Masculinities: Ken doll

Masculinities: Ken doll

Ernest Hemingway

men

men 2

men 3

men 4

Asymmetry between study of femininity and masculinity

„Woman has ovaries, a uterus; theese peculiarities imprison her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his own anatomy also includes glands, such as testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it.” (Simone de Beauvoir)

Masculinity as a social construction Hegemonic masculinity (W. Connell)

Edward Poynter: The Catapult

„If we live in a ‘man’s world’, it is not a world that has been built upon the needs and nourishment of men. Rather, it is a social world of power and subordination in which men have been forced to compete if we want to benefit from our inherited masculinity” (Victor Seidler)

„our culture cruelly constrains [men], in varying degree, to be the bearers of a gender identity that deforms and harms them as much as it damages women”

(Cynthia Cockburn)

• The male machine is a special kind of being, different from women, children, and men who don’t measure up. He is functional, designed mainly for work... His most important positive reinforcement is victory. He has armour plating which is virtually impregnable... The male stereotype makes masculinity not just a fact of biology but something that must be proved and re-proved, a continual quest for an ever-receding Holy Grail

Marc Feigen Fasteau: The Male Machine (1974)

Masculinity is not simply a position of power that puts men in comfortable positions of control ... If we understand masculinity as a constant contradictory struggle rather than just the privileged position within a power disequilibrium, we come closer to a full understanding of gender studies

(Peter N. Stearns: Be a Man! Males in Modern Society, 1990)

Masculinity (gender) as construction

- Psychological construction for each individual

- Social construction, set of ideas, practices,

images

Masculinity as a psychological construction Freud: Oedipus complex, Oedipal rivalry Alfred Adler: inferiority complex Karen Horney, Melanie Klein: breast envy(couvade)Carl Gustav Jung: persona vs. anima

Louis XIV and his shapely legs

Victorian masculinitiesClassical (Roman) heroes Ascetic, monastic ideal (masculinity as the

repression of male energies) Chivalric ideal Muscular ChristianitySoldier hero Athleticism, physical cultureHomosociality

Dandyism: Beau Brummell and Oscar Wilde

David: Oath of the Horatii

Frank Dicksee: Chivalry

Collinson: The Siege of

Sebastopol

W. Frank Calderon: Son of the Empire

Charles Spencelayh: Dreams of Glory 1900

„Athletics vs. Aesthetics”

Illustrated London News, 1882

Lord Baden-Powell’s book (1908)

But, besides boy scouts, there are also peace scouts ... There are the frontiersmen of all parts of our Empire. The ’trappers’ of North America, hunters of Central Africa, the British pioneers, explorers, and missionaries over Asia and all the wild parts of the world, – all are peace scouts, real men in every sense of the word, and thoroughly up in scoutcraft, i. e. they understand living out in the jungles, ... they know how to look after their health when far away from any doctors, are strong and plucky, and ready to face any danger, and aways keen to help each other. They are accustomed to take their lives in their hands, and to fling them down without hesitation if they can help their country by doing so. They give up everything, their personal comforts and desires in order to get their work done. They do not do all this for their own amusement, but because it is their duty to their King, fellow-countrymen, or employers. The history of the Empire has been made by British adventurers and explorers, the scouts of the nation, for hundreds of years. The Knights of King Arthur, Richard Coeur de Lion, and the Crusaders, carried British chivalry into distant parts of the earth. (Lord Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, 1908)

Frederick Leighton: Daedalus and Icarus

Eugen Sandow

Eugen Sandow

The Dying Gaul

Briton: Dead Hector – Nevinson: Paths of Glory

Richard Nevinson (WW1)

John Singer Sargent: Gassed

Eric Kennington: Gassed and Wounded

Eric Kennington:The Making of a

Soldier(Gas Mask)

Hard-boiled

thriller, film noir (Raymond

Chandler)Humphrey Bogart

Hans Suren: Men and the Sun

Arno Breker’s sculptures

Kameradschaft

Young Italian fascist

This century is ours

And we shall live In the full beauty of our Manhood(Theo Lang, British

Union of Fascists, 1935)

Body building

Arnold

Body building is „the dream of physical perfection and the agonies you go through to attain it” (Arnold Schwarzenegger: Pumping Iron, 1976)

„Dominant fiction calls upon the male subject to see himself ... only through the mediation of unimpaired masculinity”

(Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins 1992)

The idea of Arnold Scwarzenegger

Three blacksmiths statue (Helsinki)

Marlon Brando in The Streetcar named Desire

Burt Reynolds in Cosmo, 1972

Titian: Venus of Urbino