Patriarchy in Practice: Ethnographies of Everyday Masculinities

In the mid-1970s, feasting on a rich diet of de Beauvoir, Dworkin, Firestone, Frieden, Greer, Millet, Juliet, Our Bodies, Our Selves (first edition!), and then Virago Modern Classics (books that have accompanied me across countries and continents), I bought a postcard depicting a woman saying to a blazered suitor, ‘I’ll be a post-feminist in the post-patriarchy’. Today, that young man might well be an acolyte of Andrew Tate, the arch-misogynist ‘influencer’, or an ‘Incel’, blaming feminists for ‘depriving’ him of sex and metaphorically emasculating him. Or worse, assaulting, disfiguring, raping, or murdering women ‘to show them who’s boss’.

As this book amply illustrates, from men with disabilities sexually ‘invisibilised’ in Kolkata (Debarati Chakraborty) to blokes in a London pub pining for ‘the good old days’ before they were wrecked by events as diverse as smoking bans or immigration (Amir Massoumian), to men transforming their masculinity through Alcoholics Anonymous) (Lucy Clarke), to sex clubs and ‘dark rooms’ (Chris Haywood), we are in the midst of a cultural and political tug of war. On one side is a resurgence of aggressive patriarchy, a relentless backlash against women’s empowerment and independence – exemplified by Trump’s boasts of sexual depravity, bans on abortion in many US states (even for children who are, by definition, victims of rape and, more often than not, incest), the Taliban’s erasure of women from public life, fining burkini-wearing women on a public beach, along with confected ‘culture wars’ and the ‘war on woke’. On the other are people who abhor this ‘hegemonic masculinity’ along with its associated misogyny, racism, homophobia, and transphobia – men who embrace the ‘feminine’ virtues of caring, non-violence, and a belief in equality, human rights, and social and economic justice – or what for the then-UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, are ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’, ‘lefty lawyers’ and the ‘metropolitan elite’.[1]

Yet, as the editors’ introduction points out:

The diverse ways in which most men endorse or tacitly go along with patriarchal norms – leaving us women to call these out, yet again – while some men in some contexts are seeking other meanings as men, and in relation to other men and to women (and, by extension, to sexuality and reproduction), are recurrent themes in the volume’s 12 ethnographic case studies. The book is divided into three main sections: (1) Backlash: From Margins to Mainstream, (2) Normativity and Diversity, and (3) Bodies and Minds. For reasons of space, I will highlight one essay from each section.

 

Cristina Oddone examines the impact of #MeToo in France, and how convicted perpetrators of domestic violence perceive themselves as ‘victims of feminism’. Great play was made internationally of an open letter signed by 100 influential French women, including Catherine Deneuve, claiming that while #MeToo helped convict serial abusers in the film industry, in this ‘moralist backlash … women’s bodies and sex have again become a forbidden territory … a new censorship against the free movement of desire’. [2] Perhaps the illustrious signatories live in a different world to the women brave enough to bear witness against Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell, let alone the one in three women worldwide who experience intimate partner violence (IPV), often for many years. [3] And a far cry from the men Odonne interviewed, convicted of various forms of violence against their (ex) partners, but who ‘are not only “perpetrators”: they are heterosexual men socialized in a gendered heteronormative culture; their accounts can reveal attitudes, beliefs, and common-sense ideas produced and widely shared in our societies’ (p. 46). Intimate partner violence transcends age, social class, profession, and place of residence; most of the men enrolled on programmes for men convicted of ‘domestic’ violence are French nationals and fathers, some old enough to be grandfathers. Odonne identifies three strategies they used to downplay or neutralise their violence. First, they blame women for being ‘provocative, unfair, irrational, hysterical, aggressive, instigators, selfish, opportunistic, insubordinate … essentially subversive of expected marital and/or maternal duties’ (p. 48), so they were just acting in self-defence. Never mind that this ‘subversive’ behaviour might be to seek more autonomy, or that her partner share ‘domestic chores and care work’ (p. 49). Second, these men believed they were ‘victims of the judicial system’ (ibid.). Regarding violence as normal among couples, it was unjust that the law against violent assault also applies to the private sphere. And third, they blamed feminism and ‘the hegemony of a feminist discourse’ that messed with their personal lives. These men, some on the scheme only to avoid a custodial sentence, tend to be hyper-aware of (and deeply offended by) any women in the public domain – whether news presenters, demonstrators in the streets, or professionals in the judicial system – and perceive women as having ‘all the rights’ because their claims of abuse are always believed (p. 52). This is ultimately based on a zero-sum worldview: women can only have more power at the expense of men’s; male violence against women is ‘just a slogan’ (cited on p. 53); and the whole system is rigged against men. As Odonne concludes:

Alvi A.H. and Hendri Yulis Wijaya discuss the experiences of LGBT people in Indonesia, where the government has enacted repressive legislation on ‘non-normative genders’ and even extra-marital sex between consenting adults. Alvi self- defines as a transman or ‘priawan’, and been criticised both for being insufficiently ‘masculine’, but also assumed to be taking advantage of male privilege, or even of being abnormal or unwell – caught between three stools. In the 1970s, ‘tombois’, or men in a female body or who felt more affinity with gendered femininity, often entered marriage to ‘perform’ heteronormality, while not necessarily forgoing same-sex relationships. For transmen, ‘generally, there are two types of transitioning – medical and social’ (p. 103). The social transition is never-ending, ‘a lifetime journey to gain social acceptance’ (ibid.), while the transman’s family and friends are also undergoing a transition ‘to understand and accept him as a man’ (ibid.). For some, medical transition (such as hormone therapy) eases the social transition, while others prefer not to go down that route; either way, the ‘ability of transman individuals to express masculinities and their identities is entangled with access to economic resources’ (p. 105). One strategy is to be so outstanding at work that colleagues ‘recognize his capabilities instead of his non-normative expressions/identities’ (p. 106), enabling the transman to leverage ‘his supposed-to-be marginalized status to a respectable one in the workplace’ (ibid.). Some adopt conventional ‘cismale’ or ‘normative masculinity’ (p. 110), while at the same time ‘inhabiting multiple forms of masculinities and challenging what they call “toxic masculinity”’ (p. 108), or ‘hypermasculinity’, such as sharing vile sexist jokes about women’s sexual attractiveness or availability (ibid., footnote 5). In other words, masculinity is ‘a contingent and relational expression inseparable from the social settings. Specific time, place, the people we interact with and our aspirations may shape how we enact our gender expressions’ (p. 111). The authors thus illustrate that we all embody characteristics that our context shapes how we ‘perform gender’: to take a banal example, a woman’s suggestions in a work meeting may not be ‘heard’, while a male colleague who appropriates them is not only ‘heard’ but credited; we all know that if they call out the double standard women will be cast as ‘petty’ or ‘stroppy’. Similarly, the diverse ways in which transmen in Indonesia live depend profoundly on how they experience ‘queerness’, and whether their family, colleagues, and society ‘hear’ and accept them simply as they are.

 

My final choice is Elisa Padilla’s essay on drag queens, a relatively new topic to me. She argues that drag queens have been used ‘as pawns’ in academic debates ‘about sex, subversion and feminism’: simultaneously ‘subversive avatars of queer excellence’, and ‘conservative and offensive parodies of womanhood’ (p. 153), and a ‘patriarchal appropriation of femininity’ (p. 159). Given the focus on dressing up, ‘drag queens could function as representatives of queer culture while also safeguarding their male identity in public’ (p. 154). Clothing and make-up are never more than an approximate marker of gender, however (recall David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust); and the humour of pantomime or carnival – to say nothing of Shakespeare’s comedies – depends on cross-dressing and concealed identities. Padilla maintains that the connection of drag to queerness ‘signals the transformation of a source of stigma into a form of spectacle’ (p. 156). ‘Camp’ then becomes a way of performing ‘queer labour’, an ‘artistic response under capitalism’ (ibid.). She focuses on two US drag queens, Divine and RuPaul, who sing, act, and perform as vulgar and hyper-sexualised women. In chat shows, however, both claim that drag is just an act; that they are entertainers, not transvestites or harbouring a wish to be women; that it is not ‘a “sex fetish”, ‘but simply a job uniform, much like those sported by Wall Street businessmen, cops or nurses’ (p. 164, citing RuPaul). As Padilla points out, ‘he is presenting his performance in the most non-threatening terms imaginable, dissipating its queer meaning to contain the stigma’ (ibid.). Ultimately, though, drag becomes a real drag on Divine’s career as a straight man – ‘drag sticks to the body of the performer, and the capital operations by which drag succeeds cannot be undone by the simple removal of the dress’ (ibid.) nor the ‘stigma of effeminacy’ (p. 168). Despite the two men’s insistence that ‘drag queening is simply a job’ (p. 169), and that under the flamboyant wigs, clothing, and grotesque femininity, they are just ‘one of the guys’ (p. 166), they exemplify ‘the contradictory state of queerness as a form of pride but also of shame and abjection’ (p. 169).

Like any edited volume, particularly one comprising such richly contextualised studies, it’s unlikely to be read cover to cover. But the editors’ excellent introduction and conclusion articulate the connections: ‘The work of dismantling patriarchy, of men participating in the struggle for a better world, cannot happen with the assumption that they should lead from the front … but to take a seat at the table, to listen to women’ (p. 252) – which takes me right back to that 1970s postcard.