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Dies ist eine Respektseite
The Materiality of Men, Bodies, and
Towards the Abolition of “Men”
JEFF HE AR N
For some decades now, the media, marketing and advertising
industries have been full of “discoveries” of “new man/men”, “new
lads”, the “metrosexual”, the “retrosexual”, the “pomosexual”, the
“übersexual”, the “urban playboy”, the “hipster”, “soft lads”,
“metropolitans”, “spurmos” (single proud unmarried over thirty),
himbos (vgl. “bimbos”), mimbos (male instant messaging boy), as
well as “mandom” (vgl. “girlpower”, “grllpower”), “manbags”
“manscaping”, “bromance”, and “menaissance”.1 Such commentaries
are of interest, but they are cultural in its limited sense, and rarely
recognize the complexities of men, gender, power and material bodies.
In contrast, in this chapter I address the theme of “bodily matters” in
relation to debates and positions that I have found to be important in
seeking to develop Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities2, and
specifically, the materiality of men.
First, one of the problems and paradoxes is: how are men to
speak differently, in relation to women and feminism, bearing in mind
that men’s voices have not been at all quiet, historically, politically,
culturally. Meanwhile, feminists, even with a clear focus on women’s
situation, have almost always been making analyses of men, indeed
have had to do so, operating in a patriarchal world. There has always
been a question of what to do with men. Indeed, men’s relations to
feminism are always problematic – there is always a gap, a gap
1 Braddock, Kevin (2011): “From lad to 4D man”, in: G2 The Guardian,
12 November, S. 8-11.
2 Hereafter abbreviated as CSMM.
between men and feminism.3 So, one question is how to name men and
critique men, without that making the space for men to make more
noise!
CRITI CA L STUDI ES ON ME N AND MASCULI NI TIES
The growth of interest in the critical study and theorizing of men and
masculinities has derived from several, not always compatible,
directions and traditions. First, there have been various feminist
critiques of men. Second, there have been critiques from (male) gay
studies and queer studies. Third, there have been some men’s specific
and explicit responses to feminism. These include those that are
specifically pro-feminist or anti-sexist; there is also work that is
ambiguous in relation to feminism or even anti-feminist in perspective.
In addition, there are the influences of poststructuralism,
postmodernism, postcolonialism, STS (Science and Technology
Studies), “posthumanism” and “new materialism”. These critiques
together make up Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities; they
bring the theorizing men and masculinities into sharper relief, making
men and masculinities explicit objects of theory and critique.
In some senses there are as many ways of studying men as there are
versions of social science, ranging from masculine psychologies to
societal structural analyses; from ethnographies of men’s activity and
constructions of specific masculinities in discourses to analyses of men
in global contexts. My own approach argues for interdisciplinary
Critical Studies on Men and Masculinities4 that are historical, cultural,
relational, materialist, deconstructive, anti-essentialist studies on men.5
3 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff (1992b): “The personal, the political, the theoretical: the
case of men’s sexualities and sexual violences”, in: David Porter (Hg.),
Between Men and Feminism, Routledge, London/New York, S. 161-181.
4 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff (1997): “The implications of critical studies on men”,
in: NORA. Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies, 5(1), S. 48-60.
5 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff/Keith Pringle, with members of Critical Research on
Men in Europe (2006): European Perspectives on Men and Masculinities:
National and Transnational Approaches, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan;
Connell, R.W./Hearn, Jeff/Kimmel, Michael (2005): “Introduction”, in:
Michael Kimmel/Jeff Hearn/R.W. Connell (Hg.), Handbook of Studies on
Men and Masculinities, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, S. 1-12.
The notion of men is not to be essentialized and reified, or derived
from a fixed, inner core or traits, as is proposed in some “men’s
studies”. CSMM are: on men; explicitly gendered; critical; by women
and men, separately or together. Such a framing more accurately
reflects the nature of contemporary work, which is inspired by, but not
simply parallel to, feminist research on women. Studies of men and
masculinities, critical or otherwise, are no longer considered so
esoteric. They are established, if rather tentatively, for teaching and
research. While these studies have examined boys’ and men’s lives in
schools, families, management, the military and numerous other sites,
many aspects remain relatively unexplored, especially at the
transnational level. As research has progressed, it has become more
complex, less concerned with one “level” of analysis, and more
concerned to link together previously separated fields and approaches.
While not wishing to play down debates and differences between
traditions, the broad, critical approach to men and masculinities
developed in recent years can be characterized by:
•a specific, rather than an implicit or incidental, focus on the topic
of men and masculinities;
•taking account of feminist, gay, and other critical gender
scholarship;
•recognizing men and masculinities as explicitly gendered rather
than non-gendered;
•understanding men and masculinities as socially constructed,
produced, and reproduced rather than as somehow just “naturally”
one way or another;
•seeing men and masculinities as variable and changing across time
(history) and space (culture), within societies, and through life
courses and biographies;
•emphasizing men’s relations, albeit differentially, to gendered
power;
•spanning the material and the discursive in analysis;
•interrogating the intersecting of the gender with other social
divisions in the construction of men and masculinities.
AUTOBIO GRAPHICAL /MATERIAL IST REFLECTION S
12 | JE FF HEA RN
I became consciously interested in feminism, gender equality and
sexuality politics in the 1970s. I usually begin this story in 1978; I was
living with my then partner and three young children, very concerned
about the many messages of feminism, and particularly conscious of
most men’s avoidance of care for children. Indeed most men who
seemed sympathetic to feminism then seemed to me to be unconcerned
about the labor of child care. From this, I became involved in founding
two groups centrally concerned with social change around gendered
power relations: one a mixed-group campaigning for more provision
for children under-five, their mothers and other carers; the other, a
men’s group that was broadly, though not always, anti-sexist, and
focusing on consciousness-raising. These and other similar personal-
political initiatives became my political home; I have been involved in
numerous anti-sexist, profeminist campaigns, groups and activities
since. But the apparent beginning point is perhaps a little arbitrary; I
could begin the story when I was five or six or seven. At five I went to
a mixed primary school; my best friends there were three girls. Two
years later I left that school and went, as was usual then, to the local
all-boys junior school; that’s the last I saw or heard of them. I was not
so keen on the way the ‘big boys’ played. Or I could begin by talking
about my admiration for my Victorian-style great-grandmother, or
doing my final degree exams in May ‘68 or reading the SCUM
Manifesto on holiday in Wales in the early 1970s, or ... .
I have long been informed by materialism, in thinking of the
materiality of men. Perhaps stemming from my working class cultural
background, I have consistently been aware of economic class, and am
dismayed when generalizations about bourgeois men are applied to all
men. Materialism has often been equated with the economic
(mechanically, or dialectically), specifically with labor-based,
technological production and its products, as within economistic
marxism. A materialist approach to men has thus often been
interpreted as men’s relations to economic class, work, production, and
the economy. But equally important are men’s relations to care,
reproduction (in the very broadest sense), and embodied existence. As
such, this involved from the start a critique of the limited (productive)
materialism of Marxism, as usually conceived.6 Indeed Marx himself
6 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff (1987): The Gender of Oppression: Men, Masculinity
and the Critique of Marxism, Brighton/New York: Wheatsheaf/St.
Martin’s Press.
embraced two very different, contradictory versions of even
reproductive materialism: a biological naturalism, and as a first social
oppression.7
Various, often non-gendered approaches to materialism and
marxism have been critiqued and developed in a very wide range of
marxist feminisms, materialist feminisms and socialist feminisms.
These include those focusing on biology, the domestic mode of
production, kinship, family, economic systems, “the politics of
reproduction”8 (biological reproduction, care of dependent children
and care more generally), “sex-affective production”9 (the production
of sexuality, bonding and affection as core processes of society),
sexuality, and various combinations thereof. In different ways, such
approaches tend to either analyze the relations of economic class and
gender relations in employment, the family, sexuality, or draw
parallels between economic class and gender/sex class, or focus on
materialism as gendered reproduction or highlight the materialism of
the body. After all, we are bodies, material bodies! Some of these
materialisms may turn marxism upside down.
Since the 1980s various feminist materialisms and radical
feminisms have influenced my own attempts to develop a materialist
analysis of men, particularly the recognition of bodily materialism and
seeing sexuality as material (as what people do rather than what people
think). I have long seen materialism as including (so-called
productive) labor/work, biological reproduction, housework, violence,
sexuality, bodily generativity/degeneration, and
culture/ideology/discourse. In the 1980s Annie Leclerc wrote “One
must not wage war on men. That is his way of attaining value. Deny in
order to affirm. Kill to love. One must simply deflate his values with
7 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff (1991): “Gender: biology, nature and capitalism”, in:
Terrell Carver (Hg.), The Cambridge Companion to Marx, New York:
Cambridge University Press, S. 222-245.
8 Vgl: O’Brien, Mary (1981): The Politics of Reproduction, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul.
9 Vgl. Ferguson, Ann/Folbre Nancy (1981): “The unhappy marriage of
patriarchy and capitalism”, in: Lydia Sargent (Hg.), Women and
Revolution: The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism, New
York: Maple and London: Pluto, S. 313-338; Ferguson, Ann (1989): Blood
at the Root, London: Pandora.
14 | JE FF HEA RN
the needle of ridicule”10; Luce Irigaray claimed: “The bodily in man is
what metaphysics has never touched”11; Hélène Cixous wrote: “Men
still have everything to say about their own sexuality”12; and Alice
Jardine “we [feminists] do not want you [men] to mimic us […] What
we want, I would say what we need, is your work.”13 I think these
statements are all still highly relevant to placing men’s voices in
relation to feminism.
The intersections of radical feminisms and materialist feminisms
have been complicated by the impact of poststructuralism and related
perspectives. Poststructuralism can be interpreted, not as a specific
critique of materialism, but rather as an expansion of materialism.
Thus materiality can be understood as reproduction in a fuller sense, as
both reproduction of the social relations of production, and the
reproduction of society through ideas, ideology and discourse. An
important influence, for me, in these complicating movements of and
around the material, towards “the discursive”, was Dorothy Smith’s
critique of political economy. Reproduction of society also includes
cultural reproduction, cultural continuation, including in discourse
(even if there may be a tension between reproduction and discourse).
At the same time, the convergence of the material and the discursive
has become foregrounded in some discursive approaches, especially
critical discourse analysis. The relations of the material and the
discursive are highlighted in materialist theories of discourse. This can
be seen in the material contexts of discourse, in understanding
discourse as (including) material acts, in focusing on the material
effects of discourse – hence the term, material-discursive practices.
In seeking to develop this approach, I have used such terms as
reproductive cultural materialism or the material-discursive.14 Feminist
technoscience and STS scholars have used the terms, the material-
semiotic and material-semiotic actors, to address somewhat similar
10 Leclerc, Annie (1981): “Woman’s word”, in: Elaine Marks/Isabelle de
Courtivron (Hg.), New French Feminisms: An Anthology, Amherst: The
University of Massachusetts Press, S. 79.
11 Luce Irigaray quoted in Jardine, Alice (1987): Men in feminism: Odor di
uomo or compagnons de route? in: Alice Jardine & Paul Smith (Hg.), Men
in Feminism, New York: Methuen, S. 61.
12 Hélène Cixous quoted in A. Jardine 1987, S. 60.
13 A. Jardine 1987, S. 60.
14 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff (1992a): Men in the Public Eye, London: Routledge.
notions, in the realm of human-machine and similar relations.
Materialism can be understood as much more complex, as the
economic/technological, the “reproductive”, the bodily/corporeal
(including sexuality and violence), and the environmental, as well as
the materiality of discourse.15 To me, this view of materialism is itself
also discursive; thus, since the late 1980s I have attempted to develop
materialist-discursive analysis of men. Having said that, there is still
major neglect of the materialities of age, disability, and the wider
“environment”.
Perhaps most importantly, talk about men and bodies is politics: the
personal is political, but the personal is also work is political is
theoretical.16 All around, locally and globally, gender injustice remains
rife, a source and site of oppression, discrimination, unfairness,
violence, and more. Men, and particular groups and versions of men,
as the dominant gender category, remain in many ways the main,
though not the only, problem, in most societies, most of the time. This
takes many forms: just think of who does most of the world’s killing,
owns the most wealth, runs the international financial system, and so
on. I am continually stirred by how the current gender relations are
deeply disturbing materially; their unfairness is personally painful to
me, even if, in some senses, by virtue of being a man, I benefit from
them.
THE MAT ERIALIT IES OF PATRIARCHIES,
MASCULI NI TIES AND SUBJECTIV ITIES
Among the many areas of current debate in theorizing men and
masculinities that bear on material analyses, three can be highlighted:
the concept of patriarchy; differences amongst men and masculinities;
and sexualities and subjectivities. In each case, there are tensions
between generalizations about men and masculinity and specificities of
particular men and masculinities.
15 Vgl. Alaimo, Stacy/Hekman, Susan (2008): Material Feminisms,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
16 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff (2008): “The personal is work is political is theoretical:
Continuities and discontinuities in (pro)feminism, Women’s Studies, men
and my selves”, in: NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender
Research, 16(4), S. 241-256.
16 | JE FF HEA RN
While the understanding of patriarchy has shifted from the literal
meaning of the rule of the father or fathers to the social, economic,
political and cultural domination of men more generally, it has been
critiqued, from at least the late 1970s, as being too monolithic,
ahistorical, and neglectful of women’s resistance and agency. Despite
this, the debate on patriarchy has continued, in three main ways. First,
there has been attention to the historical movement from private
patriarchy, with men’s material embodied power located primarily in
the private domain as fathers and husbands, to public patriarchy, with
men’s power primarily in public domain organizations such as
capitalist and state managers and workers. Second, the various sites or
bases of patriarchy have been specified more closely. Walby analyzed
six patriarchal structures: capitalist work, the family, the state,
violence, sexuality, and culture, and in 1987, I identified a slightly
different set of structures: reproduction of labor power, procreation,
degeneration/degeneration, violence, sexuality, and ideology.
Patriarchy may be seen as differentiated rather than unified; it may be
more accurate to refer to (public) patriarchies rather than the singular
patriarchy.17 Third, commentaries on men, materiality and patriarchies
have been developed in relation to debates on globalization.
A second related area of development in CSMM has been around
difference, as in pluralizing masculinity to masculinities. This has been
partly a means of recognizing both material embodied power relations
between men and women and material embodied power relations
between men and masculinities, for example, between hegemonic and
subordinated masculinities.18 There has been parallel concern with
analyses of both unities and differences between men and between
masculinities.19 Just as a major issue within feminism has been the
relationship of commonalities and differences between women, so men
can be analyzed in terms of material commonalities and differences,
mirroring debates on diversification of patriarchy. Men are bound
17 Vgl. Walby, Sylvia (1986) Patriarchy at Work, Cambridge: Polity; Walby,
Sylvia (1990) Theorising Patriarchy, Oxford: Blackwell; J. Hearn 1987, 1992a.
18 Vgl. Carrigan, Tim/Connell, R.W./Lee, John (1985): “Towards a new
sociology of masculinity”, in: Theory and Society, 14(5), S. 551-604.
19 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff/Collinson, David L. (1994): “Theorizing unities and
differences between men and between masculinities”, in: Harry
Brod/Michael Kaufman (Hg.), Theorizing Masculinities, Newbury Park,
CA: Sage, S. 97-118.
together, not necessarily consciously, by dominant sexuality,
(potential) violence, socio-economic privilege, power of the father,
household relations, work or political power more generally – all
material embodied structures and processes. However, the idea of a
unity of men is also a myth. Men’s collective power is maintained
partly through the assumption of hegemonic forms of men and
masculinities – often white, heterosexual, able-bodied men (WHAMs),
as the primary form, to the relative exclusion of marginalized and
subordinated men/masculinities. In many social arenas there are
tensions between collective power of men and masculinities and
differentiations amongst men and masculinities, defined through other
social divisions, such as age, class, race, and sexuality. Using the term
masculinities makes clear there is no one masculinity; rather,
masculinity is elaborated and experienced by different men in different
ways.
A third area of debate that examines men and masculinities has
been around sexualities and subjectivities. Tensions between unities
and differences apply to sexualities; while sexuality may be
individually experienced, it simultaneously operates trans-individually,
not least through structured discourses. The material embodied here
operates within the subjective. Critical studies of sexuality/subjectivity
have pointed to the dominance of men’s heterosexuality and male
(hetero)sexual narratives, and the close interrelations of dominant
forms of men’s sexualities and men’s violences. Yet such heterosexual
dominance often co-exists with homosociality and even
homosexual/gay subtexts. Within these contexts, there are recurring
tensions – between the domination of heterosexuality and
homosociality/homosexuality; asexuality and the eroticization of
dominance and hierarchy; coherent identity and fragmented identity;
and essentialized, experience, felt as one’s own, and deconstruction.
These issues are again important in terms of possible and often taken-
for-granted connections with sexualities and violences; tensions
between the power of individual men and the relations of men to each
other; and the material embodied, yet fragmented, experiences and
identities for some men.
18 | JE FF HEA RN
MASCULI NI TIES, HEGEMON IC MASCUL INITY, THE
HEGEM ONY OF MEN
In all these developments, the concept of masculinities has been
applied in many, sometimes different and confusing ways. It has
served for researchers, activists, commentators, journalists and policy-
makers to have a conversation about “something”, but not always the
same thing. In particular, the concept of hegemony has figured
strongly, especially through the concept of hegemonic masculinity;
however, one might argue that what is more hegemonic than this is the
hegemony of men. It is thus necessary to say some more about this
concept and also link it to discussion of bodies.
Hegemony addresses relations of power and ideology, including
domination of the ‘taken-for-granted’, and ‘commonsense’. It
highlights the importance of consent, even though provisional and
contingent, and backed by force. It encompasses the formation of
social groupings, not just their collective action. In this Gramscian
view the cultural and intellectual realm has greater political impact
than as an effect of economic structure and relations. Hegemony
enfolds the economic, political, cultural, and, for our purposes, the
bodily, rather than prioritizing the economic. Following a Gramscian
mode, Donaldson (1993: 645) summarizes hegemony as:
“[…] about the winning and holding of power and the formation (and
destruction) of social groups in that process. It is about the ways in which the
ruling class establishes and maintains its domination. The ability to impose a
definition of the situation, to set the terms in which events are understood and
issues discussed, to formulate ideals and define morality is an essential part of
the process. Hegemony involves persuasion of the greater part of the
population, particularly through the media, and the organization of social
institutions in ways that appear ‘natural,’ ‘ordinary’, ‘normal’. The state,
through punishment for non-conformity, is crucially involved in this
negotiation and enforcement.”20
The notion of hegemonic masculinity has developed from work on
gendered processes within patriarchy.21 This process usage of
20 Donaldson, Mike (1993): “What is hegemonic masculinity?”, in: Theory
and Society, 22(5), S. 645. My emphasis.
21 Vgl. Connell, Raewyn (1995): Masculinities, Cambridge: Polity.
hegemony has been by no means as popular or as influential as the
other usage by Connell and colleagues, in linking hegemony to
masculinity. In this, “hegemony” as a key social process mutates to
“hegemonic” as a descriptor of certain masculinities. In this latter
scheme, forms of masculinity have been recognized, including
hegemonic, complicit, subordinated, marginalized, and sometimes
resistant, protest and ambivalent masculinities. In their 1985 paper
Carrigan, Connell and Lee write that hegemony
“always refers to an historical situation, a set of circumstances in which power
is won and held. The construction of hegemony is not a matter of pushing and
pulling of ready-formed groupings but is partly a matter of the formation of
these groupings. To understand the different kinds of masculinity demands an
examination of the practices in which hegemony is constituted and contested –
in short, the political techniques of the patriarchal social order.”22
There seems to be a slippage here from formation of groupings to
different forms of masculinity.23 Most importantly, the concept of
hegemony has generally been employed in too restricted a way. If we
are interested in what is hegemonic about gender in relation to men
and masculinity, then it is ‘men’ who or which are far more hegemonic
than masculinity. Instead, it is time to go back from masculinity to
men, to examine the hegemony of men. This involves addressing the
hegemony of men – in both senses. The hegemony of men seeks to
address the double complexity that men are both a social category
formed by the gender system and dominant collective and individual
agents of social practices. This perspective raises key social processes,
regarding:
•hegemonic acceptance of the category of men.
22 T. Carrigan/R. Connell/J. Lee 1985, S. 594. My emphasis.
23 Over the last 15 or more years, there has been growing debate on the
usefulness and meanings very concepts of masculinities and hegemonic
masculinity. Critiques have come from more micro and poststructuralist
approaches to more macro materialist approaches. The latter emphasize
problems of relativism, if patriarchal contexts are ignored; use as a primary
or underlying cause of other effects; tendency towards idealism; neglect of
historical, (post)colonial and transnational differences; and reproduction of
heterosexual dichotomies.
20 | JE FF HEA RN
•distinctions and categorizations between different forms of men
and men’s practices to women, children and other men
(“masculinities”).
•which men and men’s practices – in the media, the state, religion,
etc. – are most powerful in setting those agendas of those systems
of differentiations.
•most widespread, repeated forms of men’s practices.
•men’s various and variable everyday, “natural(ized)”, “ordinary”,
“normal”, most taken-for-granted practices to women, children and
other men, and their contradictory, even paradoxical, meanings.
•how women may differentially support certain practices of men,
and subordinate other practices of men or ways of being men.
•interrelations between these elements above: relations between
“men’s” formation within hegemonic gender orders, that also form
“women”, other genders and boys, and men’s activity in different
ways in (re-)forming hegemonic differentiations among men.24
These various and embodied aspects clearly suggest a much more
multi-faceted and indeed embodied account of men and masculinities.
The hegemony of men is a dialectical material, embodied formulation,
highlighting naming men as men25, the gender class of men, yet also
critiquing how the taken-for-granted category of men obscures
inersectionalities.
MEN, MA LES AND BOD IES
In this section I turn to the more specific element of the materiality of
men: men’s bodies. So this is the canvas, a canvas of and for the
bodily materiality of men. I should begin by saying that I do not
believe there is such a thing as “the male (bodily) essence” or even
24 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff (2004): “From hegemonic masculinity to the hegemony
of men”, in: Feminist Theory, 5(1), S. 49-72.
25 Vgl. Hanmer, Jalna (1990): “Men, power and the exploitation of women”,
in: J. Hearn and D. Morgan (Hg.), Men, Masculinities and Social
Theory, London and New York: Unwin Hyman/Routledge, S. 21-42;
Collinson, David L./Hearn, Jeff (1994) “Naming men as men: implications for
work, organizations and management”, in: Gender, Work and Organization,
1(1), S. 2-22.
“the male perspective”, and certainly not in the singular. These kinds
of terms can so easily suggest some kind of so-called “deep bodily
masculinity” that supposedly only men can know about, and that is
men’s or males’ special property. On the other hand, there is another
usage or meaning of “male”: something that speaks to the specific
social, political and embodied bounded experience of men … the
boundaries, bodies, skin, fluids, leaks and all, all embodied, material,
all social and cultural. And this makes some more sense, but I am still
a cautious of the word, “male” – as it can so easily be misused out of
context; this is partly why I often prefer to use the concept of “men”
rather than “male”. Yet having said that, I am still influenced by a very
social constructionist version of sexual difference theory – a form of
social, that is, social structural, essentialism.
Males and men have so often been represented as taken-for-granted
biologically driven bodies. Yet at the same time, men may be
constructed as taken-for-granted disembodied, or least as primarily
(“rational”) minds, rather than bodies. There has been a long running
debate on how could this ever be possible. This tendency can be
illustrated whenever men are seen as the primary and ‘authoritative’
conveyors (even ‘embodiments’) of ideas, ideology, religion,
rationality, knowledge. Bodies as minds and images of men are shown
throughout history as the monopoly bearers of knowledge, even when
woman is represented as “justice”, often as “beauty”, sometimes even
as “truth”.
According to some social theorists, in this account, ‘malestream’
theorists grant epistemological and usually idealist privilege to men,
constructed as minds, over women, constructed as bodies (O’Brien,
1981).26 The construction of men as having supremacy as minds,
whilst women remain as bodies, can be traced back to many ancient
traditions, intellectual and spiritual, including classical social theory,
and reappearing in various guises in the Enlightenment, and more
recently.27 Go to any ancient university, and most modern ones too,
and you will find ample examples in the libraries, on the walls, in the
naming of buildings, and so on. There is an inordinately large
26 Vgl. M. O’Brien 1981.
27 Vgl. Lloyd, Genevieve (1984): The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’
in Western Philosophy, London: Routledge; Sydie, Rosalind (1987):
Natural Women, Cultured Men: A Feminist Perspective on Sociological
Theory, Toronto: Methuen.
22 | JE FF HEA RN
literature that provides spurious rationales for keeping the bodies of
women out of the public body of men, who can then debate and decide
through reason. In The Politics Aristotle placed women alongside
slaves and children, believing that women needed a certain amount of
coercion of the body to maintain their goodness and purity within the
private domain. A contrasting example of male embodied
disembodiment appears in the mortification of the flesh and
(self-)punishment, in many religious traditions, including some
Christian, Moslem and Hindu versions.
Dichotomizations of mind/body mirror many other dualisms: man/
woman, culture/nature, public/private, reason/passion, and so on. The
absence or disembodiment of the body in discussing men and men’s
knowledge as minds is very far from material realities; males without
bodies tend to be bourgeois “enlightened”, spiritual religious, non-
othered constructions of males/men. Seeing males as rational minds, as
without bodies, as absent bodies, can be seen as the other side of the
coin from the biologically bodied perspective. The contradiction of
males as both simply bodies and as absent/without bodies, separated
from bodies, is much to do with social locationality, specifically with
economic class, ethnicity, and other signifiers of the dominant and the
unmarked. These dichotomies map onto another set of contrasts:
between male bodies as biological, and masculine bodies as socially
constructed: the biological versus the social body.
Moving to more social accounts of males/men raises many
possibilities, and indeed further dichotomies, dilemmas and
contradictions. With some examples of social embodiments the male
social body may be identified as determinate and paradoxically
“socially abstracted”, even socially disembodied, driven. Indeed, while
sex assignment is usually seen as strictly biological, this is not the
whole story. Fausto-Sterling, herself an eminent biologist, has written
extensively on the construction of the biological, including the
biological male. Some biologists do only write on biology; they also
provide accounts of human socialization, along with the neatness of
many biological accounts. She discusses the making of the male at
birth, and how masculinity is indeed a social phenomenon, including
the assumptions of the active in/of masculinity, and of hormones as
social drivers.28 In this more social account the sex male is a variable
28 Vgl. Fausto-Sterling, Anne (1995): “How to build a man”, in Maurice
Berger/Brian Wallis/Simon Watson (Hg.), Constructing Masculinity,
and indeed “summary” category, summarizing chromosomal
variations, averaged though variable hormonal levels, that can be
changed to some extent. The sex of male is a shorthand for the
summary of primary sex characteristics and secondary sex
characteristics. This social perspective on the male sex is made clearer
when considering the considerable cultural variation in dominant body
types, and various forms of transgenderism. Such social
constructionist issues have long been made clear also within micro-
sociological analysis, perhaps most famously by Garfinkel, and
Kessler and McKenna.29 They have also been taken up in CSMM.
Interestingly, the first substantial discussion of “hegemonic
masculinity” was based in the discussion of boys’ and men’s bodies,
within the patriarchal context, in the paper “Men’s bodies”.30 This
considered the social construction of the body in boys’ and adult
men’s practices. In discussing “the physical sense of maleness”, sport
is marked as “the central experience of the school years for many
boys”31, emphasizing the practices and experiences of taking and
occupying space, holding the body tense, skill, size, power, force,
strength, physical development, and sexuality. In addressing the bodies
of adult men, Connell highlighted physicality within work, sexuality,
and fatherhood, stressing
“the embedding of masculinity in the body is very much a social process, full
of tensions and contradiction; that even physical masculinity is historical,
rather than a biological fact. […] constantly in process, constantly being
constituted in actions and relations, constantly implicated in historical
change.”32
Routledge, New York, S. 127-134; Garlick, Steve (2003): “What is a man?
Heterosexuality and the technology of masculinity”, in: Men and
Masculinities, 6(2), S. 156-172.
29 Vgl. Garfinkel, Harold (1967): Studies in Ethnomethodology, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall; Kessler, Susanne. J./McKenna, Wendy (1978):
Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
30 Vgl. Connell, R.W. (1983): Which Way Is Up? London/Boston: Allen
& Unwin.
31 Ebd. S. 18.
32 Ebd. S. 30.
24 | JE FF HEA RN
This account drew upon Gramsci, Sartre (or de Beauvoir?), Bourdieu,
Merleau-Ponty, practice theory – influences that have provided
groundwork for much masculinities theory. These are largely social
constructionist influences, rather than from sexual difference theory.
Male bodies may also be understood as the agents of patriarchal
collectivities. Here, the body becomes the collective body, the
historical subject (or object). This may be most clear when considering
the body within the onslaught of famine, war and macro historical and
societal contexts. This is also clear when we reflect on how the
disembodied bourgeois male body is strangely at odds with another
dominant account of men and men’s bodies, in everyday life and in
academic writing, namely, men’s bodies as machines, sometimes as
proletarian machines. Machinic bodies care can be seen in terms of
physicality and physical labor, and even the proletarianization of the
body. In some ways the biological body and the disembodied mind are
two sides of the same coin, just as are the proletarian machinic body
and the disembodied bourgeois mind.
On the other hand, the construction of the men’s body can easily
become over-socialized. In recent years, debates on the body have
moved beyond oppositions between biology versus social
constructionism, and towards a concern with the embodied material-
discursive practices and processes. Stephen Whitehead33 has written on
the discursive materializing of the male body; Calvin Thomas34 has
argued for re-enfleshing boys’ and men’s bodies. He argues that the
“matter” of the male body may be “one possibly productive way to
analyze male power and hegemony, and to reconfigure male
identification and desire”.35 This in turn may serve to change gender
relations and men’s dominance in the bodily and sexual realms, and
elsewhere.
Such multiply faceted concerns with the male body open up various
possible, more complex accounts of masculine bodies, being
masculine, and doing bodies. One approach is to seek to address the
33 Vgl. Whitehead, Stephen (2002): Men and Masculinities,
Cambridge: Polity.
34 Vgl. Thomas, Calvin (2002): “Re-enfleshing the bright boys; or, how
male bodies matter to feminist theory”, in: Judith Kegan Gardiner (Hg.),
Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, New Directions, New York:
Columbia University Press, S. 60-89.
35 Ebd. S. 60.
relations of the phenomenological body in being men, the material
body, and the discursive body, simultaneously. How this works may
vary for different occurrences of bodies. For example, in researching
older men’s bodies, the combination of feminist phenomenology,
sexual difference theory, and queer theory may be relevant.36 This may
so as ways of making sense of older men’s bodily relations to
movement (or lack thereof), taking up space and activity3 7, and bodily
boundaries, fluidity, and leakages38, in contrast to those male bodies
characterized as impermeable, hard and hermetic.39 Sexualities of older
men may challenge dominant male, particularly heterosexual,
sexualities. Other possible approaches stem from the disability
movement, crip theory40, and studies of bodily (hetero)normativity41. A
second example is some men’s close embodied relations (love?) with
some technologies, such as cars and other vehicles. These may be
usefully analyzed by bringing together studies of men and
masculinities, sexuality studies, and STS.42
36 Vgl. Hearn, Jeff/Sandberg, Linn (2009): “Older men, ageing and power:
Masculinities theory and alternative spatialised theoretical perspectives”,
in: Sextant: Revue du Groupe Interdisciplinaire D’Etudes sur les Femmes
et le Genre (Belgium), 27, S. 147-163.
37 Vgl. Young, Iris Marion (1990): Throwing Like a Girl and other Essays
in Feminist Philosophy and social theory, Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
38 Vgl. Grosz, Elizabeth (1994): Volatile Bodies: Toward a corporeal
feminism, Indianapolis, Indiana University Press.
39 Vgl. Waldby, Catherine (1995): “Destruction: Boundary erotics and
refigurations of the heterosexual male body”, in: Elizabeth Grosz/Elspeth
Probyn (Hg.), Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, New
York: Routledge, S. 266-277.
40 Vgl. McRuer, Robert (2006): Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness
and Disability, New York: New York University Press.
41 Vgl. Gerschick, Thomas J. (2005): “Masculinity and degrees of bodily
heteronormativity in Western culture”, in: Michael Kimmel/Jeff
Hearn/R.W. Connell (Hg.), Handbook of Studies on Men and
Masculinities, Thousand Oaks, Ca.: Sage, S. 367-378.
42 Vgl. Balkmar, Dag/Joelsson, Tanja (2009): “Burning rubber, marking
territory: Technology, auto-erotic desires and violating mobility”, in:
Cecilia Åsberg/Katherine Harrison/Björn Pernrud/Malin Gustavson (Hg.),
Gender Delight: Science, Knowledge, Culture and Writing … for Nina
26 | JE FF HEA RN
SITUATE DNESS, AND TOWARDS THE ABOLITI ON
OF MEN
In making sense of these complex materialities of men, masculinities
and bodies, situated knowledges are crucial. These are a means of
engaging with the major question of the relations between men as a
gender class, and differences between men. From specific
objectifications, which themselves constitute part of oppression by
men, and patriarchies more broadly, subjectivities may develop, as
bases of knowledge. A plural, composite material-discursive approach
is likely to yield greater insights than attempts to impose a single
grand theory. Indeed, men’s theorizing of men always needs to be
understood as provisional. As noted, men’s relationships to feminism
remain problematic; men can never fully answer the questions raised
by feminism. This includes both explicitly naming men as men and
decentering men. Naming men as men does not construct masculinities
as simply variable within given reformist or resistance (pro)feminism,
but seeks the abolition of gender as power, including ‘men’ as a social
category of power.
Plural situatedness is also part of a methodology for deconstructing
the hegemony of men. Men’s relations to this theoretical object may
range from dismissal as irrelevant to immense uncertainty and
humility to even a certain kind of social paralysis for some men, or
onto an awakening of renewed optimism of a future where gender is
degendered, with the abolition of the category of men. This resonates
with Judith Lorber’s43 multiple framing of feminism.44 In keeping with
Lykke, Linköping: Linköping University Press, S. 117-126.
43 Vgl. Lorber, Judith (Hg. 2005): Gender Inequality: Feminist Theories and
Politics, Los Angeles: Roxbury.
44 Vgl. Egeberg Holmgren, Linn/Hearn, Jeff (2009): “Framing ‘men in
feminism’: Theoretical locations, local contexts and practical passings in
men’s gender-conscious positionings on gender equality and feminism”,
in: Journal of Gender Studies, 18(4), S. 403-418. Gender rebellious
feminists seek to “take apart the gendered social order by multiplying
genders or doing away with them entirely.” Connections with other social
divisions, differences and oppression become central, as do
deconstructions of the categories of sex, sexuality, and gender, and
the progressive problematization of men, men’s critical theorizing of
men can usefully consider what might be involved in the abolition of
the social category of men. In seeking to understand possible moves
towards the abolition of men, there are many possibilities.
A wide variety of texts have shown the limitations of both a view
of gender as in any fixed relation to sex and an overly dichotomized
view of gender relations. These include historical and cross-cultural
analyses of “multiple gender ideologies”45, “gender ambiguity”46, and
“the third sex/third gender”47, all of which represent movements
beyond sexual dimorphism. Another set of approaches derive from
historical dialectical processes of transformation of men as a gender
class.48 A third derives from practices of undoing gender, queer theory,
dualities (re)produced through them. Men, or rather “men”, become an
unstable social category. This contrasts with gender reform feminism and
gender resistance feminism. In the former, gender equality might be a
matter of realizing the potential of women and men equally, albeit in the
context of the current gender order: “An overall strategy for political
action to reform the unequal gendered social structure is gender balance.”
The implication for men is that men can contribute positively to (or can
position themselves against) such change towards the abolition of gender
imbalance. Gender resistance feminists “argue that the gender order cannot
be made equal through gender balance because men’s dominance is too
strong.” Gender equality per se is not a feasible aim, as it is likely to mean
women becoming like men. More radical transformation is necessary, with
women’s voices and perspectives reshaping the gendered social order more
fundamentally, including the abolition of patriarchy. Men’s positionings
are less certain; an implication is that men need to position themselves in
relation to the radical project of abolishing patriarchy and patriarchal
relations.
45 Vgl. Meigs, Anna (1990): “Multiple gender ideologies and statuses”, in:
P. Reeves Sanday/R. Gallagher Goodenough (Hg.), Beyond the Second
Sex: New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, S. 92-112.
46 Vgl. Epstein, Julia/Straub, Kristina (Hg. 1991): Body Guards: The
Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, New York and London: Routledge.
47 Vgl. Herdt, Gilbert (Hg. 1994): Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual
Dimorphism in Culture and History, New York: Zone Books.
48 Vgl. J. Hearn 2004; Howson, Richard (2006): Challenging Hegemonic
Masculinity, New York: Routledge.
28 | JE FF HEA RN
transgender studies, refusing to be a man49, effeminism50, and non-
hegemonic heterosexualities.51
This involves not beginning from the assumption that men are
either the object or the subject of theory, but rather that the social
category of men is historically transitory, as most other social
phenomena. One of the clearest statements of this possibility of
abolishing men is that by Monique Wittig in her analysis of the
possibility of the abolition of the categories of women and men:
“[...] it is our historical task, and only ours (feminists) to define what we call
oppression in materialist terms, to make it evident that women are a class,
which is to say that the category ‘woman’ as well as the category ‘man’ are
political and economic categories not eternal ones. Our fight aims to suppress
men as a class, not through genocidal, but a political struggle. Once the class
‘men’ disappears, ‘women’ as a class will disappear as well, for there are no
slaves without masters.52
CONCLUS ION
All these debates bear strongly on theorizing and changing men. The
notion of the hegemony of men combines recognition of a qualified
view of men as a social gender class, naming men as men, along with a
deconstructive, transsectional view. Rather than simply talking of
hegemonic masculinity in a way that can so easily degenerate into a
pluralist series of forms or types, I want to ground debate in a more
fundamental embodied way, to speak of the hegemony of men in terms
of, first, how men make a social category of power, and, second, how
at the same time hegemony is in many respects constructed and
controlled by men as individual and collective agents. A focus on the
49 Vgl. Stoltenberg, John (1989): Refusing to be a Man: Essays on Sex and
Justice, New York: Meridian.
50 Vgl. Dansky, Steven/Knoebel, John/Pitchford, Kenneth (1976):
“Effeminist manifesto”, in: Jon Snodgrass (Hg.), For Men against Sexism:
A book of readings, Albion, CA.: Times Change Press.
51 Vgl. Heasley, Robert (2005): “Queer Masculinities of Straight Men: A
Typology”, in: Men and Masculinities, 7(3), S. 310-320.
52 Wittig, Monique (1992): The Straight Mind and Other Essays, NewYork:
Harvester Wheatsheaf, S. 160.
hegemony of men paradoxically entails decentering everyday political-
theoretical “centers”, including working towards the abolition of
“men” as a category of power and as taken-for-granted agents of social
power. A challenge is how to name men as men, and at the same time
deconstruct and subvert men. How to move away from being “real
men”, and towards feminist voices, to name but decenter men?
These are clearly not just academic questions. The hegemony of
men involves men being a taken-for-granted social gender category in
all sorts of everyday contexts. Men are formed with this gender
system. But men also reproduce this situation in both individual and
collective ways of being and doing. These ways tend to reinforce the
hegemonic. But this is not a closed system; it is contested and
potentially unstable. If you are a man, please recognize that, but please
do not speak simply “as a man”. Take (the problem, power and
hegemony of) men incredibly seriously, but do not take your own self
“as a man” seriously at all. What is the use of certain kinds of
knowledge if they do not stop men’s domination, violence and sexual
violence?53
53 Widerberg, Karin (2005): “Situating knowledge – liberating or
oppressive?”, in: Ericka Englestad/Siri Gerrard (Hg.) Challenging
Situatedness: Gender, Delft: Eburon, S. 259-267.
