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Letter from the Editors

2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 5; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/jasiapacipopcult.5.2.0121

2380-7687

Adam Geczy, Vicki Karaminas, Paul Mountfort,

The nucleus of articles around which this special issue coheres were presented at the Millennial Masculinities: Queers, Pimp Daddies, and Lumbersexuals Conference, which was held at Massey University of New Zealand, Wellington, on December 10–11, 2019. Convened by JAPPC editors Vicki Karaminas and Adam Geczy, with a paper delivered by Paul Mountfort, the conference brought together scholars from a range of discipline areas, with keynotes by such distinguished scholars as Christopher Breward of the National Galleries of Scotland, London College of Fashion’s Pamela Church Gibson, Shaun Cole of Winchester School of Art, and Andrew Reilly of the University of Hawaii. Reviewing the scope of the papers involved is beyond our purview here, but the panel areas that the forty-odd papers spanned give some sense of the diversity of practice, and praxis, which the conference encompassed: cinema, style, history, television and cinema, objects/brands, pop culture, representation, fashion, bodies, visual culture, appearance, and performance. What they also underline is that there is really no disciplinary nexus to which the study of masculinity is not in some way germane.One of the paradoxes of masculinity in scholarly and theoretical contexts is that much of its contemporary critique and reconfiguration has come from sidereal fields, namely feminist, queer and trans studies. In particular, work by theorists such as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Teresa de Lauretis have progressively repositioned gender from presumed biological determinants to cultural ones, by which gender is reconfigured as a construct, a performance, even a technology. There is evidence that this retooling away from essentialism and toward what one might term “gender constructivism” is making real inroads into Millennial and Generation Z culture, with gender fluidity seeming to enjoy growing acceptance, at least in certain social and institutional contexts. The idea that one can choose or even disavow gender is not, of course, uncontested, and is caught up in the wider left-versus-right culture wars of the present day. But, for all that, it is undeniably more mainstream than was imaginable even a few short years ago.But where does this leave masculinity? A further paradox of masculinity today is partly explained in generational terms: while Millennials and Gen Z-ers may be staging increasing challenges to hegemonic masculinity, the literal hegemons of the world seem to be cementing its crudest iterations ever more concretely in place. On the world stage, not only has the patriarch’s hegemony over both our material and cultural economies never been properly vanquished but our era seems to be regressing into one in which the atavistic strong man is resurgent everywhere. Autocrats, dictators, and aspiring fascists, almost to a man, revel in muscular displays of their own particular brand of hypermasculinity, some to the point of literally taking off their shirts, bearing—and all but beating—their chests for the camera. Of course, most would not survive such literal disrobement and scrutiny before the public gaze; their personal embodiments of masculinity, in any valorizing sense of the term, being less of the real and more of the purely symbolic or imaginary orders. Nonetheless, amplified, like the comic book mecha of manga and anime, by the oppressive state and the corporate and media apparatuses that they manipulate, they are able to trample around and nakedly project this power as history’s strong men are wont to do: to the subjugation of their vassal states, literal and affective.This state of affairs, particularly in the case of the former US President, clearly both feeds off and into a wider crisis of masculinity, especially at its point of intersection with whiteness. Trigger happy—and overwhelmingly male—Anglo police officers in paramilitary garb spray bullets into the backs of Black and Latinx men, women and children, with abandon and seeming impunity. Truncheon-wielding National Guards beat down anti-fascism protesters on the streets of major American cities like New York, Chicago, and Portland. Un-uniformed units spill out of unmarked black vans to snatch “insurgents” away to undisclosed locations as if these were the streets of Fallujah. Whipped up by the POTUS, rifle-toting thugs menace state capitals, ram vehicles into crowds of protesters, and shoot down Black Lives Matter protesters. The bizarre spectacle of “boogaloo boys,” a rallying of angry white conservative men in Hawai’ian shirts, would almost be funny, were it not for the flak jackets, AK-47s and implied imprimatur of the highest office in the land. Of course, this is not just white America’s problem. All around the world the iron-fisted authoritarians gaily shred the velvet gloves of former freedoms and reforms: just look at the BRICs—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—all under the hegemonic grip.Clearly, these brutalizing forces are not solely manifestations of masculinity, and plenty of men of varying ethnicities are part of a growing resistance, but there seems little doubt that at their core lies a complex that comprises masculinity’s most rogue manifestations, all wrapped up in blind patriotism, the fetishization of the phallic apparatuses of the nation-state, and sublimated servility to the ruling caste of oligarchs, kleptocrats, and the grand wizards of tech for whom these divide-and-rule distractions are more than just welcome. They are, indeed, deliberate orchestrations. At the more radical end of critiques of masculinity, this has led some commentators, such as the trans scholar Ciara Cremin, author of Man Made Woman (2017) and contributor to an earlier issue of JAPPC,1 to argue in symposia that we should not even delineate “toxic” masculinity from the common-and-garden varieties. In other words, masculinity itself is inherently toxic in its current iterations at this late turn in what she terms “End Capitalism.” Cremin argues that the patriarch is “lodged” both in the body politic and, affectively, our very selves as subjects, and that the challenge, as she has rather colorfully termed it, is to “shit the patriarch out of our anus.”One need not necessarily embrace this posture to recognize both the dangers and possibilities inherent in the current crisis in masculinity. Indeed, arguably what the articles in this volume that are concerned with masculinity suggest is that it is via such critiques that the possibilities for reconfiguring masculinity into heterodox masculinities are unlocked. The sun may long ago have set on the genre of “The Western,” but the figure of the genocidal gunslinger continues to ride out of the cinematic imagination and into the plane of everyday actuation. In “The Afterimage of John Wayne and the Shape of Masculinity in the Landscape,” Mark Shorter considers his own performance work, The Afterimage of John Wayne, in terms of how such performance art forms have the capacity to shift and loosen the mythologies that underpin the performance of masculinity within The Western genre. The framework is located within the legacies of conceptual art, which emerged, originally, in the 1960s, enabling new ways of engagement with contemporary culture across a range of disciplines and practices. The specific method is the Instructional Statement, a form that facilitates the understanding of performance not only as a cultural production but an organ of critique, in this case of gendered masculinity and its genre representations.Aysha Iqbal Viswamohan and Sanchari Basu Chaudhuri’s “Bollywood’s Angromance: Toxic Masculinity and Male Angst in Tere Naam and Kabir Singh” tackles this configuration head-on via the authors’ theorization of hegemonic masculinity through the specific performance of toxic masculinity. The locus for this is in works of mainstream Bollywood cinema, Tere Nam/In Your Name (Satish Kaushik, 2003) and Kabir Singh (Sandeep Reddy Vanga, 2019), and in an analysis of shifts in the intervening years. What these films share is the extension of traditional portrayals of obsessive love into problematic, sadomasochistic territory through the hypermasculine traits of their putative “heroes.” In the context of a backlash in India against misogyny in the industry and sexist portrayals in popular culture, Viswamohan and Chaudhuri argue how “Bollywood assembles various masculinities to validate the performance of angromance.” In doing so they reveal the limitations of such masculinities, especially in the context of the endemic, rising tide of real world crimes of violence against women in an India in which the far right, religious orthodoxy and nationalist movements are a ballooning menace.In Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo and Ngũgĩ Wa Mirii’s I Will Marry When I Want (1977), we read of the “white man of God with Bible in left hand, gun in the right,”2 and it is hard to judge as to which was the more destructive of the two weapons. “‘Let Us Make Men in Our Own Image’: The Mission Station as a Site of Black Emasculation in Nineteenth-century South Africa” by Siyabulela Tonono critiques depictions of Black men in nineteenth-century literary sources that were shaped out of reports by European “explorers” and Christian missionaries of the time. These tended to portray African men as “uncivilized and savage brutes,” as part and parcel of the colonizing rationale—infamously known as the White Man’s Burden—by which the mission of these stations was supposedly to civilize such “brutes.” As part of this “civilizing” project of refashioning African men along the lines of British sociocultural precepts, the authors argue, Black men were subject to ontological violence and emasculation. In highlighting this, the article grounds itself in decolonial thought, echoing the wider challenge of decolonizing the mind in the postcolonial (or neo-imperial) period that Ngũgĩ, among other African writers and critics of conscience, has advocated.3Finally, this issue closes with two reviews. Thomas E. Simmons reviews an important new collection, Law and Justice in Japanese Popular Culture: From Crime Fighting Robots to Dueling Pocket Monsters (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018), edited by Ashley Pearson, Thomas Giddens, and Kieran Tranter, while H. R. Hyatt-Johnston reviews the 22nd Biennale of Sydney NIRIN(March 14–June 8, 2020), “One Way or Another.”The problem of masculinity or, rather, the problematics of masculinities are unlikely to recede in the coming weeks, months and, indeed, years, given the huge uncertainties in a world beset by COVID-19, the climate crisis, and rising statist and populist authoritarian movements. In many ways, those involved in the scholarly and cultural enterprise of conscience and critique could be forgiven for being somewhat despairing in their regard of the current gestalt. However, the cumulative insight of several decades of theorization of masculinity in the context of gender, queer and, more recently, trans studies is precisely that nothing in human affairs is fixed. As Millennial Masculinities, along with the associated articles in this volume—and those that critique and essay other hegemonic forces—suggest, the possibilities for radical reconfiguration have never been as wide open.