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Reaching Critical Mas/culinities: Normative Masculine Ideology as a Generative

Rhetorical Construct

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of

the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Michael D. Johnson

August 2019

This dissertation titled

Reaching Critical Mas/culinities: Normative Masculine Ideology as a Generative

Rhetorical Construct

MICHAEL D. JOHNSON

has been approved for

the Department of English

and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Mara Holt

Associate Professor of English

Joseph Shields

Interim Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

ABSTRACT

Johnson, Michael D., Ph.D., August 2019, English

Reaching Critical Mas/culinities: Normative Masculine Ideology as a Generative

Rhetorical Construct

Director of Dissertation: Mara Holt

In this project, I propose and develop normative masculine ideology as a generative rhetorical construct in order to reinvigorate Rhetoric and

Composition’s engagement with issues of masculinities and to contribute to the field’s emerging scholarship on rhetorical embodiment from a gendered lens.

This research addresses our field’s lack of functional/critical frameworks required to adequately address and challenge traditionalist ideologies that still influence our cultural understanding and practices of modern masculinity. As an

(orienting) construct, normative masculine ideology provides scholars of

Rhetoric and Composition with a functional term that complements their critical/cultural frameworks. As a rhetorical construct, normative masculine ideology incorporates social-epistemic rhetorics, gendered rhetorical embodiment, and Discourse to expand its utility into critical and liberatory work.

As a generative construct, normative masculine ideology provides new inroads for inquiries into masculinities as a rhetorical project. Challenging and changing the deeply entrenched cultural myths that produce inequitable social, societal, micro- and macro-political relations is not only possible, it is necessary. This project stands as one effort toward such social justice progress.

DEDICATION

For Tele. For Virt. For my parents.

I made it!

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor, Mara Holt, for her support, guidance, and… stern encouragement. Without your continued efforts, this project would not have come to fruition.

To my committee members—Sherrie Gradin, Albert Rouzie, and Akil

Houston—your critical insights and professional skepticism at the early stages of this project challenged me to elevate and improve my scholarship.

To former mentors, Daniel Hoyt who directed me toward this field when I was an undergraduate and Michelle Robinson who assisted me through my MA thesis and the PhD application process, I would not have had this opportunity if it weren’t for your significant contributions.

To Keri Epps, my unofficial cheerleader, life coach, and therapist, your unmatched efforts of support and feedback lifted me across the finish line and ensured the completion of this project.

To my two favorite Gillams, Jacob for taking genuine and sustained interest in the development of this project and Gloria for sending that incredibly thoughtful “Dissertation Care Package” in a moment when I needed it most, my appreciation of your presence in my life during and beyond this project is more than I can express.

And, finally, to my friends and family. I cannot list you all, but you surely know who you are. You’ve kept me tethered and motivated over the last several years. Thank you!

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………... 3 Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 4 Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………….. 5 List of Tables…………………………………………………………………………………………….... 8 List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………………………...9 Chapter 1: Reaching Critical Mass: A Masculinity in (Need of) Reformation…….10 Overview of The Project, Research Questions, and Objectives…………………... 16 The Politics of Masculinity: A Rationale for Engagement with and Resistance to Masculinity………………………………………………………………………………………..19 Ethical Considerations in the Study of Masculinities………………………………...24 The Organization of this Project………………………………………………………….…. 26 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………... 29 Chapter 2: Men and Masculinities: Critical Orientations and Necessary Foundations……………………………………………………………………………………………... 32 Critical Masculinities Studies: What It is (and What It Isn’t)...... 36 The Sociological Turn in Critical Masculinities Studies……………………….. 38 Critical Masculinities Studies and the Men’s (Rights) Movement…………..41 Men and Masculinities Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition……………...44 The Absence of Critical Masculinities in Rhetoric and Composition……… 45 A Review of Critical Masculinities Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition……………………………………………………………………………………..51 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………….57 Chapter 3: Normative Masculine Ideology as Gendered Rhetorical Embodiment: Foundations for a Generative Rhetorical Construct………………………………………. 59 Engendering Gender and/in Rhetoric and Composition…………………………... 62 Gender as Research Construct………………………………………………………….. 63 Gender as Postmodern Construct/ion……………………………………………….. 64 Rhetorical Embodiment and Gender……………………………………………………....68 Gendered Rhetorical Embodiment……………………………………………………..72 Normative Masculine Ideology: A Generative Rhetorical Construct…………... 77 Hegemonic Masculinity…………………………………………………………………….82

Traditionalist Masculinity Ideologies………………………………………………….85 The Rhetorical Function of Gendering………………………………………………. 90 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………... 92 Chapter 4: Historicity and the Need for Historical Consciousness in Theorizing Normative Masculine Ideology…………………………………………………………………….94 Patriarchy and Patriarchal Legacy………………………………………………………... 100 Modern Masculinity and Normative Masculine Ideology: Its Emergence and Its Entrenchment………………………………………………………………………………...107 The Emergence of Modern Masculinity………………………………………….... 108 The Masculine Body Made Manifest/o……………………………………………... 110 Cultural Buoyancy through Othering………………………………………………... 115 Forged in Fictitious Fires: Mobilizing Normalcy………………………………... 117 Made in America: Modern American Masculinity……………………………....119 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………..125 Chapter 5: Normative Masculine Ideology as Embodied and Bodily Practice: A Social Framework with Sociopolitical Significance……………………………………....128 Normative Masculine Ideology: Embodied and Bodily Practice……………….. 133 The Embodiment of Normative Masculine Ideology………………………….. 135 Normative Masculine Ideology as Bodily Rhetorical Practice………………140 Hyper-normative Masculine Ideology in Social Practice: Toxic Masculinity as Critical Inquiry…………………………………………………………………………………….145 Toxic Masculinity as a Site for Critical Resistance……………………………...146 Toxic Masculinity as Popular Concept……………………………………………....149 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………………..157 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………………….. 162

LIST OF TABLES

Page

Table 1. Overview of Traditional Masculinity Ideology………………………………….90

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1. Normative Masculine Ideology’s Location within Rhetoric and Composition Scholarship…………………………………………………………………………….78

Figure 2. Laocoön and His Sons, Greek Sculpture………………………………………...112 10

CHAPTER 1: REACHING CRITICAL MASS: A MASCULINITY IN (NEED OF)

REFORMATION

“Our bodies have learned many lies. If we dare to be ruthlessly honest, we can perhaps recover truth” --John Stoltenberg

“He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful.” This injunction is delivered by Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) to

Father Karras (Jason Miller) in the moments leading up to the climactic confrontation in William Friedkin’s 1973 class The Exorcist. For most of my life—having watched The Exorcist countless times—these words have simply been dialogue to propel the narrative of the film. However, while watching the film this past Halloween, Father Merrin’s warning to Damien took on a significance that extended beyond the screen. In that moment, I heard Father Merrin’s words as a restatement of Sally Kempton’s well-circulated remark that “It’s hard to fight an enemy who has outposts in your head.” I heard his words—his demon, her enemy—as a commentary on modern masculinity, on modern masculinity and its control over men, on modern masculinity and its detrimental continued influence on our society and our sociopolitical relations.

Allow me, then, to open this project with a simple claim: Modern masculinity—or normative masculine ideology as I will advance in this project—is in need of revision, of remaking, of reformation. In no uncertain terms, visionary feminist bell hooks has asserted that “Patriarchy [and its coercion of masculinity]

is the single most life-threatening disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation” (17). I use this structuring metaphor to underscore the necessity of taking up my claim that masculinity requires our critical attention and activist energies. Namely, if modern masculinity is a social disease, what are some of its more telling symptoms? Misogyny, institutionalized racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape culture, our retributive justice system with its militarized police state, interventionist foreign military policies, the notion of corporate personhood, vertical and horizontal occupational segregation—the societal ills of modern masculinity as embroiled in our patriarchal legacy1 are legion.

Unfortunately, in the logics of an “imperialist, capitalist, ableist, hetero-normative, patriarchal, white-supremacist machine” (Brook)2, these symptoms are not symptoms at all: they are the hallmarks of modern masculinity, designed to provide men with the varying levels of privilege provided by a patriarchal dividend (Connell) through the acceptance of a Faustian patriarchal bargain (Kandiyoti). What’s more problematic, these symptoms qua

1 In chapter 3, I discuss our patriarchal legacy and patriarchy in greater detail, but I will note here that my conception of patriarchy is influenced by both bell hooks and radical feminist Alan Johnson. In The WIll to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks defines patriarchy as “a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence” (18). Similarly, in The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy, Johnson describes patriarchy as a social and political system whose “defining elements are its male-dominated, male-identified, male-centered, and control-obsessed character” that are based upon “a set of symbols and ideas that make up a culture embodied by everything from the content of everyday conversation to the practice of war" (37). 2 While I use Brook’s phrasing, it should be noted that this phrasing is indebted to bell hooks, who in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, states, “I often use the phrase ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics” (17), which is an evolution of her use of the phrase “white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal state” (21) in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.

hallmarks are so interwoven into the fabrics of our society that they appear ordinary to a degree that they often remain unexamined as unconscious masculinity (Gelfer) and accepted/tolerated as individuals live in the complicit shadow of masculinity (Connell; Heasely).

This project challenges our received (often unexamined) narratives of and the detrimental and pernicious effects produced by modern masculinity through leveraging my expertise with the conceptual tools of Rhetoric and Composition.

In the title of this project, I draw attention to the idea of reaching critical mass through engagement with Critical Masculinities3. By critical mass, I am alluding to the threshold amount of a material (e.g., a catalyst) necessary to foment a change in current conditions. I use this concept to suggest that modern masculinity is nearing such a threshold, a critical mass that will introduce

“incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard xxiv) and finally fracture the pretense of coherence from which modern masculinity maintains its power. In what follows, I survey several recent trends across the domains of the academy, our sociopolitical climate, and popular culture texts to illustrate this momentum.

In regards to the academy, not only has masculinity begun to be incorporated into Women and Gender Studies texts4 but also it approaches disciplinarity status with the first North American Masculinity Studies program having been launched in 2018 at the University of Calgary (Hunt) and with Stony Brook University set

3 In chapter 2, I provide an overview of Critical Masculinities Studies as an emerging field. 4 See Christie Launius and Holly Hassel’s Threshold Concepts in Women’s and Gender Studies as a pertinent example.

to offer an online Master’s Program in Masculinity Studies in Fall of 2019

(Bennet; Rodriguez-Cayro). Furthermore, men’s initiatives on college campuses have seen an uptick in institutional support over the last few years5.

Regarding our sociopolitical climate, the #MeToo movement and the

Time’s Up initiative have been indispensable in directing critical and public attention at men and normalized androcentric predatory practices. Even prominent feminist writers like Rebecca Solnit are now suggesting critical engagement with men and masculinities as a next step forward in our efforts towards social justice (Ziesler). Additionally, in August of 2018, the American

Psychological Association released a report titled APA Guidelines for Psychological Practices with Boys and Men that, among other proclamations, identified traditional masculinity ideologies as harmful for boys and men6. These statements, coupled with newly formed organizations directed at men specifically like HeforShe and the NBA’s partnership with LeanIn, are shifting the public perception and conversation regarding men and masculinity’s role in gender inequity. Moreover, within popular culture, feature films such as Richard

Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016), and Andrew Neel’s Goat (2016) have used cinema to address problematic issues with modern masculinity while being well-received and critically acclaimed. Similarly,

5 See the Ohio Consortium of Men and Masculinities in Higher Education, OCMMHE, as one local and indicative example. 6 These guidelines also mark the first-ever release from APA to address boys, men, and masculinity.

14 companies like Axe7 and Gillette8 have taken up issues with men and masculinity with mass market advertisements that doubly function as public service announcements. The examples I’ve provided here are not exhaustive, but they do demonstrate the solidification of a critical orientation towards masculinity that has, plainly stated, not existed in this capacity at any other point in American history.

As exciting as this kairotic moment may be, I want to stress that we are reaching critical mass, not that we have yet reached it. I've learned in many an unnecessarily tense conversation and unproductive argument that the necessity to cultivate a critical orientation towards men and masculinity is not self evident. Within our own discipline, in fact, efforts by Robert Connors and Lad Tobin to introduce men and masculinities issues into our field in 1996 failed to gain any traction. Why have these efforts failed? Well, a few reasons... but let me offer two distinct but related reasons. First, those of us interested in these issues have continually assumed the self-evidence of their worth (e.g., “Obviously we need to be talking about men and masculinity”). As a result, we have often failed to adequately articulate the reasons for why it is pertinent to address issues related to men and masculinity in such a concerted fashion. Second, as a discipline,

Rhetoric and Composition (to say nothing of society as a whole) has lacked the necessary frameworks and established social progress to productively engage in conversations about men and masculinities. While second-wave feminism and

7 See “is it okay for guys…” on AXE’s Youtube Channel. 8 See “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be | Gillette (Short Film)” on Gillette's Youtube Channel. 15

the Women's Liberation movement has resulted in women having new freedom, new purpose, new understandings, a new consciousness about themselves—in short, a new way being, a new definition of femininity, and a new possibility for what it means to be a 'woman'—men have not experienced such a reformation.

Unfortunately, feminism has not been leveraged to radically alter our normative masculine ideologies in a similar fashion. As bell hooks suggests in Feminism is for Everybody, although second-wave feminists provided insightful analyses and critiques of patriarchy (in addition to other systems of oppression that supported inequitable gender binaries), it has largely lacked adequately developed viable alternatives for traditional masculine archetypes, dampening its efforts at radically altering normative masculine ideologies. Our societal conceptions of masculinity are largely rigid, and any changes to masculinity have come in small renegotiations instead of needed global revisions. Critical considerations of masculinities have only recently started to approach critical mass in a way that can encourage meaningful and sustained change in our social and political landscapes. Critical Masculinities Studies, predicated on feminist and sociological frameworks, is one needed contribution in pushing masculinity into postmodernity, into viable and productive masculinities. Beyond just working towards decentering our normative and hegemonic masculine metanarratives, Critical Masculinities Studies also demands that men participate in these efforts. When paired with rhetorical literacies, this field has the capacity to negate the “opt-out clause” that many men have historically relied

on to avoid critically engaging with their often unquestioned relationship with masculinity. By this, I mean that while men can, and often do, avoid and disengage from conversations regarding feminism and women’s issues, men cannot so easily circumvent the conversations forced by rhetoricized Critical

Masculinities Studies—and there is tremendous power in this forced identification and concomitant critical focus.

Overview of the Project, Research Questions, and Objectives

In this project, I propose and develop normative masculine ideology as a generative rhetorical construct. I advance this rhetorical construct within a social-epistemic situatedness that foregrounds the ideological underpinnings of modern masculinity. I locate normative masculine ideology within Rhetoric and

Composition’s emerging scholarship on gender-informed rhetorical embodiment, or what I position as gendered rhetorical embodiment. This positioning, within conversations of rhetorical embodiment, is necessary because it both 1) facilitates the discussion of the embodiment and re/production of ideologies and 2) enables insights from Critical Masculinities scholarship to substantively extend our field’s conceptions of rhetorical embodiment from a gendered lens. Ostensibly, this project is concerned with theory building, with developing an explanatory construct that accounts for masculinity and its problematics. To be clear, no such totalizing theory exists, and I have no interest in proposing such a grandiose theory. Instead, I have been intentional in labeling my construct of normative masculine ideology as a generative rhetorical construct to indicate that the

17 rhetorical theory building that does occur within this project is also foundational and suggestive. More than to name a particular phenomenon, I propose normative masculine ideology as a concept for generating new lines of inquiry within and beyond our discussions of gendered rhetorical embodiment.

To that end, this dissertation takes up the following questions:

● How has Rhetoric and Composition addressed issues of masculinity?

● In what ways can Critical Masculinities Studies contribute to Rhetoric and

Composition’s theorization and enactment of gender as a form of gendered

rhetorical embodiment?

● How might we define and forward normative masculine ideology in

relation to material and marked bodies in the re/production of specific and

privileged practices of gender?

● What does a gendered understanding of rhetorical embodiment look like?

● In what ways can a historical consciousness regarding modern masculinity

inform our scholarly engagements with masculinity and enable us to

disrupt and resist its cultural hegemony?

● How can normative masculine ideology inform a critical

reading/interrogation of masculine enactments (such as toxic

masculinity)? 18

● How can the conceptual tools of Rhetoric and Composition be best

leveraged in the pursuit of social justice in gender relations9 to critically

investigate and challenge our prevailing metanarratives of masculinity?

These research questions inform my objectives for this project, which are:

● To establish the need for Rhetoric and Composition to (re)engage with

issues of men and masculinities.

● To establish Critical Masculinities Studies as an emerging field whose

scholarship can contribute to Rhetoric and Composition.

● To propose normative masculine ideology as a synthesis of Critical

Masculinities scholarship relevant to scholars in Rhetoric and

Composition.

● To theorize normative masculine ideology as a rhetorical construct with

critical applications for Rhetoric and Composition.

● To position normative masculine ideology as a generative construct (e.g.,

as an invention heuristic) that can invigorate and enable new lines of

scholarly inquiry in the field beyond the applications suggested in this

project.

9 I am influenced here by Raewyn Connell, who declared in her landmark text Masculinities that “The baseline for the analysis in this book is social justice: the objective possibility of justice in gender relations, a possibility sometimes realized and sometimes not” (44). While my concern may be social justice in gender relations, gender is one structural position within a larger matrix. An intersectional understanding of gender as only one nodal point in a larger, tangled system means that pursuing social justice in gender relations is also, at least implicitly, concerned with pursuing social justice at a broader level: race, class, sexuality, ability, etc. 19

In the remainder of this introduction, I provide further rationale for engaging with masculinities, address several necessary ethical considerations in the study of masculinities, and preview the subsequent chapters that comprise this project.

The Politics of Masculinity: A Rationale for Engagement with and Resistance to

Masculinity

“But things are better now,” I've been reminded. “The future is progressive,” I've been informed. “It's not like you have anything to worry about,”

I've been reassured. Unfortunately, such responses have been both lauded by

Panglossian progressives to propagandize hopefulness and wielded by defensive traditionalist-types to curtail and undermine inconveniently vexing conversations about mechanisms of power and privilege—particularly for those whose structural positions10 locate them at intersections of such power and privilege. To be sure, the it’s-better-now-than-sometime-before and the-next-generation-will-bring-change sorts of disengagements are predicated on a mixture of indifference and passivity (even when employed optimistically). But, it is that latter type of withdrawal—the egocentric and indignant it-doesn’t-concern-you disengagement—that is decidedly underscored with an

10 I’m borrowing the term structural positions from feminist theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, who uses the term to denote sociopolitical categories generally assigned at birth such as “gender, race, class, religion, heterosexualism, and age” (10). Fiorenza employs the term in her concept of kyriarchy, which “is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social and religious structures of superordination and subordination” (9). While appearing similar to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality as advanced in “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” (1989), Fiorenza’s concept differs from Crenshaw’s in that it attempts to theorize the system that results from interlocking oppressions. 20 alarming sense of antipathy and unexamined self-righteousness. The logic here is that such platitudes of progress, of better circumstances, of not my problem should be sufficient enough to dismiss our nation's legacy of social, racial, sexual segregation and victimization. The logic here is that through recognizing my privilege in society as an able-bodied straight, White cisgendered male-identified heterosexual person I should be content to reorient my gaze forward and upward.

That I just need to be reminded a few more times to accept my right to a life of comfort, and excess, and blissful ignorance, ensconced in that fictive American

Dream of a mostly White suburb in a mostly affluent community with a mostly perfect woman in a mostly positive monogamous matrimony with our mostly capable 2.4 children. All I need to do is want to be complicit enough to grab my conveniently located bootstraps and step over and on top of whomever I need. To be, in no uncertain terms, man11 enough to take what’s mine.

And yet, how can I willingly sleepwalk through this gifted American

Dream when so many Others are subjected to the sociopolitical nightmare of an

“imperialist, capitalist, ableist, hetero-normative, patriarchal, white-supremacist machine”? Consider briefly the triumvirate of perennial umbrella social issues at the forefront of America’s political consciousness: racism, homophobia and transphobia, and sexism and misogyny.

11 While gendered expressions like these (“man up!”) are problematic, my use here is intentional and twofold. In short, this term foregrounds both the phallogocentrism that props up such discourses and alludes to the critical investigation of the rhetoricity of masculinity that this project will undertake. 21

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments that abolished slavery and provided the most basic of rights to people of color (though effectively African American men) were written into law 149 years ago. And yet, racial inequalities in a 'post-racial' America are still abhorrent. In the foreground, continued systematic and institutional sabotage—not to mention rising levels of prejudice borne of jingoistic zeal and xenophobia— afflict the daily personal and professional lives of people of color in both obvious and rather subtle (although still significant) capacities. At the same, in the background12 , White supremacists and other right-wing extremists have enjoyed relative obscurity while continuing to be the leading cause of domestic terror (Anti-Defamation League). Racial bias in media coverage has been well documented, and this disparity is only the tip of a very White iceberg predicated upon White supremacy and White privilege.

What’s more, our sexualities and sexual identities are still the subject of political legislation and social inscription and sanction, mired in the problematic logics of heteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality (Ahmed; Rich). It has been forty-nine years since the Stonewall Riots and America has recognized same-sex marriage (a relatively superficial metric of equality in its own right) in all fifty states for only the last handful of years. Even this negligible victory has been marred by the religious and conservative right who continue to try and manufacture folk heroes out of bigots who refuse to offer marriage licenses or

12 As comedian Ken Cheng noted on Twitter, “terrorism is one of the only areas where white people do most of the work and get none of the credit.” 22 bake cakes13 . More unsettling, trans individuals are still fighting for the most basic acknowledgments (such as visibility and personhood) and anti-discrimination protections to feel safe outside of their own homes, if even they feel safe there.

And, of course, sexism and misogyny, which as much as it is or will be a mainstay of the lived experience of some 300+ million individuals in the United

States, continues to loom even larger in our periphery and persistently threatens to regress our efforts towards gender justice. Consider just one ever germane example of sexist and misogynistic politics: reproductive rights. Fifteen years before I was born, the United States Supreme Court—in response to the indomitable efforts of feminist activists—made a landmark decision in granting women the constitutional right to seek an abortion. However, in my home state of

Ohio, in 2018, Governor John Kasich signed one of the most restrictive bans on abortion in the nation while seven other states have only one abortion provider in the entire state (Balmert). These facts don’t even take into consideration the numerous restrictions and ridiculous rigamarole women must endure, including external impediments such as potential bodily harm and/or harassment from protestors and financial constraints when seeking a legal, constitutionally protected medical procedure.

13 While instances of discrimination in this venue are plentiful, I’m referring here to a pair of instances that gained international media attention: Kentucky clerk Kim Davis, who gained notoriety in 2015 when she refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses (Martinez) and Jack Phillips, who was absolved of discrimination in 2018 for refusing to bake a cake for a same-sex couple (Sanders). 23

With so much work still to attend to regarding these and other social issues, I’ve often been asked by colleagues and friends why I would choose to allocate my resources into talking about men and masculinity? And, furthermore, why should they want to spare any of their already stretched-thin resources in an effort to become more cognizant of men and masculinities? These questions are fair, but as I alluded to in the beginning of this chapter, the answer is surprisingly simple: the bedrock of America’s (inequitable) social and political systems, of its cultural zeitgeist, is one of deeply entrenched and unproblematized traditionalist masculinity politics (Connell, Messner)14 situated within a patriarchal legacy that fosters gendered subject positions and social relations that encourage and support a system of inequity and oppression through overdetermined, outsized, and culturally-enforced restrictive gender ideologies. Stated in other terms, I choose to talk about men and masculinities because our shared cultural consciousness around masculinities—one that operates on retrograde and rigid boundaries—enables the system that produces the conditions for gender and other social injustices. I choose to talk about men and masculinities because the field of Rhetoric and Composition has made little inroads on the subject despite our conceptual tools and knowledge having much to offer to such an analysis. I

14 In Masculinities, Connell defines masculinity politics as “those mobilizations and struggles where the meaning of masculine gender is at issue, and, with it, men's position in gender relations. In such politics masculinity is made a principal theme, not taken for granted as background" and further describes masculinity politics as “the making of the gendered power that is deployed in those issues. It is a force in the background of some of the most fateful issues of our time" (205). While masculinity politics can also refer to oppositional and progressive efforts by men to challenge the status quo, these efforts have not generated social change in the way that traditional and conservative masculinity politics have (adversely) affected society. 24 choose to talk about men and masculinities because while I cannot exist outside of my own privileged affordances, I can work to uniquely leverage that privilege in an effort to mark, interrogate, and subvert its existence.

Ethical Considerations in the Study of Masculinities

When I’ve discussed my research interests with colleagues, their responses have run the gamut from out-and-out encouragement to outright incredulity. I understand that for some readers, Critical Masculinities Studies and, particularly, the notion of dominant masculine ideologies/enactments that I explore in this project—masculinities largely imbricated with the logics of White heteropatriarchy—are met with varying amounts of reservation, trepidation, and/or skepticism. In this section, I feel compelled to address these very real and warranted concerns.

To be candid, given that (White) men in the academy do not have a stellar track record with regards to the mis/use, appropriation, and reconceptualization of disciplinary knowledge, how can varying levels of reservation and trepidation not be expected? In addition to this history of social, political, and institutional domination by men, how can one not be skeptical of (White) men proclaiming to critically interrogate the patriarchal bargain and patriarchal dividend that conferred them with such undue social and cultural capital in the first place? As

Connell contends in Masculinities, because of both the history and the power dynamics inherit in these inquiries, “are explosive and tangled, the chances of going astray are good” (ix). As to minimize those chances of going astray, we need 25 transparency, situatedness, and a meta-awareness of our potential pitfalls. First and foremost, critical work with men and masculinities must be cognizant of its own tendencies, especially as the field nears disciplinary codification.

Additionally, critical work that takes up inherently problematic or precarious inquiries (such as proposing a generative working model of normative masculine ideology) needs to be clear and intentional in the aims of that work.

In “Academic Viagra: the Rise of American Masculinity Studies,” Bryce

Traister foregrounds the implicit bias in general discussions and mainstream understandings of Critical Masculinities Studies by referring to the field as

“heterosexual masculinity studies” and “American heteromasculinity studies”

(276). While I earlier noted how scholarship on men and masculinity that falls under the purview of Critical Masculinities Studies is quite diverse in its content, one only needs to consider the work of Michael Kimmel1516 , who is largely regarded as the poster child for current understandings of Critical Masculinities

Studies in America, to see that mainstream conversations of masculinity are indeed often concerned with and understood as inquiries into White, middle-class, straight men. My mention of Michael Kimmel here is not to criticize his work in and of itself, but rather to raise attention to the ways that Kimmel’s

15 For pertinent examples, see Manhood in America, Guyland, Angry White Men, and even his TedTalk “Why Gender Equality is Good for Everyone—Men Included.” 16 In August of 2018, Inside Higher Ed reported on allegations against Kimmel and his professional conduct. Specifically, a former graduate student wrote of “his explicit sexual talk, homophobia, transphobia and general ‘lack of respect’ for anyone but cisgender heterosexual men.” At the time of this writing, these allegations against Michael Kimmel are under investigation, and he currently maintains his position as Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. 26 figurehead status shades mainstream understandings of the breadth of Critical

Masculinities Studies scholarship. With that said, I want to reiterate that my research is not concerned with apologetics for or a defense of White or hegemonically positioned men, masculinities, or maleness. To be clear, nothing short of radical reformation will bring about social justice in gender relations. In an era of emboldened White supremacy and the emergence of increasingly toxic and embattled groups of (White) men, the critical tools of Rhetoric and

Composition in interrogating these dominant ideologies is more prescient and necessary now than it has been in recent history.

The Organization of this Project

To this point, this introduction has established a precedent for taking seriously issues of masculinity by discussing how modern masculinity is imbricated with larger issues of social injustice. I have positioned Rhetoric and

Composition and Critical Masculinities Studies scholarship as a crucial intersection for further interrogating and resisting the metanarratives and sociopolitical implications of modern masculinity. In forwarding the questions that drive this project, I briefly outlined my framework of normative masculine ideology as a generative rhetorical construct to further explore these considerations in the chapters that follow.

In “Men and Masculinities: Critical Orientations and Necessary

Foundations” (chapter 2), I outline Critical Masculinities Studies as an emerging discipline and review Rhetoric and Composition’s engagement with issues of men 27 and masculinity since its first broaching in 1996. This chapter both 1) demonstrates how scholarship produced within Critical Masculinities Studies is leveraged in this project and 2) establishes a large gulf in Rhetoric and

Composition scholarship via its lack of shared language and functional frameworks in regards to issues of masculinity. Given our current sociopolitical climate and Rhetoric and Composition’s history of critically addressing social and cultural issues, a renewed engagement with masculinities is warranted in our critical/cultural and gendered-informed scholarship.

In “Normative Masculine Ideology as Gendered Rhetorical Embodiment:

Foundations for a Generative Rhetorical Construct” (chapter 3), I discuss the development of gender as a critical construct within our field and locate my project within these conversations—particularly within emerging discussions of rhetorical embodiment informed by social-epistemic rhetorics frameworks and

Critical Masculinities Studies theorization of the body (what I term as gendered rhetorical embodiment and social-epistemic situatedness in this project). Within these frameworks—gender, social epistemic situatedness, and gendered rhetorical embodiment—I introduce my construct of normative masculine ideology as a functional synthesis of prominent Critical Masculinities work on hegemonic masculinity (Connell, Connell and Messerschmidt) and traditional masculinity ideologies (Thompson, Jr., and Pleck; Pleck; Levant). Additionally, I position normative masculine as a rhetorical construct by foregrounding the 28 inherent rhetoricity of this scholarship to suggest how my synthesized construct can be leveraged by Rhetoric and Composition scholars in a critical capacity.

In “Historicity and the Need for Historical Consciousness in Theorizing

Normative Masculine Ideology” (chapter 4), I establish a historical context for the development of normative masculine ideology as a means of both 1) highlighting the constructed metanarratives that inform our mainstream understandings of masculinity and 2) pointing to potential historical inquiries that can be pursued with regards to modern masculinity’s development. I propose that the emergence of modern masculinity in the late 1700s is a technology of patriarchy/patriarchal legacy (Johnson), a technology that has centralized the male body in its perpetual re-negotiation for cultural hegemony. By understanding the history that engendered our current practices in relation to modern masculinity, we can further develop and enact critical constructs such as the one that I forward in this project for resisting and revising masculinity in the pursuit of gender and social justice.

In “Normative Masculine Ideology as Embodied and Bodily Practice: A

Social Framework with Sociopolitical Significance,” I extend my construct of normative masculine ideology by situating it within the practices of everyday life.

To explore the embodiment of normative masculine ideology, I draw on the concepts of habitus (Bourdieu) and folk psychology (Bruner) to discuss the interpretation of these ideologies; Then, I forward the frameworks of Discourse

(Gee) to explain the re/production of normative masculine ideology through 29 bodily, social practice. I conclude the chapter by addressing destructive, coercive, and socially inequitable forms of masculine identity—or what popular culture has labeled roughly as “Toxic Masculinity.” Such performances are, in short, overcompensating to idealized forms of masculinity predicated on normative masculine ideologies (i.e., a hyper-normative masculine ideology). This chapter showcases normative masculine ideology as a generative construct, providing the foundation for further social inquiries.

Conclusion

While my research interests in masculinity originates from 31 years of gendered subjectivity, the genesis of this particular project can be traced to the summer of 2015 when I made what I considered the rather uneventful decision to update my wardrobe after being informed that a man like myself was too young to still be wearing cargo shorts but too old to be wearing clothes from brands like

American Eagle. Although I had previously understood fashion at a material level, I had not fully grasped the level at which culturally-favored and sanctioned forms of fashion (e.g. GQ) were not only ideological, political, and rhetorical but also a significant element of how individuals perform and attribute gender ideologies (Edwards). My sartorial choices were more than mere fashion choices; they were also my capitulation to and participation in a system of normative expectations around my masculinity that would enable me to take advantage of the privileges associated with a culturally dominant and advantageous form of 30 dress, especially when paired with my easily identifiable structural positions

(namely, being an able-bodied presumably straight, White cisgendered man).

Since that summer, I have become more aware of how my masculinity has acted as a fortress. But, I’ve also become aware of how those vaunted walls also double as a prison. I’ve come to believe that contesting and reforming the normative masculine ideologies that produce this paradoxical fortress/prison location that many male-identified bodies inhabit and many non-male-identified bodies participate in is not only possible, but necessary. Challenging and changing the deeply entrenched cultural myths that produce inequitable social, societal, micro- and macro-political relations is not only possible, but necessary.

Having become conscious of that reality, this project emanates from a wellspring deep within me, from an ideological and epistemological shift marked by a growing discomfort in the social and political relations, in the de facto privileges and cultural capital, that my body, and bodies like mine, re/produce and embody through our daily in/actions and political commitments. Bodies that are inscribed and regulated as male vis-a-vis their masculinity, bodies that are rhetorical projects of sociocultural politics and gender ideologies, bodies that are always recognized and interpreted as the former (“masculine”) while often rendered invisible or inconsequential as the latter (“rhetorical projects of sociocultural politics and gender ideologies”).

In undertaking this project, I have been influenced by Gail Ukockis who, in the preface to Women’s Issues for a New Generation, writes of her own project: 31

"In one way, this book is a form of activism. The first step for any type of activism is education not only about the specific issue... but the wider framework of that issue" (xv). Similarly, I view this project as a form of activism—a form of activism built on the necessity of change, and a form of activism predicated on the pursuit of social justice in gender relations17 . I hope that this project works toward the production of new and the reclamation of old knowledge about ourselves as interpellated sociopolitical and culturally-gendered bodies through the development of more inquiring and critical relationships with our gendered realities through the conceptual frameworks of rhetorical theory and critical literacies. It is my belief that progress is possible but that progress is not inevitable. This dissertation is one effort toward progress.

17 I am influenced here by Raewyn Connell, who declared in her landmark text Masculinities that “The baseline for the analysis in this book is social justice: the objective possibility of justice in gender relations, a possibility sometimes realized and sometimes not” (44). While my concern may be social justice in gender relations, gender is one structural position within a larger matrix. An intersectional understanding of gender as only one nodal point in a larger, tangled system means that pursuing social justice in gender relations is also, at least implicitly, concerned with pursuing social justice at a broader level: race, class, sexuality, ability, etc. 32

CHAPTER 2: MEN AND MASCULINITIES: CRITICAL ORIENTATIONS AND

NECESSARY FOUNDATIONS

Given our current sociopolitical climate—the wake of the 2016 election,

#MeToo movement and the Time’s Up initiative, a burgeoning number of

Women’s marches (Beckers), a record number of women voted into congress

(Desilver), prominent male figures claiming the mantle of feminist (Feasey), and the expected reactionary backlash to these efforts at social progress—it should not be surprising that we are reaching a critical mass in regards to men and masculinity in the American mainstream. Since the late 60s/early 70s, radical18 and visionary/revolutionary feminists (hooks) have been drawing significant attention to men through the theorization of patriarchy and gendered power dynamics. These conversations have heightened cultural consciousness to male privilege and power structures that have reified the position of men within societal and social systems. However, unlike our past conversations about men and masculinity, today’s focus on men is... different. For starters, the participation in and promulgation of the critical examination of men (in the public sphere) has greatly benefited from the degree to which these discussions

18 My use of the term radical here is informed by Rosemarie Tong and Tina Fernandes Botts examination provided in “Radical Feminism” in their text Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Examination. In brief, the pair outline the term from the perspectives of radical-libertarian and radical-cultural orientations. 33 have become popular19 , by which I mean occuring at an increasing frequency outside of the academy and/or activist movements (i.e. “mainstream”).

For instance, for many individuals, patriarchy and intersectionality are no longer obtuse, academic terms, having reached a level of shared understanding the like that critical terms such as post-structuralist or deconstructionism have not. The emergence of patriarchy and intersectionality as public concepts—bolstered by the emergence of both queer theory and intersectional feminism—and a political-activist rallying point20 has laid the foundation for mainstream conversations that can attend to both institutionalized systems of male power (patriarchy, broadly defined) and the ways of being in which certain men define and express themselves as men (that is, maleness and masculinity as an enacted and constructed subject position). The groundwork of these feminists, coupled with sustained efforts in Critical

Masculinities Studies, has resulted in individuals, especially male-identified individuals, beginning to question and resist the problematic practices that surface when they pursue traditional masculine subjectivities.

While this trend is encouraging, especially for those interested in Gender

Studies and Critical Masculinities Studies, we still have much work to do to sustain and continue these developments, especially within Rhetoric and

19 While it can be argued that women’s movements brought these issues to public discourse beginning in the late 60s through the 80s, these conversations were limited in their scope, often to the participating groups and traditional media coverage. Today, these conversations are occuring in our movies, music, memes, and across our social media, not to mention the ease of access to a number of feminist new sources and the wealth of content hosted on Youtube. 20 For example, the popular phrase “smash the patriarchy” has become a commonplace amongst many feminists. 34

Composition. Within our field, these conversations are nascent and lack shared language and functional frameworks. While the term patriarchy has become commonplace, other productive terms like hegemonic masculinity have not yet fully filtered into our scholarly and pedagogical considerations. Although feminist theory, women’s issues, and Critical Masculinities Studies work can be (and increasingly is) cut from the same cloth, I’ve found it quite a common assumption that Critical Masculinities scholarship lies wholly outside of feminist and Gender

Studies frameworks. Perhaps several decades ago, this assessment would have been somewhat true, but, increasingly, considerations of Critical Masculinities work are being incorporated into contemporary discussions of gender at both the academic and popular level. Many of my colleagues that I have spoken with have also assumed that Critical Masculinities scholarship has no history within

Rhetoric and Composition. While this assessment is not surprising given Critical

Masculinities scant presence in our field, it is also an oversimplification. In short, both our current lack of critical engagement with masculinities given our current sociopolitical climate and the erasure of the history of masculinities work within our field is problematic and in need of redressing.

In this chapter, I establish the need for scholarly work on men and masculinities in Rhetoric and Composition by detailing how little scholarship has been produced since the mid-1990s. That is, despite first appearing in our literature in 1996, critical scholarship on masculinities, let alone a framework for interrogating masculinities, still remains in its nascent stages. Because many 35 readers may be unfamiliar with Critical Masculinities Studies, I find it imperative to first sketch the contours of Critical Masculinities Studies as a site for academic inquiry and provide context/clarification of Critical Masculinities Studies as a field in formation before detailing Rhetoric and Composition’s scholarly engagement with issues of men and masculinities. More pointedly, in “Critical

Masculinities Studies: What It Is (And What It Isn’t),” I offer an overview of the emerging field of Critical Masculinities Studies. I locate myself within its dominant sociological paradigm and highlight its theorization of masculinities as is relevant to this project and the field of Rhetoric and Composition. Then, I address the commonly misunderstood relationship/conflation between Critical

Masculinities Studies and the men’s (rights) movements. With that context provided, in “Men and Masculinities Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition,” I review the scholarship on men and masculinities that has taken place within the field of Rhetoric and Composition since the mid-1990s. This survey highlights the field’s (dis)engagement with masculinity as a critical concept and suggests many gaps in our knowledge, gaps that this project and subsequent investigations can work to close. 36

Critical Masculinities Studies: What It Is (And What It Isn’t)

Critical Masculinities Studies21 is an emerging discipline and field of inquiry that takes men (predominantly though not exclusively) and masculinity as its subject of inquiry. It investigates the “many ways in which [individuals] have defined, imagined, and experienced male identity [and masculinity] in the social, cultural, and political contexts” (Carroll 1). Sociologist and Professor of

Gender Studies Stephen Whitehead describes a central objective of Critical

Masculinities Studies as “turn[ing] attention to men [and masculinities] in a way that renders them and their practices visible, apparent and subject to question, and to undertake this examination with an explicit political intent” (402). For

Whitehead, and many other scholars, a fundamental concern is power and privilege —“that is, how is men’s power experienced, manifested, exercised, resisted and produced? Furthermore, to what extent is this power patriarchal, hegemonic, discursive, socially constructed or functional?”— at the personal, institutional, and societal levels (Whitehead 402). For many scholars, the explicit

(or implicit) political intent in their work is the pursuit of gender justice and gender self-determination for men, women, and individuals beyond that binary by interrogating the cultural positioning of men and the cultural constructions of masculinity.

21 This emerging field has variously been referred to as Men’s Studies, the Study of/Studies on Men and Masculinity/ies, Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities, Masculinity Studies. In this project, I use the term Critical Masculinities Studies and/or Critical Masculinities. Although this term is not the most commonly used to name this discipline, I prefer it because it i) foregrounds the interrogative and challenging orientation of the field and ii) it emphasizes the multiplicative and dynamic landscape that is masculinity while not relegating it solely to the male body. 37

Because Critical Masculinities Studies has not been centralized within the academy as of yet22 , its scope and boundaries can appear quite amorphous.

Similar to Rhetoric and Composition’s tendency to import theories and methodologies from other disciplines, Critical Masculinities Studies methodologies and areas of inquiry have been located in and informed by many disparate academic disciplines, such as anthropology, history, politics, literary studies, media studies, psychology, sociology, and religion. As an example of this scholarly fecundity, consider a survey of general thematic categories covered in several established encyclopedias and handbooks on men and masculinities. Bret

Carroll’s American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (2003) presents articles within fourteen broad categories: Art and Literature; Body and Health;

Class, Ethnic, and Racial Identities; Concepts and Theories; Family and

Fatherhood; Historical Events and Processes; Icons and Symbols; Leisure and

Work; Media and Popular Culture; Movements and Organizations; People;

Political and Social Issues; Religion and Spirituality; and Sexual Identities and

Sexuality. Michael Kimmel, Jeff Hearn, and R.W. Connell’s Handbook of Studies on Men & Masculinities (2005) organizes its essays under the headings of

22 Although Critical Masculinities Studies has yet to establish a centralized foothold within the academy, recent developments suggest disciplinarity may be imminent. For instance, the University of Calgary has started the first program in Masculinity Studies in North America, and Stony Brook University is rumored to be launching the USA’s first advanced degree in Masculinity Studies in Fall 2019. While there are many markers of disciplinarity, codifying and legitimizing a field of study through conferring advanced degrees is a strong push for institutional disciplinarity. Even in the absence of an advanced degree, Women and Gender Studies departments are increasingly incorporating issues of men and masculinity within their curricula, suggesting that WGS departments may become the de facto location for Critical Masculinities work within the academy. 38 theoretical perspectives; global and regional patterns; structures, institutions, and processes; bodies, selves, discourses; and politics. Rachel Adams and David

Savran’s The Masculinity Studies Reader (2002) approaches the field through the broad lenses of eroticism, social sciences, representations, empire and modernity, and borders. Michael Flood, Judith Keagan Gardiner, Bob Pease, and

Keith Pringle’s International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities (2007) divides its vast number of entries across the following themes: Boyhood; Aging and Adulthood; Intimate Relations; Sexuality; Fatherhood; Violence and Crime;

Health; Work, Class, and Economic Relations; Institutions; Bodies;

Representations; Arts; Literature; Theoretical and Disciplinary Perspectives on

Men and Masculinities; Forms of Masculinity; Cultural Formations; Histories and Historical Formations; Masculinity Politics; Working with Men and Boys.

Despite the vast interdisciplinary influences and pastiche nature that still characterize Critical Masculinity Studies today, a paradigm shift of sorts began in the late-1980s.

The Sociological Turn in Critical Masculinities Studies

In 1995, a mounting paradigm shift predicated on sociological frameworks crystalised with Australian sociologist R.W. Connell’s publication of

Masculinities, one of the most widely cited and regarded works within the field. On the heels of Connel’s watershed text, American sociologist Michael Kimmel would publish his own landmark text on American men with Manhood in America: A Cultural History in 1996. The critical success of these texts 39 established one of the first, and still, dominant paradigms for the research on men and masculinities, namely one informed by sociology and the social sciences.

More importantly, for the purposes of this project, I draw attention to this development because I locate my own understanding of Critical Masculinities Studies within this sociological paradigm. Given its (pro)feminist orientation, its sensitivity to and the centrality of intersectional frameworks to its epistemology, and because of its sociology of gender, this understanding and application of

Critical Masculinities Studies is pivotal to this project and our field. It both clearly delineates Critical Masculinities Studies from essentialist conceptions of men and masculinities and also enables masculinities to be theorized as a rhetorical project.

An exhaustive overview of the tenets of Critical Masculinities Studies is not of immediate concern here; however, given both my focus in this project and what I have perceived as a general unfamiliarity (and sometimes misinformed presumptions) with this still-coalescing field’s orientation towards masculinity, I will elaborate on Critical Masculinities Studies social constructionist23

23 Given that social constructionism, particularly as it relates to gender, is tantamount to a threshold concept for many within the humanities and social sciences, an extensive discussion is not warranted within the space of this project. However, I will note that my understanding of gender as a postmodern, poststructural social construct can be traced over a handful of touchstone texts published between 1968 to 1998. These foundational texts include Anne Oakley’s Sex, Gender, and Society (1972), Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna’s Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (1978); Anne Fausto-Sterling’s The Myths of Gender (1985) and "The Five Sexes" (1993); Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s "Doing Gender" (1987); Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988) and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990); Judith Lorber’s Paradoxes of Gender (1994); RW Connell’s Masculinities (1995); Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996); Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman (1997), and Jack Halberstam’s Female Masculinities (1998). 40 theorization of masculinity and men via the scholarship of R.W. Connell. One of

Connell’s most significant contributions to Critical Masculinities Studies is her theorization of masculinity in the mid-80s that brought then-recent developments within gender scholarship into discussions of men and masculinity in order to advance a relational framework for understanding and investigating masculinity24 . Whereas sex/gender-role theories through the 1970s continued to forward limited and rigid conceptions of masculinity that still permeate our cultural understandings of gender today through stereotypes and proclamations of natural male behavior rooted in biology (e.g., “boys will be boys”), Connell’s work provided an early counter-voice, arguing for a richer and more dynamic understanding of men and masculinity. Primarily, Connell foregrounded the plurality of masculine experience while challenging the sex/gender conflation that plagued earlier discussions of masculinity. For Connell:

To speak of masculinities is to speak about gender relations. Masculinities are not equivalent to men; they concern the position of men in a gender order. They can be defined as the patterns of practice by which people (both men and women, though predominantly men) engage that position.

A fundamental tenet of contemporary gender scholarship is that gender is, in sum, socially constructed—culturally maintained/enforced and multivarious in expression/performance—and Connell’s work helped to centralize this understanding as a threshold concept within the early formation of Critical

24 Connell’s relational framework advanced the widely employed concept of hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity will be discussed in more detail in chapter three. 41

Masculinities Studies research2526. In addition to its other implications, this understanding of masculinities aligns with Rhetoric and Composition’s understanding of texts as socially constructed and mediated through the dialectic of individuals and their rhetorical contexts, which positions masculinity as a rhetorical project.

Critical Masculinities Studies and the Men’s (Rights) Movement

As I mentioned previously, it has not been an uncommon occurrence in my discussions with people unfamiliar with Critical Masculinities Studies to encounter inaccurate presumptions about this field. One frequent source of this confusion derives from the conflation and/or mistaking of Critical Masculinities

Studies with the men’s movement. This confusion often causes concerted discussions of men and masculinity to be pervaded with a knee-jerk skepticism and recalcitrance. And given the predominance of the mythopoetic men’s movement through the 1990s and recent negative developments within the mainstream men’s movement(s)—take, for instance, the entrenchment of the

25 Other seminal texts that helped to cement this axiom within early critical conversations regarding men and masculinity are Candace West and Don Zimmerman’s “Doing Gender,” published in Gender and Society in 1987 and Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America: A Cultural History, published in 1996. Judith Butler’s “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” published in Theatre Journal in 1988 and Gender Trouble, published in 1990 are worth mentioning here as well; however, Butler’s work had a more pronounced effect on the emerging area of queer theory than on early discussions of men and masculinity. 26 An example of the proliferation of masculinities within contemporary conversations in the field can be found in The International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities. While no means exhaustive, this encyclopedia discusses no less than nineteen embodiments/enactments of masculinity: 1) African-American, 2) Asian-American, 3) Australian, 4) Chinese, 5) Colonial and imperial, 6) Diasporic and migrant, 7) East European, 8) Gay, 9) Global, 10) Indian, 11) Indigenous and First Nations, 12) Japanese, 13) Jewish, 14) Mexican, 15) Military, 16) Postcolonial, 17) Queer, 18) South Asian, and 19) Marginalised.

#NotAllMen mentality (Zimmerman); the emergence of online communities via

Reddit and 4chan like MGTOW and Red Pill; and the rise in popularity of various anti-feminist fringe groups and individuals like Gavin McInnes and the Proud

Boys (“Proud Boys”), Richard Spencer and the Alt-Right (“Alt-Right”), and Milo

Yiannopoulos, just to name a few—such skepticism and recalcitrance is quite understandable. However, at this point it should go without much explication that the aims and pronouncements of men’s rights activists are far removed from, if not diametrically opposed and antithetical to, the aims and insights of Critical

Masculinities Studies.

As to not put too fine of a point on this discussion of distinctions, the men’s rights movement is often also understood to be synonymous with the men’s movement. Such an understanding of the men’s movement as some singular, unified effort is equally as problematic as conflating the men’s rights movement with Critical Masculinities work. Commenting on the plurality of the men’s movement, Starhawk states, “Of course, the men’s movement is no more a single monolith than is the feminist movement. There are ten, a dozen, fifty different men’s movements. Some of them make me break into a cold sweat.

Others involve the men I most deeply love and respect” (27). Although I see little benefit in cataloging fifty or more distinct men’s movements, an overview of the major strands within the men’s movement will suffice to illuminate the obfuscating pall of the men’s rights movement and position it in relation to and from the aims and objectives of critical work on men and masculinities. 43

The men’s movement in America can be understood as five overlapping strands: men’s liberation, anti-sexist or profeminist, men’s rights and father’s rights, spiritual and mythopoetic, and Christian (Flood 419-20). Although somewhat similar, the men’s liberation strand “focuses on the damage, isolation and suffering inflicted on boys and men through their socialisation into manhood” (420) while the anti-sexist or profeminist strand aligns itself more closely with women’s movements, particularly second-wave feminism.

Antithetical to the profeminist strand, the men’s rights and father right’s strand is, usually, decidedly anti-feminist and even misogynistic, often scapegoating women and other disenfranchised groups to maintain patriarchal/hegemonic power structures. For many individuals, and before men’s rights activists co-opted the national spotlight, the mythopoetic strand served as the posterchild for the men’s movement in the early 1990s following the release of Robert Bly’s

Iron John. More than the others, this particular strand focused on self- and spiritual-healing, drawing inspiration from Jungian psychology (and, of course, from Bly). Finally, the Christian strand draws guidance from scripture and other religious teachings to establish and reify more traditional gender roles. Although

I do not wish to belabor the point, I do want to reiterate that these strands are overlapping strands, they are generally descriptive, not absolutely proscriptive. Previously, I stated that it was a mistake to conflate Critical Masculinities

Studies with the men’s movement, but that does not mean there is no relationship between Critical Masculinities Studies and the various men’s

44 movements. Of the strands previously discussed, the men’s liberation strand has found the most purchase in the work of masculinity scholars. Scholars such as

William Pollack, Jackson Katz, Alan Johnson, and Michael Kimmel have addressed the issues of socialization and manhood in various capacities.

Furthermore, liberal adherents within the profeminist strand have also influenced discussions of masculinity, but their greater impact has been seen outside of the academy in activist efforts and organizations, such as the previously mentioned HeforShe (gender equality) and the NBA’s partnership with LeanIn (women’s support and empowerment), in addition to other longstanding organizations such as NOMAS (National Organization for Men

Against Sexism), Men Can Stop Rape (men’s violence against women), and the

White Ribbon Campaign (men’s violence against women). And, while the other three strands have not contributed significantly to masculinity scholarship proper, each have served as fodder for investigation and critique within both

Critical Masculinities and Women’s Studies. Having contextualized Critical

Masculinities Studies broadly, I now turn my attention to the scholarship on men and masculinities within the field of Rhetoric and Composition.

Men and Masculinities Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition

Despite Rhetoric and Composition’s interdisciplinary origins and its inroads with feminist-informed theories and inquires, the landscape of scholarship concerning men and masculinities is rather barren: several articles, several books, and a handful of conference presentations mark this relatively 45

untrodden sub-field. Given this relative dearth of scholarship, I approach this literature review somewhat unconventionally. Before I discuss the scholarship on men and masculinities that does exist within Rhetoric and Composition, I first examine a variety of sources from which critical engagements with men and masculinities is absent. By pointing to the dis-locations of these critical conversations in our field, I underscore the necessity for further developing our understanding of masculinities as a rhetorical project with the potential to invigorate our critical and liberatory cultural scholarship and pedagogical practices.

The Absence of Critical Masculinities in Rhetoric and Composition

I want to begin this review of absent scholarship by discussing Rhetoric Review’s 2007 Survey of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition (Brown, Enos, Reamer, and Thompson). I start here because Rhetoric Review’s survey offers both a cursory glance at the field’s most evident/visible values as represented through its institutional programs and how the field may value the scholarship being produced by doctoral students at those institutions. Of the then

78 programs affiliated with the Doctoral Consortium in Rhetoric and

Composition, the survey collected data from 67 programs, accounting for nearly

86% of the represented field. Stuart Brown, Theresa Enos, David Reamer, and

Jason Thompson analyzed and reported on the data, and while the analysis is interesting in its own right, for my purposes, I am particularly interested in their categorization of dissertation types.

From the 1,025 dissertations completed between 2000 and 2007, the authors derived 20 categories: rhetoric/composition pedagogy, theory of rhetoric and/or composition, technology and communication, history of rhetoric and/or composition, literacy studies, literary studies (rhetorical emphasis), rhetorical criticism, nonacademic or workplace studies, political rhetoric, linguistics, visual rhetoric, theory of technical/professional communication, writing center studies, technical/professional communication pedagogy, writing across the curriculum, program evaluation or assessment, writing program administration, medical rhetoric, history of technical/professional communication, and other. As can be noted from the above categorization, “masculinity” is absent (perhaps expectedly so). However, what’s notably absent is a category like “gender,” “feminist scholarship,” or even a catchall term like “gender/race/class.” When contrasted with the authors’ statement that “new categories… such as studies of visual, medical, and political rhetoric” emerged, the lack of acknowledgment for a relatively long standing topic of inquiry like gender is telling—though given the field’s tendency to marginalize feminist concerns and issues, not surprising. I want to be clear that I am not insinuating that these authors hold dismissive attitudes toward scholarship on gender or masculinity27 . However, at the very least, when considering the expectations, values, and attitudes of their primary

27 Considering Theresa Enos published Gender Roles and Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition in 1996, at least one of the authors in this survey is very attuned to such scholarship 47 audience, the authors appear to not have been compelled to discuss or mention scholarship centering on gender or feminist concerns28 .

To this point, I’ve been concerned with the authors’ statements on what qualifies as valuable and appropriate for study via their categorization of dissertation types. Such an investigation has its merits but is, admittedly, limited.

Fortunately, the authors made available the full survey data for each of the 67 programs that responded to the survey in a keyword-searchable PDF. This data included a wealth of information on each program, but of importance to my purpose here is the information regarding the specialization of core faculty and recent dissertations. Unsurprisingly, key terms such as “men,” “man,” and

“masculinity” yielded no results29 . Broadening the scope to include the more inclusive term “gender,” the data reveals that only 3 of the established faculty/scholars have a listed interest in gender, a factor that likely contributes to the lack of dissertations concerned with gender—at least of those reported. Again, the lack of masculinity or gender concerns/interest in the full survey data does not prove that these topics are absent from the field. However, these findings do suggest that, despite encouraging developments within feminist strands of research and representation, masculinity is, at best, a fringe concern (and, at

28 I find this omission even more grievous when considering that the authors felt compelled to recognize (and legitimize) a niche area like medical rhetoric but not acknowledge, in the very least, the scholarship being produced within feminist inquiries. 29 As a point of comparison, the keywords “woman,” “women,” “feminism,”and “feminist” appeared in the title’s of 9 dissertations and in the stated specialties of 47 faculty. 48

worst, a non-concern) for both established and soon-to-be professionals within

Rhetoric and Composition as late as 2007.

Another approach to determine how masculinity is represented in

Rhetoric and Composition is to examine its presence within collected anthologies that attempt to represent important issues within the field at large, particularly for enculturating members. To that end, I have selected the third edition of

NCTE’s Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva and Kristin Arola and published in 2011, and The Norton Book of Composition Studies, edited by Susan Miller and published in 2009, as a general litmus test. In the preface to Cross-Talk, Villanueva states, “My hope—our hope, Kristin’s and mine—is that this collection will continue to serve the needs of those coming into the conversations in our community of theorists of the teaching of writing” (xiv).

So, given this hope, how is the conversation regarding masculinity? In a phrase, not so well. Cross-Talk contains 43 articles spanning six major sections, but only Elizabeth Flynn’s “Composing as a Woman” entertains a discussion of masculinity, or at least the development of male-identified students and how their gender expresses/manifests itself in their writing. Several other articles—Gesa Kirsch and Joy Ritchie’s “Theorizing a Politics of Location in

Composition Studies,” Joy Ritchie and Kathleen Boardman’s “Feminism in

Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption,” and Cynthia Selfe and

Richard Selfe’s “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic

Contact Zones”—include discussions of gender within their larger arguments, but

I’d hesitate to code these as strong instances of discussions centered on masculinity. In the case of Cross-Talk, then, for someone attempting to familiarize themselves with the “relevant” conversations occurring in

Composition and Rhetoric, considerations of gender is only about 9% relevant at the most generous estimate, though 2% is likely a more accurate estimation for attention directed toward masculinity.

Unfortunately, though not unexpectedly, The Norton Book of Composition Studies fairs even less favorably despite containing more than double the articles of Cross-Talk. Furthermore, Miller’s goal for The Norton Book of Composition Studies—“to be a collection that supports a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses, among them composition theory, teaching practica, and introduction to composition studies” (xxxii)—intimates that its scope is also more ambitious than Cross-Talk. And yet, of the 102 articles collected in the anthology, no article substantively addresses masculinity, and only 4 articles—Linda

Brodkey’s “On the Subjects of Class and Gender in ‘The Literacy Letters,’” Lynn

Worshams’ “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion,”

Rebecca Moore Howard’s “Sexuality, Textuality: the Cultural Work of

Plagiarism,” and Russel Durst’s “Writing at the Postsecondary Level30”— engage discussions of gender. Certainly “comprehensive” anthologies such as Cross-Talk

30 In this article from 2006, Durst offers a brief literature review on “Gender Issues” within the field, stating, “Scholarship on gender concerns in the composition classroom began to appear in the late 1980s. Most of this work deals with women students and is rooted in feminist approaches” (1663). Despite qualifying his statement by suggesting “most of the work deals with women,” Durst only mentions Flynn’s “Composing as a Woman” as an example of gender research addressing male students.

and The Norton Book of Composition Studies do not represent the values and opinions of all scholars and students in Rhetoric and Composition, but these anthologies absolutely have embedded within them a system that valorizes and legitimizes certain areas of inquiry over others (e.g., our ideologies packaged as our roughly shared epistemologies that coalesce into our field), especially for graduate students attempting to understand the conversations, values, and opinions of a field and decide how they will contribute to its body of knowledge31.

If I am claiming too much about the field’s overarching concerns from examining these two anthologies, a survey of both recent and past publications by the major presses within Rhetoric and Composition also demonstrates a lack of attention to masculinity. For instance, Routledge has published 29 books under the auspices of “Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication,” their cutting-edge, scholarly studies and edited collections in the field of rhetoric and writing studies.” Of these 29 books, Ronald Jackson II and Jamie Moshin’s 2013 collection Communicating Marginalized Masculinity: Identity, Politics in TV, Film, and New Media unequivocally provides a sustained and thorough treatment of masculinity, but upon further inspection, none of the scholars in the text are within the field of Rhetoric and Composition. This fact does not downplay the collection’s rhetorical investigations of masculinity; however, I’d be

31 On their website, the Conference on College Composition and Communication offers a “Bibliography in Feminist Research and Gender Issues in Rhetoric and Composition.” This bibliography lists 74 sources; however, the list is skewed toward feminist research than broader considerations of gender.

hard pressed to label this collection as an example of Critical Masculinities

Studies within Rhetoric and Composition.

The University of Pittsburgh Press—which has published over 60 books within their Pittsburgh Series in Composition, Literacy, and Culture over the past two decades—demonstrates a similar publication trend. Despite a number of influential titles, the press has avoided venturing into issues related to masculinity or gender. Considering that the University of Pittsburgh Press almost exclusively publishes books that are more theoretical/conceptual in nature to the exclusion of pedagogy-related issues within the field, the exclusion of theoretical treatises on gender is a little surprising, especially when considering 11 of their publications are feminist in approach/scope (“Composition, Literacy, and

Culture”). Likewise, Parlor Press—which has published 22 books within their

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition over the last decade—has also excluded issues of masculinity and gender (though not women’s/feminist issues). As this examination suggests, issues of masculinity and gender within Rhetoric and

Composition’s major presses are relegated to few intermittent publications often lost in a flood of other publications.

A Review of Critical Masculinities Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition

Rhetoric and Composition did not concertedly broach the issue of men and masculinities until 199632 with a pair of articles published in an issue of College

32 An argument can be made that Elizabeth Flynn’s 1988 article “Composing as a Woman” is the first instance of discussing masculinity within the field; however, while that article does discuss the work of male students, its focus is, as the title suggests, on female-identified students.

English. In “Car Wrecks, Baseball Caps, and Man-to-Man Defense: The Personal Narratives of Adolescent Males,” Lad Tobin focuses on his own (negative) reactions to essays written by male students to suggest broader pedagogical implications, such as teachers should i) “pay more attention to the cultures of adolescent males” (167), ii) understand and acknowledge “our own biases and unconscious associations play in our interpretation of and response to any heavily gendered narrative” (170), and iii) “change the pattern of response to

[our] male students” (171). Working from a similar premise as Tobin, Robert

Connors uses “Teaching and Learning as a Man” as an occasion to reflect on his experience/relationships with male students. However, instead of offering suggestions, Connors proposes several questions aimed toward starting a conversation regarding masculinity within the field: “Why are our male students often stereotyped as insensitive, or passive, or defensive?”, “Are there specifically

‘male’ genres of writing?”, “What are the stances available to teachers of male students, and which are the most useful?”, “Does teaching young men effectively call for pedagogical techniques different from those effective with young women?” (149-153). Furthermore, both authors suggest that scholarship on men and masculinities will be beneficial in addressing their perceived concerns with our male students.

Connors followed up his burgeoning interest in issues of masculinity by guest editing a special issue of Pre/Text on “Constructing Masculinities” [sic]. In his foreword, “Introduction: The Construction of Masculinities,” Connors mainly 53 focuses on addressing the charged question of “Is there a need for specific studies of the cultural construction of manhood?”, to which he marshals forward a few of the usual suspects in making the case for studying men and masculinities—waning college admissions and performance, an increase in delinquent and criminal behavior, and rising mental health issues. He then closes his introduction with another question—“‘What do men do?’”— before framing the eight featured articles with the purpose of “explor[ing] some of those questions of how we are invited to, struggle toward, or attempt to escape from that task of constructing or reconstructing masculinities today” (Connors 187).

While the special issue is diverse in the research presented, the articles converge on three broad issues: student-teacher dynamics (Ballenger; Donnelly), using literature or film to explore the construction of masculinity (Murray; Alexander;

Smith and Trimbur; Ramirez), and gendered constructions of the field (Krause;

Ballif). On one hand, this special issue of Pre/Text is significant in its treatment of masculinities; however, the scholarship in this journal fell on the deaf ears of scholars in the field.

Despite these incipient efforts to engage issues of masculinity in a more direct and concerted fashion, the conversations that emerged were almost exclusively in response to Connors’ “Teaching and Learning as a Man33.” In the

“Comment & Response” section of issue 58.8 in College English, both Patrick McGann and Gesa Kirsch took umbrage with Connors’ article. For McGann,

33 One exception occurs with Thomas O’Donnell commenting on Tobin’s “Car Wrecks…” to which Tobin responded in College English 59.7 (1996) 54

Connors fails to consider the pro-feminist men’s movement in his discussion.

Kirsch, on the other hand, charges Connors with essentializing the male experience and not adequately foregrounding issues of “race, class, background, education, ethnicity, religion, nationality, and other powerful factors that shape young men’s identity” (966). And, again, in the “Comment & Response” section of issue 59.4 of College English, Cathleen Breidenbach and Kristie Fleckenstein also weigh in on Connors’ article. Breidenbach’s critiques largely parrot

Kirsch’s—what of class? Economy? Essentializing? Psychology? Fleckenstein offers a different concern from the previous 3 scholars, instead raising the issue of Connors marginalizing women by focusing solely on men. Connors’ article also spawned an article by Laura Micciche published in Composition Studies entitled “Male Plight and the Feminist Threat in Composition Studies: A Response to

‘Teaching and Learning as a Man.’” Micciche’s argument here is similar to

Fleckenstein’s critique that Connors’ suggestions of taking on masculinity in a more direct and concerted way within the field “have dangerous implications for feminism’s future in composition” (Micciche 21-2). Robert Connors released

Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy in 1997, which obliquely touches on gender. Tragically, Conners would die in a motorcycle accident in 2000.

Although the immediate aftermath of “Teaching and Learning as a Man” generated considerable pushback, several book-length investigations focusing on masculinity did emerge within the field. In Ragged Dicks: Masculinity, Steel,

55 and the Rhetoric of the Self-Made Man (2000), James Catano advances his investigation of a “mythic rhetoric of masculine self-making” (6) within a psychoanalytic framework and focuses primarily on the masculine self-making that occurs within the steel industry. In Misreading Masculinity: Boys, Literacy, and Pop Culture (2002), Thomas Newkirk limits his study to boys and their relationships (via literacy) to various popular culture media, such as sports, movies, and video games and their use of violence and subversive humor as literacy strategies. He argues that these sites and strategies should not be dismissed or penalized and instead challenges educators to expand their understandings of literacy to better encompass and acknowledge these forms of engagement. In From Boys to Men: Rhetorics of Emergent American Masculinity (2016), Leigh Ann Jones primarily examines masculinity as it is constructed in male youth organizations. Drawing on Kenneth Burke, Jones establishes a framework for understanding the emergent rhetorics of adolescence

(that is, the process of boyhood into manhood) as they have been constructed within several enduring American organizations (such as the Boy Scouts).

Although technically not Rhetoric and Composition scholarship, it is worth mentioning the work of two other honorary scholars here. First, Peter Murphy, professor of English at Murray State, wrote a critical glossary of sorts entitled

Studs, Tools, and the Family Jewels: Metaphors Men Live By in 2001 to call attention to the common tropes and metaphors (e.g., “Piece of Ass”) that implicitly/explicitly inform the ways men construct their masculinity (or 56

manhood, in Murphy’s terms). Second, bell hooks, whose work has informed many scholars in our field, wrote a pair of texts in 2004 focusing on men and masculinity: The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love and We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Even before these texts, however, hooks had addressed men and masculinity, both in “Men: Comrades in Struggle” in her seminal text Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) and in “Feminist Masculinity” in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000). At this point, I want to conclude my examination of the representation of masculinity within the field of Rhetoric and Composition by tracking its presence over the last decade at the field’s flagship conference, the Conference on College

Composition and Communication. I will do this by reviewing convention schedules, which are available on the conference’s website as PDFs. Over the last

10 years, there have been 14 presentations concerned with masculinity in some integral capacity34: “Frederick Douglass and the Rhetoric of Masculinity” (Lena

Ampadu, 2006), “Complicating Gender Representations: Masculinity Theory in the Writing Classroom” (Leigh Jones, 2007), “Framing Masculinity in Small

Town Texas for Mass Audiences” (Terry Peterman, 2008), “‘A Man Without a

Country’: The Boundaries of Legibility, Social Capital and Cosmopolitan

Masculinity” (Featured Speaker Mark Anthony Neal, 2010), “Gender Remix:

Masculinity in a Global Frame” (Steven Lessner, 2010), “Dude Ways: Black

Masculinity, Black Female Embodiment, and the Making of Self and Community”

34 By integral capacity, I mean that the presentations were concerned with masculinity to a degree that warranted its inclusion in the title or description.

(Elisa Marie Norris, 2010), “Muted Voices: Masculinity in the Composition

Classroom” (Justin Crawford, 2011), “Genres of Self—Black Masculine Rhetorics and Writing Black Masculinities” (David Kirkland, 2011), “Butch Rhetoric: A

Queer Masculinity in Rhetoric and Composition” (Casey Miles, 2012), “Hmong

Masculinity in Fresno State University’s Writing Classroom” (Asao Inoue, 2013),

“Inventing Masculinity: A Conversation on Young Black Males, Writing, and

Tears” (David Kirkland, 2013), “Culturally Relevant Reading Material and the

Written Discourse of African American Males” (Tiffany Smith, 2014), “Space,

Literacy, and Gender: The Risks and Rewards of Disrupting Hegemonic

Masculinity in the Writing Classroom” (Nicholas Marino, 2015), “Beasts of

Burden or Burden for Beasts: Re/In/De/scribing Codes of Masculinity through

Public Pedagogies” (Robert Mundy, 2015). On one hand, given that there have been thousands of presentations over the past decade at CCCC, the paucity of masculinity-focused presentations can be viewed as an indicator that the conversation around masculinity has not gained much, if any, purchase since the efforts of Robert Connors in the mid ‘90s. On the other hand, that masculinity is being presented on at the flagship conference is an encouraging finding that suggests some interest exists in masculinity, even if it has not resulted in more mainstream or valorized investigations.

Conclusion

Critical Masculinities Studies presents an understanding of masculinity that positions it as a highly rhetorical and ideological construction with viable

58 and productive applications for Rhetoric and Composition’s scholarship and pedagogical commitments35 . As I explicated above, our field has yet to develop such a critical orientation towards men and masculinity, let alone even substantively engage with these issues. In the next chapter, I extend this investigation by examining Rhetoric and Composition’s engagement with issues of gender more broadly conceived and outline my construct of normative masculine ideology as a functional construct with rhetorical potentiality. The following chapters propose and advance normative masculine ideology as a generative rhetorical construct that can serve as a launching point for renewed critical engagement with masculinities in our field. By exploring the rhetoricity of masculinities—that is, the cultural constructions/productions and performances/enactments of normative masculine ideologies—normative masculine ideology has the potential to contribute not only to Rhetoric and

Composition’s conversations on gendered rhetorical embodiment but also to its rich history of social awareness and dedication to critical and liberatory knowledges.

35 Although this project does not take up the pedagogical imperative at length, I want to briefly mention my influences. I am influenced by bell hooks’ discussion of engaged pedagogy in Teaching to Transgress and Kathleen Blake Yancey’s discussion of the lived, delivered, and experienced curriculum in Teaching Literature as Reflective Practice situated within an understanding that college represents a period of great change for students, not only in academic capacities but also in psychosocial change, attitudes and values, and moral development (Pascarella and Terenzini). Given this context, developing a rhetorical framework for understanding, analyzing, and resisting dominant models of masculinity reproduced and reified by ideologies has the ability to produce meaningful growth in our students as both intellectuals, and more importantly, as humans. It has the potential to help our students (of all orientations and identities) work toward healthy representations and alternatives of masculinity within broader understandings of gender. 59

CHAPTER 3: NORMATIVE MASCULINE IDEOLOGY AS GENDERED

RHETORICAL EMBODIMENT: FOUNDATIONS FOR A GENERATIVE

RHETORICAL CONSTRUCT

“We are all moving, breathing, thinking, rhetorical bodies” — Johnson, Levy, Manthey, and Novotny

Discussions of the body, of embodiment, are an ideologically fraught and under-explored issue within Rhetoric and Composition (Knoblauch; Johnson,

Levy, Manthey, and Novotny). This state of affairs reflects the general disposition towards the body in most disciplines, including Critical Masculinity Studies. On the body, Tim Edwards states, “If the sociology of the body is arguably still in its infancy and consequently underdeveloped, then the sociology of the body and its relationship to masculinity more specifically has yet to be born and is non-existent” (151). While Edwards is certainly overstating the ambiguities that exist within Critical Masculinities Studies, I agree that discussions of the body and rhetorical embodiment in regards to gender are in need of further theorization, particularly in regards to how modern masculinity and its normative ideologies interpellate individuals (both in how male-identified bodies are coerced to reproduce normative masculine ideologies and how non-male bodies are complicit/supportive in this reproduction). Considering that a discussion of the body is, at some level, also a discussion of sex (a la the sexed body), this lack of critical theorization around the interplay of body and gender—the gendered body that is also a sexed body—is not surprising given the 60

knee-jerk essentialist assumptions that lurk in the shadows of materiality and corporeality in relation to our poststructuralist understandings of gender.

While gender has been thoroughly established as a social construction in the social sciences and humanities for several decades now, sex as a construct has not been so unequivocally theorized. As Judith Lorber writes in Paradoxes of Gender, “Physical differences between male and female bodies certainly exists—a roomful of naked people would tell us at least that—but these differences are socially meaningless until social practices transform them into social facts” (52).

Similarly, in The End of Patriarchy: Radical Feminism for Men, Robert Jensen states plainly that “the biological differences between male and female humans are not trivial,” but he also notes that “Though we know relatively little about how the basic biological differences influence... psychological capacities, the dominant culture routinely assumes that the effects are greater than have been established” (emphasis mine, 52). That is to say, historically, bodies and bodily difference have been foregrounded to categorize and separate individuals, often with social and political consequence; however, that historicity of gender inequity is a social phenomenon, not a biological one. The naturalness of this historicity contributes to a rather entrenched and institutionalized understanding of sex that constructs difference out of relative homogeneity and separates bodies into two dominant,

“correct” segments with culturally inscribed roles and expectations. In this framework, sex becomes an entanglement of biological “fact” and social interpretation (or a “social fact”), which produces normative and essentialist

logics that regulate bodies as if gender belonged to and was borne from the sexed body. To be clear, however, one can acknowledge the material body in the construction of gender while not adopting an essentialist or reductive position36. In fact, an understanding that the sociocultural and political significance attached to sex has no necessary relation to its biological component is at the heart of much Critical Masculinities Studies and feminist theory scholarship.

In this chapter, my primary objective is to propose the framework for my generative rhetorical construct of normative masculine ideology. I locate this construct within Rhetoric and Composition’s discussions of gender from the postmodern-informed social-epistemic rhetorics paradigm37 first discussed at length by James Berlin in the late 1980s. However, before I outline normative masculine ideology as a working construct, I first begin by surveying the development of gender within our field, tracing its development from a research construct to a postmodern construct/ion. Having established where we are in the

36 The influence of Judith Butler’s shadow looms large on our understandings of gender as a performative and discursive (e.g, postructuralist) construction, especially within Rhetoric and Composition. However, post-Butlerian feminist scholarship such as Gail Weiss’s Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (1999), Sara Heinämaa’s Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003), Iris Young’s On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays (2005), and Linda Alcoff’s Visible Identities, Race. Gender, and the Self (2006), among others, have variously argued for a more nuanced understanding of the marked, visible, material body in relation to self and social identity—or, taken more broadly, for a more nuanced understanding of embodiment within feminist discussions of sex and gender. 37 As James Berlin’s work established, his notion of social-epistemic rhetorics was something of an umbrella term, highlighting a common thread across the work of many scholars. In this project, I will advance the term social-epistemic situatedness to distinguish my specific use of the term. In short, my understanding is primarily concerned with an application of James Berlin’s insights regarding the emergence of social-epistemic rhetorics in the ‘90s as forwarded in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” “Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom: Postmodern Theory in Practice” and Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985.

62 field, I shift focus to the concept of rhetorical embodiment, which is an emerging avenue for new theorizations of gender in the field. I highlight the work of

Jonathan Alexander on the embodiment of gender, and I extend his discussion with the work of Critical Masculinities scholar R.W. Connell to posit an extended conception of what I have termed gendered rhetorical embodiment. This understanding of gendered rhetorical embodiment, situated within the frameworks of social-epistemic rhetoric, will constitute the phenomenological foundation for my framework of normative masculine ideology. I conclude the chapter by outlining my working model of normative masculine ideology through a discussion of how normative masculine ideology organizes itself both intra- and inter-personally through a rhetoricized framework of hegemonic masculinity and traditionalist masculine ideologies. Our field’s understanding of gender is still developing, and my explication of normative masculine ideology can offer new lines of inquiry within research on gendered rhetorical embodiment through acknowledging the social and lived experiences of material and marked bodies in the re/production of specific and privileged practices of gender.

Engendering Gender and/in Rhetoric and Composition

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Critical Masculinities Studies has yet to establish any certain footholds within our field. However, when considering issues of gender more broadly conceived, Rhetoric and Composition’s engagement can be traced back to the 1970s (Ritchie and Boardman). While it is beyond the scope of this project to review the entirety of contributions toward the 63 field’s developing consciousness of gender, I do want to open this chapter by outlining Rhetoric and Composition’s developing conceptual shifts on gender as a critical construct. Stated in broad terms, our field’s conception of gender has moved from viewing gender as a viable research variable in the study of student writing to understanding gender as a complex, multi-faceted postmodern practice/process/product. This shift, from gender and composition to gender and its composition, renders gender as a sociopolitical and rhetorical construct in need of critical investigation and resistance within both our scholarship and our classrooms. Furthermore, recent developments in the field concerning rhetorics of embodiment suggest that another shift may be imminent in our understandings of gender as a rhetorical construct—a shift that suggests points of connection between the scholarship of Critical Masculinities Studies and Rhetoric and Composition, points of connection that have the potential to enhance our theoretical and pedagogical practices.

Gender as Research Construct

Although historically located at the margins of the field, feminism and feminist theory has made significant contributions to Rhetoric and Composition, especially in regards to its engagement with and theorization of issues of gender.

In “Feminism in Composition: Inclusion, Metonymy, and Disruption,” Joy

Ritchie and Kathleen Boardman survey three decades of feminist inquiry and practice within Rhetoric and Composition, demonstrating that “three different but also converging narratives of feminism” (600) made significant contributions 64 to the field by i) arguing for inclusion of women within the field and its scholarship, ii) establishing foundational intuitive connections between feminist thought/practice and the field, and iii) engaging in feminist disruptions to the politics, practices, and theories of the field. While Elizabeth Flynn’s “Composing as a Woman” is often marked as one of the first concerted efforts to take gender as its main inquiry, Ritchie and Boardman suggest that two special issues of

College English published in 1971 and 1972 and Adrienne’s Rich’s 1978 essay “Taking Women Students Seriously” serve as the groundlaying scholarship that argued for the inclusion of gender considerations, and thus, introduced gender into the consciousness of the field. On top of this foundation, then, with

“Composing as a Woman,” Flynn made the intuitive connections between feminist studies and Rhetoric and Composition by providing a systematic approach for studying issues of gender within the field that previously had not existed. Her initial efforts opened up new possibilities for further gender-based inquiries in Rhetoric and Composition research38 .

Gender as Postmodern Construct/ion

At this point, in the late 1980s, Flynn’s modernist feminist approach to issues of gender in “Composing as a Woman” came to represent the field’s early dominant orientation in establishing gender as a viable research variable that

38 In her article, Flynn notes the disconnect between feminist studies and composition studies, stating that the fields “have not engaged each other in a serious or systematic way” (425). To address this concern, Flynn proposes what a feminist approach to composition studies would look like: “A feminist approach to composition studies would focus on questions of difference and dominance in written language. Do males and females compose differently? Do they acquire language in different ways? Do research methods and research samples in composition studies reflect a male bias?” (425). 65

could produce insights into students’ composing—that is gender and composition, gender in the service of research on the composing process. However, scholarship predicated on the then-emerging postmodernist and antimodernist feminist movements would expand the field’s understanding of and engagement with issues of gender in the early 1990s. One important instance of this reorienting scholarship is Terry Myers Zawacki’s “Recomposing as a

Woman—an Essay in Different Voices,” published four years after Flynn’s

“Composing as a Woman.” Not only did Zawacki’s work provide one of the earlier challenges to Flynn’s proposed modernist feminist investigation of composing, but it also marks a significant shift in the field’s understanding of gender: gender as a rhetorical sociopolitical construct with applications far beyond understanding how a student might compose based on their gender. Moving beyond this exploration of how men and women compose differently, Zawacki focused on the potentiality of gender(ing), on how the “experience of gender and the use of language are wrapped up in the politics of manipulation and marginalization based on socially constructed gender differences” (Alexander

49). Also important, Zawacki’s response to Flynn is indicative of the burgeoning narratives of feminist disruption, narratives that also included “Gloria Anzaldua's mestiza, Trinh T. Minh-ha's subject-in-the-making, Donna Haraway's cyborg, and Judith Butler's performer of gender” (Ritchie and Boardman 611). While Zawacki’s work may not be as recognized as the other feminist disruptors mentioned here, “Recomposing as a Woman—an Essay in Different Voices”

serves as one of the earliest voices within the field that both challenged and re-oriented the field’s engagement with gender.

The emerging postmodernist and antimodernist feminist movements that shifted the field’s conception of gender towards a more rhetorical and sociopolitical construct were indicative of the larger shifting rhetorical paradigms occurring in the field during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Flynn). This “new rhetoric,” grounded in poststructural/postmodern thought, recast many of the field’s basic assumptions, expanding our understanding of subject, the construction of knowledge, and even the overarching objective of our profession and classroom practice. This emerging rhetorical paradigm—what has been identified as a social-epistemic rhetoric—was first (and is still best) outlined in the work of James Berlin. In his 1987 monograph Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges. 1900-1985, Berlin provides a brief overview of the history of epistemic rhetorics (165-177). Over the next several years, he would greatly expand on this initial discussion with the publications of “Rhetoric and

Ideology in the Writing Class” (1988), “Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom: Postmodern Theory in Practice,” (1992), and the posthumously-published Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Reconfiguring College English Studies (1996). Through his work, Berlin argued for a radical transformation of both our theoretical assumptions and pedagogical practices.

For Berlin, the defining feature of social-epistemic rhetoric—as opposed to the other prominent rhetorics within the field of cognitive psychology,

67 expressionism, and current-traditionalism—was its explicit and self-reflexive stance on ideology. With social-epistemic rhetoric, ideologies were no longer rhetorical, instead rhetorics were ideological and at the center of all rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy. Berlin’s scholarship has many implications for the field, but this new understanding of ideology and its central function in rhetorical theory may be the most significant:

Ideology always carries with it strong social endorsement, so that what we take to exist, to have value, and to be possible seems necessary, normal and inevitable-in the nature of things. Ideology also, as we have seen, always includes conceptions of how power should—again, in the nature of things—be distributed in a society. Power here means political force but covers as well social forces in everyday contacts. Power is an intrinsic part of ideology, defined and reinforced by it, determining, once again, who can act and what can be accomplished. These power relationships, furthermore, are inscribed in the discursive practices of daily experience— in the ways we use language and are used (interpellated) by it in ordinary parlance. Finally, it should be noted that ideology is always pluralistic, a given historical moment displaying a variety of competing ideologies and a given individual reflecting one or another permutation of these conflicts, although the overall effect of these permutations tends to support the hegemony of the dominant class. (479)

In no uncertain terms, our realities—the dialectical interaction of the material, the social, and the subjective— are constitutively and fundamentally ideological, and because of this fact, scholars of Rhetoric and Composition, in a social-epistemic rhetoric orientation, are charged with working through and 68

against the ideological bulwarks of our modern society. The tenets of social-epistemic rhetoric have been well documented, and its axioms have been absorbed into many of our field’s current pedagogical approaches, especially within Critical/Cultural Studies pedagogies.

Rhetorical Embodiment and Gender

In the previous section, I outlined the field’s shift from a predominantly modernist feminist framework (e.g., Flynn’s early conception of a feminist approach to composition studies) to a predominantly Critical/Cultural Studies and postmodernist framework (since informed by intersectional feminist, queer, and sexualities studies) for rendering gender as a rhetorical project. This framework has become well-established within the field and most contemporary understandings and investigations of gender within Rhetoric and Composition are grounded in or informed by this orientation to some degree39. Recent scholarship, however, has suggested our understandings of gender as a feminist rhetorical project can be extended even further through the inclusion of rhetorics of embodiment (Alexander; Johnson, Levy, Manthey, and Novotny) which have the potential to elaborate on the rhetoricity of gender through taking seriously the question of the body and how gender is composed on, within, through, and amongst bodies.

39 In his work, Berlin referred to gender (along with class and race) as an “authority regime” naturalized by ideology (23). This stance, gender as an ideological authority regime, is still an accurate assessment of how gender is primarily understood within the field today.

Interest in embodiment is—somewhat paradoxically—both as old as the history of rhetoric itself and a relatively new interest across many sub-disciplines within Rhetoric and Composition (particularly within Digital Media scholarship and increasingly in feminist rhetorical inquires). Given this winding history, notions of embodiment have been used in un/related ways across lines of inter- and intra-disciplinary research. In “Bodies of Knowledge: Definitions,

Delineations, and Implications of Embodied Writing in the Academy,” Abby

Knoblauch identifies the categories of embodied language, embodied knowledge, and embodied rhetoric as three major overlapping-yet-separate uses/theorizations of embodiment within the field that need clearer delineation from one another40 . Regarding embodied rhetoric, she defines it as “the purposeful effort by an author to represent aspects of embodiment within the text he or she is shaping.” She continues, “Furthermore, when practicing embodied rhetoric, the author attempts to decipher how these ‘material circumstances’

(Royster 228) affect how he or she understands the world” (emphasis mine, 58).

Knoblauch’s essay is one of the first to attempt to parse the field’s somewhat slipshod theorization and employment of embodiment. As an anchoring point, it provides an idea of what constitutes embodied rhetoric, and her proposition that embodied rhetoric is an authored practice in an individual’s phenomenological framework is an important tenet. However, for my purposes in this project,

40 For instance, Jonathan Alexander—whom I discuss in this chapter—uses the term “embodiment of gender” interchangeably with “embodiment rhetorics” when these terms, as Knoblauch would argue, are referring to related though separate concepts. 70

Knoblauch’s encompassing definition does little in explaining the role of gender within embodied rhetoric.

Critical engagement with embodied rhetorics within feminist rhetorical theory in the field of Rhetoric and Composition is a relatively new venture, at least in theorizations that take seriously the rhetoricity of the body. As recent as

2015, in an issue of Peitho, the journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, feminist scholars Maureen Johnson, Daisy

Levy, Katie Manthey, and Maria Novotny argue for their feminist colleagues, and for the field at large, to more seriously consider notions of rhetorical embodiment within their work:

Scholars of rhetoric, particularly those in feminist rhetorics, have worked to reveal the inequitable distributions of power across groups. We echo these scholars’ concerns about the ways women and their bodies have been obscured in conventional scholarship. We also suggest there is more work to do: by recognizing the inherent relationship between embodiment and rhetoric, we can make all bodies and the power dynamics invested in their (in)visibility visible, thereby strengthening the commitment to feminist rhetorical work. One approach is to cultivate an even more expansive view of embodied rhetorics, one that supports our discipline’s movement beyond seeing the body in binary terms as either objectified or subjectified. Granted, feminist rhetorics has recognized embodiment by connecting areas like labor, literacies, cultural practices, and the bodies who regulate/are regulated by such. But what if we could recontextualize bodies and experience the physical body as an entity with its own rhetorical agency? This re-vision can provide insights, experiences, and questions into areas like ethics,

community, pedagogy, and Meaning-making. (39)

Responding to Johnson et al.’s call41 , Patricia Fancher published “Composing

Artificial Intelligence: Performing Whiteness and Masculinity” in a 2016 special issue of Present Tense focusing on “Embodied Rhetorics and Affective Rhetorics.” In the article, Fancher focuses on a chatbot program named Eugene Goostman, which mediates her employment of embodied rhetoric: “Given that Eugene

Goostman has no flesh and bloody body, my analysis focuses specifically on discourses about bodies” (2). Although enlightening on the ways that normative ideologies of whiteness and masculinity can be reproduced and embodied (e.g.,

“encoded”) within machines via artificial intelligence, Fancher’s analysis extends the discussion of rhetorical embodiment in a direction that is outside the scope of my purposes in this project.

Instead, perhaps the best example of an attempt to theorize rhetorical embodiment in relation to gender for the field of Rhetoric and Composition, particularly as it relates to pedagogical practices and our students, occurs in

Jonathan Alexander’s 2005 article “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing

Narratives of the Gendered Body.” In this spearheading article, Alexander, who identifies as a queer feminist compositionist, challenges the field’s taken-for-granted postmodern conceptions of gender as a discursive social construction by focusing on the lived body through trans scholarship. Alexander argues that the intimate and often conscious relationship between body and

41 I mean this quite literally, as Fancher states, “I am responding to Maureen Johnson, Daisy Levy, Katie Manthey, and Maria Novotny’s call ” at the outset of her article (1). 72

gender for many trans theorists, activists, and writers has the potential to provide the field with acute insights into gender and its rhetoricity, insights that rely on recognizing and interrogating the primacy of the gendered body. In this way,

Alexander’s theorization attempts to cultivate “a sense of the gendered body and how gender finds itself written on—and read from—the bodies we inhabit and through which we both derive and articulate a sense of self” (Alexander 70). In drawing attention to the “profoundly politicized bodies, called to a gendered scrutiny, sculpting, and legibility that determine which bodies are male and female, powerful and weak" (Alexander, 70), Alexander’s conception of rhetorical embodiment does not work against the field’s existing postmodern construction of gender as much as it expands the boundaries within which our scholarship can work.

Although we see the beginnings of what a gender-focused embodied rhetoric can look like in “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body,” neither Alexander nor other scholars in the field have revisited or advanced this preliminary theorization. In the next section, I contribute to this early work on the rhetorical embodiment of gender through additional theoretical insights derived from the landmark scholarship of trans

Critical Masculinities Studies scholar R.W. Connell on gendered bodies.

Gendered Rhetorical Embodiment

Although Alexander does not draw on Connell’s scholarship in

“Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered Body,”

Connell’s theorization of the body shares much affinity with Alexander’s work. In what follows, I provide a discussion of Connell’s work42 regarding corporeality and body-reflexive practices with the primary intention of re-engaging with and extending Alexander’s preliminary theorization of rhetorical embodiment.

Additionally, this overview of Connell’s work also suggests natural points of connection between contemporary rhetorical theory and Critical Masculinities

Studies. For the purposes of distinguishing this discussion from other scholarly conversations on rhetorical embodiment, I forward the term gendered rhetorical embodiment to frame my engagement here. At the outset, it is imperative to understand that Connell’s scholarship on masculinities is predicated on an understanding of men’s bodies that transcend either sociobiological (“nature”) or social constructionist (“nurture”) explanations for the basis of masculine enactment (that is, the performance and re/production of masculine ideologies). On one end of the spectrum, sociobiological arguments are essentialist and argue for an understanding of true or natural masculinity that derives from a narrow-band of sex-specific or biological traits. Conversely, social constructivist arguments often minimize or erase the primacy of the male body and view the body as a canvas upon which culture imprints an understanding of masculinity. For Connell both of these arguments are flawed because the body is

“inescapable in the construction of masculinity; but what is inescapable is not

42 While I primarily focus on Connell’s work as it relates to masculinities, it should be noted that Connell has also applied her insights to gender systems more broadly, and that her work, including her concept of body-reflexive practices, has broader applications beyond just theorizing the enactment of masculinities within male-identified subjects.

fixed” (56). She continues, “Bodies cannot be understood as neutral medium of social practice. Their materiality matters. They will do certain things and not others. Bodies are substantively in play in social practices such as sport, labour and sex” (Connell 58). To be clear, Connell’s argument here is not a simple compromise between sociobiologists and social constructivist theories. Instead,

Connell provides what could be described as a social-epistemic framework, positing a dialectical and historically-situated synthesis of how individuals (e.g., bodies) and material and cultural institutions position and affect one another.

For Connell, the body is a significant and tangible element in the cultural engendering of masculine identity/expression/performance. That is, while masculinities are not exclusive to a specific sex category (i.e. “men”), Connell remained skeptical of and pushed back against hard versions of social constructionist theories that sought to explain gender wholly through cultural/societal discourse (or nurture, within the popular “nature versus nurture” formulation). Though discussions of a sexed body can raise red flags within gender scholarship, Connell’s understanding aligns, or at least does not mis-align, with other analyses of gender and the body from her contemporaries—such as sociologist Judith Lorber’s, Paradoxes of Gender (1994), Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity (1998), and Susan Bordo’s The Male Body (1999). More importantly, Connell’s understanding of the body resonates with the phenomenological basis from which Alexander engages the body in relation to rhetorical embodiment. These explorations of masculinity and

gender, albeit different in approach and scope, all work toward articulating the liminality of the gendered body, the paradoxical arbitrary-consequential interaction of sex and gender.

Understanding the sociological feedback loop that is individuals and institutions (that is, nature and nature) is the first necessity in acknowledging the centrality of the body in a gender order43 and within a conception of gendered rhetorical embodiment. However, simply acknowledging this feedback loop does little to theorize the body’s role within the (rhetorical) process, practice, and project of gender. In describing this complex interplay between gendered bodies and culture, between ideology and corporeality, Connell argues that bodies are both objects of history and social practice and agents in the production of history and social practice, a phenomena she explains through her concept of body-reflexive practices. In “Gender, Men, and Masculinities,” Connell elucidates on how bodies are both agents and objects of historical and social practice44, describing how certain activities—such as “when a teenage girl learns to use cosmetics to make herself heterosexually attractive, or a teenage boy works out in a gym to develop a masculine physique’’ (Connell 3)— are mired in and reinforced by bodily pleasures that are imbricated within both sociocultural

43 In 50 Key Concepts in Gender Studies, authors Jane Pilcher and Imelda Whelehan define gender order as “a patterned system of ideological and material practices, performed by individuals in a society, through which power relations between women and men are made, and remade, as meaningful. It is through the gender order of a society that forms or codes of masculinities and femininities are created and recreated, and relations between them are organised” (61). In her text Masculinities, Connell often employs this term, gender order, when speaking of gender. 44 I take up the issue of history in relation to modern masculinity at length in chapter 4 and social practice in relation to masculinity at length in chapter 5.

symbolism and social divisions of labor and gendered expectations. Here, we see how engaging in body-reflexive practices, in socially-gendered activities that we experience through the body, contribute to the rhetorical project of one’s sense of gender (or relative position within a gender order), contribute to how rhetorical embodiment can be seen as a gendered phenomenon.

In sum, Connell shows us how masculinity draws attention to and is produced and performed through the body but can never be reduced to the physical body alone. Gendered rhetorical embodiment—as expressed in the pairing of Connell’s scholarship with Alexander’s preliminary discussions on a gender-focused rhetorical embodiment—allows for scholars within Rhetoric and

Composition to recognize the primacy of the body that operates as a both cultural logic and social fact45 and provides an understanding of the sexed body in relation to the gendered body that is not limiting or reductive but dialectic and productive

(within a social-epistemic rhetoric paradigm). Furthermore, this expanded understanding of gendered rhetorical embodiment opens the space for further inquiry, namely the phenomenological nature of gendered embodiment. Stated in other terms, gendered rhetorical embodiment is a process that happens within, through, and among bodies, and that process is, at its most fundamental, an ideological one that re/creates and sustains the cultural logics, the social realities,

45 I am reminded of when a student once wrote in a reflection that “as a man your body is the most important part of being.” The significance of the body in identity formation as dictated by cultural norms is well documented. That is, normative cultural body ideals are generally tied to specific gender and gender role identities, and these social facts often result in gender policing and commonly accepted gender role practices predicated on exclusionary sex categories.

77 of gendered subjectivity. In the next section, I identify and expand upon one such prominent ideology in the rhetorical project of masculinities.

Normative Masculine Ideology: A Generative Rhetorical Construct

Gendered rhetorical embodiment positions the body as a site for the re/production and enactment of ideologies (an issue I take up in chapter 5).

When understood within a social-epistemic rhetoric framework, as I’ve positioned it, the ideologies that constitute our Western logics of gender and structure our lived realities as gendered subjects become the focus of critical inquiry and resistance. While this shift is theoretically invigorating, any attempted discussion of ideology broadly conceived is destined for generalities or hackneyed proclamations. I do not possess such hubris as to attempt to take on, or even catalog, all of the intersecting and competing ideologies that constitute our Western gender order. Instead, I delimit my focus on what I argue to be the ideologies that most centrally functions to uphold our “imperialist, capitalist, ableist, hetero-normative, patriarchal, white-supremacist machine” (Brook). In this section, I turn my attention to proposing a generative, rhetorical construct of what I call normative masculine ideology, a model that I situate within our field’s scholarship (see Figure 1). 78

Figure 1. Normative Masculine Ideology’s Location within Rhetoric and Composition Scholarship.

In the introduction to this project, I discussed the deeply entrenched and unproblematized traditionalist masculinity politics qua patriarchy that enables, encourages, and coerces a shared cultural consciousness around masculinities that systematizes the conditions for gender and other social injustices. The basis of this masculinity politics is rooted in a phallogocentrism best captured in

Catharine MacKinnon’s cogent overview of America’s sociopolitical climate:

...virtually every quality that distinguishes men from women is already affirmatively compensated in this society. Men’s physiology defines most 79

sports, their needs define auto and health insurance coverage, their socially defined biographies define workplace expectations and successful career patterns, their perspectives and concerns define quality in scholarship, their experiences and obsessions define merit, their objectification of life defines art, their military service defines citizenship, their presence defines family, their inability to get along with each other — their wars and relationships — define history, their image defines god, and their genitalia define sex. For each of their differences from women, what amounts to an affirmative action plan is in effect, otherwise known as the structure and values of American society46 . (36)

It’s that sociopolitical climate that establishes our taken-for-granted practices and beliefs about masculinity that create inequitable social and gender relations.

As Jack Halberstam observes in the opening of Female Masculinity, “...although we seem to have a difficult time defining masculinity, as a society, we have little trouble in recognizing it, and indeed we spend massive amounts of time and money ratifying and supporting the versions of masculinity that we enjoy and trust” (1). Stated otherwise, those versions of “masculinity that we enjoy and trust” are more often than not informed by a normative masculine ideology. In short, these ideas comprise the “symbolic sea we swim in and the air we breathe.

They are the primary well from which springs how we think about ourselves, other people, and the world" (Johnson 39). This masculine precedent and default constitutes the foundation for a masculinity politics qua patriarchal legacy that

46 Readers unfamiliar with this quote may be surprised to learn that MacKinnon wrote this analysis in her 1984 paper “Difference and Domination: On Sex Discrimination.” Unfortunately, 35 years later, MacKinnon’s observations are still as relevant, highlighting both the intractability of masculinity politics and necessity in still challenging and resisting them today. 80 creates the self-sustaining conditions47 that re/produce, legitimize, and ultimately reify normative masculine ideology. I further discuss the nature and implications of this patriarchal legacy in the next chapter, but I will underscore here the importance of history, of historical consciousness, in the pursuit of resisting dominant ideologies and re/composing new cultural metanarratives regarding masculinities.

At its most base, normative masculine ideology represents a culturally-valorized and dominant schema for interpreting and interpellating the rhetorical practices and enactments of male-attributed subjects48 . At a cultural level, this manifests in our societal stereotypes of how men act, such as men are aggressive and assertive, logical and analytical, physically strong and inclined toward athletics, natural protectors, emotionally stoic and always in control, and sexually aggressive (Launius and Hassel). However, as an embodied phenomenon, normative masculine ideology takes on a specific shape—that is, it becomes associated with and more readily available to certain kinds of men and its enactment brings various levels of privilege and cultural capital. These considerations are taken up further in chapters 4 and 5 when I examine

47 By self-sustaining conditions, I mean that our cultural scripts for normative masculinity (i.e., the ideologies) are borne from traditionalist masculinity politics that are, then, reinforced and propped up by the bodies that embody and enact those traditionalist cultural scripts. 48 At the risk of being repetitive, I want to underscore that normative masculine ideology is an ideological construct — that is, it describes an interwoven and overlapping system of thoughts, practices, beliefs, ideas, assumptions, expectations, values, cultural mores, etc. Like any ideology, it must be put into social practice. When put into practice by male-identified bodies, we can see various enactments of masculinity (such as patriarchal manhood). When put into practice by non-male bodies, normative masculine ideology often takes the form of gender policing and culturally sanctioning. 81 normative masculine ideology through a framework of social-epistemic situatedness that address both its historicity and its interpretation and re/production through social practice.

As a structuring concept, normative masculine ideology is a synthesis of the sociological construct of hegemonic masculinity (Connell; Connell and

Messerschmidt) and the psychological construct of traditional masculinity ideology (Thompson, Jr., and Pleck; Pleck; Levant). However, in addition to their established place within their respective fields, I have also selected these concepts because they are concerned with the rhetoricity of masculinities as much as they are its practice. That is, while hegemonic masculinity and traditional masculinity ideology are often (though certainly not always49 ) discussed in relation to and embodied by male-identified individuals (i.e., “the practice”), these concepts also describe our historically-mediated cultural schema for what constitutes and how to locate valid or normative masculinity (i.e., “the rhetoricity of masculinities”).

Given the kairotic and dialectical nature of these concepts, normative masculine ideology becomes not only a structuring concept but also a rhetorical construct.

The following overview of each concept is intended to 1) provide an understanding of hegemonic masculinity and traditional masculinity ideology and 2) outline the general framework of my construct for normative masculine

49 Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble is one of the most influential works concerned with divesting gender from a sexed body (or “gendered body” in Butler’s terms) with her theorization of gender performativity. However, Judith Halberstam’s Female Masculinity is as, if not more, germane to the discussion here because Halberstam’s work takes masculinity as its central subject of inquiry to demonstrate how masculinity is not the sole domain of male-identified bodies. Both works are important in highlighting the rhetoricity of masculinity, in both how it is performed and how it is interpreted/read in our culture. 82 ideology. As stated earlier, this working model is forwarded within and extends from my previous discussion of gendered rhetorical embodiment.

Hegemonic Masculinity

Of all Critical Masculinities Studies scholarship, R.W. Connell’s work on the social organization of masculinity, particularly her concept of hegemonic masculinity, is arguably one of the most enduring and referenced concepts to emerge from the field. As I’ve previously discussed, for Connell, a practical theory of masculinities is less about arguing for a cataloging of masculinities or masculine experience and, instead, more focused on the interplay between individuals and institutions, between the micro- and macro-politics of gendered experience. Within this orientation, gender is less an identification and more of a social practice predicated on power relations. Moreover, masculinity becomes less a fixed character type and more about “‘doing gender’ in a culturally specific way” that confers varying levels of power over or powerlessness depending upon the given sociocultural context (Connell 68). Within this framework for understanding the social organization of masculinity, Connell proposed a system of “relations internal to the gender order” (80) of masculinity predicated on hegemony, subordination, and complicity, or what would come to be referred to in shorthand as the concept hegemonic masculinity.

Hegemonic masculinity, like most complex theoretical constructions, has been subject to both broad application and reformulation over its three decades of existence, having been referenced in hundreds of papers across a variety of 83 disciplines and fields “ranging from education and antiviolence work to health and counseling” (Connell and Messerschmidt 830). Given this broad and liberal application, hegemonic masculinity is certainly subject to the same critiques that

Knoblauch forwarded about Rhetoric and Composition’s use of embodiment. To address these potential concerns, I will provide an abridged trajectory of

Connell’s developing theory of hegemonic masculinity. In what follows, I discuss four chronological touchstones of hegemonic masculinity that outline the development of the concept: first, hegemonic masculinities inception in Gender and Power (1987); second, Connell’s expansion of the term in her landmark text Masculinities (1995); third, her reformulation of the term with James Messerschmidt in the article “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept” published in Gender & Society (2005); and, finally, Connell’s regrounding of the concept in her All About Women festival presentation “Masculinities” (2016).

In her text Gender and Power, Connell introduces the term hegemonic masculinity in a short six-page subsection titled “Hegemonic Masculinity and

Emphasized Femininity.” Here, Connell discusses her use of hegemony

(borrowed from Gramsci), how hegemonic masculinity is a fleeting form of power that most men cannot actually inhabit, and the process by which hegemonic masculinity needs to reify itself in relation to and in dominance of other gender expressions, which dovetails into a brief discussion of emphasized femininity

(183-88). Following her initial efforts, Connell’s most significant theorization of hegemonic masculinity occurred in her 1995 landmark text Masculinities. In this 84 text, Connell sketches out a “provisional” framework for analyzing the social organization among men and masculinities predicated on the overarching relationship between i) hegemony, subordination, complicity, and ii) marginalization50 within a larger understanding of power, production, and cathexis51 (Connell 74). In Masculinities, Connell defines hegemonic masculinity as “the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women” (77). Also, Connell shelves discussions of emphasized femininity in favor of decidedly focusing on the social organization of masculinities and the embodiment of masculinities within men.

Although readily adopted and employed, this conception of hegemonic masculinity suffered from several critiques that Connell and Messerschmidt sought to redress in their 2005 article “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the

Concept.” In this article, the pair reformulate the concept in regards to “the nature of gender hierarchy, the geography of masculine configurations, the process of social embodiment, and the dynamics of masculinities” (847). In short,

50 To provide further context here, Connell states, “These two types of relationships -- hegemony, domination/subordination and complicity on the one hand, marginalization/authorization on the other -- provide a framework in which we can analyse specific masculinities. [...] I emphasize that terms such as 'hegemonic masculinity' and 'marginalized masculinities' name not fixed character types but configurations of practice generated in particular situations in a changing structure of relationships"” (81). 51 For Connell, power refers to “the overall subordination of women and dominance of men — the structure Women’s Liberation named ‘patriarchy’”, production refers to the gendered division of labor, and cathexis refers to "the practices that shape and realize desire are thus an aspect of the gender order" (74). 85 these reformulations sought to place the concept within a more dynamic and comprehensive framework, calling for greater considerations of femininity and global masculinities and providing clearer and updated theorization of the body and power relations. Most recently, Connell gave a presentation entitled

“Masculinities” at the Sydney Opera House’s All About Women festival. While this presentation does not revise the concept in any significant way, it does reground the discussion, locating it more firmly within a feminist lens and acknowledging patriarchal and economic considerations to a greater degree than previously discussed52 . This framing is significant because it both puts into practice the reformulations discussed in 2005 and also mirrors recent developments within Critical Masculinities Studies that sees the subfield as increasingly related to and in concert with Women and Gender Studies. In sum, when considered in the context of gendered rhetorical embodiment and Rhetoric and Composition, Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity provides a nuanced discussion of and tool for analyzing relations among (rhetorical) patterns/practices of masculinity.

Traditionalist Masculinity Ideologies

As previously discussed, hegemonic masculinity provides a framework for understanding patterns of masculinities in relation to one another. It also names

52 I acknowledge that Connell’s discussion of hegemonic masculinity at the All About Women festival is as much a product of the rhetorical context of presenting at a feminist conference as it is indicative of an evolution of the concept to be more informed by feminist theory. That said, this presentation was authored and delivered by Connell herself, so, rhetorical constraints withstanding, a more feminist theory informed conception of hegemonic masculinity has been articulated, even if it has not yet been codified within a published text. 86

a particular configuration of masculine enactment/practice (or a particular gendered ideology). That latter understanding of the concept—as a label for a particular pattern of masculinity that is entrenched and normalized by contemporary masculinity politics—has also been the subject of psychological research on men and masculinity since the early-1980s53. This research originated with Joseph Pleck’s work, particularly Pleck’s discussion of “the male sex role” in his groundbreaking 1981 text The Myth of Masculinity and his 1986 article “The Structure of Male Norms” co-authored with Edward Thompson, Jr., and has established the theoretical framework of the Gender Role Strain

Paradigm. For Pleck and others, this paradigm emphasizes “the centrality of gender ideology as a cultural script that organizes and informs everything from the socialization of small children to the emotions, cognition, and behavior of adults” (Levant and Richmond 130). Within this framework, research advanced an understanding of masculinity ideology, defining it as an “individual’s internalization of cultural belief systems and attitudes toward masculinity and men’s roles” with the rhetorical power to enforce “expectations for boys and men to conform to certain socially sanctioned masculine behaviors and to avoid certain proscribed behaviors” (Levant and Richmond 131). For the purpose of this project, it is this discussion of masculinity ideology that I am most interested in.

53 Explications of traditionalist masculinity ideologies can also be found in Jackson Katz’s The Macho Paradox and related media literacy film Tough Guise 2; Thomas Keith’s Bro Code and Empathy Gap; Michael Kimmel's discussion of the “guy code” in Guyland, Paul Kivel’s concept of the “Act Like a Man Box,” and Tony Porter’s concept of the “Man Box.” For a discussion of how this ideology manifests in boys, see William Pollack’s discussion of the “boy code” in Real Boys.

Because of the diversity of ideologies that inform various enactments of masculinity, much research within the Gender Role Strain Paradigm has been delimited to a focus on traditional masculinity ideology because of its oversized influence on our modern gender order. Robert Levant and Kathleen Richmond describe this “common constellation of standards and expectations associated with the traditional male role in the Western world” as a codification of “the dominant view of the male role prior to the feminist deconstruction of gender roles and rules that began in the U.S. and the Western world in the 1960s and

70s” (Levant and Richmond 131). In what follows, I survey work from both Pleck and Thompson, Jr. and Levant to provide a more coherent and descriptive working definition of traditional masculinity ideology. This working definition will complement my previous discussion of hegemonic masculinity by outlining the cultural scripts (e.g., the ideological tenets) that undergird our cultural understanding of what constitutes hegemonic masculinity as a social position.

In their 1986 article “The Structure of Male Role Norms,” Thompson Jr. and Pleck forward an understanding of masculinity as a socially-situated, rhetorically-mediated construct by foregrounding the prevailing thoughts and expectations that inform the cultural understanding and enactment of dominant

(e.g., hegemonic, patriarchal) expressions of masculinity. An important contribution in this study was the pair’s reformulation of the term male role, which they outlined as “the social norms that prescribe and proscribe what men should feel and do. It is a sensitizing concept that summarizes the general social 88

expectations men face” (531). In other words, instead of being preoccupied with excavating some sort of “male essence” or treating masculinity as a static construct like previous research had, Thompson, Jr. and Pleck focused on how sociocultural forces (that is, ideologies) contribute to the constructions of masculine enactment via the “male roles” that men felt compelled to practice/ embody. Using a 57-item scale for measuring attitudes about masculinity, the researchers determined that the “traditional male role” centered on three overarching factors: status (“men’s need to achieve and others’ respect”), toughness (“the expectations that men should be mentally, emotionally, and physically tough and self-reliant”), and antifemininity (“the belief that men should avoid stereotypically feminine activities and occupations”) (Thompson and Pleck 534). Although a number of the men participating in the study claimed to not “fully endorse traditional male role norms” (540), it is necessary to understand the import of Thompson, Jr. and Pleck’s research: to measure the beliefs about and expectations embedded within the dominant cultural understanding of masculinity, beliefs that, when inscribed with cultural significance and capital, become more than beliefs—they become ideologies that inform and direct both our production and interpretation of gender.

This foundational work by Thompson Jr. and Pleck has been extended by other scholarship54, most notably by Robert Levant. In his 1996 book Masculinity

54 I focus on the scholarship of Robert Levant because it has received more traction within psychological research, but I will briefly mention Mahilik, Locke, Ludlow, Diemer, Gottfried, Scott, and Freitas’s 2003 article “Development of the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory.” In this study, the researchers posit 11 factors in their forwarding of what constitutes traditionalist

Reconstructed, Levant identified seven traditional masculine norms derived from his Male Roles Norm Inventory assessment: 1) avoidance of femininity, 2) restricted emotions, 3) sex disconnected from intimacy, 4) pursuit of achievement and status, 5) self-reliance, 6) strength and aggression, and 7) homophobia. Following the publication of Masculinity Reconstructed, Levant continued to refine his Male Roles Norm Inventory by developing the Male Role

Norms Inventory-Revised (Levant, Rankin, Williams, Hasan, & Smalley) and the

Male Role Norms Inventory-Short Form (Levant, Hall, and Rankin). In their recent 2013 study “Male Role Norms Inventory-Short Form (MRNI-SF):

Development, Confirmatory Factor Analytic Investigation of Structure, and

Measurement Invariance Across Gender,” Levant et al., have slightly updated the seven subscales that constitute the male role norm. As currently constituted, for

Levant, his expanded male role norms comprises the sorts of beliefs often associated with traditional masculinity ideology: 1) Avoidance of Femininity, 2)

Negativity toward Sexual Minorities, 3) Self-reliance through Mechanical Skills,

4) Toughness, 5) Dominance, 6) Importance of Sex, and 7) Restrictive

Emotionality. Refer to Table 1, Overview of Traditional Masculinity Ideology for a comparison of the ideological constructs that have been discussed. The texture that this research provides to an understanding of my construct of normative masculine ideology is primarily in an understanding of how masculinity

masculinity ideology: 1) Winning, 2) Emotional Control, 3) Risk-Taking, 4) Violence, 5) Dominance, 6) Playboy, 7) Self-Reliance, 8) Primacy of Work, 9) Power Over Women, 10) Disdain for Homosexuals, and 11) Pursuit of Status. As can be seen, these factors are similar to the factors proposed by Levant et al, and hence, not necessary to discuss at length in the body of this chapter. 90 ideologies are socially-situated, rhetorically-mediated constructs mired in a dialectical historical process. All of which is to say, these ideologies inform the cultural understanding and enactment of dominant (e.g., hegemonic) expressions of masculinity.

Table 1.

Overview of Traditional Masculinity Ideology Thompson Jr., and Levant: Male Role Levant, et al: Male Role Pleck: Norms Inventory (1996) Norms Inventory-Short Male Role Norms Scale Form (2013)

1. Status 1. Avoidance of 1. Avoidance of 2. Toughness Femininity Femininity 3. Anti Femininity 2. Restricted 2. Negativity toward Emotions Sexual Minorities 3. Sex Disconnected 3. Self-reliance from Intimacy through 4. Pursuit of Mechanical Skills, Achievement and 4. Toughness Status 5. Dominance 5. Self-Reliance 6. Importance of 6. Strength and Sex, and & Aggression 7. Restrictive 7. Homophobia. Emotionality.

The Rhetorical Function of Gendering

I draw on these discussions of hegemonic masculinity and traditional masculinity ideology to theorize normative masculine ideology as a gendering 91 ideology with critical rhetorical capacities. While my use of the term gendering is informed by Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna’s theory of gender attribution outlined in their groundbreaking 1978 text Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, I have elected to use the term gendering because it is more flexible and amenable for my purposes here. In short, gendering names the dialectical process wherein gender is interpreted and inscribed onto a person (a process of interpellation via gendered ideologies), often with incomplete knowledge informed by gender stereotypes. However, gendering also captures the process by which we attribute gender onto objects and activities in our society where nearly everything is gendered. Through this process, gender becomes something we buy, we wear, we speak, we think, we consume55 —metaphorically, ideologically, and literally. For instance, recent research shows that our attitudes about gender, our working assumptions about how gender should operate within society, structure our reading of basic emotions in other individuals. This cultural impulse to constantly en/gender our lived experiences works to perpetually create and sustain our modern gender order through the regulation of gender as a socially constructed and embodied phenomenon (Butler).

Gendering is an inherently rhetorical process predicated on ideological assumptions, and hegemonic masculinity and traditional masculinity ideology can be understood by the rhetorical functions they enable. Hegemonic masculinity, as a system of relations between competing forms of masculinity,

55 For an example of the commodification of gender, see Sociological Images Pinterest board on “Pointlessly Gendered Products.” 92 socially locates men 1) among other male-attributed subjects and 2) above and against other non-male-attributed subjects. This system of relations emerges through the process of gendering such that the markers that constitute a hegemonic, subordinate, complicit, or marginalized masculine enactment must be attributed. That is to say, the cultural signifying practices that inform these relations do not exist before gendering, they are, in fact post hoc the gendering process. In a similar fashion, through the rhetoricized processes of enculturation and socialization, traditional masculinity ideology constructs the script for socially-acceptable and encouraged expressions of masculine enactment that are not only embodied by male-attributed subjects but also reinforced and regulated by other cultural and social influencers and arbiters, regardless of gender identity. That is to say, a traditional masculinity ideology works at both the level of the individual (self-authored) and at a societal level. For example, mothers who raise their young sons to be 'real men'—that is, subject them to interpellation via traditionalist ideologies—are engaging in the rhetorical process of gendering and subsequently inculcating and perpetuating a normative masculine ideology.

Conclusion

While scholarship on gender within Rhetoric and Composition can be traced back to the 1980s, discussions of a rhetoric that takes seriously the gendered body—considerations of the rhetoricity of gender—have been relatively absent. In this chapter, I’ve proposed a framework of normative masculine ideology that positions it as both a functional and critical (e.g., rhetorical) 93 construct. Such a construct draws on Rhetoric and Composition’s understanding of gender and rhetorical embodiment to position itself as an instantiation of gendered rhetorical embodiment. That is, through an extension of Jonathan Alexander ‘s “Transgender Rhetorics: (Re)Composing Narratives of the Gendered

Body” via Raewyn Cornell’s theorizations of the body and body-reflexive practices, I located my inquiry within our field’s limited (but potentially emergent) conversations on what I’ve described as gendered rhetorical embodiment. This framework foregrounds the body as an individual site of embodiment from which I then move outwards to normative masculine ideology.

My focus here is informed by a social-epistemic situatedness that places ideology at the center of our scholarly and pedagogical work. Through this orientation, I am concerned with the engendering of gendered rhetorical embodiment. Given my social justice orientation outlined in the introduction, advancing normative masculine ideology as a generative rhetorical construct allows scholars to begin the necessary process of marking, resisting, and revising these metanarratives. In the next two chapters, I turn my attention to the rhetorical enactments, practices, and performances of an embodied normative masculine ideology. 94

CHAPTER 4: HISTORICITY AND THE NEED FOR HISTORICAL

CONSCIOUSNESS IN THEORIZING NORMATIVE MASCULINE IDEOLOGY

In the 2014 HBO crime drama series True Detective, aloof male detective Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey) ruminates to his partner that “This is a world where nothing is solved. Someone once told me, 'Time is a flat circle.'

Everything we've ever done or will do, we're gonna do over and over and over again.” When I saw this scene, I was reminded of Samuel Beckett’s famous play

Waiting for Godot (1953), in which Vladimir and Estragon56, having lost nearly all sense of time and personal history, engage in the same unmoored, almost ritualized, practice of waiting (for Godot) day after day, ultimately... solving nothing. Or, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), in which Albert Camus draws on the plight of Sisyphus to muse on man’s impotent efforts towards meaning making, efforts that often solve... nothing. It seems Nic Pizzolatto, the male writer and creator of True Detective, through the mouthpiece of Rust Cohle, is alluding specifically to Nietzsche’s (presumably male) dwarf in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1891), who uttered, “All that is straight lies… All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle57” (136), and whose utterance was recast by the titular White, male protagonist when Zarathustra later thus spakes, “But the knot of causes recurreth

56 Waiting for Godot features five characters on stage—Vladamir, Estragon, Pozzo, Lucky, a nameless boy—and the eponymous Godot in the backdrop, all of whom are men, or at least implied to be so. 57 In some translations of Thus Spake Zarathustra, this line actually reads “All truth is crooked; time itself is a flat circle.”

95 in which I am twined. It will create me again! I myself belong unto the causes of eternal recurrence” (193).

I could continue this discussion, either as genealogy (for Nietzsche did not originate the idea of eternal recurrence or such an interest in the perpetuity of history) or as intellectual lineage (for instance, I haven’t even mentioned the philosophy of John Paul Sartre—being indebted, in large part, to Nietzsche’s philosophical work—whose codification of existentialism reinvigorated notions of meaning/lessness and situatedness and who arguably had more of a direct influence on the works of Beckett, Camus, and many other notable cultural influencers); however, I mention these texts not to wax philosophical but for another reason: for the metanarrative between Man58 and history that emerges, between history and normativity, between notions of masculinity and its entanglement with the very fabrics of society. At the figurative level, these texts forward an unrelenting understanding of history, made all the more unrelenting when that history is either lost or, worst, lived un-reflexively. Moreover, at the literal level, these texts are written by White men, spanning nations and centuries, who write of White men that are understood to represent society at large. As I will discuss in this chapter, this historical uneasiness, or lack of history, is much more than a philosophical trope. Indeed, it is the wellspring that

58 I use “Man” here to imply the Western notions of compulsory hetero- and Euro-normativity. 96

maintains our normative cultural practices through the enactment of traditions and historied practices59.

The above dialectic, between unresolved/unexamined history and the centrality of Man, encapsulates (and perhaps recapitulates) much of the history regarding the construction of men, modern masculinity, and contemporary normative masculine ideology. My musing on history here is influenced by James

Berlin, who in “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class,” underscores the importance of history within any understanding of rhetoric, stating in no unequivocal terms that “a rhetoric is an historicist orientation... a rhetoric is an historically specific social formation that must perforce change over time” (emphasis mine, 488). For Berlin, critical engagement with histories provide a necessary safeguard against the totalitizing nature of ideologies because it “makes possible reflexiveness and revision as the inherently ideological nature of rhetoric is continually acknowledged" (488). Unfortunately, for men and masculinity, this ideological safeguard has been largely absent (and purposefully so, as we shall see). While I agree with Michael Kimmel’s proclamation in Manhood in America that “men have no history of themselves as men60” (Kimmel 2), his assertion does not go far enough. The mass majority of individuals in our society lacks this

59 By historied practices, I mean practices that have been conducted over long periods of time. These practices do not necessarily have a history (e.g., historical narrative or significance) attached to them aside from their endurance/duration and, perhaps, a sense of nostalgia. 60 Kimmel contends that despite “virtually every history book [being] a history of men” that “such works do not explore how the experience of being a man, of manhood, structured the lives of men who are their subjects, the organizations and institutions they created and staffed, the events in which they participated” (1-2).

97 critical history, both in general and about men and the construction of modern masculinity in particular.

To be clear, an un-reflexive history of men is precisely not what I am concerned with here—after all, the majority of our history books and the curricula of K-12 and higher education are saturated with such myopic accounts. Instead, I am arguing for the importance of a new historical consciousness, one that foregrounds men as men as consumers, producers, benefactors, and victims of the cultural constructions of received and unproblematized masculinity based in the outmoded logics of modernity. I am arguing for this historical consciousness, this critical literacy of masculinity, because it is exactly this cultural amnesia that propagates and legitimizes the normalcy and “naturalness” of (White, heterosexual) male supremacy. That is, without a history, or grasp of our historical situatedness, the social histories produced by our Western phallogocentrism will continue to co-opt our efforts at gender justice and social progress and interpellate male bodies in narrow and dangerous capacities. The consciousness raising that occurred through the Women’s Liberation Movement and second-wave feminist efforts enabled women to understand their historical subjectivity, leading to a postmodern fracturing of femininity in a way that masculinity has yet to benefit from. History is change, and an understanding of our histories informs us that change is possible. If nothing else, a critical historical orientation points to the seams (and cracks) in still prevailing enactments of modern masculinity. If nothing else, a historical orientation 98 provides us with the hope that modern masculinity is not inevitable, is not eternal, is not a flat circle with no solution. In the previous chapter, I introduced the preliminary frameworks for my construct of normative masculine ideology. I discussed how normative masculine ideology organizes itself both intra- and inter-personally through a rhetoricized framework of hegemonic masculinity and traditionalist masculine ideologies.

This model suggests, in the abstract, how normative masculine ideology operates as a regulating social mechanism through the patterning of social and political relations. However, this initial framework, like many initial frameworks, is intentionally limited to be more descriptive than suggestive, more theoretical than practical, at its outset. Ultimately, however, I view the utility of a model of normative masculine ideology in its capacity to elucidate social phenomenon and not simply to propose a theoretical abstraction. In what follows, I begin that necessary process through a focus on the historicized history of Western masculinity. Additionally, although it is beyond the scope of this current project, by providing a historical orientation for this construct, I open further lines of inquiry for Rhetoric and Composition scholarship, such as how modern masculinity’s legacy is imbricated in other issues beyond gender.

In this chapter, I layer my construct of normative masculine ideology with a social-epistemic situatedness61 . This social-epistemic situatedness is predicated on an understanding of the development of modern patriarchy and Western

61 By social-epistemic situatedness, I mean an application of James Berlin’s insights regarding the emergence of social-epistemic rhetorics in the ‘90s. 99

modern masculinity and the dialectic between these systems and the individuals within those systems. It is through this cultural legacy that the dominant ideologies of American masculinity via normative masculine ideology emerge.

Most importantly, this social-epistemic situatedness enables my concept of normative masculine ideology to begin bridging the gap between theory and practice, for it to become a practical theory62—a generative construct—for understanding how dominant conceptions of masculinity operate ideologically.

For this purpose, I draw primarily on the works of George Mosse’s Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (1996); Raewyn Connell’s “The Social Organization of Masculinity” and “The History of Masculinity” from

Masculinities, Second Edition (2005); Allan Johnson’s The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, Third Edition (2014); Michael Messner’s Politics of Masculinities: Men in Movements (2000); and Michael Kimmel’s trio of Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996), Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (2008), and Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (2013). Histories, and rhetorics, in regards to masculinity often remain unexamined, seamlessly interwoven amongst plausible(ly) normative discourse. By discussing the outset, rise, and constant reconfiguration of Western modern masculinity as a technology for patriarchal

62 While this chapter emphasizes the historical component of social-epistemic situatedness, the next chapter will to return to the issue of ideologies and the rhetoricized process of meaning making within and through the individual subject, specifically how ideologies operate as an embodied phenomenon that reproduce themselves through bodily performance and action.

100 society, this scholarship provides a useful lens for understanding the ideological and cultural legacy that (re)defines, and confines, society today.

Patriarchy and Patriarchal Legacy

In this section, I take up the task of historical investigation with respect to providing a social-epistemic situatedness for my model of normative masculine ideology. First, I open with a brief discussion of patriarchy as a structuring sociopolitical system. This discussion seeks to both redress several of the problems that academics have with the concept and provide a framework for understanding the dialectical nature of (patriarchal) society and individuals that produced and still produces normative constructions of masculinity.

Although patriarchy is perhaps the most enduring and popular concept to emerge from the Women’s Liberation Movement and feminist theory, it has been somewhat unpopular in academic circles for the last several decades. For instance, in her 1994 book Paradoxes of Gender, feminist sociologist Judith Lorber avoids using the term patriarchy because "'Patriarchy' has been used so commonly by feminists of every perspective to stand for 'what oppresses women' that it sometimes seems to be the theoretical equivalent of phlogiston—what causes fire to burn—before the discovery of oxygen" (3). In 1995, R.W. Connell largely avoided the term patriarchy in her landmark Masculinities, instead advancing the term gender order in its place. Similarly, outside of several references buried within the endnotes, Michael Kimmel also generally avoids using patriarchy in any critical capacity in his influential text Manhood in 101

America. Lorber’s objection and Connell’s and Kimmel’s avoidance are but three suggestive examples that capture the general reservations of many academics since at least the early 1990s. While certainly not all scholars viewed patriarchy as having jumped the shark63, it became increasingly commonplace to view patriarchy as being both over-extended in its applications and under-theorized as an explanatory concept for women’s oppression or as an explanation of male supremacy.

Still, for whatever weaknesses patriarchy carries as an explanatory concept for various disciplines and their presupposed methodological rigor, one cannot deny the centrality of the term in most mainstream conversations about gender issues and critical conversations about men and masculinity. In the very least, patriarchy has utility as a politically-infused term, imbricated with a feminist consciousness that forces an examination of male privilege in a much greater capacity than other similar concepts (such as the aforementioned gender order). As an entry point into critical conversations about masculinity, patriarchy may still be our most useful term for starting conversations about male privilege and supremacy. More than this, however, patriarchy can be leveraged as an organizing construct with the capacity to provide deft theoretical insights (Walby; hooks; Johnson). As such, I open with an explication of patriarchy informed by

Allan Johnson’s examination of patriarchy as a systematized form of sociocultural legacy (i.e. a patriarchal legacy). I draw on Johnson’s work here

63 For instance, the work of visionary feminist bell hooks has unabashedly continued to champion patriarchy as a critical construct.

102 because not only does he demonstrate the critical capacity of patriarchy as an organizing construct but also his theorization provides a cogent and streamlined social framework that aligns with the goals of this project. In The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, sociologist Allan Johnson sets out to challenge the deep rooted structures of patriarchal culture, what he describes as our patriarchal legacy. However, Johnson acknowledges that our conceptions of patriarchy are flawed—or, at least not fully realized—and he provides a critical theorization of patriarchy based on a feminist-informed sociological orientation. Instead of emphasizing individuals

(as many models of patriarchy are wont to do), Johnson forwards an understanding of male privilege and male supremacy (informed by feminist conversations on the topic) as being re/produced through the dialectical interaction of individuals and society (informed by his training as a sociologist). While this may sound inconsequential on the surface, understanding patriarchy as a system has profound implications on our ability to both theorize and resist it.

In outlining the scope of patriarchy and how it operates as a system, Johnson advances two cogent metaphors worth sharing at length. In describing the structure of patriarchy and its centrality within society (i.e., the what), Johnson likens patriarchy to a tree:

It is like a tree rooted in core principles of masculine control, male dominance, male identification, and male centeredness. Its trunk is the major institutional patterns of social life as shaped by the roots—family, economy, politics, religion, education, music, and the arts. The 103

branches—first the larger, then the progressively smaller—are the actual communities, organizations, groups, and other systems in which we live our live, from cities and towns to corporations, parishes, marriages, and families. And in all of this, individuals are the leaves who both make possible the life of the tree and draw their form and life from it. (17)

Furthermore, to explain the nature of patriarchy as a system larger than the individuals who participate in it and how that system guides, coerces, and demands certain behaviors and expectations, Johnson draws on the rhetorical context produced by a board game:

In some ways, we are like players who participate in a game. Monopoly, for example, consists of a set of ideas about things such as the meaning of property and rent, the value of competition and accumulating wealth, and rules about rolling dice, moving around a board, buying, selling, and developing property, collecting rents, winning, and losing. It has material elements such as the board, houses and hotels, dice, property deeds, money, and pieces that represent each player’s movements on the board. Thus, the game is something we can think of as a system whose elements cohere with a unity and wholeness that distinguish it from other games and nongames. Most important, we can describe it as a system without ever talking about the personal characteristics or motivations of the individual people who actually play it any any given moment. (32-33)

While these metaphors are descriptive in and of themselves, I want to briefly unpack several of the more central elements that Johnson’s discussion of patriarchy brings to the table.

104

For Johnson, any critical literacy of patriarchy begins with an understanding of its foundational elements. As the tree metaphor suggests, patriarchy is rooted in four predominant elements that shape society and our participation in it. First, patriarchal society is male dominated. As Johnson notes, “Patriarchy is male dominated in that positions of authority—political, economic, legal, religious, educational, military, domestic—are generally reserved for men,” which “creates power differences between men and women” and

“promotes the idea that men are superior to women” (6). Second, patriarchal society is male identified. Here, Johnson is highlighting how “core cultural ideas about what is considered good, desirable, preferable, or normal are culturally associated with how we think about men, manhood, and masculinity,” which

“takes men and men’s lives as the standard for defining what is normal” and places the “cultural descriptions of masculinity and manhood in terms that are virtually synonymous with the core value of society as a whole” (7). Third, patriarchal society is male centered. This centeredness places the “focus of attention... primarily on men and boys and what they do,” which results in male experiences being positioned and packaged to “represent human experience, even when it is women who most often live it” (Johnson 10). Finally, patriarchal society, and particularly the male-identified members of that society, are fixated on control and subjugation borne from a fear of losing power. As Johnson notes, “Under patriarchy, control shapes not only the broad outlines of social life but also men’s inner live. The more that men see control as central to their sense of 105

self, well-being, worth, and safety, the more driven they feel to go after it and to organize their lives around it” (14). This control leads to the subordination and devaluing of women, but its main thrust in driven by a fear of other men—that is, more than patriarchy being about male supremacy over women through control and domination, it is about men maintaining their culturally constructed supremacy through control over other men within a system that women are often used as a strategy in constructing the conditions for that male supremacy and privilege. These four characteristics, while distinct, all coalesce around the strategies used to position and maintain men within the cultural hegemony of modern Western society.

Understanding the roots of patriarchy is a pivotal first step in making sense of what patriarchy is, but perhaps more important to a critical comprehension of patriarchy is grasping the implications of patriarchy as an in/dependent social system that simultaneously structures our interactions within society while also being re/structured and sustained by those interactions.

For Johnson, understanding this Möbius loop of individuals and societies is the linchpin to advancing our conversations about patriarchy:

Obviously, we are in something much larger than ourselves, and it is not us. But equally obvious is our profound connection to it through the social conditions that shape our sense of who we are and what kinds of alternatives we can choose from. As a system, patriarchy encourages men to accept male privilege and perpetuate women’s oppression, if only through silence. And it encourages women to accept and adapt to their oppressed position even to the extent of undermining movements to bring

106

about change. We cannot avoid participation in patriarchy. It was handed to us the moment we came into the world. But we can choose how to participate in it. (17)

As Johnson’s board game example demonstrates, patriarchy is a social system consisting of its own set of both cultural rules and material practices, all of which contribute to unnecessarily elevating male-identified subjects to culturally dominant positions in relation to other positions within that social system. And because these social systems are part and parcel with culture, they serve the function of socialization/enculturation and provides paths of least resistance that regulate our behaviors in ways that are advantageous for the maintenance of that system and its embedded power structures. However, even though this system is comprised of individuals—people must play the game, after all—the system has been well established and still exists beyond any of its individual constituents.

Patriarchy cannot be understood by simply examining the actions of those who benefit the most from the system or by the actions those individuals take to ensure that system stays in place. That is all to say, our modern patriarchal society has constructed a patriarchal culture that has established a legacy of explicit and implicit norms (i.e. benchmarks and expectations) by which we as members are interpreted and interpellated. These interpretations and interpellations exist only within the logics of the system, which, in turn, only exist because we participate within that system, but given that it is the only system, we are all but forced to exist within its parameters. 107

Certainly, patriarchy has enabled and continues to enable particular versions of masculinity, especially versions of masculinity that embody and reproduce normative and traditionalist ideologies, which, in turn, contribute to the maintenance of what I’ve previously described as our imperialist, capitalist, ableist, hetero-normative, patriarchal, white-supremacist machine. But patriarchy isn't merely poor socialization that can be corrected within individual men. I’ve discussed Johnson’s work with the intention of providing a contemporary theorization of patriarchy that redresses several of the concerns about the use of patriarchy within academic contexts. More importantly, I have used Johnson’s conception of patriarchy as a frame for the following discussion of the development of modern masculinity and its implications in the construction of normative masculinity from a historical and rhetorical perspective. In this way, modern masculinity can be understood as a technology that engenders our modern patriarchal society.

Modern Masculinity and Normative Masculine Ideology: Its Emergence and Its

Entrenchment

To write of men as men, two elements are required: “first, to chart how the definition of masculinity has changed over time” and “second, to explore how the experience of manhood has shaped the activities of… men” (Kimmel 2). In this section, I take up these two elements. This discussion proposes that Western modern masculinity developed as a technology for engendering a modern patriarchy, particularly through the employment of three primary rhetorical

108 strategies (signifying the male body, Othering, and mobilizing normalcy) that have contributed to the patriarchal legacy of our society. Finally, I trace the development of modern masculinity within America specifically (as opposed to

Western Europe and America more broadly) to outline the ideological precepts that contribute to normative masculine ideology. On one hand, this history is a starting point, a functional literacy. However, to shake the stupor of a masculinist cultural amnesia, men will require more than a functional literacy of their history; they will require the capacity to critique that history (in the next chapter,

I return to this issue). The work in this chapter is a needed contribution in that pursuit. Only through first identifying normative masculine ideology as a traceable historical artifact will we then be able to approach it as a critiqueable rhetorically-constructed and -constructing subject.

The Emergence of Modern Masculinity

Western understandings of “masculinity” (used here in the generic, archetypal sense) emerged at some indeterminate point between the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, as Western societies shifted from traditionalist aristocratic to modern middle-class sensibilities and capitalist values (Mosse; Connell; Johnson). At the outset, it is imperative to note that dominant ideas about masculinity and manhood obviously existed before the

18th century, but this formative period in society marks the systematization of what we can consider the modern construction of masculinity—of what would set the template for the ideas and ideals that would coalesce into the ideologies that 109

still, in many ways, operate today via normative masculine ideology. Additionally, masculinity (even when delimited to its development within Western culture or the United States of America specifically) has a complex and variegated history; it is, obviously, not linear, and no single discussion could account for all facets that contributed to its formation. With that said, I will advance a provisional definition of the term modern masculinity here. To speak of modern masculinity is to speak of the development of “normative patterns of morality and behavior, that is to say, typical and acceptable ways of behaving and acting within the social setting of the past centuries" (Mosse 4) that, ultimately, resulted in an ideal of masculinity that society valorized and men, en masse, pursued. Furthermore, modern masculinity can be understood as the ideological progenitor for previously mentioned terms such as patriarchal manhood, hegemonic masculinity, traditional masculinity ideology, and normative masculine ideology.

A historical understanding of the development of modern masculinity has several important implications for my purposes in this project. First, to discuss modern masculinity as it developed in Western Europe and America is to discuss a masculinity imbricated in whiteness (and, largely, able-bodiedness). Second, given its concurrent rise with modern society, this idealization of masculinity became tantamount to society—specifically, to society’s wants, needs, desires, and to its economic and intellectual capital—and, thus, established itself as the universal default position for humanity. It is here, then, we find the roots of whiteness and maleness (and straightness and able-bodiedness as we will discuss

110 shortly) as the normative and eventual take-for-granted (e.g., “invisible”) privileged structuring positions in contemporary society. Third, this developing masculine ideal would become “one of the most important and lasting symbols of modern life” (Mosse 194), and, as a living, cultural symbol, masculinity quickly became a (t00) powerful ideology that would perpetually coerce society into reifying its centrality, leading to our modern gender order and patriarchal legacy.

In what follows, I outline three of the primary rhetorical strategies that both enabled and produced modern masculinity as the cultural progenitor from which contemporary normative masculinity ideology still operates today.

The Masculine Body Made Manifest/o

In the previous chapter, I discussed the importance of the male body in relation to the construction of masculinities. This conflation, of the male body and masculinity, constitutes the first rhetorical strategy that aided in the construction and perpetual reinscription of modern masculinity and patriarchal society. As a living symbol, masculinity needed to be materialized, and thus the body (and a particularly type of exclusively male body) became the primary marker for masculinity: “The body did not contain the man, expressing the man within; now, that body was the man” (Kimmel 127). One of the major factors that allowed for this emergence of a new and societal defining masculine stereotype came from Enlightenment ideas about the relationship between the mind and the body. Within this new epistemology, the body took on a new primacy in modern society. For instance, Mosse highlights the significance of Johann Kasper 111

Lavater’s new “science” of physiognomy—the theory that an individual’s physical characteristics and profile could provide insight into their moral being and character—as a marker for establishing the centrality of the body within society, but particularly for men: "Physiognomy is important for the construction of modern masculinity because in an obvious manner it reflected the linkage of body and soul, of morality and bodily structure" (Mosse 25-26). Through this linking of body and mind, the body emerges as both physical and social. Or, stated differently, bodies were no longer just vessels; instead they were dialectics of a physical and a social reality, a physical and social orientation, a physical ontology and a social epistemology. Physiognomy represents early efforts in the process of gendering, in gender being inscribed on our bodies in terms of their shape, size, and appearance through constructed gendered personality traits, virtues, and delineated roles/positions within social and professional relations.

However, Lavater had one issue that needed to be resolved: his subjective theory needed an ‘objective’ base to validate itself. That is to say, while Lavater’s physiognomy provided a convenient method for quickly cataloging the social and moral worth of an individual, such a method would also require a convenient standard of beauty upon which to make such assessments. As it would happen for Lavater, an ideal of male beauty articulated by famed archeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann had been gaining cultural cache in Western Europe around the same time, providing a ready-made theorization of male beauty that came complete with a host of attributes and virtues. The

112 aesthetic of beauty that Winckelmann put forward was based on his interest in Greek sculpture, particularly the bodies of young, male athletes. The most influential and indicative of these statues may be that known as Laocoön and His

Sons (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. Laocoön and His Sons, Greek Sculpture 113

As can be seen in the aesthetic of Laocoön, the bodies that Wincklemann valorized64 were paragons of physical fitness, replete with literally and figuratively sculpted, muscular bodies that represented their harmony and diligence. This new linkage between the idealized male body and the interior qualities of a person would result in a conception of sex/gender65 (read: masculinity) that would need to be enacted, performed, a continuously reaffirmed (“proved”) through how men presented and positioned their bodies in the world.

While it is important to understand what this new ideal of male beauty stood for, of greater consequence is the social effect that this aesthetic had on the pursuit of this masculine ideal—that is, on the construction of masculinity. On the heels of this standard, at the end of the eighteenth century, the practice of sculpting the body became an integral element in the attainment (i.e. the construction) of socially valorized masculinity. Here, the practice of gymnastics, influenced by Guys Muth, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, and Per-Henrik Ling, served the first crucial role in shifting men’s focus onto sculpting their physical bodies in pursuit of approximating the masculine ideal66 . More than for physical fitness,

64 It was known that Winckelmann was homosexual. Considering much has been written about the homosociality and latent homoeroticism within the constructions and practices of modern masculinity, it is interesting to note that the standard of male beauty that would come to prop up a normative (homophobic) standard of masculinity was, in part, predicated itself on aesthetic ideals advanced by Winckelmann, who may have had some erotic investment in the male beauty paradigm he helped to establish. 65 I use this construction of sex/gender to denote essentialist logic that either views social gender and biological sex as synonymous or understands gender as an exclusively biological process. 66 Between 1850 and 1880, organized sports would replace the primary function of gymnastics. Moreover, the anxieties linked with the male ideal would ultimately pervert the pursuit of 114 men engaged in gymnastics because the sculpted gymnast’s body represented a man who was, among other things, “disciplined, industrious, modest, and persevering” (Mosse 45). Gymnastics also became adopted by national militaries, which served another pivotal role in the development of modern masculinity.

This connection linked the construction of masculinity with nationalism in a way that had not previously been made explicit. Through its associations with militarism and nationalism, modern masculinity became linked explicitly with conquest, whether that conquest occurred through war on a battlefield or war simulated on the sports field. Through this process, it’s important to stress that these masculine practices were establishing normative social attitudes and behaviors—that is creating culture. The development of modern society allowed for the re-drafting of cultural scripts. These formative years set that stage for what masculinity would become, a legacy that continues up through our present day67 , a legacy that can be seen in the astute cultural analysis of Susan Bordo’s

The Male Body (1999), which demonstrates the way that the male body and ideas and expectations about the body have permeated our cultural consciousness.

masculinity with self-centered concerns/vanity. For instance, as the bodybuilding movement in America. 67 For the psychological implications and health crises that such a fixation on an idealized male form can engender, Harrison Pope, Katharine Phillips, and Roberto Olivardia’s The Adonis Complex provides a telling examination of the “usually secret, but surprisingly common, body image concerns of boys and men,” which “range from minor annoyances to devastating and sometimes even life-threatening obsessions—from manageable dissatisfactions to full-blown psychiatric body image disorders” (7). 115

Cultural Buoyancy through Othering

A second major strategy that worked toward cementing the patriarchal legacy of modern masculinity took the form of othering. Mosse labels this historical phenomenon as the process of countertyping. From its origins in between the second half of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, modern masculinity has engaged in a “No True Scotsman” application of logic where normative masculinity organized and defined itself both horizontally

(amongst Other men) and vertically (above women). Primarily, modern masculinity defined itself in relation to and above three broad social categories of individuals: i) outsiders, ii) unmanly men, and iii) non-men. Outsiders consisted of any men who could not be classified within the boundaries of national border.

Historically, in Europe, the typecasted outsider became the Jew, while in

America, Black men became the de facto outsider against which the normative ideal of masculinity was set. Unmanly men constituted primarily three sub-categories of men, linked through their societally-ascribed deviant and pathological status: the habitually criminal, the insane, and the homosexual.

While criminals had always been assumed to lack the moral worth to be part of a functioning society, it wasn’t until the rise of modern masculinity that homosexuality came to be associated with approbation68. While many of the same characteristics were used to subjugate outsiders and unmanly men, homosexual men were often additionally described in terms that positioned them in close

68 See Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, particularly the first volume The Will to Knowledge, for a cogent critical history of this social phenomenon.

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relationship with femininity, or as non-men (or women). As gendered divisions became more sharply pronounced with Western society’s transition into modernity, separate spheres and delineated gender roles for men and women established themselves in ways that had not previously existed. These divisions further exacerbated a dichotomy between masculinity and femininity, which contributed to the strict sex/gender dichotomy that still operates in society today.

That normative masculinity needed to establish these countertypes is of little surprise. Few men could actually live up to the ideal masculinity in terms of its aesthetic requirements, not to mention that these aesthetics had no actual bearing on one’s character. So, a secondary standard by which to obtain masculinity needed to be established, one where Others were constructed to prop up those with or who aspired to power. Few men could live up to the mythic ideals of normative masculinity, but, then again, few men needed to so long as they could construct a convenient scapegoat over and through which they could define their own shortcomings as good enough. Here then, these countertypes have historically provided (in)stability to the masculine stereotype, allowing it to both define itself and to strengthen itself, highlighting the adaptability of normative masculinity to continually reassert itself at the center of societal ideals.

The historical legacy of this countertyping is readily apparent. Take, for instance, the most widely cited concept to emerge from Critical Masculinity

Studies: hegemonic masculinity. Given that hegemonic masculinity is predicated on a relational framework that defines hegemonic masculinity in relation to

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other, non-hegemonic forms of masculinity, such as dominant, subordinated, and marginalized masculinities, Raewyn Connell’s conception of hegemonic masculinity, in many ways, is simply a contemporary account of this historical phenomenon. While the specific terms may be different, these same social categories—outsiders, unmanly men, and non men— are still largely used to reify the valorized and idealized position of normative masculine ideology.

Forged in Fictitious Fires: Mobilizing Normalcy

A third dominant strategy built into modern masculinity is its ability to co-opt and assimilate cultural change and progress in a way that allows itself to bend but never break (from tradition). As has been demonstrated, modern patriarchy and modern masculinity are tantamount with modern society. By positioning itself as modern society, modern masculinity has been able to frame real and imagined threats as rallying cries for the defense of a specific and normative masculine ideal under the guise of protecting traditional societal ideals. On one hand, war has often been used as both a measure of masculinity and as an occasion to demonstrate the necessity of men and manly valor for the protection of society. On the other hand, modern masculinity vis-a-vis men in privileged and powerful social positions have painted social progress (“change”) as an attack on the moral fabric and ideals of a healthy and functioning society.

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Consider, for example, a November 2014 issue of TheBlaze69 magazine, which decried, “Progressives are fully engaged in a war on men, attacking boys, husbands and fathers. The media demean them, feminists slander them and

Marxists vilify them. Their goal: eradicating traditional masculinity.” Or, disgruntled charlatan and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones of Infowars who also felt the need to wax political when Paul Jospeph Watson outlined ten ways that the “elite” qua the establishment and establishment-controlled and -created second-wave feminism are besieging American masculinity. For Watson, in 2014,

“men and masculinity are under assault on every level” (italics mine). TheBlaze and Infowars are but two examples of recent attempts to sustain a fever pitch surrounding men and masculinity through incendiary war associations

(re)advanced two years earlier by Suzanne Venkers’ FoxNews.com opinion-piece

“The war on men” and her subsequent media appearances. This sort of bombastic rhetoric is a chief strategy in manufacturing and mobilizing normalcy around traditionalist, modern (outmoded) idealizations of masculinity.

What I have discussed up to this point has been the establishment and entrenchment of Western modern masculinity as a historical and rhetorical process. Modern masculinity is a cultural creation, and, as such, it has required much effort to maintain its cultural hegemony. From its outset, modern masculinity has used the male body, Othering, and social mobilization as

69 TheBlaze network, founded by libertarian crackpot Glenn Beck, produces and hosts—in addition to the aforementioned eponymous magazine— Internet shows, radio shows, and other content through their website.

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rhetorical strategies to embed and equate itself with modern society itself. These strategies have resulted in a phenomenon that has affected the development of modern Western societies. However, at this point, I want to turn to how this broad idealized masculine stereotype developed within America specifically because it is this development of the American ideal of masculinity that largely undergirds my conception of normative masculine ideology.

Made in America: Modern American Masculinity

The work of Michael Kimmel provides an understanding of masculinity as it developed within America. In his veritable tour de force on the history of masculinity in America, Manhood in America: A Cultural History70, Kimmel traces the development of American manhood from 1776 through the mid-1990s, primarily through the development of the Self-Made Man. Adopting the stance of a historical sociologist71, Kimmel documents how, from the wake of the American

Revolution onward, American men have expressed their manhood through three predominant archetypes: the Genteel Patriarch (Southern gentleman), the Heroic

Artisan (skilled craftsman), and the Self-Made Man (the capitalist). But rather

70 As I discussed in the introduction, Manhood in America is one of Michael Kimmel’s well-known texts that sets the stage for mainstream understandings of Critical Masculinities Studies as primarily concerned with (presumably) straight, White men. To be fair, Kimmel acknowledges that his study “describes only one version of ‘Manhood in America’—albeit the dominant version” predicated on “straight, white, middle-class, native-born” structuring positions (6). 71 In the introduction, Kimmel states, “This book is less about what boys and men actually did than about what they were told that they were supposed to do, feel, and think and what happened in response to those prescriptions” (10). Although Manhood is America is a cultural history through and through, I will suggest that Kimmel’s book, at times, provides a rhetorical history of masculinity by recognizing and discussing the discoursal and rhetorical constructions of masculinity. Even without these explicit moments, however, some may argue that the fluid relationship between rhetoric and culture allows Kimmel to simultaneously engage in a cultural and rhetorical history of masculinity.

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than co-existing, these archetypes inevitably competed to be the archetype, the definition of manhood.

By the mid-1800s, the archetype of the Self-Made Man had virtually assumed the de facto and default model for American manhood. As early as the

1870s, the Self-Made Man replaced “the idea of ‘inner strength’ [with] a doctrine of physicality and the body” (Kimmel 120). The turn of the century saw proto-Alpha Males like Bernarr Macfadden and Charles Atlas advancing a “new muscular manhood” (Kimmel 127). Macfadden and Atlas convinced boys and men alike that physiques and masculinity were one in the same. More than advocating physical fitness, however, Macfadden and Atlas were espousing ideologies: “Atlas saw his mission as building ‘a perfect race, a country of perfect human masterpieces’’(Kimmel 211). Contemporary normative masculine ideology still operates on similar ideologies. Amidst this change, American men still struggled to define themselves. Initial dependence on an unpredictable and often unforgiving marketplace had produced men that were “temperamentally restless, chronically insecure, and desperate to achieve a solid grounding for a masculine identity” (Kimmel 17). The turn of the century seemed only to exacerbate this struggle. Kimmel notes that during this watershed moment, “manhood was replaced gradually by the term masculinity, which referred to a set of behavioral traits and attitudes that were contrasted now with a new opposite, femininity” (121). Additionally, at the turn of the twentieth century, Kimmel notes that

“masculinity was increasingly an act, a form of public display; that men felt the

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need for such display at virtually all times; and that the intensity of the need for such display was increasing” (100). As masculinity became interlaced with homosociality, the body took on symbolic significance much like it had in

Western Europe. Prodded by their unceasing uncertainty, men felt (and still do feel) compelled to constantly prove their manhood, particularly to and against one another. While compensatory models of masculinity may rely on cultural capital and commodification as strategies for proving one’s manhood, the use of domination and violence are not uncommon strategies either. Such tactics of violence are often internalized and act as a unifying thread for many fringe men’s groups.

On one hand, then, given this “core element of homosociality72” (Kimmel

26) imbricated with chronic insecurity, the Self-Made Man was his own and his fellow man’s greatest nemesis. On the other hand, the Self-Made Man ostensibly sought out new competitors—to make appropriate use of Watson’s exaggerated claim—“on every level.” Diversification of the public sphere due to an influx of women, emancipated slaves, and immigrants (i.e. not native-born, White, middle-class men but non-men, unmanly men, and outsiders); a dwindling frontier to explore and colonize; and even too much industry, the Self-Made Man at the turn of the century exhibited an inordinate amount of self-made paranoia.

72 Kimmel’s idea of homosociality, that “American men define their masculinity...in relation to each other” (7), can also be understood as a gendered-version of the reflected or looking-glass self: “the imagination of our appearance to [another] person; the imagination of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification” (Cooley 152). For further explication of Cooley’s concept of the reflected or looking-glass self, see “Chapter V—The Social Self—1. The Meaning of ‘I’” in Cooley’s Human Nature and the Social Order.

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As if in self-fulfilling prophetic form, men precipitously responded to these shifting cultural sands by developing strategies of excessive self- and social-control, strategic (and eventually institutionalized) marginalization, subjugation, and objectification of the Other; and outright withdrawal through retreats to the outdoors73 or fantastical identifications with masculine paragons or masculinist motifs.

A glossing survey of the next several decades in America reveals that the more things changed, the more the Self-Made Man desperately tried to make them stay the same. (White) Men expanded their methods (or burdens) for proving their masculinity, particularly in sports and sculpting the body. As with

Western Europe, (White) American men vilified a new Other—the homosexual—while doubling down on their efforts to exclude and suppress women and minorities. (White) Men paraded (and reinvigorated) their machismo through new war efforts: WWI, WWII, the Cold War and Vietnam, the Gulf War.

(White) Men retreated into new fantasies of identification, as exemplified in the proliferation of Men’s magazines (such as the emergence of Playboy). And (White) Men even renegotiated the private sphere in the name of fatherhood through recapitulating the public/private sphere divide into a “separation of spheres for boys and girls” that ultimately reified rigid, and arbitrary, gender identities and roles starting at birth (Kimmel 161).74

73 Given the closing of the frontier, men consoled themselves with a desperate substitution. They “reinvented the frontier as simply the outdoors” (Kimmel 136). 74 For instance, “By the first decade of the new century, boys and girls were not only wearing different clothes but playing with different toys” (Kimmel 161). Also, in 1936, Lewis Terman, who

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The sheer volume of strategies men utilized to both hoard power and legitimize and reify their own identities in America would suggest men continued to feel “temperamentally restless, chronically insecure, and desperate to achieve a solid grounding for a masculine identity” (Kimmel 17). The cultural zeitgeist of the 1960s and ‘70s should have provided the critical mass necessary to expose the masculine mystique of the Self-Made Man as an Atlassian burden with Sisyphean perpetuity, as an unbearable and unrealistic fiction, but men continued to operate under the auspices of normative masculine ideology. During this period, many men felt their control wrest away as “The social movements of those two decades—the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, and the gay liberation movement—all offered scathing critiques of traditional masculinity and demanded inclusion and equality in the public arena” (Kimmel 271).

Furthermore, the 1970s once again witnessed disillusioned men on the offensive against their Self-Made fellowmen with the emergence of a profeminist and activist men’s movement (Adams and Savran; Kimmel). In a way, the social movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s portended what was presumed to be the inevitable postmodern shift for masculinity, the theoretical unmaking of

Kimmel’s Self-Made Man into alternative and viable conceptions of masculinities. created the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, and Catherine Cox Miles developed the Terman-Miles “M-F” test meant to measure “gendered behaviors, attitudes, and information [toward]...the successful acquisition of gender identity” (Kimmel 206-07). The test “included an inventory of 456 items and utilized state-of-the-art psychological personality tests—including Rorschach ink blots, projective tests that asked children to imagine themselves in various situations, and standard attitude and knowledge inventories—to position each test taker along a continuum from Masculinity at one pole to Femininity at the other” (Kimmel 207). More importantly, as Kimmel notes, “The test also formed the basis for virtually all studies of gender-role acquisition ever since” (209).

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While this had already happen at a literal level—we’re quite obviously not a society of Stepford Wives equivalents of normative masculine ideological formation—the revolution to displace the stranglehold of normative masculine ideology, in a phrase, never came.

The knot of causes recurring in which he is intertwined (read: normative masculine ideology supported by a patriarchal legacy), the Self-Made Man did not disappear. The social movements, despite their immense significance, certainly still have a long march ahead of them. And the vigor of the men’s liberation movement flagged rather quickly, transmogrifying into the debatably self-aggrandizing, defensive, and reactionary “mythopoetic” movement spearheaded by the works of Robert Bly in the 1990s (Adams and Savran;

Kimmel). The patriarchal legacy in which he is intertwined, the Self-Made Man’s enduring ideological and cultural tropes continue to pervade and pervert modern conceptions of masculinity. Kimmel revists and extends this conversation about

American masculinity and manhood in his 2008 text Guyland. In Guyland, Kimmel switches his focus from providing a cultural history to providing a contemporary cultural snapshot of the landscape in which male-identified members of American society become men—that is, Kimmel’s interest lies in examining how our society enculturates men, how it re/produces certain ideologies around masculinity through our cultural practices. Given his limited scope, Kimmel focuses on what he identifies as adultescene, the formative years

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between adolescence and adulthood75 (roughly the age of 16 until the mid/late

20s). Because of shifting socioeconomic factors, the onset of adulthood, especially for men, is essentially delayed. This delayed onset of adulthood (and its concomitant responsibilities) coupled with a lack of traditional cultural markers for manhood results in an approximation of a normative masculine ideal that is often hyperbolic and exaggerated. Stated simply, “Guyland sells most guys a bill of goods telling them that a constellation of behaviors are the distilled essence of manhood, which could not be farther from the truth” (23). Guyland is a training ground for masculinity, and its curriculum is often that of normative masculine ideology. And we see the heavy implications of Guyland in our daily lives—our classrooms are filled with students navigating the turbulent climate created by this ideology not to mention the election of Donald Trump exacerbated and encouraged many men to seize (cultural) power through exaggerated displays of machismo.

Conclusion

Histories are important because they provides us with a map of our current landscape. But, even more importantly, that map also provides us with new directions—paths for where can travel, means for leaving our current landscapes. Our patriarchal legacy has worked diligently to make such a map inaccessible. Rhetoric and Composition has established means for critically engaging with histories, and through the use of our methods and insights, we can

75 In Guyland, Michael Kimmel introduces the term adultescene to describe ”a liminal undefined time span between adolescence and adulthood that can stretch for a decade or more” (4).

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enable the literacies necessary to chart our current landscape. That is to say,

Rhetoric and Composition provides us with a means for not only identifying but also challenging and resisting the historical rhetorical strategies that have supported normative masculine ideologies.

That men have no sense of their history provides the conditions for the cultural amnesia that allows propagandist rhetoric to repackage this inherently flawed ideology as a crisis to which each successive unaware generation of men must respond. Michael Kimmel’s work paints a picture of American masculinity that is both familiar and peculiar. American masculinity is, at its base, a franchised version of Western modern masculinity, culturally situated within the unique patriarchal legacy that directed and co-opted the development of

American society. Whether we speak of Kimmel’s Self-Made Man that dominates the cultural history of Manhood in America or the adultescent bro who occupies the cultural examination in Guyland (or any other conception of dominant masculinity in America), we can see the vestiges of Western modern masculinity and their implications for an understanding of normative masculine ideology.

What is peculiar here is that as we drift further from the origins of modern masculinity, we drift closer to reaching a critical mass for reforming modern masculinity. As postmodernity has and continues to challenge our notions of received and unquestioned Truth and as we seem to have even less of a historical consciousness and critical orientation towards our sociopolitical locations in contemporary society, the practices of normative masculine ideology seem more

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open to challenge, or at least more easily recognizable as a strained, cultural creation in need of constant reification and support. While we can discern many of the same patterns being recapitulated in contemporary enactments of masculinity, the moral imperatives that were once attached to these valorized enactments appear to be all but eroded. These are the issues that I take up in the next chapter—the social interpretation and re/production of ideologies and the emergence of toxic masculinity as a label for an unmoored masculinity that centers itself on the exaggerated precepts of normative masculine ideology.

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CHAPTER 5: NORMATIVE MASCULINE IDEOLOGY AS EMBODIED AND

BODILY PRACTICE: A SOCIAL FRAMEWORK WITH SOCIOPOLITICAL

SIGNIFICANCE

In John Carpenter’s 1988 cult classic They Live, humanoid aliens have infiltrated and gained control of society through the manipulation of our material reality via subliminal cultural indoctrination. While most of society is unaware of this alien occupation, an underground resistance movement has managed to create a technology that will allow humans to (literally) see the societal programing via propaganda that enables the aliens to remain undetected and in power. Unfortunately, the aliens discover the location of the resistance movement and kill all of its members before this technology can be distributed. In the rubble and wreckage of the resistance camp, a drifter named Nada (Roddy Piper) finds a box full of the resistance’s technology, which have been fashioned into cheap looking sunglasses. This set-up leads to an early pivotal scene in the film where

Nada—who is unaware of both the alien’s presence in society and the resistance movement’s technology—puts on the special glasses for the first time while walking down a busy Los Angeles boulevard. Immediately upon wearing the sunglasses, he sees a billboard that reads “OBEY.” Startled, he quickly removes the sunglasses. The billboard, an advertisement for Control Data, now reads

“WE’RE CREATING A TRANSPARENT COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT.” He then notices a billboard featuring a bikini-clad model posing in a swash of waves on a beach underneath the words “come to the… CARIBBEAN,” which reveals

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itself to actually read “MARRY AND REPRODUCE” as he returns the sunglasses to his face. As he continues down the boulevard, more objects reveal their hidden propaganda: store signs for a men’s apparel shop state “NO INDEPENDENT

THOUGHT” and “CONSUME;” a run-of-the-mill magazine variously exhorts

“OBEY,” “STAY ASLEEP,” “BUY,” “DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY,”

“WATCH T.V.,” and “NO IMAGINATION;” a dollar bill demands “THIS IS YOUR

GOD.”

At this moment in the film, Nada realizes They live, and it is their Truth, hiding in plain sight, that facilitates the normative and complacent functioning of modern society. More pointedly, this scene speaks to the structuring and normative function of ideology within society, to what Theodor Adorno describes as the culture industry in his 1975 essay “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In this essay, Adorno highlights the passivity involved with and the conformity encouraged by the culture industry:

The concepts of order which [the culture industry] hammers into human beings are always those of the status quo. They remain unquestioned, unanalyzed and undialectically presupposed, even if they no longer have any substance for those who accept them. [...] It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness. (emphasis mine, 17)

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Moreover, this culture industry “impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves”

(Adorno 19). Stated in other terms, the dominant ideologies of mass culture, of an organized society, create immense pressure points that push76 individuals into paths of least resistance, which, ultimately, re/produce those dominant ideologies through social practice (and, in turn, reify those ideologies’ socially ascribed status as ‘dominant’). In this system, choice is a largely an illusion because individuals choose from such a limited, artificial range, made limited and artificial through a rhetoricized process of symbolic annihilation. Adorno’s conceptualization of the culture industry is, in short, a rhetoric of cultural re/production and recapitulation. That is to say, our society is structured on the framework of dominant ideologies that we broadly understand as ‘culture’

(created by the culture industry) that is then internalized within and reproduced by the individuals that participate in its day-to-day practices—namely because those individuals lack the critical literacies necessary to recognize, understand, and resist these dominant ideologies77.

76 I want to draw attention to my use of “push” here. It is important to maintain that society does not determine social action. Individuals are free to act within society; however, those actions are always mediated by the various political, legal, and social contexts of that society. In that way, while individuals are free to act, they are also strongly incentivized (.e.g., pushed) through a system of societal rewards and punishments to act in prescribed and preferred normative patterns. 77 Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the strategies that mass media use to re/produce ideologies, I will note here that Adorno’s notion that the culture industry creates passive and distracted individuals is further taken up in the work of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky famously asserted in The Common Good (1998) that “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum” (43). Moreover, Chomsky’s work in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (Herman and Chomsky, 1988) and Media Control:The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 2e (Chomsky 2002) take up, indirectly at least, some of Adorno’s

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In this chapter, I continue my objective of positioning my conception of normative masculine ideology within a framework of social-epistemic situatedness based on James Berlin’s theorization of social-epistemic rhetoric. A social-epistemic situatedness foregrounds two elements: a historicist orientation and a postmodern conception of the subject. In the previous chapter, I provided a pointed rhetorical history for the emergence, development, and entrenchment of normative masculine ideology in the United States of America. In this chapter, I turn my attention to the second concern of social-epistemic situatedness: the ideological subject as “a social construct that emerges through the linguistically-circumscribed interaction of the individual, the community, and the material world” (Berlin 489). In what follows, I take up the notion that ideologies must be composed through social action—that is, socially reproduced. In much the same way that composition is an act of both “textual interpretation and construction” (Berlin 22), so too must ideologies be both interpreted and re/constructed through social action. Given that normative masculine ideology is an embodied ideology, it must be internalized (embodied through interpretation) and, concomitantly, re/produced, largely, through bodily practices.

The import of theorizing and discussing what I’ve proposed as normative masculine ideology has been established throughout this project, and it is

more pointed assertions. In The Manufacturing of Consent, Herman and Chomsky advance the idea of a Propaganda Model for media (although Chomsky is talking more narrowly about traditional mainstream media in the service of political elite ideologies, the general discussion is still applicable). Chomsky revisits these ideas in Media Control, where he outlines how the media uses propaganda to control the “bewildered herd.”

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unnecessary to retrace those arguments here. However, in giving my model of normative masculine ideology a historical and sociopolitical dimension, I will also contextualize the importance of these discussions by considering the emergence of what has been dubbed “toxic masculinity” in our sociopolitical, mainstream consciousness. Here, I forward the position that toxic masculinity is a reactionary enactment of normative masculine ideology that predominantly relies on coercive strategies of power over in an attempt to obtain an unmaintainable position of cultural hegemony in a society of increasingly complicated and shifting sociocultural power relations. I intend for this discussion to showcase the generative capacities of normative masculine ideology and be suggestive of future critical work.

I advance this chapter over two primary sections. In “Normative

Masculine Ideology: Embodied and Bodily Practice,” I explore the issues of interpreted ideologies and their reproduction through social practice. To discuss the interpretation of ideologies by individuals—the embodiment of ideologies—I draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of habitus and Jerome Bruner’s conception of folk psychology. After providing a frame for understanding the embodiment of ideologies, I turn to a discussion of how ideologies are (re)produced through social practice. To do this, I use the work of James Paul Gee on Discourse to demonstrate the rhetorical importance of the body in the production of ideologies. In the second section, “Hyper-Normative Masculine Ideology in Social

Practice: Toxic Masculinity as Critical Inquiry,” I showcase how normative

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masculine ideology problematically emerges in sociopolitical contexts. This discussion points to the ways that normative masculine ideology is a generative construct with invention heuristic applications. By providing a cultural snapshot of the currently trending descriptor “toxic masculinity,” I bring clarity to a term that is used broadly and often without a clear designation. I identify several core elements that constitute this ideology and then outline how this ideology is portrayed in mainstream consciousness through examining two cultural texts.

These sections are intended to round out my discussion of normative masculine ideology as a form of gendered rhetorical embodiment through locating normative masculine ideology in the practice of lived experience. Perhaps, most importantly, now, as much as ever, we need renewed lines of resistance via nuanced and informed understandings so that we can overcome this current bastion of pathetic albeit quite potent (and dangerous) normative masculine ideology. This chapter makes a contribution towards that end.

Normative Masculine Ideology: Embodied and Bodily Practice

Ideology, like rhetoric, is a concept with immense generative potential.

However, without care, ideology, like rhetoric, can become a totalizing and tautological concept, the de facto UR-explanation wherein it becomes both the problem and its own solution. James Berlin recognized this potential pitfall and suggested that social-epistemic rhetoric had the capacity to safeguard against this totalizing effect through “methods for discussing the production and reception of texts” (20). Berlin’s predilections for history and social location made sure that

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rhetorical work on ideologies always grounded those discussions within the appropriate and necessary rhetorical contexts. In short, Berlin’s scholarship advanced ideology as a functional concept with critical capacities.

In this section, I emulate Berlin’s efforts by examining normative masculine ideology as a rhetoricized social process of interpretation and bodily

(re)production. In the first subsection, “The Embodiment of Normative

Masculine Ideology,” I explore the notion of ideologies through Pierre Bourdieu’s understanding of habitus and Jerome Bruner’s framework of folk psychology. I pair the work of these scholars because their concepts share an emphasis on the role of language as a system of meaning-making that constitutes and is constituted by ideologies vis-a-vis what we understand as culture and society.

Independently, Bourdieu’s work is particularly relevant because his notion of habitus foregrounds the role of the body while Bruner’s work gives special consideration to narrative (of a rhetoric) in his theorization of folk psychology.

Together, using Bruner’s folk psychology as an extension of Bourdieu’s habitus, these scholars contextualize ideologies within a social context, as an embodied

(interpreted) epistemology that compels individuals into certain social action. In the second subsection, “Normative Masculine Ideology as Bodily Rhetorical

Practice,” I position this social action as a form of Discourse as outlined by James

Paul Gee. Contextualizing normative masculine ideologies within the social frameworks provided by Bourdieu, Bruner, and Gee positions the construct in a

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way that makes it amenable and susceptible to the conceptual tools of rhetoric, to examination, resistance, reconfiguration, and dismantlement.

Before continuing, I will make a quick note on the organization of this section. Although I separate this discussion into the two aforementioned subsections, I do this largely for reader convenience. Stated simply, the connection between the interpretation of ideologies and the re/production of those embodied ideologies are not so neatly distinguishable. A model of recursion, much like a model of the composing process, is a more accurate encapsulation than one that is simply and neatly linear. With that caveat noted, I have structured the discussion in this section along a continuum of both ideological awareness/consciousness and relevance to scholars of Rhetoric and Composition. That is, in terms of ideological awareness/consciousness, Bourdieu deals largely with the sub-conscious, Bruner with functional awareness, and Gee with critical awareness in relation to ideologies. As for relevance to scholars of Rhetoric and Composition, again, Bourdieu recognizes the importance of language, Bruner employs narrative as the foundation for meaning making, and

Gee draws on linguistics and rhetorical theory to position Discourse as a social phenomenon.

The Embodiment of Normative Masculine Ideology

In The Logic of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu advances his understanding of habitus. On one hand, Bourdieu’s habitus can be a tricky term to fully pin down.

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Take, for instance, this oft-cited passage from “Structures, Habitus, Practice,” in which Bourdieu outlines habitus as follows:

The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively 'regulated' and 'regular' without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor. (53)

At first blush, this passage may seem to have more in common with Lewis

Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky” than it does with elucidating Bourdieu’s thoughts on habitus; however, the gist of Bourdieu’s understanding and use of habitus operates on several rather straightforward principles. First and foremost, habitus is concerned with social practice—taken here to mean both attitudes and actions, or dispositions as Bourdieu would have it. Second, this social practice is mediated by a (social) history—taken here to mean, in large part, ‘culture’—which exerts its influence on that social practice. Third, influenced social practice (i.e., an individual acting within a field or subculture of society) will, in turn, produce/construct (social) history, which will often be largely similar although not necessarily the same as the social history that mediated that social practice.

These three principles lead to an understanding of habitus as “embodied history,

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internalized as a second nature, and so forgotten as history” (Bourdieu 56). That is to say, for Bourdieu, habitus is entirely a cultural creation, an unrecognized byproduct of the dialectic between historied culture and individuals that is so deeply internalized that it seems natural or self-evident. Moreover, as should be evident at this point, the internalization and social practice of a habitus is, more than an abstract or mental process, a bodily practice. An understanding of habitus as an embodied and forgotten history that is re/produced in, on, and through the body has clear implications for an understanding of normative masculine ideology. As I discussed in the last chapter, the normative masculine ideologies that still loom large in our society have an obscured and elided patriarchal legacy (read: forgotten and internalized social history) that began, quite literally, with the male body. The ideologies that constitute the patriarchal legacy discussed in the previous chapter can be understood through the concept of habitus in that it they form “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” through the cultural

(and social) capital that the enactment and encouragement of normative masculine ideology produces. In short, a culture imbricated in the logics of patriarchy to the extent that those logics are often presumed to be the natural state of that society (and humanity writ large) mistakes normativity for normalcy.

That normative masculine ideology can function as a gendered form of habitus within this culture should not be surprising; it should be expected.

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If habitus provides a grounding for how embodied ideologies operate at a largely sub-conscious level, Jerome Bruner’s work on folk psychology in Acts of Meaning focuses on the tip of that ideological iceberg. Similar to Bourdieu, Bruner’s work begins with an understanding of society as a cultural creation that mediates social practice:

...it is culture, not biology, that shapes human life and the human mind, that gives meaning to action by situating its underlying intentional states in an interpretive system. It does this by imposing patterns inherent in the culture's symbolic systems—its language and discourse modes, the forms of logical and narrative explication, and the patterns of mutually dependent communal life. (34)

More than similar starting premises, Bruner’s folk psychology covers similar ground as Bourdieu’s habitus. However, folk psychology enflects Bourdieu’s habitus with a clearer account of intentionality and human agency, moving the discussion from embodied history to “enculturated knowledge” (20). In laying out his model, Bruner describes folk psychology as “a set of more or less connected, more or less normative descriptions about how human beings ‘tick,’ what our own and other minds are like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible modes of life, how one commits oneself to them, and so on” (35). Bruner argues that “It is through folk psychology that people anticipate and judge one another, draw conclusions about the worthwhileness of their lives, and so on.” He continues that folk psychology’s “power over human mental functioning and human life is that it provides the very means by which culture

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shapes human beings to its requirements” (14). Stated otherwise, folk psychology is the conscious interpretation (and concomitant expression) of our structuring ideologies. More than just providing an account of what constitutes social practice, it also works to understand how that social practice is expected to operate within the historical and rhetorical constraints of a given culture.

Another distinguishing and central element of folk psychology is Bruner’s explication of narrative as “a natural vehicle for folk psychology” (52). He draws particular attention to “its sequentiality, its factual ‘indifference,’...its unique way of managing departures from the canonical,” (50) and its inherent dramatism

(via the work of Kenneth Burke) as the primary mechanisms that enable humans to interpret the meanings generated within social practice. These mechanisms also frame social action. That is, despite earnest and promising progress since the

1960s, normative masculine ideology, supported by traditionalist sex-based gender role stereotypes/expectations, still operates largely unabashed. In this way, normative masculine ideology resonates within our cultural conscience at the level of habitus manifest as folk-psychology, providing society with a narratival ruleset for ordering and interpreting experiences, such as William

Pollack’s “old Boy Code” and “gender straightjacket” (6) and Adrienne Rich’s identification of compulsory heterosexuality. Here, then, in the work of Pierre

Bourdieu and Jerome Bruner, an understanding of ideologies as embodied phenomenon has been advanced. Now, I turn my attention to the re/production of normative masculine ideology, specifically as a bodily practice.

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Normative Masculine Ideology as Bodily Rhetorical Practice

Normative masculine ideology is embodied, employed, enacted through (primarily) male bodies78. In this way, this concept should be understood as both object and subject, both product and producer of power. Having discussed normative masculine ideologies as an embodied form of habitus that manifests as folk psychology at a semi-conscious functional level, the next issue to attend to is the employment and enactment of those embodied ideologies. James Paul Gee’s work on Discourse proves useful in elaborating on how normative masculine ideology is employed and enacted from a sociolinguistic and rhetorical level.

However, before I proceed to Gee, I will first provide some brief commentary on the work of Judith Butler in regards to normative masculine ideology. Because

Butler is so foundational and so often invoked in discussions of gender enactments/performance, I have elected to use Gee so as to not retread many of the insights already derived from Butler’s work and discussed at length by many other scholars. However, precisely because Butler is so foundational and so often invoked in these sorts of conversations, I would be remiss not to provide some discussion of her work in this project.

Judith Butler’s discussion of gender constitution via performative acts has rather clear and obvious implications for discussing normative masculine ideology as an enacted (i.e. performed) embodied ideology. To start, Butler

78 As I’ve noted variously in this project, although normative masculine ideology is embodied, employed, and enacted through (primarily) male bodies, it is also endorsed and reproduced through society at large. That is, non-male bodies and non-male identified individuals also play a significant role in upholding and reproducing normative masculine ideologies.

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recognizes gender as a mandated and constrictive fiction—a cultural creation to the nth degree. For her, “Genders… can be neither true nor false, neither real nor apparent. And yet, one is compelled to live in a world in which genders constitute univocal signifiers, in which gender is stabilized, polarized, rendered discrete and intractable” (Butler 528). In an understanding not dissimilar to the function of

Bourdieu’s habitus, individuals establish a (fictive) gender identity “through a stylized repetition of acts,” such as “body gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds” (519) within “the confines of already existing directives” (526).

These acts, more than playful, are constitutive and reify the seeming necessity and naturalness of gendered identities. In this way, the performativity of gender can be understood as both a rhetoric of the body and an embodied rhetoric in its construction and interpretation of the self. Much like the subject of social-epistemic rhetoric, the subject of gender constitution emerges from the historically-mediated dialectic of self and society. Furthermore, gender performances and the social sanctions and taboos that mediate/regulate those performances operate as an enactment of Bruner’s folk psychology—we act out and interpret gender from our collective cultural scripts of narrativized meaning making. Judith Butler’s work established queer theory as a field and has set the course for much poststructuralist discussion of gender in the humanities. As for many scholars interested in gender and sexuality studies, Butler has been essential in my own understanding of gender enactment/performance. However, as to not simply recapitulate the arguments of any number of scholars since the

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publication of Gender Trouble, I will focus the remainder of this section on the work of James Paul Gee and its implications for elucidating normative masculine ideology.

In “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction,” James Paul Gee sets out to re-define the field of Literacy Studies in much the same way Berlin did for Rhetoric and Composition. Arguing that any study of language should always also be a study of social practices, Gee proposed his concept of Discourse. For

Gee, language use includes “playing the right social role and (appearing) to hold the right values, beliefs, and attitudes. Thus, what is important is… saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” (6). In line with the positions outlined by both Bourdieu and Bruner, Gee states that “Discourses are ways of being in the world; they are forms of life which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, and social identities as well as gestures, glances, body positions, and clothes" (6-7). Similarly, much like Bruner’s social implications of folk psychology, Gee likens Discourse to an “identity kit,” which provides

“instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize" (emphasis mine, 7). However, as with Bruner for Bourdieu, Gee’s work provides a more explicit framework for discussing the acquisition and production of ideologies79.

79 To demonstrate the ideological nature of Discourse, Gee provides the example of a five-year-old girl telling a story about her birthday party while pretending to read that story from a book. The story itself is not of importance, but the implications of her telling that story are. As Gee notes, "Notice, then, how the very form and structure of language, and the linguistic devices used, carry an ideological message. In mastering this aspect of this Discourse, the little girl has unconsciously 'swallowed whole,' ingested, a whole system of thought, embedded in the very linguistic aspects of

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Gee’s framework of Discourse is composed of several interlocking, overlapping, and competing levels of Discourse that are necessary to understand.

To begin, all individuals start with a primary Discourse80, the “one we first use to make sense of the world and interact with others” (8). From this foundational, or primary, Discourse an individual will acquire a host of secondary Discourses through their interactions with various social institutions via the process of enculturation/socialization, which range from community groups to bureaucratic organizations. These secondary Discourses can be thought of as being either dominant or non-dominant. As Gee defines them, “Dominant Discourses are secondary Discourses the mastery of which, at a particular place and time, brings with it the (potential) acquisition of social 'goods' (money, prestige, status, etc.),” and “Non-dominant Discourses are secondary Discourses the mastery of which often brings solidarity with a particular social network, but not wider status and social goods in the society at large" (8). Given that an individual will have dozens

(or more) secondary Discourses, these Discourses will often be at odds and conflict with one another in ways that can interfere with the mastery of one or more other secondary Discourses. However, it is this same problematic that imbues secondary Discourses with critical and liberatory potential, namely in

Discourses can never be isolated from nonlinguistic aspects like values, assumptions, and beliefs" (16). 80 While all Discourses are ideological, primary Discourse can be considered of a different sort because their ideological underpinnings are often imbued with the major structuring ideologies (traditions, mores, taboos, values) of a society as interpreted and inculcated by the sponsors of that primary Discourse—“family, clan, peer group” (8) as Gee would have it.

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their ability to challenge or unsettle an individual’s primary Discourse through meta-knowledge and what amounts to a critical literacy orientation.

Applying Gee’s discussion of Discourse to normative masculine ideology brings to the fore four critical implications. First and foremost, given the patriarchal legacy discussed in the previous chapter, the logics of normative masculine ideology are embedded within the primary Discourse of many individuals81 because our society acts as cultural hotbed for an enculturation of normative masculine ideology. As Gee notes, these “aspects and pieces of the primary Discourse become a ‘carrier’ or ‘foundation’ for Discourses acquired later in life” (8). This patriarchal enculturation sets the stage for years of cultural conditioning during the formative years of development that serve to entrench the masculine stereotype, which functions not only as a cultural guidepost for many male-identified individuals in fashioning their own masculine identities but also as a cultural barometer for assessing and responding to all masculinities regardless of their subject position or social location. Second, more than just a primary Discourse, normative masculine ideology also operates simultaneously as both a dominant and non-dominant Discourse. This duality accounts for its centrality and endurance by elevating some men to venerated positions in society

(i.e., dominant Discourse) while also providing social cohesion through the successful enactment and/or support of its social employment (i.e.,

81 Unfortunately, even the most progressive of households cannot compete with the effects of secondary Discourse, which will certainly be wrapped up in the logics of normative masculine ideology

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non-dominant Discourse). Third, although it is pervasive and resilient—and perhaps because it is so willing to adapt to maintain its cultural hegemony—normative masculine ideology is not a particularly stable construction. As I discussed in the previous chapter, normative masculine ideology is, in part, characterized by its ability and necessity to perpetually redefine itself. This characteristic causes both tension and conflict that can interfere with the acquisition of other Discourses—often having the effect of reifying normative masculine ideology itself. Finally, and most importantly, once positioned as a Discourse, normative masculine ideology is subject to be critiqued and resisted in similar ways to other Discourses. Gee proposes the two-pronged strategy of "'Mushfake,' resistance, and meta-knowledge” (13) as a means “to manipulate, to analyze, [and] to resist” (13) normative Discourses. By exposing the frameworks and logics of normative masculine ideology—how it operates in social practice through its collective interpretations (embodiment) and re/productions (through bodily practices)—we can continue our efforts toward delegitimizing normative masculine ideology and displace it from its de facto, default position in the structuring of our society.

Hyper-Normative Masculine Ideology in Social Practice: Toxic Masculinity as

Critical Inquiry

Modern masculinity and what I have advanced as normative masculine ideology throughout this project still casts a dark shadow on American men and

America’s sociopolitical landscape in much the same way that it has since its

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construction in the late 1700s. And yet, normative masculine ideology finds itself at a precarious precipice, a precipice that, if pushed over its edge, could prove to dislodge normative masculine ideology from its heteropatriarchal bulwark and force a long delayed embrace of, to misquote Lyotard, incredulity toward its own metanarratives. As can be imagined, this transition toward a postmodern fracturing of masculinity at a mainstream, cultural consciousness is far from guaranteed. As I discussed in the last chapter, the logics of patriarchy have created many strategies and safeguards against such change. While these strategies have been successful in continually reifying a normative enactment of masculinity, they have also resulted in an ideal of masculinity that is logically inconsistent and largely impossible to obtain and/or maintain. When men fail to maintain such idealized enactments of masculinity, they may resort to their own problematic strategies to achieve a sense of cultural capital and power. To this point, critical conversations around the concept of toxic masculinity have emerged as an attempt to identify and problematize the coercive ideological and cultural tropes of a hyper-normative masculine ideology. As to suggest potential avenues for further research, I offer a preliminary discussion of toxic masculinity as not only a viable but also a necessary site for critical interrogation and rhetorical resistance.

Toxic Masculinity as a Site for Critical Resistance

At the outset, the term toxic masculinity requires some operationalizing. As I will advance the term, toxic masculinity can be understood as a caustic,

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reactionary hyper-enactment of normative masculine ideology. In that, toxic masculinity can be understood within the frameworks of normative masculine ideology; however, normative masculine ideology is not the same as toxic masculinity. The terms hyper-normative masculine ideology or toxic normative masculine ideology serve to mark this distinction, but I will use toxic masculinity in this discussion for coherency. In that, toxic masculinity has analogues in male supremacy82 and other anti-feminist sentiments. Toxic masculinity is a response to the precarious nature of masculinity83 (Vandello and Bosson). Superficial touchstones of masculinity (wealth, status, physical fitness and or other arbitrary physical features), latent homophobia, and the objectification and commodification of women: toxic masculinity not only recapitulates but also enhances the worst tropes of normative masculine ideology.

As I’ve outlined, normative masculine ideology is aspirational, meaning that it is an iteration of masculinity that society constructs as desirable and teleological given its concomitant cultural markers. In this sense, normative masculine ideology operates as the master narrative for successful masculinity and manhood—it is our baseline, our benchmark masculinity. Toxic masculinity,

82 The Southern Poverty Law Center defines male supremacy as a “hateful ideology advocating for the subjugation of women” with “A thinly veiled desire for the domination of women and a conviction that the current system oppresses men in favor of women [as] the unifying tenets of the male supremacist worldview.” Male supremacy, like toxic masculinity, is rooted in male fragility 83 In “Hard Won and Easily Lost: A Review and Synthesis of Theory and Research on Precarious Manhood” (2013), Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson argue that manhood constitutes a “precarious social status” (101). Their thesis comprises three tenets, which echo many of the arguments forwarded in this project. First, one’s manhood must be earned. Second, even after being earned, one’s manhood must be continually re-earned lest it be de-legitimized. Third, manhood is ascribed via a social and public process — it is others that validate one’s manhood.

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however, is endemically anti-aspirational because, implicitly at least, it understands—again, even if it will not recognize—that normative masculine ideology is Sisyphean in its attainment. Even when an individual reaches the esteemed cultural summit, their success will be short-lived and the struggle to retain or return to that position will begin anew (i.e., manhood as a precarious social status). Not only does such a narrative write toxic masculinity as “normal” but also seeds it with ideations of taken-for-granted privilege and entitlement. It reifies existing structural positions of privilege by situating valorized expressions of masculinity (i.e. toxic masculinity) within those structural positions.

What I mean by this statement is that toxic masculinity has a familiar face, and it looks a lot like Audre Lorde’s mythical norm of the “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual Christian, and financially secure” person (116) or Jeanie

Ludlow’s “portrait of US cultural power” as a White, upper/middle class, able bodied, heterosexual, Protestant male adult (46). Reverting to using privileged structural positions as a mechanism for organizing social dynamics and relationships among masculinities is problematic for a myriad of obvious reasons from a critical-cultural perspective. At the same time, this mechanism also creates a slippery slope within toxic masculinity that not only renders it inaccessible to most men but creates a cultural model of masculinity that exerts constant pressure to maintain one’s masculinity.

Because toxic masculinity works within a pseudo-hierarchy of social organization, a constant feature of it is competition, which breeds escalating

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standards for successful attainment. Taken to its logical end, an individual would need to emulate Kate Bornstein’s “perfectly gendered person84” (87) in their efforts to reach the apex of normative manhood. Given such a high barrier for entry, it is infinitely easier to enact toxic and coercive strategies to attain/maintain one’s masculinity. In this way, toxic masculinity becomes an expression of masculinity that strives for power through power over (domination) to compensate for aggrieved entitlement85 and unchecked (male) privilege. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but toxic masculinity is an over-conforming and over-performing of the narrow ideations of normativity and a byproduct of a heteropatriarchal capitalist cultural system.

Toxic Masculinity As Popular Concept

For certain, toxic masculinity also carries a specific cultural mythos—that is, the concept has been substantiated enough by popular culture that it produces a generally shared schema. But, like other contemporary cultural tropes (e.g., the

84 For Bornstein, the “perfectly gendered person” would possess the following characteristics: white; citizen of the USA; Protestant-defined Christian; middle aged; upper class; hetersexual; monogamous, monofidelitous; able-bodied and of sound mind; tall, trim, and reasonably muscled; attractive, according to cultural standards; right-handed; well-educated; well-mannered; professional or executive level; politically conservative; capitalist; self-defining and self-measuring; physically healthy, with access to health care; in possession of all rights available under the law; free and safe access to all private and public areas as allowed by the law; property owning; binary-oriented; logical (linear thinking); lives in a wealthy suburb; possessing a well-formed, above-average length penis, a pair of reasonably matched testicles, and at least an average sperm count; legally married, and parent of more of the same (87). 85 This term comes from Michael Kimmel’s 2013 book Angry White Men, the premise of which is a sociological investigation into the psyche of the Angry White Man and the cultural precedents that enable(d) this mentality. For Kimmel, “Aggrieved entitlement is a gendered emotion, a fusion of that humiliating loss of manhood and the moral obligation and entitlement to get it back. And its gender is masculine” (75).

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gym rat, the hipster, or the basic white girl), it also depends on who you ask. For instance, The Good Men Project (Carley) defines toxic masculinity as:

a narrow and repressive description of manhood, designating manhood as defined by violence, sex, status and aggression. It’s the cultural ideal of manliness, where strength is everything while emotions are a weakness; where sex and brutality are yardsticks by which men are measured, while supposedly ‘feminine’ traits—which can range from emotional vulnerability to simply not being hypersexual—are the means by which your status as ‘man’ can be taken away while Maya Salam, writing for The New York Times, describes toxic masculinity as “what can come of teaching boys that they can’t express emotion openly; that they have to be ‘tough all the time’; that anything other than that makes them

‘feminine’ or ‘weak.’” In this regard, toxic masculinity is less like a portrait and more like a photomosaic. The photomosaic is a style of photography that composes a central image—say, a cat—out of a number of smaller images, usually related to the central image. When viewed from an appropriate distance, the photomosaic looks similar to a blocky impressionistic rendering of the central image, but when viewed at a closer distance, the individual pictures take precedence. Employing this metaphor as an organizing gestalt, my primary concern is with the photomosaic that emerges from its various enactments of coercive and problematic subcultures. That is to say, for the purposes of this project, I want to largely focus on the overarching, more impressionistic conception of toxic masculinity that operates in our mainstream conversations.

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Before proceeding, however, a glossing survey of the aforementioned subcultures of toxic masculinity is warranted here. I want to make clear here at the outset that these toxic subcultures are not indicative of a fracturing modern masculinity (of a masculinity reaching critical mass). To the contrary, these subcultures are reactionary and misguided attempts at once again reifying modern masculinities cultural hegemony. This survey charts the landscape of these subcultures and is suggestive of future avenues for research beyond the scope of this project. In what follows, I will touch upon Meninists qua MRAs,

Incels, MGTOWS, and Red Pillers. As with many subcultures, the boundaries

(e.g., thoughts, beliefs, customs, practices, etc.) that roughly define one group are not always clearly defined and often overlap with the boundaries of other similar groups. Also, as with many subculture identities, distinctions between groups and group solidarity carry significance, so that even though we may be able to trace many common strands between say Red Pillers and MGTOWs, members within that community may vehemently disagree with such broad characterizations.

The least legitimized of these subcultures is Meninists. In 2013, men on

Twitter started using the hashtag #meninists both as a lazy joke and as a legitimate “channel for men to express the difficulties of being a man in the 21st century” (Warren; Zand). Although the hashtag quickly fell out of use, this

Meninist mentality emanated from the Men’s Rights Movement that I discussed in the second chapter. While not all men using the #meninist hashtag would

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consider themselves MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists), many of their general complaints echoed in one form or another the typical agenda issues for MRAs.

The term Incel is a neologism for the phrase “involuntary celibate,” which, as the phrase suggests, is a subculture of men whose toxicity is centered on their inability to own and control women. From this simple premise, Incels have developed an extensive subculture that works to provide them with a semblance of power as predicated on their antipathy towards women and their overt homosocial affinities (Conti). Often confused with Incels, MGTOW (pronounced

Mig-Tau) is an acronym that stands for Men Go Their Own Way. Men who subscribe to this group not only work to actively distance themselves from women in both social and sexual relations but also, eventually, to become disenfranchised with the government, which, like feminism, contributes to the oppression of men in society in their estimation.

And, finally, Red Pillers are a community of men that emerged and coalesced on Reddit in 2013 via the r/TheRedPill subReddit. Many of the posts within this subreddit have been collected in The Red Pill Handbook, 2nd Edition, which describes Red Pill as, “The recognition and awareness of the way that feminism, feminists, and their white-knight enablers affect society. Seeing the world for what it is, seeking truth no matter how painful or inconvenient the truth may be” (411-12). Furthermore, Red Pill is often marketed as “men’s sexual strategy” in response to a prevailing feminist sexual strategy (7). Even a cursory browsing of the pitiable cesspool that is The Red Pill Handbook reveals that the

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underlying foundation of Red Pill, like any subculture of toxic masculinity, is misogyny and an aggrieved sense of entitlement and privilege born from male fragility and shifting sociocultural and production relations (e.g., a shifting capitalist market and unstable middle class) in society.

Given my focus in this project, the above survey of toxic subcultures is meant to merely identify several of the contemporary groups that embody and reproduce toxic and coercive normative masculine ideology. At this point, however, as to not miss the forest for the trees, I want to return to outlining our broader cultural conception of toxic masculinity. To do this outlining, I discuss how toxic masculinity is addressed in two recent cultural texts: Michael

Rohrbaugh’s 2016 MTV’s Look Different Creator Competition winning short film entitled American Male and Axe’s 2017 image re-defining #isitokayforguysto ad-initiative.

In American Male, Rohrbaugh sets out to challenge the cultural metanarratives that young men interpret and enact in the pursuit of ‘successful’ masculine enactment. To achieve this, Rohrbaugh centers his film on the eponymous American Male—a white, privileged, college-aged student with a relatively homogenous social circle. Over the course of 6 minutes, the audience is able to glimpse into what appears to be a rather quotidian weekend—watching spots, working out, partying—that culminates in a fraternity pledge hazing ceremony. While these events play out, the American Male provides commentary via narration on what it means to be a “man”:

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Order beer, not wine. And beef, not chicken. Never light beer though. And not tofu. Can’t get more gay than tofu. Steer clear of the arts unless you live on the coasts. That means no theater, dancing, painting, poetry, or prose. Too much reading is also risky, because it makes you look soft and bookish. What can I say? Better safe than sorry. Women gesture more when they speak. They call this a limp wrist. When I was younger, I used to gesture a lot until I learned to keep my hands in my pockets. Women cross their legs when they sit, men keep their legs open. Women hold books across their chests, men hold them at their sides. Women listen to pop music, men listen to rock. Women sing to the radio, men nod along. Women wear bright colors like pink, yellow, and purple, men wear dark shades of blue, brown, green, grey, and black. Women play woodwinds or string instruments — like the violin and the flute, men play brass or percussion. Women understand fashion, color, and design, men are better at math, mechanics, and home repair. Women move their hips when they walk; men move their shoulders. Women use exclamation points; men use periods. Women sing, dance, and perform on stage; men play sports, watch sports, and talk about sports. Women write in diaries; men journal. Women cook; men grill. Women second guess; men go with their gut. Go big, or go home. Miguel Cabrera has a 338 batting average. Tom Brady threw 4,770 yards last year. The Dodge Ram tows 10,800 pounds. And the Bugatti Super Sport goes from zero to 60 in 2.4 seconds. In order to survive, a chameleon will change colors to blend in with its surroundings. At a young age, I began to closely observe the people around me. The way they talked, the way they walked, what they said, where it got them. Now, I am no longer a person, but a set of social cues. Not a person, but a path of least resistance.

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In these comparisons, Rohrbaugh highlights the construction of masculinity through demonstrating how masculine identities are actively constructed against a defined opposite (in this case, women). American Male cogently demonstrates how normative masculine ideology is embodied and reproduced in the micro- and macro-politics of everyday life. Normative masculinity is constructed in our food and drink choices, in our hobbies, in our dispositions and body language, in our sartorial choices, and in how we force gendered binaries onto activities to change their social significance (e.g., “Women cook; men grill”). Moreover,

Rohrbaugh foregrounds how normative masculine ideology coerces men to both embody and reproduce it through enculturation (e.g., “At a young age, I began to closely observe the people around me. The way they talked, the way they walked, what they said, where it got them. Now, I am no longer a person, but a set of social cues. Not a person, but a path of least resistance”). This text not only highlights how normative masculine ideology structures our broader understandings of gender (and particularly of gender as understood as a binary of male/female) but also emphasizes the way that normative masculine ideology interpellates male bodies into restrictive and toxic behaviors with the short film’s culminating hazing ritual and display of male aggression and dominance.

Similar to Rohrbaugh’s American Male, Axe—the company made famous for its sexist and heteronormative advertisements for its line of body sprays—released an ad/initiative that focused on the constrictive and toxic effects of normative masculine ideology on male bodies. The spot opens with a statistic

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drawn from The Man Box Study, which reads, “72% of guys have been told how a real man should behave,” before presenting a montage of scenarios with men asking the following questions: “Is it okay to be skinny?” “Is it okay to not like sports?” “Is it okay to be a virgin?” “...to experiment with other guys?” “Is it okay for guys to wear pink?” “Is it okay for guys to be nervous?” “...to have long hair?”

“...to like cats?” “...to take a selfie?” “...to shave your [body]?” “...to be depressed?” “...to be scared?” “Is it okay for me to be the little spoon?” The ad concludes with a search box on screen that displays these aforementioned voiced questions in addition to new inquiries86 before posing the final question: “is it okay for guys to be themselves?” The point of the Axe initiative is to highlight how the implicit answer to all of these question is an emphatic “yes,” but that prevailing notions of what it means to be a “real man” often position these questions as problematic because they fall outside the “Act Like a Man Box”

(Kivel) that most men find themselves compelled to stay within.

Both American Male and the Axe initiative underscore the importance of women as objectified currency in the enactment of masculinity and the role of homosocialy and homophobia in the construction of masculinity. However,

86 The full text from this portion of the ad reads, “is it okay for guys to be…” “be skinny,” “be sensitive,” “be shirtless,” “be bisexual,” “experiment with other guys,” “eat edamame,” “eat tofu,” “do yoga,” “drink soy milk,” “do their eyebrows,” “dye their hair,” “cook,” “cry,” “cross their legs,” “change together,” “wear leggings,” “wear rings,” “wear white jeans,” “wear makeup,” “use emojis,” “use xoxo,” “use hairspray,” “use concealer,” “be a virgin,” “be the little spoon,” “be depressed,” “be nervous,” “say I love you first,” “say aww,” “say lol,” “say I miss you,” “have long hair,” “have female friends,” “have armpit hair,” “have long nails,” “pee sitting down,” “paint their nails,” “pierce their ears,” “pierce their tongues,” “get jealous,” “get their eyebrows down,” “go commando,” “get pedicures,” “like cats,” “like fashion” “like romance,” “listen to girly music,” “take a selfie,” and “take baths.”

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American Male more explicitly takes on the expression of toxic masculinity. During a hazing ritual, where pledges are paddled at a party, one of the pledges, after being paddled by the American Male character, bumps into the American

Male, causing him to spill his drink. This exchange provides the grounding for the

American Male to prove his masculinity, at which point he throws down the pledge and begins to violently paddle him repeatedly until he needs to be stopped by other men at the party. Once he is separated from the pledge, he repeatedly yells “faggot” at the pledge. This scene demonstrates how volatile the pursuit of normative masculinity can be, and how easily normative masculinity can slip into a toxic enactment of power over in an attempt to prove one’s manhood.

Conclusion

As I come to the end of this project, I’m reminded of a quote by Kurt

Vonnegut, who cautioned that discussions of "Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak." I want to be careful that in having advanced normative masculine ideology as a generative rhetorical construct that it does not become obfuscated behind theoretical discussions of functional and critical ideologies and their role in the re/production of the imperialist, capitalist, ableist, hetero-normative, patriarchal, white-supremacist machine that is masculinity politics and our culture at large. In the introduction, I spoke of our collective consciousness surrounding masculinity nearing a critical mass. At this point in the project, it should be clear that normative masculine ideologies are recalcitrant

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to change. And yet, they are changing, are being forced to change. This change is not without struggle.

Even in its death rattle, normative masculine ideologies are still active in structuring our lives. As we continue our march toward gender justice, reactionary masculinity politics make their last stand. A last stand which finds our patriarchal legacy both enabling and even encouraging coercive normative masculine ideologies. In no uncertain terms, a patriarchal legacy of coercive and reactionary normative masculine ideology is one where young rich White males like Brock "20 Minutes of Action" Turner and Ethan "Affluenza" Couch receive criminally lenient sentences because of their socially-venerated identity markers.

A patriarchal legacy of coercive and reactionary normative masculine ideology is one where platforms are continually given to White conservative provocateur-pundits like Milo Yiannopoulos, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Steven

Crowder, and Gavin McInnes because they serve as the mouthpieces for White men mired in traditionalist masculine ideologies. A patriarchal legacy of coercive and reactionary normative masculine ideology is one where Ammon Bundy can lead an armed militia of mostly White, mostly male bodies in seizing and occupying the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge for over four weeks before law enforcement fully intervened. A patriarchal legacy of coercive and reactionary normative masculine ideology is one that enables Richard Spencer to mobilize hundreds of misguided and easily manipulated angry White men into descending upon Charlottesville for a Unite the Right rally. A patriarchal legacy of coercive

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and reactionary normative masculine ideology is one that allows for an incompetent, egotistical White supremacist sympathizer to con his way into the office of President of the United States. A patriarchal legacy of coercive and reactionary normative masculine ideology enables the confirmation of Brett

Kavanaugh, a questionably qualified, belligerent, alleged sexual assaulter to the

Supreme Court and places conservatives one supreme court ruling away from destroying many of the footholds established during the civil rights, gay and lesbian liberation, and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and ‘70s. A patriarchal legacy of coercive and reactionary normative masculine ideology created the system that enabled the countless instances of harassment, coercion, and assault by privileged and culturally powerful men like Harvey Weinstein,

Matt Lauer, Sherman Alexie, Louis CK, Junot Diaz, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Kevin

Spacey, and Bryan Singer before being exposed by individuals empowered by the

#MeToo movement and the Time’s Up initiative. And it’s our patriarchal legacy of coercive and reactionary normative masculine ideology that, despite all the very real and continued progress of our steps toward reaching critical mass, is allowing many of these men to regain their positions of power and authority after brief retreats from the public’s consciousness. To be sure, progress is possible, but it is not inevitable. Now, more than ever, we need concerted, coordinated, informed acts of resistance.

In this project, I have proposed normative masculine ideology as a generative rhetorical construct. As a functional construct, normative masculine

160

ideology provides scholars within (and adjacent to) Rhetoric and Composition with a working term that expands their understanding of Critical Masculinities—a concern more and more warranted given our sociopolitical landscape. As a rhetorical construct, normative masculine ideology incorporates social-epistemic rhetorics, gendered rhetorical embodiment, and Discourse to expand its utility into critical and liberatory work. As a generative construct, normative masculine ideology—through the historical and theoretical context I’ve discussed in the preceding chapters—provides new inroads for inquiries into masculinities beyond the particular application that this project demonstrates.

Our engagements with masculinity have truly yet to begin in full. Given this state of affairs, I have made the case for Rhetoric and Composition to consider issues of masculinity as viable sites of critical investigation and scholarly inquiry. Normative masculine ideology necessitates our marking traditionally invisible axes of cultural power (maleness, whiteness, etc.) as a strategy for sustained resistance to and reformation of dominant cultural ideologies. By marking and foregrounding normative masculine ideology, the normalcy of yoking masculinity with dominant structuring positions (maleness, whiteness, straightness) can be challenged through critical rhetorical literacies. Dominant models of masculinity are normalized in far as they remain unnamed/invisible.

To identify, and interrogate, the dominant structuring positions that reify normative masculine ideology is to be able to decenter it—or at least to begin that process.

161

In the introduction, I stated that I view this project as a form of activism—a form of activism built on the necessity of change, and a form of activism predicated on the pursuit of social justice in gender relations. I want to end this project as a means of beginning, of renewing our scholarly commitments to critically address masculinity as a strategy for enacting gender and social justice. To that end, I close this project with the following call to action:

We have so much more to give We are the alternative And our voices will rise in unison We have yet to begin We cannot let ourselves wear thin And for what it’s worth our resolve Will not see its end. (Stick to Your Guns)

We are reaching critical mass. We are changing. We will change.

162

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