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Abstract
'The shame of being a man--is there any better reason to write?' wonders Gilles Deleuze, and so do I. Here, I say that to write is not to free oneself from the shame of being a man. Writing might also be a way of meeting with shame, a coming into male shamefulness. I try to conclude that male shame is less to be regretted than one might at first think, There are four stages to this article. First, I say that men are coming into shame. Men have often before been ashamed of particular ways of falling short of being a man, but now some men are encountering the shamefulness of being a man as such and at all. Second, I briefly review some of the thinking about shame, especially in its relations to guilt, that has been done in philosophy, psychology, anthropology and sociology during the past century. I suggest that, where shame tends nowadays to be seen as a moral emotion, and to be discussed as an ethical problem, its reach is larger than this. I argue that shame is not only to be thought of as a moral prop or provocation, but as a condition of being, a life-form, even, and will offer a brief, wild phenomenology of it. Third, I suggest that male masochism is not so much the expression of shame as an attempt to exorcize it, by turning shame into guilt and thereby taking its measure and making it expiable. Fourth, I consider the power of shame, suggesting that it has possibilities beyond those traditionally claimed for it. Doubtless, one can die of shame, as Salman Rushdie has said; but, stranger than this, it seems one can live of it too.
... Unlike the American "move-West" approach to masculinities that has been prevalent since the nineteenth century, namely the "Self-Made Man" (which is premised on maternal disassociation or fleeing in order to identify with an undomesticated father), the approach of hegemonic Canadian masculinity has been to privilege intersubjectivity. 2 To draw a little on the Hegelian dialectic regarding the relation between "subject" and "other," the tensions raised by the process of identity formation produce an intersubjective structure for thinking about male identity formation (Nonnekes 2008, 98). 3 In contrast to the traditional oedipal narrative of father-son feud taken up by American West frontier hegemonic 1. For examples of the discussion of "the Crisis of Masculinity" see: Michael Atkinson (2011), Deconstructing Men and Masculinities; Kenneth C. Clatterbaugh (1997), Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity: Men, Women and Politics in Modern Society; Steven Connor (2001), "The Shame of Being a Man"; Steven Connor (2009), "'Crisis in Masculinity' leads to eating disorders in young men"; Judith Newton (2002), "Masculinity Studies: The Longed for Profeminist Movement for Academic Men?"; Anthony Rowland, et al. (1998), Signs of Masculinity: Men in Literature 1700 to the Present; David Rosen (2000), The Changing Fictions of Masculinity; Bryce Traister (2000), "Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies." ...
This article addresses two questions regarding the Christian men's organization Promise Keepers Canada (PKC). First, why is it that despite Canada's geographical and cultural proximity to the United States, the PKC has not followed the same historical trajectory and elicited similarly negative responses as its American counterpart? Second, is there something particular about Canadian experiences of masculinities that accounts for the differences? The article uses the concept of "culture wars" as one of the keys to explaining the differences in public reception. The article also demonstrates that PKC participates within a largely intersubjective tradition of masculine identity formation that is particular to Canada. While acknowledging that the discourse of relationality has resulted in a more interdependent or intersubjective notion of religious hegemonic masculinities in the Canadian context, the article also notes the limits of this discourse.
A title such as Money: A Suicide Note (1984) triggers a doubling of meaning that may itself entitle divergent, even incompatible strategies of reading, a discussion of which will inevitably echo Derrida’s speculations about Baudelaire’s title “Counterfeit Money” in Given Time. On one hand, these titles may be read referentially (as part of their texts): like the main body, the title is about money. Conversely, they may be read as extrinsic to the text, naming it figuratively and performatively, equating it with money: in buying Money, that is, the reader is buying money.1 Amis reinforces the latter possibility through his subtitle, which invokes the ambiguity of “note.” In the light of the novel’s textual dynamics, “suicide note” sounds like a coupon or specialized banknote that stands for suicide — a refund for it or possibly its opposite: money is that which staves off suicide. “Money is the only thing we have in common,” says John Self, Money’s narrator-protagonist. “Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes. Money is a suicide note” (116). To entertain both of these possibilities simultaneously requires seeing the text as involved in a performative folding: “money” will speak about “money,” about, that is, itself. This paradox resembles the financial transactions in which the novel’s dubious “moneyman” Ossie Twain is involved: working “in the cracks and vents of currencies, buying and selling on the margin, riding the daily tides of exchange” (120).
The masks of comedy and tragedy: the mask as persona, the faces of the dramatis personae. They also signify as per sona, through sound, deploying the voice to reveal the hidden face itself. Or, rather, not to reveal it as the expression of a self, but as what it impersonates.1KeywordsPublic MeaningHide FaceDramatis PersonaShamanic RitualPure ThemeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
If the figures of mobility and displacement have become leitmotifs for redressing the future for gender agency and autonomy, how do the formal devices of Ian McEwan's later fiction predict the implications of directing such critical metaphors at masculinities in fields of social visibility? What does it mean for his aesthetic to perform this kind of emblematic function for "masculinity studies' anyway? And can it do so without anachronism: without merely affirming the abstractive practices of theory's intrusion into literary fiction in search of answers? This article addresses the dialogue between contemporary gender politics and fictional technique in a novelist who remains a far from straightforward figure for feminist ethics today--not least because of his (in)famously spare and elusive narrative register. Tailoring alternative frameworks to three key novels from his later oeuvre , it agues that the possibility of complicating the dialectically constitutive and constituting model of human agency is actively re-envisioned through McEwan's use of literary realism. For if masculinity is irreducible to visual regimes of legitimation, then it is the unfinished and aesthetically promiscuous idiom of McEwan's realisms in which an open-ended account of male subjectivity finds its narrational dynamism. Reading becomes viewing, and Derrida meets Percy Lubbock, in this portrait of a tricksterish McEwan whose later experiment tackles the complex mapping of masculinity's creative formation as it emerges between, if ultimately collapsing, the poles of compulsory inherence and wishful voluntarism, bodily inscription and recuperation.
For much of the twentieth century , literary criticism tended to be relatively dismissive of Anne Brontë's novels. While recent scholarship has argued for the complexity of gender and class dynamics in Agnes Grey (1847), there is little consensus as to what, precisely, those dynamics are. Elizabeth Hollis Berry suggests that Agnes “takes charge of her life” (58), and Maria H. Frawley argues that her narrative is a “significant statement of self-empowerment” (116). Maggie Berg and Dara Rossman Regaignon, however, highlight the continued subjugation of Agnes in the course of her narrative. These scholars’ divergent readings demonstrate how Agnes Grey and Agnes Grey can be read both as illustrative of what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has famously described as the nineteenth century “female individualist” (307), and as instructive of the social strictures that circumscribed this identity. In this essay, I outline how shame works in and through the novel to bridge these opposing readings.
Saturated with gloom, anxiety, mirth or irony, discourses of men in crisis are ubiquitous. Critically surveying available empirical evidence and the ever-expanding conceptual apparatus for deconstructing and refiguring masculinities, this article reflects upon the historical, social, cultural and political landscape of crisis literature. It considers the limitations of attempts to reform or undo some of the unwanted repercussions of manhood, whether endeavouring to reform, deconstruct, subvert, reclaim or ironize social attitudes, texts or performances of masculinity.