Christian masculinities talk next week

If you’re in Melbourne, feel free to come along to a talk I’m giving next week at Sea of Faith:

Undoing Christian Masculinities

18 March 2010 at 7.30pm

Carlton Library Meeting Room

Corner Rathdowne and Newry Streets

North Carlton

I’ll be talking about the different kinds of masculinities that can be identified within the broad Christian Men’s Movement: specifically, how evangelical men’s ministries promote a traditional masculinity, whereas their Catholic counterparts promote a somewhat “softer” masculinity.

Please, bring your questions. After someone from my 2012 talk at the Atheist Society this week called me a “parasite”, I’m ready for anything

Integral Explorations of Sex, Gender and Spirituality

A little while ago, I was contacted by Sarah Nicholson who is editing a book with Vanessa Fisher called Integral Explorations of Sex, Gender and Spirituality: Emerging Visions of Women and Men, under preparation for the new SUNY Press’ Integral Theory series. The blurb states:

This anthology highlights the cutting edge discourses on sex, gender and spirituality that are emerging from within the Integral paradigm of theory and practice. This collection of essays from academic theorists and advanced practitioners brings the Integral perspective to bear on issues of gender, sexuality, feminism, the men’s movement and women and men’s spirituality, as they appear within disciplines as diverse as psychology, sociology, philosophy, religious studies and art theory. This anthology will feature a broad range of scholars and practitioners working across a diverse field of disciplines including: Ken Wilber, Elizabeth Debold, Robert Masters, Warren Farrell, Sarah Nicholson, Giles Herrada, R. Michael Fisher, Claire Zammit, Luke Fullagar, Vanessa Fisher, Diane Musho Hamilton and Marc Gafni.

Sarah wanted to know if I was interested in contributing to the book, to which I said something along the lines of “have you actually read any of my stuff?” Anyway, after a period of time which equates quite closely with how long it takes to find a copy of my modestly-distributed book in Australia, Sarah got back to me and repeated her question. So now we have settled upon the inclusion of an edit (minus some of the naughtier bits) of my integral chapter from Numen, Old Men in Sarah and Vanessa’s book.

Now, given that I’ve had a bit of a poke at a few of the other contributors in this book, lining up with them on the same Table of Contents seems a bit unlikely. But credit is due to Sarah and Vanessa: this is exactly the type of editorial decision that moves the debate along. It seems there are now a number of folks who want to pursue this debate (see my previous post on Rebecca Bailin’s paper): at some point this should affect the Integral Party line which hasn’t budged since the limited perspectives outlined in Sex, Ecology and Spirituality.

Men Were Created to Work

“Men Were Created to Work”: this is the headline of the new ad for men’s ministry guru Patrick Morley’s new book, A Man’s Guide to Work. “We feel most happy, most alive, and most useful doing the work we were supposed to do”, the blurb states.

This continues a long connection between men’s ministry, business and work. Particularly within evangelical ministries, work is used as a signifier for masculinity and, following the prosperity gospel, the pursuit and receipt of wealth through work is seen as a sign of God’s favour. As William Connolly amusingly puts it, “the right leg of the evangelical movement is joined at the hip to the left leg of the capitalist juggernaut. Neither leg could hop far unless it was joined to the other”.

Men’s ministry leaders often flaunt their business pedigree to confirm their ministry leadership and masculinity. Indeed, ministry leadership is often spoken of using business terminology. For example, Patrick Morley is described as ‘Chairman and CEO’ of Man in the Mirror and his biographical details refer to his past business success. And now Morley’s new book makes this connection between Christian masculinity and work even stronger.

There are problems with this from two different directions.

First, too many men are already dissociated from their interiority: the last thing they need to do is to start constructing their masculine identities around yet another external variable such as work. The seemingly endless pursuit of work is one of the things which results in a pathological masculinity.

Second, it is part of the continuing co-opting of the spiritual into the economic domain, demanding that we employ that last part of the world that belongs to us (the spiritual) in the office 9-5. The end game here (usually engineered in the management realm) speaks more to the priority of work than us as individuals. As Jeremy Carrette and Richard King say in their excellent book $elling Spirituality, “What is being sold to us as radical, trendy and transformative spirituality in fact produces little in the way of a significant change in one’s lifestyle or fundamental behaviour patterns (with the possible exception of motivating the individual to be more efficient and productive at work)”.

No thanks, Patrick.

Male Studies

Some years back, when discussing how the study of men and masculinities was divided up, Jeff Hearn and Keith Pringle put critical studies of masculinities in opposition to men’s studies, which they perceived engaged in “much more ambiguous and sometimes even anti-feminist activities … which can become defined in a much less critical way as ‘by men, on men, for men’”. I have always resisted this binary, because while my political allegiances have rested with critical studies of masculinities, men’s studies has been more accommodating to the study of masculinities and religion, and also I simply know plenty of people engaged in what they describe as “men’s studies” who are very clear in their political/feminist stance.

However, a new subset of this broad area of enquiry is far less ambiguous: Males Studies, describing itself as “a new academic discipline” has its inaugural symposium on April 7. A lengthy article by Miles Groth on Men’s News Daily outlines how he sees the discipline shaping up. It really is the most bizarre article, in which Groth states that gender studies (both women’s and men’s) is a made-up area of enquiry, and that only a biologically-determined category (“male”) can genuinely be studied. We read other gems such as:

Gender reconciliation is not an issue of male studies. It would be as silly an idea as expecting zoology to bring about peace between panthers and gazelles. Gender difference is one of the inventions of women’s studies to provide it with one of its basic themes. Another of its inventions is the notion of gender equality (on the presumption of there being gender inequality).

Groth scoffs at those who study this fantasy-subject, stating of them, “not everyone with a PhD and a university post is a scholar. In fact, sadly, today most academics are not scholars,” suggesting that via his discipline of male studies we are getting the real academic deal. Let there be no mistake: if researchers of male studies walk into any vaguely orthodox gathering of academics and start arguing this case they will be laughed out of the room. And this is not because there is some liberal conspiracy in the academy seeking to oppress the study of males (as the followers of male studies might suggest), but because holding this position is like being a member of the Flat Earth Society: by all means, hold the position, but don’t expect to be taken seriously (by anyone, at least, other than men’s rights activists, which is ironic, as Groth states of gender studies that “as interests of social activists and reformers, it may have a kind of life. But it cannot be a discipline”).

But let’s not get too comfortable either in the critical studies of masculinities camp. In the latest issue of Journal if Men’s Studies we read Michael Murphy’s “An Open Letter to the Organizers, Presenters and Attendees of the First National Conference for Campus Based Men’s Gender Equality and Anti-Violence Groups” where he and his colleagues found at this event a certain reluctance to hear the concerns regarding violence against gay and trans-folk.

Where’s a decent fellow to go amid all this compromising of values in the study of men and masculinities? Over to Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, of course

2012 talk next week

If you’re in Melbourne, feel free to come along next week to a talk I’m giving at The Atheist Society.

A Critical Look at the 2012 Phenomenon

Tuesday 09 March 2010 at 8:00pm

Unitarian Church Hall

110 Grey Street

East Melbourne (Opposite the old Mercy Hospital)

I’ll be giving an overview of 2012, an outline of some of the key players in the movement, and my own “prophetic” take on how 2012 is going to play out in Australia and New Zealand. All viewed through a suitably critical lens, of course (especially as Melbourne will be on FULL DEBUNKING ALERT with the 2010 Global Atheist Convention in town just a couple of days later).

The Need for Men’s Liberation via Integral Life: Bailin paper

Further to my earlier post about the Integral Life Newsletter concerning “The Need for Men’s Liberation”, we are also directed to the article, “Feminine, Masculine, Female, and Male in the Integral Space” (Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, 4(2), pp. 89–103) by Rebecca Bailin.

Bailin does a pretty good job of echoing my concerns about the integral treatment of gender, referring to the conflation of sex and gender, biological determinism in development, and even how integral gender flirts with the pre-trans fallacy. It’s a shame she didn’t get the chance to read my book, as I unpack these issues further still, but looking at the publication dates we were probably writing at the same time (I would also have cited her).

Bailin argues that Wilber et al stumble in this area because while they have a sufficiently nuanced position, they complement this with problematic casual statements, correctly stating:

It is not enough that these individuals use footnotes and more nuanced qualifications from time to time. The fact that they engage in public conversation with “sound bites” that lack sophistication around these matters has an impact on our academic and embodied efforts to avoid naïve essentialism (n. 6, p. 101)

But this is also where Bailin’s paper shows its limitations. Bailin focuses on these casual (“less academic”) sources, “to draw attention to the more vernacular and simplified ways of talking about these issues that pervade the integral community both in its academic and popular expressions” (ibid). This gives the impression that if those “more academic” sources were addressed, the story would look less grim, but the reality is quite the reverse. Where my own writing on this subject differs from Bailin’s is that I unpack those footnotes and expose how their contents offer deeper problems. In short, I would argue there is no nuance to integral gender.

My feeling, too, is that Bailin’s research in to this area is colored by her investment in integral theory; as such, she seeks to look upon it in the best possible light, salvaging what integral gender insight she can rather than the more reasonable conclusion of rejecting it as faulty.

In the end, integral theory brings nothing new to the table in regard to gender and the spirit which hasn’t been outlined in various forms for decades with feminist, gay and queer spiritualties; indeed, it unwinds some of the valuable progress made by these arguments.

The Need for Men’s Liberation via Integral Life

Rarely a month goes by without the Wilberian Integral Machine pumping forth new evidence of its alignment with the men’s movement, as outlined in various blog posts here.

This week’s Integral Life Newsletter is entitled “The Need for Men’s Liberation” and directs readers to a conversation between Ken Wilber and Warren Farrell where they will be offered “Instant Insights” such as:

• “Power” is not defined by the amount of control someone has over others, but the amount of control one has over his or her own life
• In terms of recognizing and developing their power, men are in a similar position today as women were in the late 1950’s, at the dawn of the feminist movement

Here’s the problem: Wilber and Farrell sound quite reasonable when they speak to issues such as “the urgent need for men to begin redefining their roles for today’s world”. However, when you scratch the surface, they begin to assert some rather more problematic positions. If you read my book you will find evidence for the following “Instant Insights”:

• Wilber distorts the work of feminist scholars such as Carol Gilligan, and claims they support his view, when they do not.
• Wilber and Farrell deny the historical reality of patriarchy, suggesting instead it was there to suit everyone.
• Wilber and Farrell’s consistent reframing of “feminism” and what it “really” means is an overt act of depoliticization and masculine power.
• Far from “redefining their roles for today’s world”, Wilber imprisons men and women into “types” on the AQAL matrix, falling foul of his own elegantly-formulated pre-trans fallacy.
• Wilber relegates “feminine” spiritual values to the pre-rational, stating “more men make it into the universal, postconventional moral stages than do women”.
• Wilber states that even in noospheric realms there can be no ultimate gender parity “given the unavoidable aspects of childbearing”.

How’s that for gender equality?

I know it’s getting rather boring with me making these comments about the integral men’s movement, but it seems that over the past year the Wilberian Integral Machine has gone on something of an offensive on this issue, which should be a worry for us all.

Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality 4.2 preview

The next issue of Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality won’t go online until June; however, here’s a sneak preview of the first two papers:

Dandy Discipleship: A Queering of Mark’s Male Disciples

Robert J. Myles (University of Auckland)

While conventional readings of the Bible unambiguously presume the normativity of heterosexuality and binary categories of gender, this paper challenges such modern assumptions by purposefully and strategically re-reading three Markan discipleship texts “sexually.”  By combining a socio-rhetorical approach with queer and gender criticism as informed primarily by the work of Marcella Althaus-Reid, the re-readings attempt to penetrate through existing homophobic and erotophobic interpretations. Particular attention is also given to the ways in which the gender and sexuality of the male disciples has been constructed and can be problematized in both the world behind the text and the world in front of the text.

Inspire, Expire: Masculinity, Mortality and Meaning in Tim Winton’s Breath

Roie Thomas (Australian Catholic University)

Tim Winton’s latest novel and winner of the Miles Franklin award Breath (2009) is investigated here within a framework of theistic existentialism alongside a critique of masculinities in the Australian context. This novel presents a particular take on hegemonic masculinity and this dovetails neatly, I argue, with a continuum of spiritual consciousness and responsiveness drawn up by Danish creative writer and theological maverick, Søren Kierkegaard.

Open Letter to Bracha Ettinger

Dear Bracha

I have enjoyed dipping into your writing. I like that fact that your Flickr photos show you hanging out with groovy people like Jean-Francois Lyotard, Judith Butler, Emmanuel Levinas and a bunch of other people I’ve mostly never heard of, but who are no doubt very interesting as you bother to take their photos. I found your take on sexual difference via matrixial borderspace interesting, and a useful complement to spatial metaphors such as Anzaldua’s borderlands and Deleuze’s rhizome. I like the fact that your lack of fame relative to, say, Butler or Irigaray, means that citing you gives my readers the impression I am far better read in these areas than I actually am.

But sometimes, Bracha, I haven’t got the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. Take your recent article, Fragilization and Resistance in Studies in the Maternal. You state, for example:

The human capacity for inspiration revealed in artworking begins with an archaic transconnectedness by psychic strings, that bounds each I, as presubject, to its particular non-I(s), and first of all to its pre-maternal transubject – its archaic m/Other. Desire, born out of the kind of transmission that the string allows, doesn’t seek for objects. It languishes for specific almost-lost links. In jointness, I and non-I differently feel-know in-and-by inspiration-transpiriting by which they are differently transformed. In each jointness that succeeds to tremble a borderlinking string, different I(s) and non-I(s) will start, restart and continue to feel-know with-in one another and with-in forms, images and encounter-events, by way of sharing with-in new and older psychic webs while also imprinting and engraving their traces in them in shareable threads. Traces are cross-inscribed and transinscribed between transubjects and between transubject and transject. (pp. 11-12)

That’s easy for you to say.

In Fragilization and Resistance you use the prefix “trans” 216 times, which is over double the usage in Weaving a Woman Artist With-in the Matrixial Encounter-Event, published five years previously; you refer in some way to “spirit” 78 times in the new paper, and only 5 times in the older (the pdf reader counted those, not me: that would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it?).

Here’s my theory, which I allude to in Numen, Old Men, which was revealed to me via Griselda Pollock’s vision of your matrixial borderspace:

of madness, of psychosis, with no signifiers to relieve phantasms and hallucinations that bleakly register both the trauma and the solace of what we now come to recognise as the matrixial dimension

To which I wrote:

Is this not another, darker weaving of a place we have heard of before? Of sacramental mystery? Ātman? Non-dual awareness? The “thresholds of I and non-I emerging in co-existence”?

Bracha, I believe through all this you want to speak freely about spirituality, but feel embarrassed by it; but it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of people eventually get tired with a secular-Leftist and psychoanalytically-informed worldview and make this turn: just read Irigaray’s work of recent years.

But I think the spiritual (as opposed to the psychoanalytic) dimension of your matrixial borderspace is better served by your painting than theory: it is, after all, pre-verbal (via the Real or, more accurately, trans-verbal). I think you could make a great living among the intelligentsia of Paris and Tel Aviv painting matrixial auras around them: oceans of bruised purple, brown and black. I’d seek you out if you did this.

Just my two cents,

Joseph.

Rhinestone Theologian

There’s a shining new star on the theological horizon:

“I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don’t know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East — you’re as good as dead.”

Source: Elton John. (2010). ‘There’s A Lot Of Hate In The World’. Parade. Retrieved 20 February 2010 from http://www.parade.com/celebrity/celebrity-parade/2010/elton-john-web-exclusive.html.

I see yet another revision of Candle in the Wind in the pipeline:

Goodbye Jesus Christ

Though I never knew you at all

You had the grace to hold yourself

While those around you crawled

They crawled out of the woodwork

And they whispered into your brain

They set you on the treadmill

And they made you change your name

And it seems to me you lived your life

Like a candle in the wind

Never knowing who to cling to

When the rain set in

And I would have liked to have known you

But I was just a kid

Your candle burned out long before

Your legend ever did

Loneliness was tough

The toughest role you ever played

Hollywood created a superstar

And pain was the price you paid

Even when you died

Oh the press still hounded you

All the papers had to say

Was that the Nazarene was found in the nude

Goodbye Jesus Christ

From the young man in the 22nd row

Who sees you as something as more than sexual

More than just our holy homo