Masculinity theory pdf

More generally, this form of masculinity includes a range of masculine behaviour which does not fully match up to the macho ideals of hegemonic masculinity. At the bottom of the gender hierarchy are femininities. The theorising of multiple masculinities by writers like Connell has led others to raise questions about the meaning of masculinity as a concept. MacInnes for example, points to the vague, confused and contradictory definitions of the concept present within much of the masculinities literature.

If masculinities are so varied and fluid, then what is it that makes them recognisibly masculine? MacInnes himself argues that masculinity does not exist as the property, character trait or aspect of individuals but should instead be understood as an ideology about what men should be like, and this is developed by men and women in order to make sense of their lives 2.

One example is the work of SA Speer which shows how, in talking about sport and leisure, young men draw on a range of particular cultural models of masculinities and in the process give shifting, gendered, accounts of themselves.

Rating : 4. Get BOOK. In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two centuries.

Demonstrating how female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances.

Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them.

Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators. Featuring a new preface by the author, this twentieth anniversary edition of Female Masculinity remains as insightful, timely, and necessary as ever.

Female Masculinity. In this quintessential work of queer theory, Jack Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered.

Masculinity without men. The need may be gauged from the enormous appetite of the conservative mass media for stories of scientific discoveries about supposed sex differences. My favourite is the story that women 's difficulty in parking cars is due to sex differences in brain function. Speculation about masculinity and femininity is a mainstay of sociobiology, the revived attempt at an evolutionary explanation of human society that became fashionable in the s.

An early example of this genre, Lionel Tiger's Men in Groups, offered a complete biological-reductionist theory of masculinity based on the idea that we are descended from a hunting species.

One of Tiger's phrases, 'male bonding', even passed into popular use. According to these theorists, men's bodies are the bearers of a natural masculinity produced by the evolutionary pressures that have borne down upon the human stock. The list varies somewhat from theorist to theorist, but the flavour remains the same. It's the red-hot blend of testosterone and adrenaline that squirts through the arteries of teenagers and young men. That is why more than 95 per cent of the injuries in snowboarding are experienced by males under the age of 30, and the average age at inj ury is 2 1.

As I noted in Chapter 1 , a great deal of research has now been done on this issue. Where differences appear, they are small compared to variation within either sex, and very small compared to differences in the social positioning of women and men. There is no evidence at all of strong determination in this sense. And the evidence of cross-cultural and historical diversity in gender is overwhelming. The power of biological determination is not in its appeal to evidence.

The body 'functions' and 'operates'. Researchers discover biological ' mechanisms' in behaviour. Both academic and j ournalistic texts are rich in these metaphors. When a metaphor becomes established it pre-empts discussion and shapes the way evidence is read. This has certainly happened with the metaphor of biological mechanism, and it affects even careful and well-documented research which most sociobiology is not.

A good example is a widely discussed study by Julianne Imperato-McGinley and others. A rare enzyme deficiency, of which 18 cases were found in two villages in the Dominican Republic, led to genetic-male infants having genitals that looked female, so they were raised as girls. At this point, normal testosterone levels masculinized the adolescents physically.

The authors reported that 1 7 of the 1 8 then shifted to a male 'gender identity' and 1 6 to a male 'gender role'. The researchers saw this as proof that physiological mechanisms could override social conditioning. The authors trace a gradual recognition by the children and their parents that a social error had been made, the children had been wrongly assigned. This error was socially corrected.

The bodily changes of puberty clearly triggered a powerful social process of re-evaluation and reassignment. The Dominican Republic study inadvertently shows something more. The authors observe that, since the medical researchers arrived in the community, 5-alpha-reductase deficiency is now identified at birth, and the children are mostly raised as boys.

Medicine thus has stepped in to normalize gender: to make sure that adult men will have masculine childhoods, and a consistent gender dichotomy will be preserved. Ironically, Stoller's work with transsexuals in the United States does the same. Gender reassignment surgery now a routine procedure, though not a common one eliminates the inconsistency of feminine social presence and male genitals.

The medical practice pulls bodies into line with a social ideology of dichotomous gender. This is what would be predicted by a semiotic analysis of gender. Closer to everyday practice, feminist studies of fashion and beauty, such as Elizabeth Wilson's Adorned in Dreams and Wendy Chapkis's Beauty Secrets, trace complex but powerful systems of imagery through which bodies are defined as beautiful or ugly, slender or fat.

Through this imagery, a whole series of body-related needs has been created: for diet, cosmetics, fashionable clothing, slimming programmes and the like. This research is supported, and often directly inspired, by the post-structuralist turn in social theory. Michel Foucault's analysis. The sociology of the body developed by Bryan Turner moves in the s. Observing that 'bodies are objects over which we labour - eating, sleeping, cleaning, dieting, exercising' , Turner proposes the idea of 'body practices', both individual and collective, to include the range of ways in which social labour addresses the body.

These practices can be institutionally elaborated on a very large scale. Cosmetic surgery now offers the affluent an extraordinary range of ways of producing a more socially desirable body, from the old 'face-lifts' and breast implants to the newer surgical slimming, height alterations, and so on.

As Diana Dull and Candace West found by interviewing cosmetic surgeons and their patients in the United States, cosmetic surgery is now thought natural for a woman, though not for a man.

Anthony Easthope in lf'hat a Man s Gotta Do surveys the issues and is easily able to demonstrate how men's bodies are being defined as masculine in the imagery of advertising, film and news reports.

There has also been a recent interest in gender ambiguity. Rather than social arrangements being the effects of the body-machine, the body is a field on which social determination runs riot.

This approach too has its leading metaphors, which tend to be metaphors of art rather than engineering: the body is a canvas to be painted, a surface to be imprinted, a landscape to be marked out. With so much emphasis on the signifier, the signified tends to vanish. As Carole Vance ruefully put it, to the extent that social construction theory grants that sexual acts, identities and even desire are mediated by cultural and historical factors, the object of the study - sexuality - becomes evanescent and threatens to disappear.

As Rosemary Pringle argues in 'Absolute sex? Bodies, in their own right as bodies, do matter. They age, get sick, enjoy, engender, give birth. There is an irreducible bodily dimension in experience and practice; the sweat cannot be excluded. Warning: the male sex role may be dangerous to your health.

It is grounded in a sex dim orphism that serves the fundamental purpose of reproducing the spe cies. If biological determinism is wrong, and social determinism is wrong, then it is unlikely that a combination of the two will be right. There are reasons to think these two 'levels of analysis' cannot be satisfactorily added. Biology is always seen as the more real, the more basic of the pair; even the sociologist Rossi speaks of the social process being 'grounded' in sex dimorphism, the reproductive purpose being 'fundamental'.

Nor does the pattern of difference a t the two levels correspond - though this is constantly assumed, and sometimes made explicit in statements about 'sex dimorphism in behaviour'. Social process may, it is true, elaborate on bodily difference the padded bra, the penis-sheath, the cod-piece. Social process has recast our very perception of sexed bodies, as shown by Thomas Laqueur's remarkable history of the transition in medical and popular thought from a one-sex model to a two-sex model.

It seems that we need other ways of thinking about the matter. The Body Inescapable A rethinking may start by acknowledging that, in our culture at least, the physical sense of maleness and femaleness is central to the cultural interpretation of gender. Here is an example, from a life-history interview in which sexuality was a major theme.

Very unusually, Hugh claims to have fucked before he masturbated. The well-crafted memory is set in a magical week with perfect waves, Hugh s first drink in a hotel, and 'the beginning of my life ': The girl was an year-old Maroubra beach chick. What the hell she wanted to have anything to do with me I don 't know. She must have been slightly retarded, emotionally if not intellectually.

I suppose shejust went to it for the image, you know, I was already the long-haired surfie rat. I recall getting on top of her and not knowing where to put it and thinking, gee, it s a long way down. Then she must have moved her leg a little way, and then it went further and I thought oh! And then I must have come in about five or six strokes, and I thought the feeling was outrageous because I thought I was going to die. And then during that week I had a whole new sense of myself.

I expected I don 't know what I - expected, to start growing more pubic hair, or expected my dick to get bigger. But it was that sort of week, you know. Then after that 1 was on my way. In almost every detail it shows the intricate interplay of the body with social process.

The young Hugh lacks the knowledge and skill required. But his skill is imp roved interactively, by his partner's bodily response ' she must have moved her leg a little bit'. Conversely the social transition Hugh has accompfohed, entering into sexual adulthood, immediately translates as bodily fantasy 'more pubic hair' , 'dick to get bigger'.

The first fuck is set in a context of sport: the week of perfect waves and the culture of surfing. In historically recent times, sport has come to be the leading definer of masculinity in mass culture. Sport provides a continuous display of men's bodies in motion. Highly specific skills are of course involved. For instance, bowling a googly in cricket - an off-break ball delivered deceptively with a leg-break action out of the back of the hand -with the elbow held straight - must be among the most exotic physical performances in the entire human repertoire.

But players who can do only one thing are regarded as freaks. It is the integrated performance of the whole body, the capacity to do a range of things wonderfully well, that is admired in the greatest exemplars of competitive sport - figures such as Babe Ruth in baseball, Garfield Sobers in cricket or Muhammad Ali in boxing. The institutional organization of sport embeds definite social relations: competition and hierarchy among men, exclusion or domination of women.

These social relations of gender are both realized and symbolized in the bodily performances. Thus men's greater sporting prowess has become a theme of backlash against feminism. It serves as symbolic proof of men' s superiority and right to rule. Running, throwing, jumping or hitting outside these structures is not sport at all.

The performance is symbolic and kinetic, social and bodily, at one and the same time, and these aspects depend on each other. The constitution of masculinity through bodily performance means that gender is vulnerable when the performance cannot be sustained - for instance, as a result of p hysical disability. Thomas Gerschick and Adam Miller have conducted a small but remarkably interesting study of American men trying to deal with this situation after disabling accidents or illnes5.

One is to redouble efforts to meet the hegemonic standards, overcoming the physical difficulty - for instance, finding proof of continued sexual potency by trying to exhaust one's partner.

Another is to reformulate the definition of masculinity, bringing it closer to what is now possible, though still pursuing masculine themes such as independence and control.

So a wide range of responses can be made to the undermining of the bodily sense of masculinity. The one thing none of these men can do is ignore it. Heavy manual work calls for strength, endurance, a degree of insensitivity and toughness, and group solidarity.

Emphasizing the masculinity of industrial labour has been both a means of survival, in exploitative class relations, and a means of asserting superiority over women.

This emphasis reflects an economic reality. Mike Donaldson, collecting accounts of factory labour, notes that working men's bodily capacities are their economic asset, are what they put on the labour market.

But this asset changes. Industrial labour under the regime of profit uses up the workers' bodies, through fatigue, injury and mechanical wear and tear.

The decline of strength, threatening loss of income or the job itself, can be offset by the growth of skill - up to a point. The combination of force and skill is thus open to change. The process is virulent where class exclusion combines v. Middle-class men, conversely, are increasingly defined as the bearers of skill. The marketing of personal computers, however, has redefined some of this work as an arena of competition and power - masculine, technical, but not working-class.

The body, I would conclude, is inescapable in the construction of masculinity; but what is inescapable is not fixed. The bodily process, entering into the social process, becomes part of history both personal and collective and a possible obj ect of politics. Yet this does not return us to the idea of bodies as landscape. They have various forms of recalcitrance to social symbolism and control, and I will now turn to this issue.

Complexities of Mire or Blood W. Yeats's wonderful poem 'Byzantium' imagines a golden mechanical bird, symbol of the artifice of an ageing civilization, scorning 'all complexities of mire or blood'.

It is precisely the plurality and recalcitrance of bodies that gives force to Yeats's irony. Philosophy and social theory often speak of ' the body'. But bodies are plural about 5. Every one of these bodies has its trajectory through time. Each one must change as it grows and ages. The social processes that engulf it and sustain it are also certain to change. They are diverse to start ;dth, and they get more diverse as they grow and age. Walking down the street, I square my shoulders and covertly measure myself against other men.

At a demonstration I size up the policemen and wonder if I am bigger and stronger than them if it comes to the crunch - a ludicrous consideration, given the actual techniques of mass action and crowd control, but an automatic reaction nevertheless. Not only are men's bodies diverse and changing, they can be positively recalcitrant. Ways are proposed for bodies to participate in social life, and the bodies often refuse.

Here are two examples from the life-history interviews. Determined to be a 'legend ', Hugh became 'a nimal of the year' at his university, on a spree of booze, drugs and sex. He left his job, wound up in a drug-induced emotional crisis and a detoxification un it. The blow to his pride was as much about the body as about the social hit miliation: 'This is all wrong, I'm a first grade footballer. Tip Southern, starting from a position of greater class adva ntage partied even , harder.

We were pretty radical, rebellious, angry young men. Towards the end it was just one big blur. Binge after binge after binge. It was just full on, we were getting pmed all the time; really, really drunk but handling it because we were so full of energy. You don 't get hangovers when you are that young and that much on the go. In due course both Tip 's family and his body stopped coming through.

I tried to get jobs. I didn 't have any good clothes with me because I had been roughing it for a long time. So I never got jobs. I don 't think I looked like the most respect I mean, I was - very undernourished in a general way, I was taking a lot of drugs, a lot of acid, drinking a lot. I have got this picture of me in my room, hidden away, of myself in the worst state that you can imagine: big stoned swollen red eyes, a huge stye in this eye, and just the most pallid face.

And finally I just knew I had to do something drastic. Michael Messner, interviewing former athletes in the United States, heard parallel stories. The pressure of high-level competitive sport obliges professional players to treat their bodies as instruments, even as weapons. Timothy Curry's recent case study of an American wrestler shows how sports inj uries become a normal career expectation.

The body is virtually assaulted in the name of masculinity and achievement. Ex-athletes often live with damaged bodies and chronic pain, and die early. Bodies cannot be understood as a neutral medium of social practice. Their materiality matters. Bodies are substantively in play in social practices such as sport, labour and sex.

Some bodies are more than recalcitrant, they disrupt and subvert the social arrangements into which they are invited. Homosexual desire, as Guy Hocquenghem argued, is not the product of a different kind of body. But it is certainly a bodily fact, and one that disrupts hegemonic masculinity. The very language for talking about this issue has been captured by medicine, freezing desperation and carnival into conditions and syndromes: 'transvestite ' and 'transsexual'.

Accounts by people doing gender switches do not show the body under the rule of the symbol. D ' Eon only put them on, under protest, when obliged to by the French political authorities. These are not unique cases. The momentum may be so strong that proprioceptive consciousness is transformed, with hallucinations of the other-sexed body - some temporary, some permanent.

In the case of 'David' , mentioned in Chapter 1 , Laing wrote of ' the woman who was inside him, and always seemed to be coming out of him'. I suggest this is a bodily, not. Bodies, it seems, are not only subversives. They can be j okers too. Mainstream social science gives little help. As Turner observed in The Body a nd Society, bodies went missing a long time ago from social theory. We need to assert the activity, literally the agency, of bodies in social processes.

The crisis s tories earlier in this chapter showed the rebellion of bodies against certain kinds of pressure. This is a kind of effectiveness, but not full-blown agency. I want to argue for a stronger theoretical position, where bodies are seen as sharing in social agency, in generating and shaping courses of social conduct. In time, however, he became more sophisticated: I am very anal oriented. And I discovered this in a relationship with a young woman quite accidentally, I really enjoyed it.

She was inserting her finger into my anus and I thought 'My god this is fantastic. But I guess that was like a triggerfor it. She really touched a spot well and truly. So I thought now what I would really like is to have a relationship with a man where I would be inserted into.

Don experienced his body and its capacities through interaction. He was virtually led to his anus by a partner. The climax of his first fuck was simultaneously a physical sensation and the high-point of the longer narration of the Tale of Don's Virginity - 'wow, I've never had this before '.

Men s Bodies 61 The socialness of the physical performance is not a matter of social framing around a physiological event. It is a more intimate connection that operates especially in the dimension of fantasy - both in nuances of Don's virginity story, and more directly in the fantasy of a new social relation 'where I would be inserted into '. This fantasy started from the experience o f being finger-fucked. The body's response then had a directing influence on Don's sexual conduct.

Jogging, for instance, is certainly a socially disciplined activity. I tell myself this every second morning while struggling out of bed and tying on the running shoes. Nor does the idea of 'resistance' to disciplinary practices cover what happens when the iron cage of discipline clunks down on the ground and gets bent.

Two days ago, in the bus going up to the university, I sat opposite a young woman who was we aring running shoes, running socks, running shorts, a silk blouse, long silver earrings, full make-up and blow-dried hair with combs. Was she being simultaneously controlled by two disciplinary regimes, sport and fashion, each of which gave up somewhere about the waist?

Don Meredith's electrification illustrates the circuits involved. It led directly to the fantasy of a new social relation, one with a man, 'where I would be inserted into. And that really excited me. Don thought of himself as heterosexual. He had rejected advances from a gay man while on the great quest to lose his virginity, 'beat him off with a tent peg'. But now the bodily experience of being penetrated led to the fantasy of a homosexual relationship, and in due course to real homosexual encounters.

Don had no luck. In his exploratory gay fuck the partner lost his erection. A woman can do the job perfectly well. He'd say I couldn 't play cricket. And things like throwing a ball. How a man throws a ball is different to how a woman throws a ball. I didn 't want to throw a ball in front of my Dad because I knew it wouldn 't look right, it wouldn 't be like the way a good strong boy should throw it.

And once, I remember, I was brave enough to throw it. And he made fun of me and said I threw it like a girl. Even so, there is a split perception.

In Adam's story the body-reflexive practice of sport called out a declaration of difference 'he made fun of me and said. Finally he deliberately began a relationship with a man to find out whether he was gay - that is, to find out where in the gender order this 'brave enough' body belonged. He was a national champion in surf sport, making a rich living from prizes, sponsorships and commercials. He had a superb physique, cultivated with four to five hours ' training ever ' day.

Steve 's body was capable of astonishing feats of precision as well as endurance: I can spread my energy over a four-hour race to not die, to not have to start up slowly. I can start at a pace and finish at a pace every time. I can start off, and any fifty is pretty well to the tenth of a second the same time each lap, and I wouldn 't even be looking at a watch.

Like others skilled at sports, Steve had a detailed and exact knowledge of his body, its capabilities, its needs, and its limits.

Steve Donoghue, young-man-about-. He could not go boozing because of training , nor ' have much of a sex life ' his coach was against it, and women had to fit in with his training schedule. In other words, m u c h of what was defined in his peer culture as masculine was forbidden him. Indeed, the body-reflexive practice that constructed Steve's hegemonic masculinity also undermined hegemonic masculinity.

Steve's social and psychological life was focused on his body. The competitiveness essential to the making of a champion was turned inwards. Yet the narcissism could not rest in self-admiration and bodily pleasure. This would have destroyed the performance on which Steve 's life trajectory depended. In his version of competition, the decisive triumph was over one's body. Steve's magnificent physique had meaning only when deployed in winning. The will to win did not arise from personal ' drive ' , a familiar word in sports talk that S teve did not use at all.

This system is far from coherent. Body-reflexive practices, as we see in all these instances, are not internal to the individual. Forming the World Through body-reflexive practices, bodies are addressed by social process and drawn into history, without ceasing to be bodies. They do not turn into symbols, signs or positions in discourse. The social process of gender includes childbirth and child care, youth and ageing, the pleasures of sport and sex, labour, injury, death from AIDS.

But i t should not give the impression that gender is an autumn leaf, wafted about by light breezes. Body-reflexive practices form - and are formed by - structures which have historical weight and solidity. The social has its own reality.

But the idea well captured the power and intractability of a massive structure of social relations: a structure that involved the state, the economy, culture and communications as well as kinship, child-rearing and sexuality. Practice never occurs in a vacuum. Practice does not proceed into a vacuum either.

Practice makes a world. Practice constitutes and re-constitutes structures. Human practice is, in the evocative if awkward term of the Czech philosopher Karel Kosik, onto-formative.

It makes the reality we live in. As body-reflexive practices they constitute a world which has a bodily dimension, but is not biologically determined. Not being fixed by the physical logic of the body, this new-made. The practice of unsafe sex, in the context of the HIV epidemic, is a more sinister case in point. Hugh went into a detoxification unit, and decided to make 'fundamental changes' in his conduct.

Tip got off the drugs and found an outdoor j ob doing physical labour, which helped return him to health. He formed, for the first time, a lasting relationship with a young woman.

Of course no two stories could represent all attempts by men to change. What these two stories illustrate, nevertheless, is an inescapable fact about any project of change. For men, as for women, the world formed by the body-reflexive practices of gender is a domain of politics - the struggle of interests in a context of inequality. Gender politics is an embodied-social politics. The shapes taken by an embodied politics of masculinity will be a principal theme of the rest of this book.

This does not reveal the failure of the scientists so much as the impossibility of the task. Yet w e can have coherent knowledge about the issues raised in these attempts. The task of this chapter is to set out a framework based on contemporary analyses of gender relations.

This framework will provide a way of distinguishing types of masculinity, and of understanding the dynamics of change. First, however, there is some ground to clear. Defining Masculinity All societies have cultural accounts of gender, but not all h ave the concept ' masculinity'.

In its modern usage the term assumes that one's behaviour results from the type of person one is. In that sense it is built on the conception of individuality that developed in early-modern Europe with the growth of colonial empires and capitalist economic relations an issue I will explore further in Chapter 8. But the concept is also inherently relational.

Historical research suggests that this was true of European culture itself before the eighteenth century. Women and men were not seen as bearers of qualitatively different characters; this conception accompanied the bourgeois ideology of 'separate spheres' in the nineteenth century. In speaking of masculinity at all, then, we are 'doing gender' in a culturally specific way.

Four main strategies have been followed; they are easily distinguished in terms of their logic, though often combined in practice. Essentialist definitions usually pick a feature that defines the core of the masculine, and hang an account of men's lives on that.

Perhaps the finest is the sociobiologist Lionel Tiger's idea that true maleness, underlying male bonding and war, is elicited by 'hard and heavy phenomena'. The Social Organization of Masculinity 69 The weakness in the essentialist approach is obvious: the choice of the essence is quite arbitrary. Positivist social science, whose ethos emphasizes finding the facts, yields a simple definition of masculinity: what men actually are. It is also the basis of those ethnographic discussions of masculinity which describe the pattern of men's lives in a given culture and, whatever it is, call the pattern masculinity.

First, as modern epistemology recognizes, there is no description without a standpoint. The apparently neutral descriptions on which these definitions rest are themselves underpinned by assumptions about gender. Second, to list what men and women do requires that people be already sorted into the categories 'men' and 'women'. This, as Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna showed in their classic ethnomethodological study of gender research, is unavoidably a process of social attribution using common-sense typologies of gender.

Positivist procedure thus rests on the very typifications that are supposedly under investigation in gender research. Third, to define masculinity as what-men-empirically-are is to rule out the usage in which we call some women ' masculine ' and some men 'feminine', or some actions or attitudes ' masculine' or 'feminine' regardless of who displays them. This is not a trivial use of the terms. Indeed, this usage is fundamental to gender analysis. We could just speak of ' men's' and 'women 's' , or 'male ' and 'female '.

The terms ' masculine ' and 'feminine ' point beyond categorical sex difference to the ways men differ among themselves, and women differ among themselves, in matters of gender. This definition is often found in media studies, in discussions of exemplars such as John Wayne or of genres such as the thriller, Strict sex role theory treats masculinity precisely as a social norm for the behaviour of men.

In practice, male sex role texts often blend normative with essentialist definitions, as in Robert Brannon's widely quoted account of ' our culture 's blueprint of manhood' : No Sissy Stuff, The Big Wheel, The Sturdy Oak and Give ' em Hell. What is 'normative ' about a norm hardly anyone meets? Are we to say the majority of men are unmasculine? How do we assay the toughness needed to resist the norm of toughness, or the heroism needed to come out as gay?

A more subtle difficulty is that a purely normative definition gives no grip on masculinity at the level of personality. Joseph Pleck correctly identified the unwarranted assumption that role and identity correspond. This assumption is, I think, why sex role theorists often drift towards essentialism. Semiotic approaches abandon the level of personality and define masculinity through a system of symbolic difference in which masculine and feminine places are contrasted.

Masculinity is, in effect, defined as not-femininity. The phallus is master-signifier, and feminini ty is symbolically defined by lack. This definition of masculinity has been very effective in cultural analysis. The idea that one symbol can only be understood within a connected system of symbols applies equally well in other spheres.

Rather than attempting to define masculinity as an object a natural character type, a behavioural average , a norm , we need to focus on the processes and relationships through which men and women conduct gendered lives. Gender as a Structure of Social Practice In this section I will set out, as briefly as possible, the analysis of gender that underpins the argument of the book. Gender is a way in which social practice is ordered. In gender processes, the everyday conduct of life is organized in relation to a reproductive arena, defined by the bodily structure s and.

Gender is social practice that constantly refers to bodies and what bodies do, it is not social practice reduced to the body. Indeed reductionism presents the exact reve rse of the real situation. Gender exists precisely to the extent that biology does not determine the social. Gender is a scandal, an outrage , from the point of view of essentialism. Sociobiologists are constantly trying to abolish it, by proving that human social arrangements are a reflex of evolutionary imperatives.

Social practice is creative and inventive, but not inchoate.