Returning to the ‘Man’ question in the posthuman predicament?

This journal is founded upon the premise of an emancipatory call for investigating, presenting, finding and opening up for new and alternative masculine gendered subjectivities. We do that by collecting and presenting work that almost always offers us keys to possibilities for reconsidering, rethinking and possibly exiting historically inherited and contemporary forms of masculinity. As such we are of course part of a long history of feminist and profeminist work that articulates and frames our fears and hopes regarding ethically acceptable and potentially less destructive forms of masculinities. This is also true for the four articles in this current issue of Norma: ‘Intersectionality and social justice in programs for boys and men’ Keddie, Amanda; Flood, Michael & Hewson-Munro, Shelley; ‘The reflective process of the perpetrator: representations of rape in novels of C.N. Adidche and V.T. Nguyn’ Cohen, Omri; ‘Rituals of (un)changing masculinity: cohesion or diversity? A study of the fraternization traditions of Swedish cadets’ at the Military Academy’ Malmio, Irja; and ‘Filial obligations, affect and masculinities: Vietnamese-Australian young men being and becoming good sons’ by Garth Stahl and Yang Zhao.

However, before giving a brief introduction to these articles in the end of this editorial, I will articulate some concerns in contemporary masculinity studies as well as reconnecting to some others that are part of our Norma’s scope of questions. As we are moving into new theoretical landscapes in masculinity studies where the connection to feminist theorizing is a constant junction to be revisited, we return to some of the ground pillars of masculinity studies such as the ‘Man question’. Such concerns are addressed in an upcoming volume (fc. Mellström & Pease, 2022) where several key thinkers in the field are taking on the question of how to calibrate masculinity studies in relation to the contemporary posthuman predicament of our world. My reasoning here draws upon some of the ideas raised in this forthcoming volume. In times of uncertainty caused by wars, climate crisis and political backlashes facing any progressive change concerning gender and sexuality, we are even more confronted with basic ontological questions connected to power and existence. Feminist theorizing has for a long time addressed such questions, not least in the theoretical wave of posthuman feminism, new materialism and theories of affect in the last decades.¹ This wave of scholarship has come to reformulate and reinvigorate a large umbrella of onto-epistemological questions concerning subjectivity, sex, gender, sexual difference, bodily appearance, systems of affect, relationality, matter, agency, human and non-human, ecology and technology. The umbrella is far too extensive to meaningfully summarize here, but there are certain questions that reoccur with a new emphasis. The ‘Man question’ is no doubt one of those and where is that question better addressed than in masculinity studies? However, masculinity studies have, with a few exceptions (cf. Garlick, 2016, 2019; Matthews, 2018; Mellström, 2016, 2020; Pease, 2021a, 2021b; Reeser & Gottzen, 2018) only begun to consider the conceptual vocabulary and ideas of posthumanism, affect theories and new materialism. This wave of scholarship is a multidimensional move, pointing to affect, materiality, ecology, technology, etcetera, but is has nonetheless a focus on ontological hybridity with an emancipatory aim of decentering the hierarchical exclusivity of ‘Man’. Historically and until today such an exclusivity has furthermore been connected to a certain privileged version of masculinity in relation to other forms of subdued masculinity, femininity and queer folks along the lines of race, class and sexuality.

Braidotti (2022, p. 18) writes: ‘This hegemonic idea of ‘Man’ as coinciding with universal reason also claims exclusive rights to self-regulating rational judgement, moral self-improvement and enlightened governance for European subjects’.

Braidotti points to how the very idea of ‘Man’ and masculinity is and has been the ‘gender of no gender’ and the normative node of what it means to be (hu)man. This can be applied in many different academic disciplines and societal arenas, but for instance how the social sciences uncritically have presumed a masculine subject when examining (hu)man conditions, or how a knowledgeable subject has been presumed and required to be a man in science or politics. Such a hu(man) subject is possibly most evident in a discipline like law as there is a long history of legal and criminological canons with law libraries full of books by men, on men and written for men (Collier, 2020; Smart, 1976). In short, the subject of the law is a man and a ‘Man’.

It has been argued that masculinity studies have been ‘the odd man out’ in gender studies (cf. Beasley, 2009; Gottzén, 2018). This means that masculinity studies have been slow to catch up in terms of appropriating different forms of post-approaches as well as still relying on a modernist and humanist paradigm which prolongs the possible transformation to a larger repertoire of movement in relation to gender fluidity, affect and embodiment. Consequently, this lingering theoretical development is also prolonging modernist questions in a posthuman predicament as well as lagging behind in the pursuit to displace (hu)man exceptionalism (Alaimo, 2016), and to displace the central role of ‘Man’ and to decenter the masculine subject as such. This is probably no surprise as the dominant gender is always most resistant to embrace alternative visions (by people who have been historically excluded) of what it means to be human, as the subversive politics and radical spark are directed directly at that same hu(man) category. In terms of social mobility and recognition, it is no doubt easier to move upwards than downwards or possibly sideways, and historically there are, to my knowledge, few examples of humans that easily give up privilege.

Nonetheless, to move beyond an anthropocentric historical condition would imply to push dominant ‘Man’ off center (Braidotti, 2022, p. 5). The convergence to a posthuman condition ‘ … implies a move forward, beyond traditional understandings of the human, so that the analyses of contemporary power and knowledge become an essential part of the feminist posthuman project’ (Braidotti, 2022, p. 8). Exactly how an analysis of contemporary power and knowledge would differ from other forms of critical excavations of power structures is unclear, but it generally points towards a move that pays closer attention to a corporeal, materialist ethics and politics of our ecologies of belonging in the world. In a feminist posthumanist framework, this implies an ontological politics and epistemological practices that take a point of departure in entanglements, intimacies and dependencies upon nature, culture and materiality, and not least relational ontologies. How an emancipatory politics with regard to studies of men and masculinities fits into such a framework, beyond the decentering of ‘Man’, is rarely a question that Braidotti and other contemporary theoreticians in the field attend to, and why would they? They have enough on their own table, but it would be interesting to understand whether masculinity is supposed to be an integrated part of the transversal subject and knowledge production in such a transversal field of knowledge as feminist posthumanism.

Still, the ‘Man’ question pops up repeatedly, and it has a new ring in each specific historic situation. The contemporary posthuman predicament is according to Braidotti (2022, pp. 3–4) facing three momentous and interconnecting changes: (1) Increasing structural injustices through the unequal distribution of wealth and prosperity; (2) Climate crisis and new epidemics; (3) New levels of digitality and technological interconnectedness, where the status and condition of the human is being defined by biotechnologies, life sciences, robotics, neural sciences, nanotechnologies, and not least social media and information technologies. Of these three predicted, new and not so new, challenges facing humanity in the posthuman convergence, the ‘Man’ question, and accordingly masculinity studies, needs to be contextualized in postanthropocentric terms. Already Foucault (1970) was signaling the death of ‘Man’ as he projected that European modernity had reached an end in the sense of its rationalist progress and technological development. Many, not least in feminist science and technology studies scholars have continuously addressed parallel questions in their work on science and technology. For instance, the work of Donna Haraway has been of an enormous importance for opening up a posthuman space and understanding of the nature-culture continuum, entanglement, affinity, affect, embodiment and a situated vision beyond the humanist detached ‘Man’. She coined and founded many of the most important figurations that have formed generations of thinkers in feminist, critical posthumanism and new materialism studies, despite her own reluctance of using the label posthumanism (2016). In parallel to being a pioneer of a wider understanding of many diverse forms of ontological hybridity, Haraway has also made groundbreaking interventions into male-dominated discursive spaces in science and technology (1989, 1991, 1997). Examples of such interventions are her symbolic appropriation of the cyborg in her famous sentence ‘I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess’ (1985), and her work on primatology as a politics of manhood in the quest for scientific objectivity and reason (2004). Her early work on diverse forms of ontological hybridity has been paralleled by many feminist scholars in various disciplines, who continuously have asked the ‘Man’ question (for instance Dowd, 2010; Grant, 1993; Parpart & Zalewski, 2008; Pearson, 2019).

A key here is about reforming masculinity or rejecting it along. Are we going to exit the term masculinity in the search for more inclusive gendered subjectivities? Is masculinity to heavily burdened by its historical luggage of patriarchal violence and domination? Is the gender binary system possible to reform and still displace the human exceptionalism of ‘Man’? Or are there affirmative ways of restoring masculinity in connection to a transformation towards postanthropocentric masculinities? In any case, such a convergence implies a deep ontological challenge to men and manhood in its many forms in relation to the posthuman challenges of gender fluidity, post-binarism, sexual diversity and species equality. These questions will take us way into the 2020s as studies of men and masculinities most possibly will engage into a closer dynamic relation with feminist theorizing and practice in posthumanisms, theories of affect and new materialisms.

This issue

In the first article ‘Intersectionality and social justice in programs for boys and men’ by Amanda Keddie, Michael Flood and Shelley Hewson-Munro, we are provided with robust evidence for how gender transformative work in Australian community-based programs for boys and men designed to educate for gender respect and gender justice, needs to apply an intersectional approach. The authors show how challenging but still highly rewarding such work can be in order to adopt more inclusive and respectful masculinities. In the second article ‘The reflective process of the perpetrator: representations of rape in novels of C.N. Adidche and V.T. Nguyn’ by Omri Cohen, the author compares the two novels The Sympathizer (2015) by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006). Despite their different historical and geographical subject-matter, these novels provide an excellent base for comparison by narrating the conditions and masculinities that enable rape. Cohen convincingly argues that we need more profound investigations of perpetrators to reinforce the fight against sexual violence. The third article by Irja Malmio, ‘Rituals of (un)changing masculinity: cohesion or diversity? A study of the fraternization traditions of Swedish cadets’ at the Military Academy’ are placing the reader in a classic male-dominated space and culture which traditionally has stressed elitism, coherence and masculine norms. Malmio depicts an organization in change, balancing between an organizational goal of creating a more diverse and inclusive organization while at the same relying on an old paradigm that emphasizes cohesion as the ultimate goal of that same organization. The author manages to show us that military masculinity is multilayered and complex phenomenon, and far beyond any stereotypical one-dimensionality. The last article in this issue is ‘Filial obligations, affect and masculinities: Vietnamese-Australian young men being and becoming good sons’ by Garth Stahl and Yang Zhao. The authors give us a fascinating account of how gender, masculinity and ‘how to be a good son’ in intergenerational families shift and collide through transnational experiences of migration. The case study of five Vietnamese-Australian young men shows the complex dynamics of affect in relation to filial piety. Stahl and Zhou also manage to give us insight to how affect can be a useful theoretical departure in studies of masculinity. These inspiring four articles are furthering a well-needed critical perspective in our field of knowledge.

Notes

1 I only mention a few of my important references here: (Braidotti, 2013, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022; Bennett, 2010; Lykke, 2022; Garlick, 2016; van der Tuin, 2011; van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2012).