Diaspora, Exile, Colonization: Masculinity Dislocated

Abstract

With the help of 5 short vignettes that explore some aspects of clinical material and a brief personal experience, I discuss masculinity’s constitutive relationship with the normative center. Experiences occurring in the periphery of the canonical and outside the margins of the expectable expose masculinity’s anxious and unstable underpinnings. When dislocated, masculinity fans out into masculinities, roomier and airier versions of itself that allow for more and better living. Relying on psychoanalytic theory, I also propose that even as we encounter the amount of invisible cultural work that gives masculinity its seemingly natural appearance of robustness and vigor we have to take note of how our own internal relationships with the masculine center are enduringly conflicted. For the most part and despite our most stringent critiques, most of us, creatures of our cultures that we are, both frown upon and covet the masculine center.

Notes

¹ For a detailed discussion of this case see Saketopoulou (2014).

² On the relationship between hazing and the construction of white heterosexual masculinity, see Ward (2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Avgi Saketopoulou

Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D., is faculty at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and the Stephen Mitchell Center. She serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Dr. Saketopoulou has received the Ruth Stein Prize, the Ralph Roughton Award, and the 2014 Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and Symonds Prizes.