Browsing by Subject "Masculinity"

This dissertation takes three crisis periods that have occurred throughout American history—times of war, times of disease, and times of apocalypse—and examines how such periods simultaneously provoke what can be called “traditional” masculine responses of toughness, independence, and executive action along with an alternative gender expression contemporary sociologists refer to as caring masculinity. Rather than consider caring masculinity a new phenomenon, Crisis: Masculinity and an Ethic of Care in American Literature seeks to establish the extended and underexplored history of manhood’s intersection with relational forms of care as expressed in popular literature. By analyzing literary works spanning from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, Crisis argues that such patterns of practice have existed in many forms, across a variety of situation, and for a long time.

Loose understandings of naturalized sexual difference have worked for hundreds of years to bolster both the legal and social oppression of women. This dissertation, Divorcing the Rake: Male Chastity and the Rise of the Novel, 1753-1857, examines how novelistic rhetoric around sexual misconduct reinforced notions of sexual difference by naturalizing male hypersexuality while implicitly suppressing possibilities for female sexual desire. By looking at the sexual ethics forwarded by stories of adultery, bigamy, and divorce in the century between Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (1753) and the Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), my research shows that the emerging genre of the novel refigured sexually profligate male characters, rendering them not only palatable but desirable to readers. Departing from eighteenth-century drama where the hypersexualized rake took center-stage, the novel purported to critique male sexual misconduct by juxtaposing minor rakish figures—such as Austen’s Henry Crawford or Burney’s Sir Clement Willoughby—against chaste male heroes in the mold of Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison. Representations of male sexual conduct during this period, therefore, idealized male sexual discipline by upholding male protagonists who willingly rejected sexual promiscuity. My work explores two seemingly counterintuitive effects produced by this idealization of sexual restraint. First, the alignment of male chastity with moral worthiness restricted women to monogamous marital desire by creating worlds in which “good” men opted for the same conservative sexual restrictions that were expected of women. Secondly, a good man’s self-discipline was also paradoxically evidence of his natural virility: a learned practice of sexual restraint implied a biological proclivity towards a transgressive level of sexual conduct. By idealizing male chastity, I argue, the novel not only worked to undermine the possibility of autonomous female sexual desire but also naturalized male hypersexuality, promoting compassionate reactions to male misconduct that were not afforded to women.

This dissertation traces the complex connections between violence, trauma, healing, and medicalization in North America. The project connects to conversations in medical anthropology and American studies, and intersects with science studies, postcolonial studies, the anthropology of militarism, and Native American studies. The central innovation in this dissertation is its focus on veterans who suffer from both the violence of war and the limits of trauma's conventional treatments. I track their experiences through a therapeutic system designed by and for Native people, and argue that questions about suffering and healing from war are inextricable from discourses and practices of gender, race, and territory.Since the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) diagnosis was codified in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980, the object of combat trauma has grown to occupy significant space in popular culture. In the contemporary world, PTSD serves as the primary lens for translating military experience to both the public and veterans themselves. However, the diagnosis and all of its clinical appurtenances fall short of contextualizing the full range of traumas associated with military service and its treatments often fail to relieve sufferers of their symptoms. An early example of this was observed in American Indian veterans of the Vietnam War, who demonstrated marked “treatment resistance” to novel PTSD therapies that were developed in the 1980s. In response to this, a Veterans Affairs (VA) hospital in southern Puget Sound responded to requests by local tribal leaders to make indigenous healing and purification rituals available for American Indian veterans. Noting the efficacy of these rituals, a ritual community of indigenous veterans became established there who continue to practice their ceremonies today on a piece of sacred land adjacent to the VA hospital. The clinical PTSD diagnosis has evolved in accordance with medicalizing trends in the four decades since its recognition in the DSM. However, the social construct of combat trauma that is often known discursively as “PTSD” has grown and become increasingly entangled with various sociopolitical projects associated with war, gender, and racial/ethnic identity. In the 21st century, veterans increasingly prefer the signifier “warrior” over the civil term “veteran.” The warrior signifier conjures a more mythical notion of timeless, transcultural castes located in martial societies. At the same time, this warrior identity is being embraced by many outside of the military, including police and civilian defense contractors. Warriors are seen as a distinct kind of person who experiences war, suffering, and healing differently than civilians. Within this context, the combat trauma construct that is often generalized as “PTSD” becomes the fundamental marker of legitimate warrior experience. When the VA approved of making space for indigenous ceremony in the 1980s, it was because indigenous veterans were seen as denizens of “warrior cultures,” and understood to be ontologically distinct from non-indigenous veterans who were expected to heal best in a clinical environment. Until relatively recently, the ritual healing community was almost exclusive to the indigenous veterans it was created for. However, the ceremonies increasingly appeal to non-indigenous veterans and are now being seen as a therapeutic option for treatment-resistant veterans of all ethnicities. This situation creates the conditions for the complex intersection of several socioepistemological projects, including medicalization, race, indigeneity, militarism, and “warrior” identity among many other things. As a combat veteran with a PTSD diagnosis, my fieldwork centered on extended participation in the ceremonial life of this ritual community. Over a period of 36 months I made several trips to the site, including seven months of continuous fieldwork in 2019. I became close with the Elder Council, the team of experienced Native chaplains who officiate ceremonies in the ritual community. Drawing from several tribal traditions, particularly from Lakota/Plains traditions, these elders conduct sweat lodges, “talking circles,” and other ceremonies. These rituals serve a dedicated cohort of regular attendees, a segment of patients from the hospital’s inpatient PTSD program, and periodic visitors who are seeking healing after the failure of clinical therapy. My findings detail two developments: First, the ritual community exposes the limits of the 20th century process of medicalizing trauma associated with war/military service. For instance, ritual participants draw on the Lakota concept of iwáyazaŋ azúyeya, "the sickness one acquires from fighting others and the self" as the therapeutic object at stake, in contrast to "PTSD". Ceremonies directly address this sickness by highlighting Native experiences of colonization, the unique ways that trauma was experienced by Native veterans (particularly from the Vietnam War era), and the connections between violence and masculinity. Second, the site shifts the ways “warriordom” connects concepts of violence to concepts of culture. The notion that warriors are a unique kind of person who both suffer and heal differently from civilians may account for the increasing appeal of ritual therapy among non-Native veterans. However, the ceremonies compel veterans to confront warrior identity as a feature of white settler violence, and effectively turn healing into a process of social critique.

In this dissertation, I propose, operationalize, and test a novel model of identity fragility using fragile masculinity as a case study. To date, identity research has largely focused on understanding how people’s membership in different social categories (e.g., gender, race) shapes their experiences, self-concept, and behavior. I contend that when (i) a social category is high-status and (ii) its corresponding norms are especially rigid—as is often the case with masculinity—people in this category may feel pressured to uphold its norms in order to maintain their status. To the extent that identities are pressured, I argue that they are “fragile”, in turn eliciting compensatory, stereotypical responses (e.g., male aggression) to perceived threats aimed at maintaining status. Supporting the proposed model, I found that young men’s (Study 1) and post-pubertal boys’ (Study 3) aggressive cognition post-threat was directly related to the extent to which their masculine behavior was extrinsically motivated (pressured). In Study 2, I found that straight men’s anti-gay bias was again predicted by a combination of extrinsic pressure and threat, which was partially mediated by men’s endorsement of gender-inversion stereotypes (e.g., gay = feminine). Finally, as one possible pathway to reduce these adverse pressures and compensatory aggression, in Study 4, I found that identity-salient events like U.S. presidential elections can loosen masculinity norms from the “top-down” to mitigate certain men’s sociopolitical aggression.

Background: HIV-related stigma is a barrier to the success of programs targeting the prevention and treatment of HIV. In Sub Saharan Africa, where the HIV epidemic is concentrated, men play a critical role in defining and shaping social constructs, including HIV stigma. This study aimed to describe HIV stigmatizing attitudes, to identify factors associated with stigmatizing attitudes, and to explore the broader context of HIV stigmatizing attitudes among men in Tanzania. Methods: This mixed-method study recruited 489 men from antenatal clinics of two public primary health care facilities in Moshi municipality, Tanzania. Participants completed a structured survey using audio computer assisted self-interviewing technology; a subset of 16 men completed in-depth interviews. HIV stigmatizing attitudes were examined using a modified version of the Personal Stigma Scale, and logistic regression models identified associating factors. Qualitative data were analyzed using applied thematic analysis. Results: The majority (72%, n=356) of participants endorsed at least one of the stigmatizing attitudes; the most common attitude endorsed was a perception of HIV is a punishment for bad behavior (37%, n=180). In a multivariable logistic analysis, men with only primary education were twice as likely as those with secondary or high to hold high stigmatizing attitudes (OR=2.05, 95% CI 1.39, 3.04). Qualitative analysis revealed that masculine identity intensified the vulnerability of men towards HIV stigma, while HIV testing experience spurred behavior change to reduce HIV risk behavior. Conclusions: HIV stigmatizing attitudes are prevalent among men. Comprehensive community-based stigma reduction programs to provide a supportive environment for men are crucial to increase uptake of HIV testing and treatment services.

The needs of South African men with HIV are often overlooked in providing healthcare for people living with HIV/AIDS, leading to unique needs and experiences for men seeking HIV/AIDS healthcare. Compounding this phenomenon are norms of masculinity guiding these men's behaviors as they navigate health and healthcare systems. The aim of this study is to provide new insight on which components of masculinity interplay with healthcare access in South Africa. The study took place at one primary health care clinic in a peri-urban township in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In-depth individual interviews were conducted with 21 HIV-positive men recruited from the clinic. Direct observations of the HIV clinic waiting area were also conducted. Data was analyzed using a grounded theory-informed memo-writing approach. Participants expressed a range of ways in which masculine ideals and identity both promoted and inhibited their willingness and ability to engage in HIV care. Notions of masculinity and social identity were often directly tied to behaviors influencing care engagement. Such engagement fostered the reshaping of identity around a novel sense of clinic advocacy in the face of HIV. Our findings suggested that masculinities are complex, and are subject to changes and reprioritization in the context of HIV. Interventions focusing on reframing hegemonic masculinities and initiating treatment early may have success in bringing more men to the clinic.

This dissertation examines the intersection of experimental art, literature, performance, photography, and architecture, as Japanese artists and intellectuals grappled with political disillusionment after the end of the protests against the ratification of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty of 1960. I focus on the work of the sculptors Miki Tomio and Kudo Tetsumi; photographs of late 1960s protests by Tomatsu Shomei and the self-portraits of the novelist Mishima Yukio; the collaboration between photographer Hosoe Eikoh and butoh dance founder Hijikata Tatsumi in the photo album Kamaitachi (The Sickle-Weasel, 1969); and depictions of the urban periphery in Hosoe's unfinished Private Landscape series (1970-) and the visionary urban planning of the architect Tange Kenzo. All shared an interest in portraying peripheral spaces, the detritus of the everyday, and the sexually perverse, cultivating a rhetoric of marginality that allowed them to explore their ambivalent feelings towards post-Anpo Japan.

This dissertation draws on Sigmund Freud’s essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) to track melancholy and genius in black letters, culture, and history from the nineteenth century to the contemporary moment; it contends that melancholy is a catalyst for genius, and that genius is a signifier of the maternal.

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Sigmund Freud prefigures an array of discourses in black studies. One mode of interrogation occurs with relation to his 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia”. Some African American literature, such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy, invokes this work indirectly, just as theoretical texts, like Joseph Winters’s Hope Draped in Black: Race, Melancholy, and the Agony of Progress, have direct engagement. Nevertheless, Freud’s attendance to mourning and melancholia is pertinent. He surmises that when the love object dies, mourning does the reparative work of suturing the ego back together after its splitting and impoverishment; melancholia, by contrast, is the “pathological disposition” which occasions such disrepair and instantiates itself through the psychic loss of the love object. In turn, melancholy carries the possibility of devolving into mania such that the one experiencing the psychic loss desires to inflict harm on, while simultaneously becoming, the love object; theorists generally assign this category to the mother. Furthermore, I assert that Freud’s diagnosis of mania reifies long-held and reductive designations when applied to blackness and maternity. My intervention stages a correlation and counterpoint to the above theorizations.

Through dissertation chapters in which an overarching thematic juxtaposes itself with each subject of inquiry, I contend that instead of melancholy catalyzing mania—a rendering of the “pathological” for the people in which the dissertation has its investments—, the affect fosters performances of excellence, given the shorthand “genius”. As a form of expression and interpretation in black thought writ large, genius emerges as a response to and in excess of one’s melancholy. This productivity concretizes that genius, not mania, is an affective vestige that is at once reducible and irreducible to the mother; and allows me to journey on a search for her, in myriad iterations, to discover a subject found as opposed to an object lost

This study investigates how an ambivalence surrounding men and masculinity has been expressed and exploited in Pop literature since the late 1980s, focusing on works by German-speaking authors Christian Kracht and Benjamin Lebert and American author Bret Easton Ellis. I compare works from the United States with German and Swiss novels in order to reveal the scope - as well as the national particularities - of these troubled gender identities and what it means in the context of recent debates about a "crisis" in masculinity in Western societies. My comparative work will also highlight the ways in which these particular literatures and cultures intersect, invade, and influence each other.

In this examination, I demonstrate the complexity and success of the critical projects subsumed in the works of three authors too often underestimated by intellectual communities. At the same time, I reveal the very structure and language of these critical projects as a safe haven for "male fantasies" of gender difference and identity formation long relegated to the distant past, fantasies that continue to lurk within our cultural currencies.

This study identifies and elaborates on a theme in the Hebrew Bible (HB) that has largely gone unnoticed by scholars: the transition of a male adolescent from boyhood to manhood. Beyond identifying the coming-of-age theme in different HB texts, the project also describes how the theme is employed by biblical narrators and redactors to highlight broader messages and transitions in the historical narratives of the HB. It also considers how these stories provide insight into the varying representations of biblical masculinity.

The project begins by showing how the recent discussions on masculinity in the HB and biblical rites of passage are incomplete without an analysis of how a boy becomes a man in the biblical text. It then establishes important principles for recognizing the maturation theme in a given narrative. More foundational work is done in chapter 2, which describes the characteristic features of manhood and boyhood as depicted in the HB to facilitate the identification of narratives where a transition is made from boyhood to manhood.

The next two chapters identify five case studies of coming-of-age: David in 1 Sam 17; Solomon in 1 Kgs 1-2; an alternative tale of Solomon's maturation in 1 Kgs 3; Moses in Exod 2; and Samuel in 1 Sam 3. Chapter 5 discusses the converse of the coming-of-age theme by presenting stories of boys who fail to mature: Jether in Judg 8, and Samson in Judg 13-16. In each case study, the narrator's techniques for highlighting the maturation theme are identified. The ways that the narrator employs the theme to point to other significant plot points or narrative transitions are also identified. Most notably, the failure-to-mature theme in the Samson narratives typifies Israel's political immaturity in Judges, and the two alternative tales of Solomon's maturation highlight an important transition in the Deuteronomistic History from the uncertain and often bloody years of the monarchy's establishment to the peaceful, prosperous reign of Solomon.

The seven case studies are also examined for the image of masculinity that they present, and that presentation is compared to the general view of manhood in the HB. Five of the seven offer quite similar images of masculinity; and these also cohere to the general picture of biblical manhood. However, two narratives (Samuel's maturation in 1 Sam 3 and Solomon's in 1 Kgs 3) depart from this conception of masculinity, each in the same way: both depict a masculinity free of violence and the need for the constant, forceful defense of manhood and honor. Since these two texts have often been ascribed to the same author, the Deuteronomistic Historian, the study suggests that he may be offering a new view of masculinity more suited to his historical context.

The project ultimately proves that the theme of male coming-of-age, heretofore virtually unrecognized, is found in several biblical texts. Moreover, this theme is often used to indicate other important messages and transitions in Israel's historical narrative and can provide unique insight into biblical constructions of masculinity.

The late-nineteenth-century realist canon in Spain is filled with male characters who are physically weak, effeminate, ineffectual, infantilized, or impotent, and, thus, decidedly "unmanly," which indicates a collective societal anxiety about masculinity in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that this anxiety about masculinity stems from another societal worry about Spain's backwardness with respect to its more modern European neighbors and the uneven rate of modernization with its own borders. I explore these issues in four novels by Galician-born realist author Emilia Pardo Bazán: La Tribuna (1882), Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886), La Madre Naturaleza (1887), and Memorias de un solterón (1896). I analyze these texts in light of historical and theoretical work on post-Enlightenment masculinity by scholars, such as George Mosse, John Tosh, Christopher Forth, and R. W. Connell.

In the first chapter, I trace the development of the post-Enlightenment, Western, model of manliness, a primarily urban, bourgeois phenomenon, which privileged rational intellect and individual hard work. I then compare the pace and extent of modernization in Spain and England to show how Spain lacked the material conditions that would allow most Spanish men to embody modern masculinity in the late nineteenth century. For the remaining chapters, I turn my attention to Los Pazos de Ulloa, La Madre Naturaleza, and Memorias de un solterón. Each of these novels shows, in different ways, how the modern masculine ideal coexists and conflicts with other pre-Enlightenment models of manliness--based on aristocratic leisure, military prowess, or brute force. I argue that the problems faced by the male characters in these novels are a direct result of this clash of masculinities, which in turn reflects Spain's economic stagnation in the nineteenth century. In Chapter II, I show how the refusal of the rural, Galician aristocracy to embrace certain hallmarks of the modern masculine ideal, such as hard work and Enlightenment thought, leads to a destabilization of feudal hierarchies in Los Pazos de Ulloa. I then argue that this destabilization results in the pervasiveness of violence in the novel. Chapter III focuses on La Madre Naturaleza. I contend that its narrator recognizes that change must come to rural Galicia and, thus, makes a gesture toward reconciling traditional and modern values, as well as pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment models of masculinity. I then show how this reconciliation ultimately fails because the narrator condemns the social mobility upon which modernization and modern masculinity depend. In Chapter IV, I discuss the importance of marriage and fatherhood to the enactment of modern masculinity in Memorias de un solterón. I then illustrate how, in the Galician provincial capital in which the novel is set, social and economic conditions make life as a bourgeois husband and father undesirable at best, and ruinous at worst.