MASCULINITIES
Ken doll

Cod-piece
(Giovanni Baptista
Moroni, 1565)
men
men 2
men 3
men 4
Asymmetry between the study of femininity and
masculinity
„Woman has ovaries, a uterus; these peculiarities
imprison her within the limits of her own nature.
It is often said that she thinks with her glands.
Man superbly ignores the fact that his own
anatomy also includes glands, such as testicles,
and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his
body as a direct and normal connection with the
world, which he believes he apprehends
objectively, whereas he regards the body of
woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down
by everything peculiar to it.” (Simone de
Beauvoir)
Men’s studies - „Men’s lib”
Robert Bly: Iron John (Vasjankó) 1990
„soft men” – „deep masculinity”
Masculinity as a social construction
Normative ideas of manliness
Masculinity:
- plural
- historically changing
- relational
Codes of masculinity ~ gender boundaries
Implicated in other discourses (race, class,
nationality) white man / Asian / black man
Hegemonic masculinity (William Connell)
Hegemony: not the same as total, absolute rule
Edward Poynter: The Catapult
Ideals of courage, self/denial, toughness,
aggressivity
Libido dominandi (Pierre Bourdieu)
“Boys don’t cry”
„If we live in a ‘man’s world’, it is not a
world that has been built upon the needs
and nourishment of men. Rather, it is a
social world of power and subordination
in which men have been forced to
compete if we want to benefit from our
inherited masculinity” (Victor Seidler)
„our culture cruelly constrains [men], in
varying degree, to be the bearers of a
gender identity that deforms and harms
them as much as it damages women”
(Cynthia Cockburn)
Men’s Dress Reform Party 1931
The male machine is a special kind of being,
different from women, children, and men who
don’t measure up. He is functional, designed
mainly for work... His most important positive
reinforcement is victory. He has armour plating
which is virtually impregnable... The male
stereotype makes masculinity not just a fact of
biology but something that must be proved and
re-proved, a continual quest for an ever-receding
Holy Grail (Marc Feigen Fasteau: The Male
Machine ,1974)
Masculinity is not simply a position of power
that puts men in comfortable positions of control
... If we understand masculinity as a constant
contradictory struggle rather than just the
privileged position within a power
disequilibrium, we come closer to a full
understanding of gender studies
(Peter N. Stearns: Be a Man! Males in Modern
Society, 1990)
Masculinity (gender) as construction
- Psychological construction for each individual
- Social construction, set of ideas, practices,
images
Masculinity as a psychological construction
Freud: Oedipus complex, Oedipal rivalry
Alfred Adler (1910s): inferiority complex –
anxiety – (over)compensation: aggressivity
Karen Horney, Melanie Klein: breast envy
Couvade syndrome (sympathetic male
pregnancy)
Masculinity as a social construct
Victorian masculinities
Early Vict.: formless male energy – needs curtailing,
harnessing: discipline, self/denial, labour, soldiering
Classical (Roman) heroes
Ascetic, monastic ideal (masculinity as the repression of
male energies)
Chivalric ideal
David: Oath of the Horatii
Frank Dicksee:
Chivalry
Normative heterosexuality vs powerful male bonding
(homosociality)
Fantasies of worlds without women:
Public school, university, club, colonies, exploration,
shipboard life, army, sport
Jekyll and Hyde
Later Victorian period: cult of male body
(degeneration fears, Empire, racism)
Spartan virility
Muscular Christianity
Soldier hero
Athleticism, physical culture (rise of sports)
„Athletics vs.
Aesthetics”
Illustrated
London News,
1882
W. Frank Calderon: Son of the Empire
Charles Spencelayh: Dreams of Glory 1900
Collinson:
The Siege of
Sebastopol
Lord BadenPowell’s book
(1908)
Besides boy scouts, there are also peace scouts ... the
frontiersmen of all parts of our Empire. The ’trappers’ of North
America, hunters of Central Africa, the British pioneers, explorers,
and missionaries over the wild parts of the world, – all are peace
scouts, real men in every sense of the word, and thoroughly up
in scoutcraft, i. e. they understand living out in the jungles, ...
they know how to look after their health when far away from
doctors, are strong and plucky, and ready to face any danger,
and always keen to help each other. They are accustomed to take
their lives in their hands, and to fling them down without
hesitation if they can help their country by doing so. They give
up everything, their personal comforts and desires in order to get
their work done. They do not do all this for their own
amusement, but because it is their duty to their King, fellowcountrymen, or employers. The history of the Empire has been
made by British adventurers and explorers, the scouts of the
nation… The Knights of King Arthur, Richard Coeur de Lion,
and the Crusaders, carried British chivalry into distant parts of
the earth. (Lord Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 1908)
Frederick Leighton:
Daedalus and Icarus
Eugen Sandow
Eugen Sandow
John Singer Sargent: Gassed
Hard-boiled thriller,
film noir
(Raymond
Chandler)
Humphrey Bogart
Hans Suren: Men and the Sun
Arno Breker’s sculptures
Josef Thorak:
Kameradschaft
(Camaraderie)
„This century is ours
And we shall live
In the full beauty
of our Manhood”
(Theo Lang, British
Union of Fascists,
1935)
Body building is „the
dream of physical
perfection and the agonies
you go through to attain
it”
(Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Pumping Iron, 1976)
The idea of Arnold
Scwarzenegger
„Dominant fiction calls
upon the male subject to
see himself ... only
through the mediation of
unimpaired masculinity”
(Kaja Silverman, Male
Subjectivity at the
Margins 1992)
Marlon Brando in
The Streetcar
named Desire
Louis XIV and
his shapely
legs
„Is that what a man
looks like?”
(Tyler Durden in
Fight Club)

The S-curve (line of
beauty)
Burt Reynolds in Cosmo, 1972
Titian: Venus of Urbino