JOSEPH GELFER

I hope someone out there has the time to write something called The Construction of Masculinities in The Tree of Life: it would make a great book chapter or journal article.

As Wikipedia states, “The Tree of Life is a 2011 American drama written and directed by Terrence Malick and starring Sean Penn, Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain. Malick’s film chronicles the origins and meaning of life by way of a middle-aged man’s childhood memories of his family living in 1950s Texas, interspersed with imagery of the origins of the universe and the inception of life on Earth … Early reviews for The Tree of Life at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival have been polarizing. The film received widely differing reactions, and drew boos as well as applause at its premiere.”

I went and saw The Tree of Life this morning at The Sun Theatre in Yarraville, and thought it was the best film I’ve seen in a long time, taking me right back to the kind of ethereal experience I had with Malick’s other great film The Thin Red Line.

Just as in The Thin Red Line, The Tree of Life contains numerous “why?”-type questions in the narration that seem to get right up some folks’ noses. Yes, they’re obvious, but the questions point to such profound existential issues that the simpler they’re stated, the better. Indeed, I think you could probably get away with just asking “why?” and nothing else, and then finally rendering the question as silence, as it is reduced to the ineffable. Indeed, this probably explains why Sean Penn’s character hardly utters a word in the whole movie. If you find such a suggestion impossibly pretentious I think that’s because we have forgotten about the quality of sincerity in movies, framed as they are today generally by multiple layers of irony and mash-up-meaning.

But more than just existential questioning, this is equally a movie about the construction of masculine identities:

• Brad Pitt and his oscillation between tyrannical and loving father, and the loss of his dreams to be somebody of significance (which I think is more heartbreaking than the death of his son).
• Pitt’s sons as their boyhoods unfold, and their polar swings of love and hate towards their parents, their exposure to death and the magnetic pull of sexuality.
• Sean Penn as one of the adult sons, adrift in an ocean of (in turn) corporate and natural emptiness.
• These masculine crises of isolation stylistically offset by their sense of physicality, tears and the beautifully designed and photographed nature of the movie.

I’m looking now for a conclusion, but there isn’t one. And that’s the point of The Tree of Life.

Gaia Charis’ article, Multiple Masculinities: The Postmodern Emperor’s New Clothes is now available on her website, which outlines her argument for the illusory nature of masculinity (and multiple masculinities, in particular). Gaia spends some time towards the end of the essay referring both to Numen, Old Men and The Masculinity Conspiracy, and how I allegedly perpetuate a number of problems about the lack of definition around masculinity in its academic study:

Gelfer’s answer to this question is both astonishing and depressing. He is standing here on the edge of the chasm that was once just a faultline in Connell’s definitional thinking. Over two decades that faultline has widened to the point that any given masculine multiplicity could both logically, theoretically and empirically embody ascribed ‘femininity’, as exemplified in Queer perspectives and specifically in the work of Judith Butler that Gelfer cites. The conclusionary void that Gelfer is staring into here is, in fact, the complete illusion of gender and particularly, as I will argue in the next section of this essay, the illusion of masculinity that is sustained by the quintessential defining of it as not-feminine. But it is a void that he chooses not to face and instead of naming what he sees he steps backwards into the false security of that illusion.

In a lot of ways, I agree with Gaia: gender is an illusion. But I would reject the claim that I step back “into the false security of that illusion”. Rather, I step back into the common perception of that illusion (which is basically the same as the “conspiracy”), as this is the site of power imbalance that requires challenging if we are to achieve transformation.

Certainly, defining what exists after the illusion of gender is revealed is important, but the vast majority of people are so embedded in the illusion that I believe they simply could not accommodate the meaning of such a revelation (were it ever successfully articulated). To achieve transformation, it is necessary to speak in the language (albeit stretching it) of those we seek to transform, thus the perpetuation of the language around masculinity, even if it is ultimately illusory.

Referring to the stretching of the meaning of multiple masculinities, Gaia concludes this first part of her essay with the claim that “the problem for the outside observer is that, from Connell all the way to Gelfer, we never found out what it was that was being stretched in the first place”. I’m not sure this is as mysterious as she suggests. What is being stretched (and in doing so, problematised) is the normative understanding of a singular masculinity that is commonly perceived to be biologically innate in and appropriate for men (sex role theory), and the power imbalances that have resulted through this in the form of patriarchy.

I find it rather ironic being lumped in with “the postmodern emperor’s new clothes” (despite the fact that relative to “genuine” academic theorising, my work is extremely light)—with all the lack of praxis that implies—when it is precisely a concern for engaging in the “real” (or at least commonly perceived) world that underpins my strategy. Would it not be the call to gender being devoid of meaning that is ultimately more postmodern, and therefore draped in the emperor’s new clothes?

I’m about 4/5ths through a new article entitled, Will the Real Joseph Gelfer Please Stand Up: Multiple Masculinities and the Self. Abstract:

A discourse of multiplicity in the study of masculinities has identified and given voice to an ever-increasing spectrum of both men’s and women’s experiences. This article extends the concept of multiple masculinities not by continuing to identify the experiences of diverse constituencies whose masculine performances have yet to be heard, but by identifying multiple masculinities/identities within the individual self. Singular masculine identities such as “gay man”, “pro-feminist” or “men’s rights advocate” rarely communicate the subtlety of a person’s genuine beliefs: they are more of a caricature than a representation of the truth. Rather than seeking “balance” between aspects of the gendered self or a “middle ground” between different approaches to the study of masculinities, via an autoethnographic analysis of the themes of sexuality and style, this article views the masculine self and the study of masculinities in a more rhizomatic fashion, noting that there are multiple positions with multiple connections to one another that comprise the greater whole.

The article draws upon some theoretical considerations I’ve been mulling over lately about the nature of multiplicity and paradoxicality, and mobilizes some of the complaints I’ve had both on this blog and other online forums about the way I go about presenting myself and my arguments in writing.

It’s either the most useful article I’ve ever written, or complete twaddle–neither of which suggest an easy journey through the peer review process