Many men profess and practise an essentialist understanding of self. Man is who he is; masculine is what he is. Such certainty of identity ensures that established frameworks of knowledge—and the normalised practices that result—remain unchallenged. Men are permitted to maintain their position of dominance in society because their masculine identities and corresponding behaviours are deemed natural.
Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ has not remained exclusively a critique of the female identity and female behaviour. This attack on the essentialism of ‘woman’ has been turned against the identity of man. Where the masculine identity relies on an absolute heterosexuality, queer theory exposes the proximity of this masculine ideal to homosociability and homosexual desire. Similarly, in response to power imbalances produced and sustained by a naturalised masculine identity, feminist theory introduces an equally powerful female identity while also engaging in attacks against established masculinised systems of knowledges that allow hegemonic identities to exist and remain.
In the poststructuralist critique, identification with the masculine is not a birthright, but a learned and performed habit. The notion of a natural masculine identity has been exposed for failing to recognise the privileged status of its white, heterosexual self. The naturalness of the masculine identity is secured only through silencing and punishing those bodies that exist outside the hegemonic imaginary of what the culture deems it means to be a man.
While traditionally women and femininity have been the major focus of investigations within ‘women’s studies’, the recent move towards ‘gender studies’ accounts for, accommodates and encourages an increasing interest in deconstructing the naturalised masculine identity. Moreover, the identity of man is no longer assumed as the base from which all investigations into gender must proceed. Indeed, as Judith Halberstam asserts, the masculine identity is not the domain simply of those bodies born as male. It is a social and corporeal component of all kinds of bodies in the culture.
In the everyday practices of gender, men are learning to take on board new identifications with the masculine as they are influenced by the changing status of women, queer cultures and consumerism.
References and further reading
Badinter, E. (1995) XY: On Masculine Identity, New York: Columbia University Press.
de Beauvoir, S. (1949) The Second Sex, New York: Vintage Books.
Halberstam, J. (1998) Female Masculinities, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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