Global Masculinities and Manhood

Introduction: Conceptualizing Current Discourses and Writing New Ones

INTRODUCTION Conceptualizing Current Discourses and Writing new o nes RONALD L. JACKSON II AND MURALI BALAJI To the question about what masculinity and manhood really are, we humbly respond that they are cultural constructions. The velocity with which interdisciplinary researchers are willing to dismiss certain cultural masculinities from the ledger of appropriate, sustainable, normal, healthy, and progressive gendered identities is astounding. Those masculinities are then treated as unacceptable and rendered useless. The problem with this is not so much that ignoble, pernicious masculine behavior is instantly acceptable or compelling because of some relativist formula, but that these masculinities and these behaviors call for critical observation within their own global, historical, and cultural contexts. Persistent exclusion of selected masculine discourses leads to both marginalization and inaccessibility of those masculinities, thereby giving power to their volatility or simply leading to their invisibility. This has happened, in one way or another, to virtually every marginalized group masculinity throughout the globe. In the early twentieth century, American journalist Katherine Mayo embarked on a personal crusade to report the “truth” about India and its colonized citizens (Sinha, 1995; Joseph & Kavoori, 2007). Mayo, who believed in the providence of Anglo imperialism, wrote pieces claiming to show the so-called barbarism and incivility of Indian society. She expanded her views of India into her well-known book, Mother India, which purported to represent the daily happenings of Indian life. Beyond making India a place where the odd, curious, and supposedly barbarous were routinely sanctioned and normalized, Mayo also emphatically argued that India needed the benevolent hand of the British man to guide the country into modern times. She did this often by noting the incapability of Indian men, whom she described as effeminate and impotent, to lead a country (Sinha, 1995; Joseph & Kavoori, 2007). Mayo derided Indian masculinity, writing that: “Given men who enter the world out of bankrupt stock, rear them through childhood in influences and practices that devour their vitality; launch them at the dawn of maturity on an unrestrained outpouring of their whole provision of creative energy in one single direction; find them, at an age when the Anglo-Saxon is just coming into full glory of manhood, broken-nerved, low-spirited, petulant ancients; and need you, while this remains unchanged, seek for other reasons why they are poor and sick and dying and why their hands are too weak, too fluttering, to seize or to hold the reins of government?” (Mayo, 1927, p. 32). In her eyes, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims were capable of emulating the type of Anglo-Christian masculinity needed to civilize a vast nation-state (Mayo, 1927; Sinha, 1995). Through compatible discourses of this kind, Indian men became the Other, disempowered by Western subjectivities and prejudice and framed as the antithesis to how men and masculinity should be. This conceptualization of masculinity as both a biological and social construction, the latter assumed to be performed ideally by white men, served as justification for colonialism and the discourses that to this day shape representations of men and masculinities throughout the globe. Mayo’s depiction of Indian men was not uncommon at a time when white Americans and Europeans used exaggerated or false depictions of Other cultures as a way of justifying their colonial domination of nonwhite lands. Early social science justified the ideals of white European masculinity, while supposedly legitimating the inferiority of the peoples of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The “white standard” of masculinity, upon which manhood and masculinities were based in Western discourse, created notions of the Other. While early American scholarship on gender roles and practices lionized white masculinity, American and European popular culture reified these norms via distribution of racialized representations in stage plays, film, and radio beginning in the early to mid-1900s and continuing with the advent of television in the 1950s and beyond. The American film industry popularized images of white male protagonists and alternately vilified, caricatured, and marginalized men of other races and cultures. These images quickly became part of the global film landscape and were mimicked throughout the world in varying ways. Ultimately, these Others were vanquished by the ideals of 18 . RONALD L. JACKSON II & MURALI BALAJI white masculinity. Some scholars might maintain that race is a monolithic construction of the West that is only owned and perpetuated by the West; however, the marginalization and oppression of the racialized Other has been called by other names...