Monthly Archives: November 2014

Reconstructing Masculinity

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I found Katz’s article “Reconstructing Masculinity” to be very interesting in its navigation of gender binaries and issues arising from the intersection (and conflation) of sex and gender. What struck me particularly about this was how the MVP program Katz describes can be seen almost entirely in terms of reframing, renaming, rebranding, or more strongly (as the article’s title puts it), reconstructing.

One main goal is the reframing of violence against women as an issue for everyone, not just women. Another that is part of the MVP program is the rebranding the man as potential bystander rather than potential assaulter. The whole program is framed as trying to discourage passivity, not as trying to discourage the individual athletes from enacting violence towards women. These two goals exemplify two different approaches to gender: the first seems to encourage movement away from understanding violence along lines of gender binary, while the second works within the ‘male’ category to change the way in which men relate to the female ‘other’.

The fact is, though, the problem of violence is gendered, as Katz notes that around 90% of perpetrators are male, regardless of the gender of the victim. Thus, while the gender binary is frustrating to me, I see the value in Katz’s all-male workshops when men can talking about issues of violence in gender-segregated contexts, and which allows participants to “deconstruct the monolithic image of masculinity the media have presented to them” (165).

It is this deconstruction which I think is the most important part of this project, for the issue of abuse goes far beyond the physical actions involved, but is connected to the attitudes of masculinity that place women in a position of inferiority. …Though it might be more accurate to say that (hegemonic) masculinity places femininity as inferior, where femininity is understood from this masculine perspective as including both women and gay men.

A reforming of masculine identity to rely less on defining itself in opposition to the feminine would help break down the binary understanding of socially-enacted gender (and possibly sexuality too, as masculinity and heterosexuality are so often conflated) and could have implications for the way in which people of different gender identities interact.

Victims of Lead

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Mel Chen’s chapter “Lead’s Racial Matters” in Animacity looks at race and narratives of globalization and contagion in the context of the 2007 recall of Chinese-made toys, the paint on which contained high levels of lead.  One aspect of this exploration that I find  particularly interesting is the ways in which this ‘crisis’ with its international implications actually impacted racial discourses within the United States.

Chen mentions two layers or two types of racialization that this panic inspired. The first is the framing of lead as “Chinese” through continued association of the potentially dangerous toys with China as a population and geographic space. The second is the instance where focus shifted within the US from the black American child as victim to the white American child as victim.

In the decades leading up to the events of 2007 , lead paint appeared in the context of health concerns with old buildings, where class and race intersected in such a way that resulted in lead poisoning disproportionately affecting African American children.

However, with the lead toy crisis, the physical appearance of the victim shifts. The Child at risk of harm from Chinese-made toys is white, middle class, and often male. (This child is even seen as heterosexual, Chen argues.)

If this child meant to represent all children, this is problematic in that the chosen image reinforces belief in a white male default, framing him as the “everychild”. On the other hand, if the chosen image reflects that the structures and companies behind such ads and campaigns seek primarily to protect these privileged children (and their privileged parents), this plays into discourses of disposability, wherein certain bodies are devalued.

The black child represents a type of “otherness” within the American racial context, but the introduction of another nation/ethnic group as occurred during the toy crisis takes away the need to grapple with ideas of other within and people can instead focus their energies on the other without. Degrees of “otherness” can be disregarded in favour of a very clear “here”/”there” binary.

Chen talks about this mentality of “here” and “there”. Lead is of “elsewhere” and it should not be “here” in America. The introduction of the “lead toys from China” threat shifted attention away from this internal problem “here” to an issue whose origins are “there”, a process that to a large extent erases the existence of lead within the US.

This paradigm of fundamental separation results in monolithic representation of “here” and “there” that applies also to race within these two conceptual spaces. Thus, despite documented health concerns of previous decades and despite great racial diversity in the United States, the child of the American “here”, the child in need of protection, is White.

Africa and the Orientalist Paradigm

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“…the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience.” – Edward Said, Orientalism

Reading John Storey’s section on Orientalism in In Cultural Theory and Popular Culture called to mind Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina’s very tongue-in-cheek piece, “How to Write About Africa”. This essay emphasizes the ubiquity of certain images and ideas in fiction and reportage set in or involving Africa that serve to paint it as “other”.

“Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these.”

Though an example of the Global South rather than the traditional “East”, this example involves the same process of “othering” that characterizes Orientalism. The types of writing to which Wainaina is alluding allow Western readers to construct themselves in relation to “Africa”, in a way that often allows them to imagine themselves in a position of relative superiority.

The fact that the figures of the “The Ancient Wise Man” or “The Starving African” Wainaina describes are familiar to me from books and films and the news media suggests their pervasiveness. That these images are stereotypes is problematic enough, but there is danger particularly in the fact that the Western consumer is permitted, even encouraged, to revel in the sense of “otherness” they evoke to the degree that we have the potential to fetishize certain troubling images.

However, even when the images are not objectively negative, the fact that they exist as tropes to begin with evidences and perpetuates the process of othering. For example, Wainana satirizes the essentialization of Africa:

“Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.”

This tendency to forgo imagining complexly and in favour of treating the “other” as a vague monolithic entity is an attribute of Orientalism, one which, in the case of Africa, manifests beyond specific cultural products in the tendency within the general Western context to treat the entire African continent as if it were a single, homogenous country.

According to the Orientalist framework, this version of Africa is created by the West and acts as a tool of superior-self-identity formation for the West. Worryingly, though, the West as fabricator might just believe its own fabrication.