Masculinities: Ken doll
Ernest Hemingway
men
men 2
men 3
men 4
Asymmetry between study of femininity and
masculinity
„Woman has ovaries, a uterus; theese 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)
Masculinity as a social construction
Hegemonic masculinity (W. Connell)
Edward Poynter: The Catapult
„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)
• 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 everreceding 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: inferiority complex
Karen Horney, Melanie Klein: breast envy
(couvade)
Carl Gustav Jung: persona vs. anima
Louis XIV and his
shapely legs
Victorian masculinities
Classical (Roman) heroes
Ascetic, monastic ideal (masculinity as the
repression of male energies)
Chivalric ideal
Muscular Christianity
Soldier hero
Athleticism, physical culture
Homosociality
Dandyism: Beau Brummell and Oscar
Wilde
David: Oath of the Horatii
Frank Dicksee:
Chivalry
Collinson:
The Siege of
Sebastopol
W. Frank Calderon: Son of the Empire
Charles Spencelayh: Dreams of Glory
1900
„Athletics vs.
Aesthetics”
Illustrated
London News,
1882
Lord BadenPowell’s book
(1908)
But, besides boy scouts, there are also peace scouts ...
There are the frontiersmen of all parts of our Empire. The
’trappers’ of North America, hunters of Central Africa, the
British pioneers, explorers, and missionaries over Asia
and all 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 any doctors, are strong and plucky, and ready to face
any danger, and aways 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, fellow-countrymen, or
employers. The history of the Empire has been made by
British adventurers and explorers, the scouts of the nation,
for hundreds of years. 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
The Dying Gaul
Briton: Dead Hector – Nevinson: Paths of Glory
Richard Nevinson (WW1)
John Singer Sargent: Gassed
Eric Kennington: Gassed and Wounded
Eric Kennington:
The Making of a
Soldier
(Gas Mask)
Hard-boiled thriller,
film noir
(Raymond
Chandler)
Humphrey Bogart
Hans Suren: Men and the Sun
Arno Breker’s sculptures
Kameradschaft
Young Italian
fascist
This century is
ours
And we shall live
In the full beauty
of our Manhood
(Theo Lang, British
Union of
Fascists, 1935)
Body building
Arnold
Body building is „the dream of physical
perfection and the agonies you go through
to attain it” (Arnold Schwarzenegger:
Pumping Iron, 1976)
„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)
The idea of Arnold
Scwarzenegger
Three
blacksmiths
statue
(Helsinki)
Marlon Brando
in The
Streetcar
named Desire
Burt Reynolds in Cosmo, 1972
Titian: Venus of Urbino