JOSEPH GELFER

The plan for 2011 is to start getting out and about more with The Masculinity Conspiracy (as well as finish writing it). Following from the previous post about the Feminist Futures conference, I’ll also be talking about The Masculinity Conspiracy at Confest over the Easter weekend. At 2 hours, this will be longer than a usual talk and include:

• The main talk: It sometimes seems as if the debate over feminism is stuck in a rut. Feminists have spent decades offering a compelling argument about how power operates via patriarchy, and advocating for gender equality. At the same time, men’s rights activists believe men’s issues have been ignored at the expense of women’s, advocating for what they perceive as gender equality, which often results in a backlash against feminism. The Masculinity Conspiracy offers some new answers to old problems by viewing patriarchy (partially tongue-in-cheek) via the lens of conspiracy logic, which political scientist Michael Barkun claims is characterised by three assumptions: nothing happens by accident; nothing is as it seems; everything is connected. Rather than simply viewing patriarchy as something men do to women, The Masculinity Conspiracy suggests patriarchy is a power conspiracy which mobilizes men to oppress women, but which paradoxically has little interest in men as individuals. By revealing the nature of the conspiracy it is hoped that men will realize that it is in theirs as well as women’s interest to overturn patriarchy, recasting the feminist agenda of liberation from a “women’s movement” to a “people’s movement”.
• Breaking off into groups to explore separate topics.
• Groups reporting back and general discussion.

I’m aiming to give the talk on Saturday 23 April, but check on the workshop boards for exact details. Confest is held in the bush about 5 hours drive north of Melbourne, over the NSW border. It costs $80 to get in for the full event from 22-26 April: once you’re inside, all the numerous talks and workshops are free.

I’m happy to have been granted a spot at the Feminist Futures conference to talk about The Masculinity Conspiracy. The conference is organized by the Melbourne Feminist Collective and will be held on 28-29 May 2011 at North Melbourne Town Hall. This is more of a community/activist conference than academic and priced accordingly ($25 full, $15 concession). Here’s the outline of the talk:

The Masculinity Conspiracy: New Answers to Old Problems

It sometimes seems as if the debate over feminism is stuck in a rut. Feminists have spent decades offering a compelling argument about how power operates via patriarchy, and advocating for gender equality. At the same time, men’s rights activists believe men’s issues have been ignored at the expense of women’s, advocating for what they perceive as gender equality, which often results in a backlash against feminism. The Masculinity Conspiracy offers some new answers to old problems by viewing patriarchy (partially tongue-in-cheek) via the lens of conspiracy logic, which political scientist Michael Barkun claims is characterised by three assumptions: nothing happens by accident; nothing is as it seems; everything is connected. Rather than simply viewing patriarchy as something men do to women, The Masculinity Conspiracy suggests patriarchy is a power conspiracy which mobilizes men to oppress women, but which paradoxically has little interest in men as individuals. By revealing the nature of the conspiracy it is hoped that men will realize that it is in theirs as well as women’s interest to overturn patriarchy, recasting the feminist agenda of liberation from a “women’s movement” to a “people’s movement”.

And here’s the conference blurb:

Feminist Futures is a conference organised by the Melbourne Feminist Collective that aims to provide a safe, supportive and active space for discussing different strategies to create a feminist future. It is an open environment for anyone interested in imagining and creating feminist futures in our community.

Participants will have the opportunity to critically engage with issues across a broad range of feminist perspectives and agendas. The lack of unity within the feminist movement is sometimes depicted as a sign of its failure or weakness. However, we believe that difference and disagreement contribute to the movement’s strength and vitality. The existence of different agendas and objectives allows for multiple goals to be pursued simultaneously, while ideological differences between feminist groups promote constructive criticism and debate. We believe that this is essential for the health and integrity of the feminist movement. Robust debate enables feminists to build strong bonds of solidarity, guards against uncritical stances and allows a number of different voices to be heard.

Feminist Futures seeks to reclaim the concept of “feminism” as a positive and necessary political ideal that is of direct relevance to the everyday lives of women and men. It aims to cultivate positive relationships between groups and individuals within the feminist movement by bringing them together to engage in thoughtful dialogue and constructive criticism of shared goals and strategies.

Feminist Futures also seeks to encourage those who are curious about feminism but who perhaps do not identify as feminist or are unfamiliar with feminism’s aims and issues, to become involved in the movement. Feminist Futures provides an open and welcoming space for all levels of interest and experience. The conference will be guided by the principles of honesty, trust and mutual respect.

Feminist Futures will also celebrate the increasing strength of the feminist movement, and challenge the view that we are living in a ‘post-feminist’ society.

One thing I’ll say for the Christian Men’s Network is that they send out great flyers which provide excellent visual aids to the kind of things I write about. This morning I received this one about an event in Jackson, Mississippi:

From this flyer we can read the key themes about how masculinity is defined in men’s ministries:

• Victory: combat
• Fight: the blend of metaphorical and physical violence
• To be a man: claiming there is such a singular thing
• Power: reasserting masculine power in the church
• Successful: masculinity through (usually business) success
• Otto Kelly: the mobilization of sport
• BBQ included: eating meat
• New Jerusalem Church: the recent Dispensationalism in men’s ministry planted by Bill McCartney.

Volume 5, Number 1: Table of Contents

Editorial:
Joseph Gelfer, Sex and Gender in Jung’s The Red Book (pp. 1-3)

Article:
Birthe Loa Knizek, Eugene Kinyanda, Vicki Owens and Heidi Hjelmeland, Ugandan Men’s Perceptions of What Causes and What Prevents Suicide (pp. 4-21)

Reviews:
Philip Culbertson, Review of Jack Malebranche, Androphilia: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity (pp. 22-23)

Philip Culbertson, Review of Tammi Vacha-Haase, Stephen R. Wester, and Heidi Fowell Christianson, Psychotherapy with Older Men (pp. 24-25)

Sarah Heinz, Review of Andrea Ochsner, Lad Trouble: Masculinity and Identity in the British Male Confessional Novel of the 1990s (pp. 26-28)

Edward C. Dodge, Review of Gordon J. Hilsman, Intimate Spirituality: The Catholic Way of Love & Sex (pp. 29-31)

Joshua Fleer, Review of Elaine Frantz Parsons, Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (pp. 32-34)

Bob Batchelor, Review of Lynne Luciano, Looking Good: Male Body Image in Modern America and John Pettigrew, Brutes in Suits: Male Sensibility in America, 1890-1920 (pp. 35-37)

Last week I had a few moments of TV glory talking about 2012 on Channel 7′s Today Tonight. You can check it out here:

Clearly, the spin was towards the sensational, but the reporter did a pretty good job in allowing me to conclude with some balance, noting that some people are trying to use 2012 as a catalyst for change in their lives.

With all these meaty posts around recently I am embarking on a new journal article entitled, Meat, Masculinity and Men’s Ministries (or, for added alliteration and oral satisfaction, Mmmm: Meat, Masculinity and Men’s Ministries).

I’ll be consolidating and expanding some previous observations about meat in men’s ministries in America, Australia and the UK, and how these operate as signifiers for normative masculinity. Theoretically, I’ll be mobilizing Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory to highlight how this feeds the masculinist agenda of men’s ministries. I’ll also be using David Grumett and Rachel Muers’ recent Theology on the Menu: Asceticism, Meat and Christian Diet as a base for some theological reflections on the matter. On a foody point, I was just looking at Angel F. Mendez Montoya’s The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist. Am I the only person who sees a eucharistic pair of genitalia in the following cover image?

After recent postings here and here about the supposed connection between men and meat comes a press release from Meatinfo.co.uk, which talks up a new study that shows:

Male meat-eaters are seen as more masculine than their vegetarian counterparts, even by steak-dodging females, research from British Columbia has found.

Vegetarian men are seen as wimps and less macho than those who like tucking into cooked animal flesh, according to the study, although non-meat eaters were seen as being more virtuous.

I went and had a look at this study, “Meat, Morals and Masculinity” in the journal Appetite. This four page “short communication” offers a good example of the absurdity of the socially-constructed nature of gender. Summarising other research, the authors describe “pancakes and syrup” as a “masculine food” and “bagel with cream cheese” as a “feminine food” (working on the assumption that high fat content is masculine).

This is the kind of thing that annoys me about a certain way of doing social science: supposedly commonly-held “perceptions” are presented in studies with no critical framework. How can someone seriously perpetuate such nonsense that a pancake with syrup is masculine and a bagel with cream cheese is feminine? Perception it may be, but science it is not: however, many social scientists would paradoxically argue that the way a humanities researcher might deconstruct such a statement is itself unscientific.

The article concludes:

Through purposefully abstaining from meat, a widely established symbol of power, status, and masculinity, it seems that the vegetarian man is perceived as more principled, but less manly, than his omnivorous counterpart. People may benefit from knowing about this consequence in how their diet affects the way that others perceive them.

I would argue that people would benefit more from a study that critiques these ludicrous perceptions, rather than perpetuating them. I understand that the authors may not consider this to be the business of their research, but presumably neither is being fodder for meat industry marketing.

There’s a lesson there for all researchers and writers: it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see how our work may be mobilized by others in ways we do not intend.

Ok, so last night I went out for like the first time in years to a young person’s gig and saw the South African performance-artist-ravers Die Antwoord at The Prince Bandroom in St Kilda.

When I first heard these guys a few months ago I had no context for them, and my initial feeling was they were either some of the most dangerous or talented people currently recording music. The utterly gruesome lyrics—exemplified by Beat Boy—suggested the latter: they are just too clever and hallucinatory to be written by the genuinely stupid performers they parody.

The phallus is central to Die Antwoord. At last night’s gig there was a kind of massive inflatable Casper the Ghost wielding a huge phallus, as echoed in the following video of their recent tune Evil Boy:

Of course, the difficulty Die Antwoord face is how their audience read their phallocentric performance. Yes, last night’s audience realised they were taking the piss, but to what degree? And how much is it a laugh, and how much a critical deconstruction of the phallus?

This is a strange pop culture reflection of Luce Irigaray’s mimetic strategy which surfaces from time to time in my own work. In its most simple sense, mimesis is about mimicry or imitation, and in the artistic realm about a form of realism in representation. But Irigaray’s mimesis is far more complex: it is a form of resistance where women imperfectly imitate stereotypes about women created for them by men, and of eroding the stereotypes from within. It is at heart a transgressive act of ventriloquism, speaking in the voice of the oppressor; this has also been described as “strategic essentialism,” where one can be charged with all sorts of essentialist representations of men and women, but for a reason other than the perpetuation of normativity.

However, the problem (or challenge) of such a strategy is that one must be comfortable inhabiting the various levels of interpretation this manifests. Die Antwoord have to be comfortable being seen both as a masturbatory joke and also a serious critique of hyper-sexualisation; furthermore, whatever their authorial intent, the Die Antwoord cock has a life of its own when combined with the intent of the audience.

Handle with care, as it were.