American and European masculinity: a transatlantic dialogue

One of the most important aspects of the feminist project involves the more nuanced exploration of female subjectivity—that is, the recognition that the construction of female consciousness involves an ongoing series of critical edeavours, rather than an assumed set of conclusions. This critical approach is also imperative when one considers the construction of masculinity in both American and European culture. In the scholarship of Harry Brod, Maurice Berger, and Michael Kimmel, for example, masculinity as a subject of inquiry in American culture is being revisited; in this sense, the contemporary interest in masculinity shares some basic tenets with feminism. The cultural assumptions which attend its construction in the West are now part of the men’s studies movement of which John Bly is most readily associated; his memoir, Iron John (1990), has become part of the men’s studies canon.

In XY On Masculine Identity, Elisabeth Badinter invites us to explore masculinity, what she refers to as the “quality of a man” (9), in its distinctive forms but also to imagine it as a way of being that does not have to locate itself in opposition to femininity. Despite Badinter’s more expansive exploration of masculinity, it nonetheless maintains a Eurocentric and Oedipally-based point of focus. As a French feminist theorist who undertook a significant portion of her academic training in the United States, Badinter is mindful of the historical and cultural imperatives which inform masculine identity in both Europe and the United States.

Though she is not a geneticist, Badinter begins her discussion with the chromosomal origins of what we define as male sexual difference. Evolution, she argues, “has determined the two sexes of the human species by differentiating the twenty-third pair of their chromosomes—XX in the female, XY in the male” (35). From this genetic knowledge, many scientists believe the X chromosome represents “basic humanity: that without which no human being is possible” (35). In other words, the Y chromosome, the symbol of male sexual difference, represents the complex process of male differentiation. As she traces the genetic origins of male identity, she maintains that the process of becoming a man involves psychological, social, and cultural factors that have no connection to genetics.

The dominant paradigm for Badinter’s exploration of male identity is the Oedipal Complex which, in Freud’s view, is the linchpin relationship in the construction of male consciousness. Put another way, the relationship between father, mother, and son and the sexual tensions that this filial triangle engenders, become the primary point of reference in the construction of male identity. In my view, however, there are questions regarding the formation of masculinity, black masculinity in particular, which the Oedipal paradigm fails to address. Despite my reservations, I find Badinter’s allusions to various writings by Europeans and Euro-Americans that contain Oedipal tensions quite provocative and convincing.

Her readings of fiction by Ernest Hemingway (The Nick Adams Stories) and Philip Roth (The Anatomy Lesson) compel us to reexamine the notions of superiority that have characterized white manhood in America. For European and Euro-American novelists of the twentieth century, masculinity is forged through feminine negation, the denial and repression of femininity.

Males generally learn what they must not be in order to be masculine, before learning what they can be, thus “many boys define masculinity as what is not feminine” (32). The realization of the masculine self, according to Badinter, is predicated on three moments of negation: “in order to signify his male identity, he will have to convince himself and others: that he is not a woman, not a baby, not a homosexual” (32). What makes Badinter’s analysis so insightful is the way in which she explores this paradigm of male development...