5. Writing Masculinities

Masculinity Studies and

Whilst much of feminist takes its cue from both Freud and Lacan and theories of mothering focus on Chodorow’s and Dinnerstein’s con- structions of the female domination of child-rearing in order to explain male dominance in the ‘public sphere’ and the misogynist construction of patriar- chy, these theories can, naturally, also be used to explore the construction of masculinity. As has already been indicated, Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering not only explores the female complex, but also offers a theory of the production of masculinity as based on the rupture of boys’ identification with their mother, which produces “a personality with re- duced capacity for relationships, stronger ego boundaries, and less motive to find completeness in constructing new relationships with the young” (Carrigan, Connell & Lee 1987: 82). However, it is probably Freud’s by now notorious account of the establishment of male and female sexuality that has laid the foundations for an exploration of masculinity. In “Some Psycho- logical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (first published in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, 1925), Freud develops his theory of the . For Freud, negotiating the Oedipal feelings for the mother as first love object is far more complex (and complicated) for girls than it is for boys who can basically retain their love object and transfer their feelings to other women later on. Girls, when they notice the penis of their brother or playmate, “at once recognize it as the superior counterpart of their own small and inconspicuous organ, and from that time forward fall victim to envy for the penis” (2002 [1925]: 16). While girls develop – and the “sense of inferiority” (ibid: 17) that ac- companies it – forces boys to suppress the desire for their mother. It is common knowledge by now and has been used as a stepping stone by many feminist theorists that much of Freudian theory is based on this essentialist assumption which privileges the male sex. Freud’s “positive, indeed ‘maleist’, view of masculinity is one that sees males as the natural, superior sex” (Whitehead 2002: 25). The same is of course true of Lacanian theory and the much-debated concept of the phallus, which is connected to 150 THE PLEASURE OF THE FEMINIST TEXT the father’s (i.e. the symbolic’s) intervention after the mirror stage, and is notoriously depicted as the ‘privileged signifier’ by Lacan. Although Lacan is adamant that the phallus is not allocated to a human organ (“It is even less the organ, penis or , that it symbolizes”, 1997 [1958]: 285), the privi- leged signifier does constitute sexual difference; as Benvenuto and Kennedy perceptively point out, it marks lack and castration:

If the phallic signifier has a privileged place in the uncon- scious, it is as a ‘partial’ object […], which the desired other, the mother, does not have. The phallus differs from other partial objects (breasts, faeces, etc.) in being an object which she lacks and desires. It is the phallus which, according to Lacan, signifies sexual difference. It is what splits human be- ings into what Lacan called ‘sexed partial beings’. (1986: 179)

In Reading Lacan (1986), Jean Gallop indicates the weakness of the concept of the phallus by highlighting that despite Lacan’s emphasis on the neutrality of the phallus, “because he uses a word that is already in the lan- guage, already in use, in the lexicon – Le Petit Robert, for example, defines it as ‘virile member’ – the confusion is inevitable” (1986: 136). Masculinity has repeatedly been defined through its relation (or contrast) to femininity. With reference to Lacan, Bob Connell states that masculinity “is, in effect, defined as non-femininity”; he explains that, in “the semiotic opposition of masculinity and femininity, masculinity is the unmarked term, the place of symbolic authority. The phallus is master-signifier, and femininity is symbol- ically defined by lack” (1995: 70). Whereas feminism can take its cue from the Lacanian definition of Woman as the essentially lacking Other, and use its antagonistic stance to develop a new description of femininity, for men, an association with the (male) phallus and the nom/non du père need not necessarily be a privilege:

Like the permanent tumescence of the symbolic phallus, the phantasmatic image of an omnipotent, god-like father serves to keep men under systemic control by ideologically inscribing their feelings of inadequacy and impotence. Within