Introduction: form and function, or masculinity as representation.

Floyd, Kevin

[1] In August 2011, with the assistance of an Alexander von Humboldt Transcoop Grant, Stefan Horlacher (of the Dresden University of Technology) and I organized an international conference at Kent State University, "Masculinities between the National and the Transnational, 1980 to the Present." We are pleased to include in this issue three essays that had their origins at that conference, essays that pose new, innovative questions about the contemporary representation of masculinity--and about the inherent potential of masculinity itself to serve a representational function.

[2] The question of representation is indeed crucial here. Though each of these essays directly examines specific instances of masculinity's narrative representation, they also collectively suggest that masculinity is not simply a social or cultural reality that enters the realm of representation; rather, it needs itself to be understood in terms of certain inherent representational capacities. The trend in the critical study of masculinity perhaps most impossible to miss over the last ten to twenty years, especially in the humanities in the U.S. and Europe, has been the theorizing of masculinity as a stylized, performative gender norm, a norm that, according to some accounts, inscribes the illusion of an ontologically gendered reality that preexists the performance itself. This understanding of gender was of course influentially introduced by Judith Butler. Whatever fundament of "reality" purports to operate "underneath" or "behind" this performance is, according to this logic, chimerical. This critical emphasis has famously tended to displace earlier critical vocabularies of gender, and especially categories like "patriarchy": vocabularies that understand masculinity not as a corporeal (and implicitly individual) enactment or style lacking any pre-existent ground, but as a component of a larger system or structure of power relations--a function of those power relations, and indeed, I would propose, a figural representation of them. Should one understand the masculinity we associate with soldiers, for example, as entirely immanent corporeal performances of violence? Or would it be more precise to understand soldiers as functionaries within, and representations of, larger systems of violence? In their various ways, these essays all ask: how does masculinity operate as a representational figure--a synecdoche, we might say--for larger, abstract structures of power? With all the attention to masculinity as an individuated, performative style, they provide worthy reminders of the dimensions of masculinity this kind of analytic has too often tended to erase.

[3] Seth Friedman's timely contribution, for example, "Constructing the (Im)perfect Cover," revisits the ostensibly dated question of gender essentialism, powerfully disclosing just how persistent and intractable this question can be. When the performative artifice of masculinity, its "constructed" character, is not only old news for critics and scholars, but also routinely registered in mass cultural narratives all around us--when journalism and media seem so regularly to represent masculinity as inherently artificial--how, Friedman asks, does this recognition proceed within the conventions of contemporary Hollywood cinema? What are the terms of this recognition, and what are its limits? Friedman's compelling answer comes by way of a discussion of what he calls contemporary "misdirection" films, conspiracy narratives in which concluding plot twists compel viewers to rethink much (or even most) of the information previously provided. In the case of his central exhibits, The Usual Suspects (1995) and Unbreakable (2000), these narratives are compelled to reiterate a broader cultural recognition of masculinity's artificiality precisely in order to make a case against it: having their masculine cake and eating it too, they tap into contemporary popular understandings of masculinity's necessary artifice, while also reassuring viewers that the artifice is paradoxically based on some kind of genuine, underlying core.

Indeed, Friedman proposes that even the performative artifice these films are compelled to register may itself ultimately be experienced by characters (and, by extension, the audience) as a kind of conspiracy, an experience that thereby aligns masculinity's stylized enactment with those so-called contemporary conspiracies (on the part of women, minorities, Big Government) that ostensibly rob formerly privileged, white male subjects of their inherent, defining autonomy. Conspiracy itself, in other words, begins here to refract those larger social and cultural anxieties so widely attributed to American white men in the last few decades. So the revealing plot twists, the revelations that arrive at the end of these films, also purport to "reveal" unmistakable masculine power behind the performative facade--a facade that happens to take the form, in these two films, of a specific physical disability the films render equivalent, ultimately, with emasculation. The narrative disclosure that the disabilities centrally motivating these narratives are in fact powerful veneers is, as Friedman puts it, "necessary [...] at a time when explicit displays of traditional masculinity are received with growing incredulity. [...] Although their duplicitous narrative structures are well suited to reveal that gender is socially constructed, these films instead portray masculine performance as a way to conceal the 'truth.'" [4] For the films Friedman examines, the larger web of relations for which these masculine performances serve as function or figure turn out to be powerful criminal enterprises. But a broader question he productively raises is: how are we to understand these deceptive, "misdirectional" masculinities as more broadly indicative of the present? He briefly suggests that the political-economic structure many of us have long called "neoliberalism" might provide an answer.

Our second essay, Raili Marling's "Working Bodies, Dislocated Identities," also examines the terms of contemporary U.S. cinema's recognition of the artificiality of masculinity and its capacities as representation; and she explicitly takes neoliberalism as her interpretive horizon. Examining, like Friedman, two contemporary Hollywood films--in this case, two films by the same director, Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine (2010) and The Place Beyond the Pines (2012)--Marling offers a provocative critique of the familiar discourse of masculinity "crisis." These films present us with a familiar figure, the working-class man who would dominate women and children in an effort to compensate for economic powerlessness: here again, a gendered representation is also an oblique indicator of broader, more general social dynamics, in this case a figure that can translate class tensions into what Marling calls "more tangible gender conflict."

[5] But if private gender relations both refract and occlude socioeconomic anxieties, the essay is also about the increasing difficulty of even this kind of ideological management. Can what Marling calls "regulatory fictions" of masculinity persuasively produce the illusion of essential gender difference? Though they both provide nuanced accounts of the sheer difficulty of doing this in the present, Marling seems, in one respect, less convinced than Friedman of the contemporary force of this particular illusion. What happens to norms of masculinity--norms traditionally conditioned, among other ways, by labor--when precarious labor and indeed joblessness becomes the norm for what we used to be able to think of as a relatively coherent national working class? This essay confronts us with the possibility that it is less accurate to say (once again) that working-class masculinity is "in crisis," than that this particular "regulatory fiction" just might be entering a long, slow process of evaporation. For Marling, these two films suggest the increasing unavailability or impossibility of the fiction of working-class masculinity in the context of what appears to be not just another economic "crisis," either, but something like the economic "new normal." What Marling, like Friedman, discloses is the contemporary unsettling of masculinity's representational capacities; but for Marling, this unsettling is perhaps much more difficult to neutralize.

[6] But in another respect, here again, as in Friedman's essay, Hollywood's apparent contemporary recognition of masculinity's artificial, representative character turns out to be even more complex than this. Marling also poses questions about the reception of cinematic representations of working-class masculinity by presumably middle-class audiences. It is precisely the class dimensions of the narratives these films unfold--and in particular, as Marling argues, their trafficking in certain "white trash" stereotypes--that can be read as reinforcing, for a middle-class viewership, the very normative fiction that the films also do so much to undercut, distancing the audience from the ongoing erosion of working-class masculinity they undeniably depict.

So on the one hand, Marling maintains that, far from doing the ideological work scholars typically expect Hollywood films to do, these films actually reveal the fictionality of normative, regulatory masculinity. But these complex narratives also perform the opposite: the contemptuous notion of "white trash" serves to distance the audience from this revelation, thereby reinforcing the norm instead of revealing its fictionality.

[7] Our final contribution, like Marling's, reconsiders masculinity's operation as a figure for that larger structure some of us still call the patriarchal family. But this essay, Sonja Schillings' "Father Sovereign, Ghost," also provides the most direct engagement in this cluster with the question of masculinity's representational capacities. Central to this analysis is the continuing relevance of patriarchal systems and the forms of violence they produce. The essay examines Poppy Z. Brite's novel Drawing Blood (1993), a work Schillings contextualizes by situating it both in the genre of contemporary cyberpunk horror, and in relation to that representation of patriarchal systems we can trace back at least as far as Hobbes's Leviathan. As Schillings points out, the account of the violent "state of nature" in Hobbes serves to naturalize the patriarchal structure for which masculinity is a figure, this structure providing, in turn, a kind of proto-political ground for his more overtly political argument: "In Hobbes, the male body of the monarch is simply a direct continuation of paternal representative masculinity in the state of nature, as the sovereign represents patres familias in the same way as they represent their families."

[8] As if in direct response to the two prior essays in this cluster, Schillings then asks: What kind of larger structure might a non-violent form of masculinity be able to represent? The answer arrives in the form of subversive, alternative forms of collectivity at once conditioned by, and antagonistic to, patriarchal family structures like those of which Hobbes provides such an influential account. Drawing Blood imagines collectives of the marginalized, victimized, and abused--forms of collectivity that take shape as precise and direct results of patriarchal violence--and that also take shape, significantly, as families. But here families are "made up of all races, genders, ages and criminal affiliations whose shared history of abuse renders them a discernible collective"--a collective of those violated by those larger structures the form of representation called masculinity has typically figured and legitimated. So in this novel, two characters traumatized by patriarchal violence endeavor to produce alternative, radically different, non-heteronormative forms of collectivity, while also necessarily struggling with the kinds of masculinity that might be able to represent it. Rather than merely critiquing or subverting masculinity's representative capacity, this novel imagines alternative versions of this capacity along with alternative forms of collectivity as such.

[9] But one of the many striking implications of this analysis is the way in which the novel itself also underscores the sheer difficulty of this kind of alternative imagining. Does one have to depart the realm of narrative realism altogether--where we are likely to see patriarchal systems "naturalized" over and over again, merely depicted (or presupposed) as "reality"--and instead enter the realm of the supernatural even to be able to imagine an alternative form of representational masculinity? This is not merely a fantasy novel, in other words, but a novel that foregrounds the critical potential of fantasy as such, potentials for which specific genres (science fiction is another) are justifiably famous. The essay suggests that genres that engage the supernatural may have a particular ability to imagine, for instance, "a hypothetical locus of origin that stands in direct rivalry to the state of nature."

This ability becomes especially suggestive in the novel's discourse of haunting: the way the traditionally gendered image of the haunted house, in particular, both expresses and potentially neutralizes the trauma to which patriarchal systems have subjected these characters --trauma that continues to haunt them, of course, as trauma tends to do. In Schillings' essay also, then, masculinity is inescapably a figure for, a function of, some larger set of relations, including the radically reconstituted set of relations this novel challenges us to imagine.

[10] That system a pioneering generation of feminist scholars, without embarrassment, used to call "patriarchy" remains very much with us, though its specific forms continue to undergo dramatic change. As scholars like Grace Chang and Saskia Sassen point out, for example, traditionally gendered household labor is now increasingly offloaded to precarious forms of highly exploited service work: women from debt-ridden, brutally jobless nations in the global South travel to the North to work as nannies, maids, and prostitutes, in a kind of global trafficking in women writ large. In this context, the wager of this cluster of essays is that analyses of masculinity that ignore the larger systemic realities masculinity represents will mystify as much as they reveal. Contemporary scholarship on this topic, so sophisticated in its attention to the gendered, dynamic, stylized body, could use some invigorated attention to the broader, gendered web of relations within which that body tends to operate, the broader structures and systems for which masculinity has served as representational form and function.

These three essays, so divergent in so many ways, converge in their contribution to that effort.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS. I would like to thank the participants in our 2011 conference for the rich, suggestive conversations we had that weekend; my co-organizer and co-editor, Stefan Horlacher; and Ann Kibbey for her masterful help in guiding these essays to publication.

WORKS CITED

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

--Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge 1990. Print.

Chang, Grace. Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy. Boston: South End, 2000. Print.

Sassen, Saskia. "Global Cities and Survival Circuits." Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. Ed. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild. New York: Henry Holt, 2002. 254-72. Print.

--"Women's Burden: Counter-Geographies of Globalization and the Feminization of Survival." Journal of International Affairs 53.2 (spring 2000): 503-24. Print.

Contributor's Note

KEVIN FLOYD is Associate Professor of English at Kent State University, and the author of The Reification of Desire: Toward a Queer Marxism (Minnesota 2009). A recent recipient of Fulbright and Alexander von Humboldt grants, his current research is on gendered labor, biopolitics, and finance.