The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland

7. Struggling Masculinities

7 Struggling Masculinities = When sturdy John Bull (England) forcibly married dreamy Hibernia (Ireland ) with her artistic temperament, it was a marriage doomed to failure. Even their children have deserted her, as thousands of their sons have left her shores. Much as we abhor divorce, Hibernia ought to get a decree against John, on a plea of incompatibility. St. Marys Star, St. Marys, Kansas, 1916 A variety of feminist scholars has cleared a path toward more fully relational studies of class, race, ethnicity, and gender through their critiques of notions proposing an ontological speci‹city to women as childbearers , as social mothers, or as essentially relational. Such identity categories not only describe but also normalize women and, therefore, exclude the complex differences that characterize them. To contest such marginalization, poststructuralist feminism has elaborated the position that the category “woman” cannot be totalized and ought to signify “an undesignatable ‹eld of differences,” as should the category “man” (see Butler 1992, 16). This position holds that both women and men are constituted in relations, as are the adjectives “masculine” and “feminine” that attach to them. “Feminine” and “masculine” designate symbolic references, not the physical bodies of female and male. In the Enlightenment tradi183 tion, one that applies to Northern Ireland, “masculine” and “feminine” de‹ne abstract qualities through opposition: masculine as strong, rational , and public and feminine as weak, irrational, and private provide a partial listing of these abstractions.1 Joan Wallach Scott has connected this critique of identity categories to the category “class.” She holds that gender, understood as social understandings of sexual difference, constitutes class relations. Gender marks class relations and class struggle because it provides a convenient and available resource to register difference. It refers to nature, to physical bodies, so gender appears natural and immutable, even though it varies across space and time (see Scott 1988, 1–11). Gender categories often work to naturalize social hierarchies and render their production as a speci‹c organization of relations dif‹cult to perceive. From this perspective, gender is apprehended not as a thing added to social relations but as social knowledge that may exert force in those relations, may transform them, and gets made and remade in various locations. It has material effects. “As a social process, we need to think of gender not only as a noun but also as a verb,” Ava Baron writes, and the study of gendering, in this sense, “is concerned with how understandings of sexual difference shape institutions, practices and relationships ” (1991, 36; emphasis in original). This chapter examines the making of masculinity among the skilled glassworkers and the effect of this construction on shop ›oor relations. Masculinity, particularly that of Irish Catholic men, entered the history of the ‹rm, was attached to its geographical location, and was expressed in the struggles that occurred there at the end of 1984 and in the strike that ensued in the spring of 1985. Masculine identities profoundly shaped the institutions, relationships , and practices of the glassworks as well as the subjectivity and actions of those who worked there. It ‹gured into the events described in the previous chapter and articulated to political and ethnic identities in complex ways. This chapter will track this identi‹cation process and will attempt to understand masculinity’s effect on social action, drawing on the identity theory of action developed by Margaret R. Somers and Gloria D. Gibson, who combine the insights of feminist theory with the recent research on narrative that emphasizes its ontological and epistemological dimensions (see Somers and Gibson 1994, 40). From this position, no ontological speci‹city is accorded to any category the troubles in ballybogoin 184 whether it is men, women, or workers. Instead, narratives, as discussed in the last chapter, are understood to provide the means through which social actors come to know their world. Actors become who they are by locating themselves in stories that are negotiated in time and space. Somers and Gibson have proposed four dimensions of narrativity— ontological, public, conceptual, and metanarrativity. Ontological narratives are the stories actors deploy to make sense of their worlds and to act in them. These are discourses that are about the self and that de‹ne persons. A person, then, is a narration made intelligible through ongoing relationships in time and space. Actors understand themselves and others by placing their actions in the context of preceding and subsequent events, and the ontological narratives they construct...