Young Men and Masculinities: Global Cultures and Intimate Lives
256
Young Men and Masculinities: Global Cultures and Intimate Lives
256Paperback
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Overview
Questioning universalist theories of 'hegemonic masculinities', the book argues that young men often feel caught between prevailing masculinities and their own struggle for self-definition. It explores both how the idea of men as 'the First Sex' has been established within the West and the ways in which men in other cultures and societies affirm their gendered identities. Seidler pioneers new methodologies that involve listening to the silences surrounding male experience as well as to oral testimonies. This enables innovative analysis of the contradictions young men are faced with in both creating their own gendered identities and establishing more equal relationships within a world of intense inequalities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781842778074 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2006 |
| Series: | Global Masculinities |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.61(w) x 8.48(h) x 0.49(d) |
About the Author
Victor Jeleniewski Seidler is Professor of Social Theory in the Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Read an Excerpt
Young Men and Masculinities
Global Cultures and Intimate Lives
By Victor J. Seidler
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2006 Victor J. SeidlerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-114-9
CHAPTER 1
introduction: young men and masculinities
teenagers
Young men today are growing up in an increasingly globalised world, one far removed from that of their parents. This has to an extent been true for each generation: young men need to define themselves in opposition to their parents. Yet, with the advent of global media, generational expectations have transformed not only in the relatively prosperous North but also in the South. Reaching an age where they no longer want to define themselves as children, they are nevertheless unsure of their status as adults. As teenagers growing up in a world shaped by new technologies, young men can feel caught between different realities, wanting to define their teenage existence but often uneasy about the adult designation 'adolescent'.
Teenagers might be adolescents for others, but they themselves often reject this medicalised definition that frames them as objects of an adult gaze. Adults have long tended to view these years as an unsettling and disturbing 'phase' that young people have somehow to 'get through'. Though aware that a globalised world offers a different future for their children, parents are often constrained by their own expectations about work and life. They have often lost touch with their own teenage years. Having forgotten what they lived through, they tend to relate to 'adolescence' as a foreign territory that needs to be disciplined, controlled and regulated through expert scientific observation. Unable to communicate with their children, parents often fall back on authoritarian traditions, which further alienate young women and men.
It is difficult to connect with teenagers, in diverse cultural settings, unless as adults we can recall what we ourselves lived through during these years. We have to remember the intensity and passion of our own teenage years if we are to appreciate what young people live through. As we recall our own refusal to tell our parents what was going on in our lives, so we can appreciate that teenage children will often refuse to speak to their parents. Keeping secrets is a mark of independence. They will talk to their friends in a way they will not with their parents. They do not expect their parents to understand, and, though at particular stages of development they may want their parents to 'be there' for them, they often refuse to account for themselves.
I remember growing up in London as a teenager in 1950s' Britain as part of the first post-war generation that had money of its own to spend. It was a new world of rock and roll; there was a sense of excitement that a new category of 'teenager' was being born with us. Accompanying the conflicts between groups of 'mods' and 'rockers' on the beaches of the south coast in Britain there was a developing awareness that 'adolescence' was not just a period that young people 'go through', but that teenagers were creating a new world for themselves, shaping a post-war identity not really known before.
Yet within the new globalised economy and the global transformation of work relations there has been a radical shift in teenage experience across different classes, cultures and traditions. With the widespread use of computer technologies young people have access through the Internet to a diversity of aspirations and definitions of teenage experience. Many young people have access to music and cultures from across the globe and can draw upon sources of information and imagery unknown to previous generations. This has helped transform the relationship between education and civil society, particularly within the West, where the school was traditionally conceived as the institution responsible for 'socialising' individuals into the norms and values of the dominant culture. Knowledge was gained at school, and young people were often dependent on their teachers for knowledge of the world beyond their family and local culture. But in the new millennium children who have access to these new communications technologies can cross boundaries of class, culture and ethnicities to control their own sources of information. This can encourage them to question traditional forms of authority as they recognise the possibilities of living differently.
Young people are also growing up in a world of greater gender equality than that of their parents. This can create its own confusions for young men, unsure about what it means to be 'a man' alongside women who take for granted the claim to equal rights, even if they do not call themselves feminists. Young women across the globe growing up with the benefits struggled for by the feminists of the 1970 s and 1980s have a new sense of direction and entitlement to gender equality. But they can also refuse to identify themselves with feminism.
There is a widespread perception, encouraged by global and local media, that feminism is 'man hating', and in an oppositional relation to men. Even if these women know that feminism does not have to go hand in hand with a disdain for men, they sometimes perceive older generations of feminists in terms of getting together in consciousness-raising groups. Sometimes seeking to define themselves against their mothers' feminist generation, and – in the West at least – having had more equal relations with young men in their education, they can conceive gender equality in different terms.
As differences have opened up between different generations of women within diverse cultures and traditions, so too there are differences between an older generation of men, who responded to the challenges of an earlier feminism centred upon their relationships with women, and a younger generation of men, who tend to focus on the contradictions and tensions in their experience as men. Within very different cultural and social settings they can be keen to discuss relationships between men and diverse masculinities while refusing to engage so exclusively with the relationship between men and feminism that was the central concern of an older generation of men. They are also more likely to refuse to identify 'men' as exemplars of particular 'masculinities', as Bob Connell seems to do in Masculinities, and will often refuse a discourse of 'hegemonic masculinities' that cannot illuminate men's embodied and emotional lives.
histories
Young men and women often unknowingly inherit the painful and traumatic histories of their communities and countries that their parents have refused to share with them. This is often a feature of migrant communities. For example, Muslim and Hindu communities in Britain carry the history of the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, which is rarely shared with the second generation. Communication can break down between parents and children when the latter are being educated into a world that is obviously very different to that their parents knew. Fathers often feel respect is due to them because of their position within the family, maintaining family honour and tradition. Young people, for their part, can feel a sense of betrayal as they are educated into British ways. They may feel torn between different worlds, obliged to live different identities at home and with their friends at school. It is difficult to reconcile these conflicting pressures, and they may find it impossible to share their concerns at home.
More generally, as traditional forms of authority became widely challenged in the late 1960 s in the West, individuals within both mainstream and migrant communities began to question the authoritarian relationships they had with their fathers. Many who became new parents in the 1980 s and 1990s wanted a closer and more intimate relationship with their own children. This involved a transformation of intimate relations that seemed to spread around the globe with new technologies and forms of communication often beyond the concerns of traditional feminisms. This was often double-edged. Women wanted greater gender equality, but this was often made possible through the employment of poorer women. In Latin America, for example, women from shanty towns would live as domestic workers in middle-class families, taking responsibility for both children and domestic labour so that both parents could go out to work. Children left in the care of these women would sometimes develop close and loving relationships with them that mothers could find threatening and difficult to negotiate. Often there would be a tension between the love the children felt and the hierarchy and disdain they experienced, especially from their fathers in relation to these women.
This was not so different from what was happening in the West, where greater gender equality was often achieved among the middle classes through the labour of poor migrant women, who would be employed to care for young children. Often children would bear resentments at their parent's absence that they might find it difficult to express, as middle-class parents would often compensate by buying their children gifts as a substitute for their own presence. Parents might return home exhausted after long hours of work, within a neoliberal economy that had seen an extension of the working day. If they earned good salaries there was often a prevailing anxiety about the security of work, and an awareness that there were many other people waiting to take their job if they put a foot wrong.
Since the 1960s there has been a generation of more liberal forms of childrearing, especially among the middle classes. Often parents have found it difficult to set limits and boundaries for their children, thinking that these are a sign of the authoritarian relationship they have rejected. Parents did not want to hurt the relationship they had with their children and were fearful of damaging the intimacy they had established. But they were also uneasy about the long hours of work, experiencing guilt in relation to their children because of their absence. There is often a tension between the importance they accord to their relationship with their children and the time they put into it.
Research in Latin America has indicated that there has been a very significant shift in attitudes to fathering, which has shown how important is the relationship with their children for a new generation of fathers (Fuller 2000; Valdes and Olavarria 1998). The research shows how they think about their futures through their relationship with their children. Unsure of their intimate relations, amid high levels of divorce, parents will invest a sense of their future in their children, knowing that these relations will persist even if their marriage breaks up. But there is also a desire, framed differently from earlier generations, to protect their children from the 'painful histories' of dictatorship that have marked so many Latin American nations.
Often it has been important for parents to feel – possibly because of their own absence at work – that their children are happy and contented in their lives. But this can encourage parents to discount and invalidate their children's experiences as they do not want to acknowledge their unhappiness or depression. Parents often assure their children that these feelings are groundless, and children can be left feeling they are somehow obliged to their parents to convey an image of continuous happiness. Often this means that young people learn to conceal their emotions, and a split can open up between their inner experience and what they learn to show to their parents. They can learn to hide their emotions because they do not want to add further to their burden, nor to be told that they are ungrateful for the gifts that middle-class parents are able to give to their children. These are emotional patterns that can help shape intimate relations across cultures. Though framed differently within specific cultures, there are often transcultural lessons to be learnt.
The need felt by a generation of parents in Argentina, Brazil and Chile in the 1980s and 1990s to protect their children from their painful experiences of military rule can create an unreality in the relationships between parents and children. Children often know unconsciously about these painful emotional histories that have been 'passed on' by their parents, even if they have never been spoken about openly. These displaced emotions can encourage a variety of forms of acting out by a younger generation who have not lived through these events. Sometimes the consequent political differences have led to splits in families.
A young woman shared her experience with me when I attended a conference in Santiago, Chile. Her father, who had been in the military, and her mother had taken different sides during Salvador Allende's government of Popular Unity. Her parents had separated and she had gone into exile with her mother to Sweden. Eventually she was to return to Chile. She has never really spoken to her mother about her experience of imprisonment and exile. Somehow a silence had been maintained in their relationship, and even now she feels that her mother might not be ready to talk. Within the terms of Chilean culture she had learnt to behave appropriately – that is, not to hurt others. Often this means, especially for young women, being more attuned to the feelings of others than to your own needs. Not wanting to upset others, this woman has learnt to accept silence from her mother, and a different silence from her father, whom she has also not questioned about these years. She has learnt to keep her feelings to herself, not recognising the possibility that they could be talked about and that she might be able to move towards some form of resolution with her parents.
Chile lived through a terrible period after the coup that overthrew Allende's government on 11 September 1972, when so many people were beaten, tortured, forced into exile, or even killed. Parents were concerned to protect their children from the effects of this traumatic history and did not want to open up these wounds for themselves. They learnt to leave the past behind, fearing that it would merely bring unresolved pain to the surface. Chilean culture can encourage people to think that, since you cannot change the past, it is better to forget it. There is a particular movement of the arms through which people express the notion that it is best not to make a fuss, at least publicly. As with many Catholic societies, there tends to be a sharp distinction drawn between inner emotional life and the proper behaviour that people learn to assume in public. They do not expect to be questioned in public about their private feelings. Boundaries are created between public and private lives in different ways within different cultures that help shape gender relations and forms of communication.
Often parents will not share their painful histories with their children, not wishing their shadows to fall on future generations. They do not want to see the signs of these unspoken painful histories in the sadness and depression that the younger generation carry. They prefer to tell their children that there is nothing to feel depressed about, even though they themselves might know otherwise. Since the young did not live through these difficult times, parents prefer to think they remain unaffected by them. They do not connect the high rates of tranquillizer and other drug use among both older and younger generations in Santiago with the silences that exist between the generations. Possibly in the name of protecting their parents, children learn to keep their own counsel as they internalise what it is best not to ask about. But this can leave young people with their own uncertainties and haunted feelings, experiencing horrors that they cannot define.
male superiority
Young men often grow up taking their superiority for granted. Seeing that their sisters are treated differently, they take for granted their advantages as men. This can help to sustain rigid forms of masculinity in which young men can feel they continually have to defend, to be on guard to prove their male identities. Sometimes trapped into feeling they are not 'man enough', they will feel that it is through risky behaviour that they can affirm their masculinity. Traditionally a sense of male superiority has worked to legitimate male violence against women. For example, research suggests that in a quarter of Chilean families women and children have experienced male violence.
As we reflect upon the sources of male violence within different cultures we need to think about the transition that boys make to become men. If young men, for instance, see their fathers taking out their anger on their mothers, they can grow up feeling that this violence is deserved and legitimate. Young men in Latin cultures might learn to think that it is particularly justified if a woman has been unfaithful in some way, if she has insulted or sworn at her husband, or even if she is simply determined to get her own way. It is a sign of male dominance within patriarchal cultures that women can sometimes blame themselves for this, thinking that if they had somehow behaved differently they would not have caused their husbands' violence. This shows how vital it is to intervene in the process of young men's learning in their transition to manhood within many patriarchal cultures. If women still think they deserve to be beaten, then this reflects a failure of educational systems and the nature of gender injustices within patriarchal societies. It also marks a failure in that young boys often become men precisely through their acceptance of male violence. They learn to identify with their fathers and to reproduce violent behaviour in their own relationships, so affirming their superiority in relation to women.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Young Men and Masculinities by Victor J. Seidler. Copyright © 2006 Victor J. Seidler. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction : Young Men and Masculinities 2. Masculinities, Histories, Cultures and Religions. 3. Listening, Speaking and Learning. 4. Questioning Adam : Men, Power and Love. 5. Rethinking Fatherhood. 6. Masculinities, Bodies and Emotional Lives. 7. Bodies, Desires, Pleasures and Love. 8. Authority, Identities, Bodies and Intimacies. 9. Bodies, Ethics, Fears and Desires. 10. Friends, Risks and Transgressions. 11. Risks, Fears, 'Race' and Belongings. 12. Risks, Self-Harm, Power and Control. 13. Young Men, Bodies, Sexualities and Health. 14. Young Men's Sexual and Reproductive Health. 15. Young Men, Families, Intimacies and Global Cultures.