Surviving Our Paradoxes?
Masculinity, Modernity, and the Body
Christopher E. Forth
University of Kansas
This article contends that, as a complex experience with definite implications for the
body, modern civilization exercises a double logic that promotes and supports the
interests of elite males while at the same time threatening to undermine those interests by
eroding the corporeal foundations of male privilege. This argument is developed by
examining: 1) those places in the West where localized concerns about the declining
power and fitness of male bodies have reflected transnational engagements with modern
civilization; 2) the ways in which tensions between masculinity and civilization are
played out in time and space; and 3) how these anxieties about bodies in the modern
world have contributed to fantasies of ―new men‖ since the eighteenth century.
Keywords: masculinity, civilization, modernity, crisis
The author is grateful to Diederik Janssen for inviting me to contribute this article, and to
Karen Downing and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.
This essay is based on a more encompassing analysis offered in Forth (2008).
All correspondence regarding to article should be addressed to Christopher E. Forth,
Humanities & Western Civilization, 308 Bailey Hall, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS
66045. Email: [email protected]
Men hear of the secret
they pass in upholstered silence
they only exist in crisis
they only exist in silence
past territorial piss-posts
past whispers in the closets
past screaming from the rooftops
we live to survive our paradoxes
we‘ll live to survive our paradoxes
— The Tragically Hip, ―Spring time in Vienna.‖ (1966, MCA Canada, Ltd.)
―Crisis‖ is perhaps the most common term used to describe the state of masculinity in the
West today, with journalists, novelists, sociologists, psychologists and other scholars in
numerous countries offering various accounts of the disquiet which many men have registered in
recent years. As one might expect, the causes of this presumed diminishment of male status and
confidence vary according to context. In certain countries, economic disruptions and financial
insecurity are sometimes offered as reasons for male malaise; in others, observers point to the
challenges posed by the moderate advances made by women, homosexuals and people of color
since the liberationist movements of the 1960s and ‘70s (Faludi, 2000; Hearn & Pringle, 2006;
Robinson, 2000; Savran, 1998). Yet as most scholars concur, problems relating to masculinity
are not adequately resolved by using terms like ―crisis.‖ After all, if there is no stable or noncritical period to be found prior to the disturbance in question (and historians have not found
one), then the very idea of a crisis makes little sense (Connell, 1995, p. 84).
Nevertheless the discourse of gender crisis is a durable one. Some have approached alleged
gender disruptions in a linguistic way, arguing that the rhetoric of crisis functions as a
performative strategy seeking to bring about the very upheaval being described, whether as a
reactionary attempt to shore up male privileges during periods when male authority is challenged
(Robinson, 2000) or as an exercise in misandry by those who ―want such a crisis to exist because
they wish to redefine the male role and masculinity itself out of existence‖ (Phillips, 1999, p.
xiii). This attention to language has the benefit of demonstrating the power of discourses to shape
our views of the world; yet its usefulness for understanding how crisis rhetoric functions in
different countries and periods is not entirely clear. In the United States, for instance, claims that
manhood is in trouble have been mounting in recent decades, no doubt as a partial reaction to the
modest gains made by women, homosexuals and people of color since the 1960s (Robinson,
2000; Savran, 1998).
Yet if crisis alerts are only reactions against the social and economic challenges posed by
marginalized groups, how do we account for references to gender disturbance during periods
when elite white men seemed to enjoy social, economic and political power with little or no
serious challenges from women and men of other groups? For instance, in eighteenth-century
Britain, debates about boxing crystallized ongoing disagreements about whether men should be
polite and refined or aggressive and robust. While these differences reflected class-based views
of the ideal body, each camp believed that the good of the nation depended on the quality of its
men (Carter, 2001; Downing, forthcoming; Kuchta, 2003). In such cases, crisis-talk is not
reducible to challenges mounted against ―patriarchy,‖ but reflects tensions among different kinds
of men competing to represent the authoritative version of masculinity.
Others engaging with gender crisis employ poststructuralist theories of subjectivity to argue
that, given the constructed nature of the self, instability is endemic to any attempt to form a
coherent and unified identity (Butler, 1990). There is much to be gained from viewing identity
formation itself as being always unstable, incomplete, and perpetually open to challenges and
disturbances. However (partly due to their reliance on psychoanalytic models), such analyses
often risk seeming ahistorical and thus not especially useful for those concerned with changing
historical contexts. We still need to sketch the historical conditions of possibility that have made
the discourse of gender crisis (whether or not this precise term is used) such a recurring
component of modern life.
…
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Put differently, the recurrence of ―crisis‖ as a means of describing masculinity at various
historical moments is to some extent made possible by the paradoxes that lurk at the heart of
modernity‘s relationship with a variety of ideals, including those pertaining to masculinity and
the male body. After all, modernity is continually troubled by what Ulrich Beck (1997) describes
as ―counter-modernity,‖ a discourse that ―absorbs, demonizes and dismisses the questions raised
and repeated by modernity‖ by positing ―constructed certitudes‖ in the face of the liquefying
tendencies of modernization. Arising with and in reaction to modernity, counter-modern
impulses seek to renaturalize many of the things that modernity sends into motion, often by
imagining a new modernity purged of its unhealthy or ―feminizing‖ components (Griffin, 2007).
As Beck suggests, a more complex view of modernity would discover ―the simultaneity of
contradictions and dependencies of reflexively modern and counter-modern elements and
structures in the image of ‗modern‘ society‖ (pp. 63, 67). Insistence upon an elemental,
embodied and recuperable masculinity lurking beneath the veneer of civilization is one of the
most durable examples of a counter-modernity that asserts itself within and against modernity.
If masculinity is approached as a contingent norm ―constituted by ever-present possibilities
of abnormal deviation‖ (Surkis, 2006, p. 12), then the shifting contours of modern life provide
some of the corporeal conditions of such deviation. This article contends that, as a complex
experience with definite implications for the body, modern civilization exercises a double logic
that promotes and supports the interests of elite males while at the same time threatening to
undermine those interests by eroding the corporeal foundations of male privilege. This argument
is developed by examining: 1) those places in the West where localized concerns about the
declining power and fitness of male bodies have reflected transnational engagements with
modern civilization; 2) the ways in which tensions between masculinity and civilization are
played out in time and space; and 3) how these anxieties about bodies in the modern world have
contributed to fantasies of ―new men‖ since the eighteenth century. While space considerations
permit no more than a very general overview of these issues, my hope is that, by considering the
relationship between male bodies and modernity, we might be in a better position to
contextualize the seemingly endless recurrence of gender crisis in the modern world.
Civilization and the Male Body
In most Western countries, bravery, strength, endurance and sexual potency have figured
prominently in most lists of ideal male bodily attributes, as have grace, beauty and harmony of
form. Yet this body has also been expected to perform more subtle functions. Historically
speaking, the bodily and emotional boundaries of men and women have been often considered to
be different, with the male body typically imagined as being more capable of resisting external
influences, whether physical or moral. Saddled with the expectation of being capable of enduring
discomfort, whether due to a harsh landscape, inclement weather, physical ailments, enemy
armies or just irritating people, the male body is conceptualized as an ideally bounded entity,
equipped with psychological and physical resources that maintain a sharp distinction between
self and other while containing (or at least channeling) dimensions of emotional life, which in the
case of men often include the feelings of fear, sorrow, love and aggression. This emphasis on the
ideally enclosed state of the body has increased since the early modern era, as Norbert Elias
(2000) demonstrates. Under the best circumstances, the body functions as both the material
3
foundation of moral qualities as well as a kind of armor for males in their dealings with the
world. If the bounded male ego can be likened to a fortified ―castle‖ or ―tower of self,‖ then the
body constitutes its psychosomatic stones and mortar (Easthope, 1990, pp. 35-44).
B Header [flush left, all 1st letters in caps, and italicized]
C header. [indented, followed with a period, only 1st word in caps, and italicized]
Notes
1. Judith Butler (1993) captures the internal contradictions of disembodied masculinity:
This is a figure of disembodiment, but which is nevertheless a figure of a body, a bodying
forth of a masculinized rationality, the figure of a male body which is not a body, a figure
in crisis, a figure that enacts a crisis it cannot fully control. This figuration of masculine
reason as disembodied body is one whose imaginary morphology is crafted through the
exclusion of other possible bodies. (pp. 48-49)
2. There is a massive body of literature in Western culture associating “true” masculinity
with the supposedly superior virtues of non-urban experiences in a range of “natural” locales
(Forth, 2008).
3. As Sarah Watts (2003, p. 16) reminds us, ―Fear of women is not fear of women as such,
but a metaphorical reduction of many other fears that signal the loss of singularity and
independence (p. 16).
4. Of course not all that is called “new” has been welcomed. Not only was the New Woman
of the early twentieth century condemned as a symptom of a degenerate culture, and thus
something to be “corrected” by a return to female “nature” in a properly rejuvenated world
(Roberts, 1994), but her pleasure-seeking and narcissistic male consort could be similarly
disparaged as a sign of modernity’s corruption of the world. The same applies to various forms
of manhood disparagingly described as “new” by those who see them as deviations from what
men “should” be like.
5. Thus if one views bodily ideals and projections of masculinity as being inextricably bound
up with any attempt at “anthropological revolution,” one cannot categorically assert, as Alain
Badiou (2007) does, that Marxist models of the “new man” are “envisioned in opposition to all
enveloping forms as well as to all predicates” (p. 66).
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