriar-
chal power, the performativity of his gender
and his identity as a “man” are brought into
question. Disability, expressed psychologically,
physically and intellectually, is often a fault
line running through performances of hegemo-
nic masculine subjectivity. This destabilization
can be, and is, popularly read as a crisis in mas-
culinity (Wilson 120), but more than this it is a
materialist problematization and deconstruction
of how masculine gender and power come to
matter together.
Scholarship on masculinities (Archer; Robin-
son) and popular media discourses of masculi-
nity both regularly suggest that men are in
“crisis”–globalization is causing crisis for
farming men because free trade agreements
mean they can’t compete with cheap inter-
national imports, boys are in crisis because
they don’t have enough male role models,
working men are in crisis because women are
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taking their jobs (Kenway, Kraak, and
Hickey-Moody). But these narratives are not
new, as scholarship on masculinities shows us
it has been “in crisis” since it has been studied
and, as such, masculinity can be seen as
somewhat synonymous with crisis (Connell,
Masculinities 84).
In late modern contexts, performances of
masculinity are not necessarily expected to be
attached to bodies that are sex marked as
male. There are lots more ways to be a man –
to “do” masculinity as Butler might say – than
there were forty years ago. The same can be
said for disability – expressions and represen-
tations of disability have diversified and have a
public visibility that is small but is, arguably,
expanding. At the same time, I think we can
also say that masculinity remains linked to
themes of power and privilege – both in the
public sphere (government and business) and
privately (men are still thought of as romantic
pursuers, as providers, as family figureheads).
Disability also remains culturally constructed
as emasculating, and as a deficit, if not as com-
pletely undesirable. A popularly accepted
example of the devaluation of disability can be
found in Peter Singer’s contentions that capital-
ist economies cannot carry the cost of disability.
A case in point is the fact that Singer advocates
the killing of infants with disabilities. The cri-
teria he proposes for deciding which infants
may be killed centre on a range of hereditary
physical conditions that he characterizes as dis-
abilities. In his book Should the Baby Live?,
written with Helga Kuhse, he argues: “We
think that some infants with severe disabilities
should be killed” (1).
The reason why Singer supports infanticide
in such cases is not to put an end to the new-
born’s suffering; rather, it is because such chil-
dren take away resources from what Singer
calls “normal” children. Disabled children
could be seen as offering a machining, or sub-
jective processing, of the world that makes
quite divergent realities, a way of making and
illustrating the differences all people manifest.
Disabled children prompt dominant cultural
forms to see and shift limits in understandings
of culture and being. But Singer does not
suggest any such value; rather, he advocates
killing “disabled” infants and replacing them
with “normal” ones. The terminology of
“replacement” is Singer’s own; in his words
his philosoph y “treats infants as replaceable”
(Practical Ethics
186). While it seems to me
that
Singer’s eugenic call for the removal of
infants with disabilities is rather extreme, in
late modern society disability is also often
being re-made or reproduced through the con-
struction of disabling technologies. This is
ironic, as the case of Pistorius shows us,
because technology can offer more (rather
than fewer) possibilities. However, instances
in which technology is assistive to people
with disabilities are particular, rather than con-
stituting the “norm” of a framework for inclus-
ive technological design.
This problem of technology as disabling is
explored by Annable, Goggin, and Stienstra
(145) who ponder the challenge posed by the
fact that technologies that could be so productive
for people with disabilities are often still
designed in ways that are disabling. Goggin
and Newell extend this discussion further by
considering the power relations of disability
within broader cultural contexts. They argue
that “people with disabilities still face a long
struggle to be accepted in society, as equal
members of their national communities and cul-
tures” (166). Eight years later, this statement
still rings true. My life in London, and indeed
my previous life in Sydney, attests to the fact
that catching public transport or attending uni-
versity, let alone participating in public
culture, remains the exception, rather than the
rule, for people with disabilities living in global
capitals. One of the reasons why Pistorius’ par-
ticipation in the “able-bodied” Olympics was
important is because it constitutes an instance
in which a body that might be characterized by
discourses of disability is framed in quite differ-
ent terms of reference. Pistorius was positioned
as too good, too specialized, to compete with
mere humans. While, as Haraway and others
have shown us, humans are already cyborgs,
the fact that disability is an opportunity for max-
imizing humans’ cyborg nature is not often
viewed as a competitive threat to “non-disabled”
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humans. There are echoes here of Singer’ s call to
kill disabled infants because they compete for
resources needed by non-disabled infants. Pis-
torius was competing for a medal that was avail-
able for people without disability and this
boundary crossing incited fear. Indeed, disabil-
ity issues are not always considered in debates
about public culture, and when they are they
are too often thought of in terms of competition
between disabled and non-disabled people or
through human rights discourses rather than as
posing a threat to some possibly “pure,” or
non-cyborg, human form.
Pistorius shows us that disability is not
always synonymous with a crisis in masculi-
nity; indeed, it can be an agent for the develop-
ment of an extremely hegemonic, homosocial
masculinity. More than this, the change in
this popular construction of the gendered
nature of disability and the threat that this
change is seen as posing show us that disabil-
ity, gender and indeed humanness are con-
structions, performances and inscriptions on
surfaces. Humanness and ideas of human
rights are implicitly problematized by this
shifting ground.
Furthering this point, human rights dis-
courses can give rise to resistance from those
who understand themselves in terms of refer-
ence that are constructed outside performative
identity-based movements. Such a response is
evident from postings to Abrahams’ (see
“Second Life Class Action”) accessibility blog
in response to his proposal that “the equivalent
of a class action” should be set up within the
virtual world of Second Life to make the
environment more accessible for users with dis-
abilities (par. 7, and on Second Life and disabil-
ity activism see also Stein, “Online Avatars”).
While Abrahams (see “Second Life is Now
Too Important”) later reported that his pro-
posed class action was “tongue in cheek,” and
was designed to raise awareness of the impor-
tance of accessibility issues, the discussion is
interesting because of the ways in which
discursive frames of reference specifictoa
human rights discourse are taken up as the
only available mechanism for discussing disabil-
ity issues.
This example highlights the lack of frame-
works that can be drawn on in order to
unpack the complexities of technologies in
relation to issues of disability and the ways in
which they are gendered and intersect with the
production of power. Human rights discourses
do not need to be the only vehicle through
which discussions pertaining to disability are
advanced (Tremain). While this point has been
made in scholarship elsewhere (Stein and
Waterstone), Deleuze’s work on surfaces can
be used to show us that some disability- friendly
technologies create surfaces that change what it
means to be a gendered body with a disability.
gendered surfaces
As a way of thinking about the produced nature
of humanness and the binary divisions of
gender, power and dis/ability that humanness
entails, I want to think through surfaces
as extensions of our subjectivity. For Deleu ze,
the
surface is neither active nor passive, it is
the product of the actions and passions of
mixed bodies […] being a receptacle of
monomolecular layers, it guarantees the
internal and external continuity or lateral
cohesion of the two layers without thick-
ness. (142)
Surfaces bring things together, they cohere mix-
tures in the world around them. They are resi-
dues, amalgamations of their actual and virtual
surroundings, the frontier between meaning
and matter, materiality and possibility (see
also Barad). Deleuze’s work offers an approach
that is conceptually different from a human
rights perspective and can be taken up to
think about “disability” as something that is
inscribed on a surface, rather than a subjective
or objective truth. Indeed, disability is a word
that is always attached to different mixtu res,
mixtures that have qualitatively different
relationships to gender and power. As the
example of Oscar Pistorius shows us, these
qualitative differences matter and they make
matter have meaning in diff erent ways (Barad;
Van der Tuin). There is not space made for
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the understanding and accommodation of such
differences in how disability comes to matter
in a human rights framework. For example,
article 1 of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights reads:
All human beings are born free and equal in
dignity and rights. They are endowed with
reason and conscience and should act
towards one another in a spirit of brother-
hood. (Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, 1948)
A Deleuzian rendition of such a statement might
read:
All human beings are born different. In
becoming more “themselves” as they act
upon one another, human beings become
different from their (former) selves.
Change, difference, or differentiation is the
ground on which humans come to be and
come to know themselves and others.
With this ontology of differentiation and sur-
faces in mind I read the carbon fibre surface
extension of Oscar Pistorius’ embodied sub-
jectivity as a material transformation of his
self and his body, his ways of connecting
with others and specifically the way he pro-
duces his gender as a power relationship
with others.
Through carbon fibre, Pistorius shared the
same surfaces as, and indeed became concep-
tually sutured to, non-disabled male athletes as
his prosthetic limb ran alongside their fleshy
feet on the surface of the Olympic track. Homo-
social intimacy was mediated across the track
and the carbon fibre blades:
a surface energy without even being of the
surface, is due to every surface formation;
and from it a fictitious surface tension
arises as a force exerting itself on the plane
of the surface. Attributed to this force is
the labour spent in order to increase this
surface. (Deleuze 142)
While the act of running binds Pistorius to ath-
letic homosocial economies, the act of produ-
cing carbon fibre surfaces binds late capitalist
economies to a broader materialist politics of
homosociality in a bid to increase frontiers avail-
able for masculine domination. As
[e]ven the frontier is not a separation, but
rather the element of an articulation, so
that sense is presented as what happens to
bodies and that which insists in propositions.
We must therefore maintain that sense is a
doubling up. (Ibid.)
Sense is a doubling of the possibility of being
faster with the act of being faster, or of the
proposition that a prosthetic limb might
extend your masculinity with the act of enjoying
mediated intimacy between men. Propositions
that are doubled are made to matter. While Pis-
torius is important because he is one of a few
examples of technology markedly extending
the experiences and lives of people with a dis-
ability, he also shows that carbon fibre is part
of a broader misogynist, homosocial cultural
economy.
conclusion
In The Logic of Sense Deleuze gives us a theor-
etical framework for reading surfaces as assem-
blages of different wholes that articulate
together as a surface that makes “sense,” and
that makes sex in a redistribution of libidinal
desire. This model for reading the surfaces
through which bodies are connected and
through which they are made to matter connects
to the position advanced in his shared works
with Guattari, that bodies, objects, images, sen-
sations, become together – subjects are divi-
duals of broader assemblages through which
they artic ulate. Deleuze suggests that “The
sexual surface is an intermediary between phys-
ical depth and metaphysical surface” (54).
Carbon fibre is a masculinized surface that is
sexualized in the sense it redistributes libidinal
intensities across competitive scapes of frontier
masculinity.
In her work on the Becoming of Bodies
Rebecca Coleman notes that if we are to take
seriously the proposition that bodies become
through things, then our task must be “to
account for […] [what bodies] limit or extend
[…]” (163). Carbon fibre extends heterosexual
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economies of misogyny that articulate the het-
erosexual matrix (Butler, Gender Trouble). Pis-
torius’ biography extends the surface of carbon
fibre masculinity as technology of homosociality
and misogyny, not just hegemonic masculinity.
Carbon fibre is the technology that propelled
Pistorius beyond the socio-cultural politics of
disability; it is the surface that connects him
to global assemblages of sporting masculinity.
Before closing, there are two points I would
like to make. The first pertains to surfaces.
The cultural production of surfaces is a sexed
and gendered politic that is naturalized and is
a way of extending, or growing, sexism. Sec-
ondly, I want to gesture towards a relationship
between Butler’s thesis in Bodies That
Matter, that the way bodies come to matter is
a sexual politic, and Deleuze’s contention in
The Logic of Sense that surfaces can be sexed.
Firstly, as I have shown, as extensions of subjec-
tivity, surfaces are sexed and gendered and this
empirical meaning needs to be accounted for in
cultural theory. Secondly, Deleuze argues that
surfaces can articulate redistributed libido, or,
as he puts it, bodies can produce certain surfaces
as a way of maintaining control of their sexual
power; the de-sexualization or the sexualization
of surfaces is a way in “which the sexual
object is maintained” (Deleuze 274). This main-
tenance of the homosocial hegemonic male
subject is naturalized and maintained across sur-
faces of carbon fibre.
This is a paper about Oscar Pistorius, disabil-
ity and masculinity then, but analytically it is
also a paper about surfaces as extensions of
sexed and gendered subjectivity. The case of
Pistorius shows us that bodies, and the gen-
dered nature of bodies and materialities, are
more than human and that humanness is con-
structed. Through Pistorius we see that disabil-
ity is socially produced and can be “overcome”
through carbon fibre. Pistorius exemplifies the
fact that carbon fibre can be a homosocial
surface; that is, carbon fibre becomes both a
surface extension of the self and a third-party
mediator in homosocial relationships, a surface
that facilitates intimacy between men in ways
that devalue femininity. Pistorius is exemplary
of the masculinization of carbon fibre, and
associated attitudes of misogyny. Running on
and with carbon fibre blades brings Pistorius
into non-disabled athletic homosocial econom-
ies; the act of producing carbon fibre surfaces
ties late capitalist economies to
a broader materialist politics of
homosociality, and in so doing
increases frontiers available for
(and methods of) achieving mas-
culine domination.
notes
Thanks so very much to Tim Laurie and also
Charlie Blake for their patience in what was a
very laboured and slow process of bringing this
paper into the world. Thanks also to Rob Imrie
for useful conversations about disability and
Rebecca Coleman for a very sympathetic read
and generous feedback. Thanks also to both blind
reviewers for their kind encouragement and
astute comments.
1 Oscar Pistorius is a South African sprint runner
who runs with artificial limbs from his knees down.
His legs were amputated below the knee at eleven
years of age (“Oscar Pistorius”). A Paralympics
sprint champion, at the 2011 World Championship
in Athletics, held in South Korea, Pistorius became
the first amputee to receive a silver medal for par-
ticipating in the 4 × 400 metre relay, representing
South Africa (“Oscar Pistorius”).
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Anna Hickey-Moody
Centre for the Arts and Learning
Department of Educational Studies
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW
UK
E-mail: a.hickey-moody@gold.ac.uk
hickey-moody
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