Distribution, assemblage, capacity: new keywords for masculinity?

Abstract

Performance and performativity have been the watchwords of gender studies for many years now. What new vocabularies might invigorate the study of Renaissance masculinities? This essay suggests that notions of distribution, assemblage and capacity might help break recent logjams in gender studies and allow greater attention to the social complexities of masculinity as it is constituted in association with a wide range of bodies, life forms and objects.

Keywords::

• masculinity
• assemblage
• distribution
• performance
• theatricality
• gender
• Renaissance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1.Butler, Gender Trouble.

^2. Of the many essays on this subject, the classic remains Orgel's “Nobody's Perfect.”

^3. Indeed, references to Butler appear early in Jennifer Low'sManhood and the Duel and quite prominently in Catherine Bates's Masculinity, Gender and Identity. My own not unrelated approach to masculinity in Renaissance England in Pain of Reformation focuses on the way a particular set of sixteenth-century literary engagements with heroic poetry enabled a conversation about virtue, and the vir in virtue, as an ethical practice not unlike the one Michel Foucault describes throughout History of Sexuality, vol. 2.

^4.Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity, 4.

^5.Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1.

^6.Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 1.

^7. Ibid., 4.

^8. As Connell puts it: “At any given time, one form of masculinity rather than others is culturally exalted. Hegemonic masculinity can be defined as the configuration of gender practice which embodies the currently accepted answer to the problem of the legitimacy of patriarchy, which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women.” Connell, Masculinities, 77.

^9. OED, “Identity,” 1a.

^10. For an alternative to the dominance of the penis or phallus in the constitution of masculinities, see Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History.

^11.Latour, Reassembling the Social.

^12. Ibid., 5.

^13. Ibid., 91–2.

^14.Yates, “Accidental Shakespeare,” 90.

^15. See Bates, Masculinity, Gender, and Identity; Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion; Kuzner, Open Subjects.

^16.Bates, Masculinity and the Hunt, 5.

^17.Simons, Sex of Men.

^18. Take, for instance, Garrett Sullivan Jr.'sSleep, Romance and Human Embodiment, which because it addresses vitality and “human” embodiment through tropes of romance, it is primarily a study of vitality and masculine bodies.

^19.Agamben, The Open, 29–30.

^20. For an insightful critique of the tendency to construe masculinity as lack, loss and anxiety see Simons, Sex of Men, 52–79.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph Campana

Joseph Campana is a poet, critic and scholar of Renaissance literature. His publications include The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (2012) and two collections of poetry, The Book of Faces (2005) and Natural Selections (2012), which received the Iowa Poetry Prize. Current projects include a study of children and sovereignty in the works of Shakespeare entitled The Child's Two Bodies and an edited collection (with Scott Maisano) entitled Renaissance Posthumanism.