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Understanding Masculinity Author(syf 5 D G K L N D & K R S U D & K D L W D O L ' D V J X S W D D Q G 0 D Q G H H S . - D Q H M a Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 35, No. 19 (May 6-12, 2000yf S S 9 Published by: Economic and Political Weekly Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4409257 Accessed: 17-04-2017 13:08 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Economic and Political Weekly is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Economic and Political Weekly This content downloaded from 193.140.194.37 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 13:08:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Understanding Masculinity Bringing men into the scope of gender studies was an aim of a recent workshop. The discussions rendered obsolete the myth of a unitary, homogenised masculinity which is only an opposite of feminity. Such studies help involve men in women's empowerment. RADmIKA C CHA, C TALI DASGUPTA, MANDEEP K JANEJA T ehe question of understanding and mapping masculinity has become increasingly significant in gender studies. Three major developments have generated this interest. The primary thrust has come from the particular historical conjunction of feminist studies with femi- nist politics introducing the theory of mar- ginal, 'subaltern genders' that produced gay and lesbian studies. This trajectory broke with the assumption of masculinity as a given structure of power, proposing 'powerless masculinities' as crucial for understanding gendered worlds. The second imperative has been the discourse around HIV/AIDS. The ques- tions that arose from the patterns of the spread of the disease among all-male groups prompted researchers to question their assumptions of heterosexuality as a coher- ent orientation that defined and 'fixed' male sexuality. Men and men-in-groups became the focus of an epidemiological gaze and while this produced a 'pathologi- cal' understanding of masculinity, it was nevertheless an extremely important step into new directions in gender research. The third thrust can be located in the relation between academics and activists. While womens' studies 'uncovered' the powerless situation of women, identifying them as the first 'subaltern gender', ac- tivists and policy-makers concerned with issues of women's empowerment worked to redress this subaltemity (through micro- credit, or making reproductive health services accessible, for exampleyf & R Q I L J - uring empowerment and redressing power- lessness have together bred a view that gender sensitive policy cannot exclude the involvement of men from the strategies of empowering women. How men's involve- ment is to be encouraged requires a better understanding of how men view them- selves, in relation with women and in relation with other men. Bringing men into the frame was one of the major imperatives behind the workshop 'Male Reproduction and Sexu- ality in South Asia', organised by the India Internmaonal Centre, New Delhi on March 18, 2000. Theworkshopsoughttobring together scholars and professionals engaged in the emergent field of gender and masculinity from different disciplinary paradigms and initiate and create an ongoing dialogue between them. Fourpapers were presented, and two documentary films screened. Lester, Coutinho of the Health Policy Research Unit at the Institute of Economic Growth presented a paper titled 'Ecology, Kinship, Caste and Sexuality: Toward Locating Masculinity in a Cultural Land- scape'. Coutinho located masculinities and risk behaviour without the filter of HIV/ AIDS, arguing that the trajectory of epi- demiological studies has fixed the loca- tion of high risk sexual behaviour in a way that unproblematically telescopes mascu- line sexuality and the occurrence of disease. Drawing from his fieldwork, conducted in a coastal multi-caste and multi-tribe village of western and southern Gujarat, through 1993-95, Coutinho looked at the gaps in anthropological knowledge of manhood, manliness, male identity, male sexuality and male roles arguing that these are extremely fluid concepts with specific histories, locations in particular power structures and distinctive cultural land- scapes. Starting from an assumption of plural masculinities and using the frame of radical pluralism, he suggested certain breaks with assumed knowledge of mas- culinity. His first break was with HIV studies which have framed men as either 'gay' or 'straight'. Instead, he suggested that the gay/straight divide is fluid, both within communities and also within indi- vidual biographies. Secondly, and impor- tantly, he suggests that this fluidity cannot be traced exclusively through discourses of desire and pleasure but needs to be related to issues of political economy. Thus conditions of drought, changes in forest ecology, and the loss of land have implications for the construction of mas- culinity and the local histories and narra- tives of emasculation. Among castes such as Bharvads, mar- riages occur in cycles of five to seven years; drought creates bachelors because people refuse to give daughters to the drought-prone village. Thus ecology and marriage structures result in a complex coexistence of homosexual and hetero- sexual relations of safe and unsafe sexual practices in the lives of Bharvad men. Changes in landownership patterns also has implications for the notions of mas- culinity among men of various castes. The loss of land by the Darbars limited their access to Vankarwomen and was viewed as a 'weakening' of their masculinity. Illus- trating his argument through individual biographies, Coutinho argued that mascu- linity needs to be viewed simultaneously as part of personal narrative and located in wider structures of political economy. In sharp contrast, Shaleen Rakesh who coordinates the Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSMyf 3 U R M H F W D W W K H 1 $ = ) R X Q G D - tion, shifted the discussion from political economy to the domains of pleasure and sexual behaviour. One of the central con- cerns of his paper 'Cruising through Masculinity' was to outline the ways men think about sexual pleasure and sexual relations. Most men make a distinction between sexual pleasure on the one hand and masculinity as a role, on the other. The interesting connection made through Shaleen's paper was with feminist stud- ies, which have made a distinction be- tween reproduction and sexuality; Shaleen brought forward these issues to frame an understanding of masculine sexuality as well. For example, men talk of 'masti', uneasily translated as sexual play/playful- ness, as having no deep repercussions on their lives. Masti is essentially constructed as recreational, not 'real' sex. However, the moment sex enters the domains of reproduction it is equated with positions of penetration and being penetrated put- ting the whole issue of masculinity. as a subject position at stake. This is of par- ticular significance within MSM relations, where the oppositional episteme of active and passive that structures relations be- tween genders are recreated within the gay community. Within the politics of pene- tration the 'giriya' or the active, penetra- tive partner of the gay dyad is positioned as more masculine than the 'koti' who is feminised as the penetrated. However, the transgendered koti community is bisexual and it is their sexual relations that reopen the question of fluid sexualities raised in Coutinho paper. Economic and Political Weekly May 6, 2000 1607 This content downloaded from 193.140.194.37 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 13:08:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The other issue was the display of masculinity as a public performance to establish proof of being male. Gay men downplay any visible markers of gay sexual orientation and adopt an 'armour of ex- cess': styles of machismo and hyper- masculine images created by the media, are internalised by men and work to dis- guise shared intimacies between them. The conditions of gay existence in India working within enduring gender paradigms enable men to live double sexual lives, presenting the issue of bisexuality as a grey area within the politics of male sexuality. It is exactly this 'enabling' of dual sexu- alities, however, that also cause immense anxiety and dissonance in the construc- tions of the masculine self. One of the most interesting aspects of the paper addressed itself to 'men's talk' of sexual health and affirmation of masculinity. Anatomy plays a crucial role in defining and providing bodily proof to men of their masculinity. The body thus became a double edged site creating both anxiety and affirmation of masculine identity. Given the south Asian 'location' of the workshop one of the most interesting aspects of the paper was the way specific aspects of an Indian sexuality were brought into play in the discussion around shame and guilt. Guilt was not the mirror in which gay men viewed their identities; instead it is existing structures of shame and honour that put gay mnen and gay identities in 'purdah'. Radhika Chopra's 'Knowing Men: An Ethnographer's Dilemma' spoke of the different modes of being and becoming male. Drawing on her fieldwork in rural Punjab, Chopra suggested that it was not possiblh to speak of a male world; there are instead fragments through and within which the practices of being and becoming male are differently mapped and the pro- cess of 'knowing' these fragments is highly gendered. She chose to outline the contours of two such fragments - the hierarchic and the egalitarian - within which the modes of being male are differently articulated. The father-son relation is the paradigmatic form that defines the hierarchic mode. How- ever, in agrarian Punjab it is also a 'real' relation where it becomes incumbent upon the father to teach his son to become a man with an idealised, hardened, labouring body. In the field, the son leams to sac- rifice his body to 'mazdoori', labour, which in turn hardens and roughens this body. The pr,cess of becoming male is a fluid one, elongated over time and not achieved at once. A combination of bodily alter- ations and cultural markers tie up the boy/ son in various ways so that the set of practices that make up the masculine self are dispersed over time, space and cultural inscription. Learning masculinity is not a linear process and goes through mutations that are cross-cut by elements of age, caste, gender and work relations through pro- cesses where masculinity is constantly learned, constructed and confirmed. While learning hard work is an idiom in the hierarchic mode of 'producing' maleness, the son, in contrast to his father, needs to assert his masculinity fiercely and the context of this assertion is the 'gang' in the street. The street is an open-ended space, exterior to both home and field, free of supervisory authority, where boys are said to indulge in 'shaitani' ordevilry. This makes the street a highly gendered space, closed to women, making it a world that is only partially known, oscillating be- tween being veiled and visible. Chopra contrasts this space and all-male fragment to the hierarchic one, tentatively suggest- ing this as the egalitarian mode, whose contours can be partially known through a language of gestures. Thus the gesture of grabbing the genitals, as one of a series enacted between the boys within the gang, while mimetically replicating the gesture of molestation directed toward women, also reverses it. The gesture is an inversion of the power relations that exist through molestation, between genders; within the group however, the gesture is a way of establishing each boy as being the same as the other. The gesture crafts a different sense of the body, a body experienced as sexualised but also mocking the possible attainment of that sexuality and therefore incomplete. While these modes exist si- multaneously, they also craft themselves against each other, so that masculinity is understood not only in oppositional rela- tions of men vis-a-vis women, but as men vis-a-vis other males. Two documentary films were screened, followed by a discussion by Ravi Vasudevan who commented on them and 'opened' them toward larger issues of representations of masculinity in popular cinema. The documentaries were Rahul Roy's 'When Four Friends Meet...' and Farjad Nabi's film from Pakistan 'Yeh Hui Na Mardon Vali Baat'. Both films are part of the south Asian Masculinities film project 'Let's Talk Men' funded by Save the Children(UKyf D Q G 8 1 , & ( ) . Ravi Vasudevan's paper 'Film Forms and Masculinity' dwelt on questions of performativity, modes of representation and the relation between performance and spectatorship. While he saw Farjad Nabi's film as an interesting tapestry of testi- mony, installing and investigating the relationship between gendered perspec- tives and social locations, he focused primarily on Roy's film because it pro- vided him a frame to discuss the way JUST PUBLISHED Chattopadhyay, B-Crime and Control in Early Colonial Bengal 1770-1860,2000, Pp. 215, Tables, ISBN 81-7074-227-7 Rs. 380.00 This book explores the interface between crime and control in early colonial Bengal. Set in the context of a violent countryside in the twilight of Nawabi Bengal it initially examines the compulsions behind the introduction of colonial police in this region by Lord Cornwallis in 1793. Ray, Bharati (ed.yf : R P H Q D Q G 3 R O L W L F V ) U D Q F H , Q G L D D Q G 5 X V V L D 3 S , ISBN 81-7074-224-2 Rs. 350.00 This volume is based on the papers presented at a seminar held in Calcutta in February 1995, jointly sponsored by the Maison des Sciences de L'-Iomme, Paris, the Women's Studies Research Centre, University of Calcutta, and the School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University. Basu, S & Das, S (eds.yf ( O H F W R U D O 3 R O L W L F V L Q 6 R X W K $ V L D 3 S 7 D E O H V , Figs., ISBN 81-7074-223-4 Rs. 400.00 This volume draws together studies by internationally acclaimed scholars on national, provincial and local elections in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal. It will hopefully contribute to the development of a comparative analytical framework for understanding contemporary South Asian politics K P BAGCHI & COMPANY 286, B. B. Ganguli Street, Calcutta : 700 012 Telefax : 2369496; E-mail: [email protected] 1608 Economic and Political Weekly May 6, 2000 This content downloaded from 193.140.194.37 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 13:08:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms masculinity inhabits different spaces and how these spaces come to be represented in cinematic styles. Vasudevan made a distinction between the intimist mode and the public orbits of expressing individual male identity in documentary film, placing Roy's film in the former and Anand Patwardhan's 'Ram ke Nam' and 'Father, Son and Holy Ghost' in the latter. It is the register of the every- day that is the terrain for the intimist mode, while it is the large, public, political event that informs the latter. Crucially the movement of gendered identity in Roy's film is between the four individual narra- tives punctuated by moments of the all- male 'friendship' group. Masculine iden- tity is represented as a slide between the individual tellings and the group's reflec- tions through memorialising shared expe- riences of power and powerlessness, of the uncertainties of everyday existence in the face of police brutality or unemployment. The question of defining the masculine self is not a single construction even within the film. The film-makers' minimal pres- ence through a 'discrete' voice that inter- venes in this re-telling of the everyday occurrence marks a pause, a break from the assumed and accepted tropes of mas- culine aggression. It is through this inter- vention that the group 'opens' and searches for terms through which gender, power and the self are potentially re-configured. Interestingly, the spaces of these intimate reflections of the world of experience are neither home nor work spaces, but a third other space which seems to be the 'home' of masculinity, recalling Chopra's argu- ment of the space of the street as exterior to home and field, a archetypically the space of male camaraderie. By contrast, Patwardhan's construction reinstates masculinity as inhabiting only the space of the public and the political, submerging the individual within the political event, denying the entry of any subjective questioning, a mode and a formation the intimist documentary at- tempts to break. Masculinity is a dominant trope in 'fic- tion' films which centre primarily on male protagonists from whose point of view the social world is represented. In art and popular cinema, the performance of the 'masculine' moves away from the intimate group (in front of whom masculinity is performed and proved as happens in Roy's documentaryyf D Q G R U L H Q W H G W R Z D U G W K e spectator. The strategies of deploying mas- culinity then move from the register of the real to the register of the consciously configured elements, realist 'types' who 'stand for' the masculine. The all-male group then becomes an 'ensemble' within which masculinity is dispersed and hierarchised through roles or characters like the 'jock' or the 'sensitive' boy and so on. Here it is the female voices who stand for the moral realm, and nudge the male subject to rethink himself. Vasudevan then shifted to a discussion of entertainment cinema in which the everyday is scaled up and the hero put together from different elements of this everyday. The spectator is invited to make an empathetic or symbolic identification with these hyperheroes. Vasudevan looked at three contemporary actors - Govinda, Amir Khan and Kamal Hasan - who pose alternative and non-coherent masculine identities. Govinda for example is not a straightforward hero and reorganises masculine tropes inviting the audience to mock a regulation masculinity. Amir Khan, the exemplar of a middle class male icon, on the other hand, moves toward a transformation of masculine identity through his own transformation as a performer/actor. His movement from his screen persona in 'Hum Hain Rahi Pyar Ke' and 'Rakh', to 'Rangila' address male aggression by mobilising the plebeian figures, distanced from his earlier screen persona as a middle class icon. This loop- ing out into machismo is significant for the return of Amir Khan who 'comes back' in films like 'Sarfarosh' having mobilised machismo in the interest of the nation. Masculinity's journey is represented both by the heroes that Amir plays and by the shifts he makes as an actor moving be- tween 'safe' and 'dangerous' categories of maleness. Finally, Kamal Hasan's 'Hindustani' and 'Hey Ram' the hero is split between the moral larger-than life father, and the 'tout' son. Despite his obvious corruptions vis- a-vis his father's equally obvious morality, the son is a liminal, ambivalent figure who, inhabiting the everyday world of deals, corruptions, and strategies of survival, presents a dilemma of identification with a man who must and does deal with issues in the real world. The film might be read as masculinities project to take on the world with its imperfections and corrup- tions and it is exactly this engagement that invites an empathetic identification with an ambivalent, dark but nevertheless bur- dened male character. The discussions that followed the ses- sions highlighted the disparate concerns that centre around issues of masculinity and sought to draw some links between the diverse terrains covered by the papers. Some questions addressed themselves to the spaces/arenas of the performance of masculinity questioning their primarily 'public' nature. In this regard, the space fo the women, and therefore the role of critical female figures, like the mother, in shaping masculinity were brought forward. In contrast, the way a boy is 'shaped' into a man by other men - whether located in the family or in fraternal worlds of friend- ship or work spaces need closer attention. A pivotal set of questions focused around 'idealised' masculinity of hegemonic and folk idioms and 'ideal' male bodies par- ticularly vis-a-vis those that are in the process of 'becoming' male. How do we view these incomplete masculinities and how do we then map and theorise their positions within male worlds? The process of 'proving' masculinity was taken up with reference to both heterosexual and homo- sexual masculinity. How, forexample, does the process of becoming male get inscribed in the absence of bodily rituals of convert- ing child to man? While this inscription has a much clearer history within the discourse of the feminine, the 'reproduc- tion' of masculinity, particularly in India, remains an uncharted terrain. Gay-ness presents a critical reflection on the constitution of masculinity/masculini- ties and questions directed themselves to the way gay orientations question and re- open the politics of penetration and the constitution of an ethics for the masculine. The neat divisions between heterosexual and homosexual orientations that seem to be intrinsic to the HIV/AIDS studies were clearly interrogated both in the presenta- tions and the discussions that followed. The papers and the discussions collec- tively rendered one myth obsolete - the myth of a unitary, homogenised masculin- ity which can be seen only as an opposi- tional category to its feminine counterpart or only be seen through the lens of vio- lence. While male aggression was an issue taken up in all the papers, it was quite clear that it needed to be juxtaposed against the uncertainties of 'reproducing' masculinity through gendered cultural tropes that are themselves paradoxical and often ambigu- ous. The cross-dialogue between the dif- ferent disciplinary locations established the urgent need to begin mapping the contours of masculinity and expand the orientation of gender studies. I3 Economic and Political Weekly May 6, 2000 1609 This content downloaded from 193.140.194.37 on Mon, 17 Apr 2017 13:08:36 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms