Abstract
The introduction to this volume Returning to Matter: The Male Body in Representation by Carmen Dexl and Silvia Gerlsbeck takes its cue from the increased visibility of male bodies in media representations. It presents critical perspectives on male embodiment and situates the subject matter within the larger fields of Masculinity and Body Studies. Sketching paradigmatic accesses to the male body as derived from phenomenological, poststructuralist, and new materialist accounts, the authors outline important theoretical strands and different attempts of conceptualizing corporeality and gender constructions and attempt a re-definition of the male body. In their elaborations, the authors stress the benefit of focusing specifically on representation and connect it to the volume’s methodological framework of balancing paranoid and reparative reading practices. The introduction also comprises a summary, which frames the contributions section-wise according to conceptual similarities and the contributors’ respective interpretive approaches.
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Notes
- 1.
We would like to thank Claudia Hachenberger for her valuable assistance in editing the manuscript and creating the index. We would also like to thank Catharina Kriesl, Marie Kluge, Vanessa Goß, Anna Alkofer, and the Office of Equality and Diversity for their support.
- 2.
See Sarah Gee and Steven Jackson’s study Sport, Promotional Culture and the Crisis of Masculinity (2017) on this topic.
- 3.
We see the bandwidth of Cultural Studies scholarship as one of the field’s benefits as it allows us to rethink the male body in the intersection between materiality, social practice, and representation, look at a wide array of cultural formats, and frame the contributions assembled here productively. All inquiries build on an extended notion of ‘text’, exploring literary, visual, and other cultural texts.
- 4.
This is in line with scholarship that, in the wake of Judith Butler, conceives of sex as a discursively produced category. Our conception of the ‘male body’ builds on this discursive notion of sex but moves on to place it in dialogue with new materialist positions that stress the relevance of matter, as this introduction to the topic and our attempt at a definition of the ‘male body’ illustrate.
- 5.
Jeff Hearn, for instance, has distinguished concepts of ‘male’, ‘men’, and ‘masculinities’ and explained their interrelations and implications; see, for instance Hearn (2012), where he uses the term ‘gex’ to refer to the intersection of gender and sex, or Hearn (2011). Closely attending to the implications of ‘male’, ‘masculine’, and ‘men’, he points towards the different significations of ‘male’ and traces its use from a mere biological perspective to account for the social, political, and other embodied experiences of men (2011, 206–207). By now, even biologists, for instance, have started to acknowledge that ‘sex’ is not to be defined as a binary category, but rather as a spectrum (cf. for instance Ainsworth 2015), thus opening the ‘male sex’ for a more social definition.
- 6.
In grappling with this by now highly differentiated field, one must point to the seminal work by Harry Brod, R.W. Connell, Jeff Hearn, Michael Kimmel, Todd W. Reeser, bell hooks, Cynthia Cockburn, or Stephen M. Whitehead, among many others. Many of their findings are by now unquestioned prerequisites for the study of masculinities. This includes assumptions that ‘masculinity’ needs to be conceived in the plural and as relational, socially constructed, produced, and reproduced, as well as historically variable.
- 7.
Body Studies, which has flourished particularly since the 1990s, is by now often used as an umbrella term for scholarly inquiries into aspects of embodiment, self-fashioning, identity, and body practices and techniques. Introductions to this field that often but not exclusively deploy a sociological point of view include the Routledge Handbook of Body Studies edited by Bryan S. Turner (2012) and Margo DeMello’s Body Studies: An Introduction (2014).
- 8.
‘Global masculinities’ emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s through seminal work like David D. Gilmore’s Manhood in the Making (1990) and was further developed through a Global Masculinities series by London-based Zed publisher, which also featured Bob Pease and Keith Pringle’s A Man’s World? Changing Men’s Practices in a Globalized World (2001), or Ronald L. Jackson II and Murali Balaji’s Global Masculinities and Manhood (2011). A more recent Global Masculinities series started by Palgrave in 2011 is concerned with the role of intersectionality, diversity, and cultural specificity for constructions of masculinity and the (tense) relation of the global and local in the formation of gender, thus inviting both comparative and transnational perspectives on the topic.
- 9.
Horlacher and Floyd’s collection Post-World War II Masculinities in British and American Literature and Culture (2013) also offers scholarship on comparative masculinity studies.
- 10.
The attempt to correct the Cartesian neglect of the body is at the center of what Maxine Sheets-Johnstone termed the ‘corporeal turn’ in her 1990 study The Roots of Thinking. She also responds critically to the privilege given to textuality and language for the production of social experience in light of an earlier, the linguistic, turn. Sheets-Johnstone’s concern with the body, specifically the lived body in movement, is paradigmatic of the wave of scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences that was published between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.
- 11.
The work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, or Sartre has also influenced the sociology of embodiment, e.g., Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of bodily dispositions (habitus) as an incorporation of social forces (Lane 2000, 100–102).
- 12.
In The History of Sexuality, for example, Foucault elaborates on the production of ‘new’ sexual identities, such as homosexuality, through the workings of discourse and power; similarly, his study Discipline and Punish includes the example of the ‘body of the condemned’, which conceptualizes the body as a locus of discipline. In Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, he expands his theoretical reflections, making an argument for how the rise of the modern nation-state and its reliance on new technologies of ‘biopower’ that enabled the state to take control over life and death contributed to increased sovereign power and aimed at generating docile, productive bodies.
- 13.
Susan Bordo draws attention to the paradoxical status of the male body even within poststructuralist thinking: While the female body continues to be viewed under “the sign of her Otherness”, the male body becomes “the Body proper” while “as male body [it] disappears completely, its concrete specificity submerged in its collapse into the universal” (1997, 198; emphasis in original).
- 14.
Butler’s thinking has paved the way to differentiated models of masculinity, as represented, for example, by what Halberstam termed ‘female masculinity’ as well as what has been identified as ‘male femininity’. By disassociating masculinity from the male body in Female Masculinity (1998) and attending to various possible forms of gender expression, such as drag-king performances, Halberstam offers directions for how to read the male body without preconfiguring it as basis for expressions of masculinity. Halberstam’s work is in line with feminist theory that brings the male body into focus as a sexed and gendered body, a specific rather than a universal body, and is particularly relevant for theorizing trans* embodiments.
- 15.
The recent decades in particular have witnessed a surge in new materialist thinking, mirrored in a plethora of publications that engage notions of anti-anthropocentrism, the agency of matter, and relationships between human and non-human matter in a variety of disciplines, see, for instance, Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s Material Feminisms (2008) or Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010). Kai Merten’s edited volume Diffractive Reading has sought to combine insights from new materialism, particularly Barad’s notion of ‘diffraction’, with new reading practices (2021).
- 16.
For elaborations on Sedgwick’s title, particularly the conjunctions ‘and’ and ‘or’ and their significations, see Berlant and Edelman (2014, 43–44).
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Dexl, C., Gerlsbeck, S. (2022). Returning to Matter: New Perspectives on the Male Body in Representation. In: Dexl, C., Gerlsbeck, S. (eds) The Male Body in Representation. Palgrave Studies in (Re)Presenting Gender. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88604-2_1
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