When I think about masculinity I automatically think white, muscly, covered in body hair, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. But the reality for most men is they will never be like that, so how does the discourse of masculinity operate within our genders?
To be honest with you I have never really considered the idea that masculinity could be considered as a multiple concept, masculinities and how complicated the idea may be to navigate, I mean how hard is life when you get paid more, have more opportunities and greater privileges than your female counterparts, right?
Well it seemed uncomplicated to me, but I have also never considered that I am looking at this as a white heterosexual female in western society, This realisation hit me like a tonne of bricks when I began the readings for the week.
The piece by Dr Audrey Yue discussed the idea of the feminised Chinese male, from the colonised point of view and how Bruce Lee and his films challenged these ideas Western society had. Bruce Lee, as Yue puts it, made way for re-masculization of bodies and as a result Bruce Lee and his films became a symbolic platform where this was possible for feminised bodies of subordinate culture and races.
"The Year Enter the dragon was released and topped the American charts ........the genre was only popular among black, Hispanic and working class audiences" thus created a subculture ideology of masculinity.
The discussion then turns to the popularity of such films like Rambo, and how a white masculinity broke through into the mainstream culture.
Yue describes these competing masculine ideologies through the settings the mainstream Rambo represents to colonisation of such lands like China or in the films case Vietnam, where as Bruce Lee is the counternation to the American Rambo.
These ideas got me thinking about the question I had earlier how does masculinity and its discourse operate throughout society. One main idea I kept coming back to is the idea that the reason it operates the way it does is due to the fear of the other, the otherness to white I suppose.
Which brought me back to my first year subject in gender diversity, where we discussed the idea of "Orientalism" (click here to see interview with Edward Said) in a book by the same named penned by Edward Said in 1978, around the time when Bruce Lee's movies were being released. Said discusses the misrepresentations and ideas that Western society have of the Orient or the East, and how they are used in opposition to the Western culture. These ideas are not based on reality, much like the feminised male Asian bodies and are used to create a discourse and power over the otherness of white.
The idea of fear as I mentioned earlier as an the fear of opposition or difference to ourselves probably drives Western Society to take the power away from the Orient, therefore taking the need for fear away.
This idea of fear can also be related to not only race as above but also sexuality, desire and gender. The fear of being seen as feminine creates the need for mean to reject everything feminine except in a desirable way. Liam Leonard suggested during the lecture that the relationships with parental figures can affect the future identity of a person for example; A female child may desire her mother and then reject the father, or a male child may have the opposite happen causing him to behave in a feminine way. Throughout society there are many ways in which we are praised or punished for behaving gender appropriately, not through a repressive state apparatus, but as an ideological state apparatus.
Looking back now I still have only covered heterosexual ideals of masculinity, and there are many more masculinities out there not only in the hetero normative world but in the queer spheres and other cultures as well.
Oh well Maybe another time :)
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