Cuts and bruises and democratic contestation

Dudink, Stefan

doi:10.1177/136754940100400203

Cited by 7 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…This genre of representation is not entirely new, and, as Abigail Soloman Godeau argues; 'contemporary representations of masculinity, either in elite or mass cultural forms, reveal significant correspondences to older visual paradigms of ideal masculinity ' (1997, p. 21 -2). In this way, past meanings are 'reactivated' from a classical tradition which held sway until the nineteenth century at which point 'nude' became equated with 'female sight' (Dudink, 2001). What is important about the current moment is that the coding of the male body as 'to be looked at' (Mulvey, 1975) disrupts conventional patterns of looking in which 'men look at women and women watch themselves being looked at' (Berger, 1972, p.47).…”

Section: Masculinity Identity and Embodimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity

Gill¹,

Henwood²,

2005

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Articles available via LSE Research Articles AbstractDrawing on interviews with 140 young British males, this paper explores the ways in which men talk about their own bodies and bodily practices, and those of other men. The specific focus of interest is a variety of body modification practices, including working out (at a gym) tattooing, piercing and cosmetic surgery. We want to argue, however, that the significance of this analysis extends beyond the topic of body modification to a broader set of issues concerned with the nature of men's embodied identities. In discussing the appearance of their bodies, the men we interviewed talked less about muscle and skin than about their own selves located within particular social, cultural and moral universes. The surfaces of their bodies were, as Mike Featherstone (1991) has argued, charged primarily with 'identity functions', allowing men to establish a place for themselves in contemporary society.Using a social psychological approach which can be characterised as a discursive analysis (Henwood, Gill & McLean, 1999;Lupton, 1998), this paper makes connections between men's private feelings and bodily practices, and broader social and cultural trends and relations. It shows that in talking about seemingly trivial questions such as whether to have one's nose pierced or whether to join a gym, men are actively engaged in constructing and policing appropriate masculine behaviours and identities; above all, in regulating normative masculinity. We identify five key discourses or 'interpretive repertoires' (Wetherell & Potter, 1992) which together construct the meanings for these men of attempts to modify the appearance of the body. The five discourses or repertoires were focused on the themes of individualism and 'being different'; libertarianism and the autonomous body; unselfconsciousness and the rejection of vanity; a notion of the 'well-balanced' and unobsessional self; and self-respect and the morally accountable body. Our analysis lends support to the claim that the body has become a new (identity) project in high/late/postmodernity (e.g. Shilling, 1993;Featherstone, 1991), but shows how fraught with difficulties this project is for young men who must simultaneously work on and discipline their bodies while disavowing any (inappropriate) interest in their own appearance. The analysis highlights the pervasive individualism of young men's discourses, and the absence of alternative ways of making sense of embodied experiences.2

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Section: Masculinity Identity and Embodimentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity

Gill¹,

Henwood²,

2005

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“…The valorized ideal of the tough, shell-like, insular male body harks back to the cuirasse esthétique (muscled male torso) of antique Greek athletic statues (Clark 1984, 40) and to 18th-century neoclassicists who imagined a male “body separated from its environment and from other bodies by seemingly impermeable boundaries” (Dudink 2001, 158). Monumental masculine hardbodies, however, were privileged with particular fervor in the years between the world wars, when Dinesen began her writing career, and when “images of active and energetic male bodies hardened against external seductions, consumer conveniences, and the sensuality of the flesh abound[ed]” (Forth 2008, 196).…”

Section: Hard and Dry Bodiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Juices of the Body”: Ecomasculine Fluidification in Two Stories by Isak Dinesen

Mortensen

2021

Men and Masculinities

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Gender is a key factor in shaping perceptions of environmental relationships, and moving toward sustainability requires that we rethink dominant ideas about both femininity and masculinity. Danish bilingual author Karen Blixen (1885–1962) wrote cryptic and convoluted stories under the male pseudonym Isak Dinesen, and while there is an abundance of feminist scholarship on Dinesen, her critique of masculine identity and her relevance to the emergent field of ecomasculinity studies have so far gone unnoticed. In this essay, I draw on feminist scholarship and cultural histories of male embodiment, as I analyze fluid masculine corporeality in “The Monkey” (1934) and “Ehrengard” (1962). In both her early and late narratives, I argue, Dinesen pushes back against the 20th century “metallization” of male bodies with baroque narratives and characters whose trajectories begin to produce novel and fruitful understandings of masculinity and the male body in relation to other bodies and the more-than-human world. More specifically, what I label “fluidification” designates recurring moments in Dinesen’s writing when corporeal boundaries are breached and male characters find themselves re-manned and re-environed by their bodies’ all-too-human participation in “transcorporeal” flows. The male bodies that populate Dinesen’s fiction, I find, diverge strikingly from the seamlessly solid, statuesque, and self-enclosed men of steel fantasized by contemporary fascists, communists, futurists, militarists, and machine-age modernists. While the hegemonic ideal of hard, dry, anti-ecological masculinity has persisted and even flourished to the present day, I approach Dinesen’s fictions as counterhegemonic sites where alternative earth-friendlier meanings of masculinity can become visible.

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Building Bodies: Violence, Pain and the Nation

Forth¹

2008

Masculinity in the Modern West

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Cuts and bruises and democratic contestation

Cited by 7 publications

References 12 publications

Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity

Body Projects and the Regulation of Normative Masculinity

“The Juices of the Body”: Ecomasculine Fluidification in Two Stories by Isak Dinesen

Building Bodies: Violence, Pain and the Nation

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