Abstract
This chapter analyzes the close, though often neglected, relationship between masculinity and emotion in culture and history and, in doing so, the political potential of emotions to transform existing sociocultural relations and structures. To illustrate this, the chapter discusses the political potential of profeminist men’s emotions as part of the feminist struggle for social and gender equality. As a concrete example, focus is given to several existing “new fatherhood” models that pervade not only culture but also contemporary literature. Although patriarchal structures undeniably keep oppressing women—as well as some (homosexual) men—the fact that some men are actively and emotionally involved in feminism—as well as caring for their daughters and sons—seems to challenge monolithic views of masculinity as synonymous with patriarchy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Although the précieux were originally aristocratic men, their influence extended to lower-class men over the eighteenth century (Badinter, 1995, 28).
- 2.
It is true, however, that the précieux were differently received in England and in France. As Badinter (1995, 27) explains, the image of the “feminized” man who adopted feminine behaviors aroused in England a fear of homosexuality that we do not see in France among those who despised the précieux. The “new man” of the English Restoration is portrayed as a pervert, as vain, Petty and bewitching as a woman. Women were pitied for having been abandoned by men and manly refinement was attacked. The English saw men’s feminization as a direct effect of French fashion on English customs. “Certain pamphlets”, as Badinter (28) concludes “very son saw a connection between the feminization of masculinity and betrayal, between traditional masculinity and patriotism”.
- 3.
However, the 1789 French Revolution put an end to this development (Badinter, 1995, 28). When women publicly demanded the right to vote, the Convention refused them this. The deputies, who had not known the delights of the Ancien Régime, reaffirmed the separation of spheres and sexual dualism. Women were asked not to mingle with men and their business. As Badinter explains, “reinforced by the Napoleonic Code and ratified by the ideology of the nineteenth century, oppositional dualism” became the hegemonic ideology for a long time to come (29).
- 4.
- 5.
One of the few critics who has shown the links between British sensibility and American sentimentality is Philip Fisher (1985), although few scholars, as Chapman and Hendler (1999, 15–6) note, seem to have taken up his point that «Sensibility […] cannot be easily differentiated from what I am calling Sentimentality» or his comparison between the affective patterns of Richardson, Sterne, and Rousseau’s texts and that of Stowe’s in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (94).
- 6.
For a detailed list of works encouraging women to play a moral and nurturing role in the domestic sphere, see Cott (1977, 63).
- 7.
The issue of nineteenth-century sentimental and domestic literature is well-documented. A detailed analysis of the subject is far beyond the scope of this chapter, which is simply focused on analyzing (and rethinking) the traditional view of sentimental culture and literature as an exclusively feminine phenomenon. For a deeper analysis of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, see, for example, Fiedler (1998, 23–125), Hartman (1997), and Leverenz (1989, 135–204).
- 8.
Pamela A. Boker, for example, has reread the fiction of Melville, Twain, and Hemingway as illustrating their common struggle with androgyny and their repression of the “feminine”. In her words:
Using the lives and fiction of Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Ernest Hemingway as examples, I will demonstrate that, despite the apparently successful efforts of American male culture to control and displace female power, our male authors continue to struggle internally with the maternal/feminine in the form of their conflicting desires for separation from, and fusion with, the intrapsychic and symbolically depicted image of the mother. (1996, 3)
- 9.
During their (therapeutic) sessions, several men’s groups, for example, encourage their members to shout or cry to release their aggressivity, which is treated as an essential(ist) masculine emotion. See Segal (1997, 283).
- 10.
Although these catharsis theories focus on a significant area of emotional function neglected by much mainstream theorizing, there are several problems with them (Middleton, 1990, 182–3). First, there is rarely some clear inner feeling waiting for release. The process of healing is a long unraveling of memories, thoughts, and emotions in which catharsis plays a role, which is partly why psychoanalysis acknowledges catharsis only as an incidental aspect of the working through of factors in the transference. Moreover, catharsis theories often neglect the potential that emotions have for rationality, communication, and sociality.
- 11.
Predominantly heterosexual, these anti-sexist men have also been confronted at their national Men Against Sexism conferences by gay men accusing them of being heterosexist and of doing little to fight LGTBIQ+ oppression (Segal, 1997, 286).
- 12.
Similarly, Christopher Newfield argues that «hegemonic patriarchy can survive without male assertion» and thrives with male «feminization» also in the form of demands for masculine emotional exploration (1989, 66).
- 13.
Clearly, the «feminization» of men has an economic and commercial component. For example, the fact that men are increasingly encouraged to take care of themselves (by buying clothes and male cosmetics, going to the gym, etc.) is (at least partly), the result of late capitalism trying to widen its markets and number of consumers. By becoming not only producers but consumers themselves, men contribute to widening the scope of the late capitalist market, which has traditionally associated men with production and women with consumption. However, the fact of men becoming consumers does not guarantee, of course, greater gender equality.
- 14.
After all, concepts such as queer and community are themselves multifaceted and indeterminate, as they have always been culture-specific and context-bound. In Dinshaw’s own words, “these terms that queer theory as highlighted all point to the alterity within mimesis itself, the never-perfect aspect of identification” (1999, 35).
- 15.
Although in the United States «male liberation» remains a powerful social movement, the emotional «soft» male has proved a failure in many countries. Several Nordic feminists, such as Merete Gerlach-Nielsen, have already voiced their Deep dissatisfaction with what they see as a passive and fragmented male. As Badinter explains, “even the most responsive to gentleness on the part of men want nothing more to do with these men, who are ersatz traditional women” (1995, 184).
- 16.
For a more detailed analysis of the issue of male violence, see Chapter 6.
- 17.
These and other examples for distant fathers in contemporary Chicano/a literature have been analyzed at length and in depth by Alonso and Domínguez (2000, 67–95).
References
Alonso, Laura P. and Antonia Domínguez. “Performative Fathers and the Inessential Macho: Fatherhood in Contemporary Latino/Latina Literature.” Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Ed. E. Bueno, T. Caesar, and W. Hummel. New York: Lexington Books, 2000. 67–95.
Armengol, Josep M. “Past, Present (and Future) of Studies of Literary Masculinities: A Case Study in Intersectionality.” Men and Masculinities 22.1 (2019): 64–74.
———. “The Politics of Masculinity and/as Emotion: Walt Whitman’s Celebration of Male Intimacy in the First Person.” Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 66 (2013): 73–86.
———. “Where Are Fathers in American Literature? Re-Visiting Fatherhood in U.S. Literary History.” Journal of Men’s Studies 16.2 (2009): 211–26.
———. (ed.). Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2021.
Armengol, Josep M. et al. (eds.). Masculinities and Literary Studies: Intersections and New Directions. New York: Routledge, 2017.
Bacete, Ritxar. Nuevos hombres buenos: La masculinidad en la era del feminismo. Barcelona: Planeta, 2017.
Badinter, Elisabeth. XY: On Masculine Identity [1992]. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
Bambara, Toni Cade. “A Tender Man.” In Envisioning the New Adam. Ed. P.E.M. Daly. Westport. CT: Greenwood, 1995. 90–105.
Berlant, Lauren. “Poor Eliza.” American Literature 70.3 (1998): 635–68.
Bly, Robert. Iron John. New York: Addison-Wesley, 1990.
Boker, Pamela A. The Grief Taboo in American Literature: Loss and Prolonged Adolescence in Twain, Melville, and Hemingway. New York and London: New York University Press, 1996.
Brewer, Gaylord. “Holy and Unholy Ghosts: The Legacy of the Father in the Plays of August Wilson.” Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Ed. E. Bueno, T. Caesar, and W. Hummel. New York: Lexington Books, 2000. 120–39.
Brod, Harry. “To Be a Man, or Not to Be a Man: That Is the Feminist Question.” Men Doing Feminism. Ed. Tom Digby. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. 197–212.
Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America. Durham: Duke University Press, 1940.
Bueno, Eva P., Terry Caesar, and William Hummel (eds.). Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature. New York: Lexington Books, 2000.
Chapman, Mary and Glenn Hendler. “Introduction.” Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture. Ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 1–16.
Chávez, Denise. Face of an Angel. New York: Warner, 1994.
Cheever, John. Stories of John Cheever. New York: Ballantine, 1980.
Chodorow, Nancy J. The Reproduction of Mothering. 1978. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.
Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage, 1991.
Cott, Nancy F. The Bonds of Womanhood: «Woman’s Sphere» —New England, 1780- 1835. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
Daly, P. E. M. Envisioning the New Adam: Empathic Portraits of Men by American Women Writers. Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1995.
Davidson, Cathy. “Preface.” No More Separate Spheres! Special Issue of American Literature 70.3 (1998): 443–63.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999.
Dinshaw, Carolyn. “Queer Perspectives.” In Debating Masculinity. Ed. Josep M. Armengol and Àngels Carabí. Harriman, TN: Men's Studies Press, 2008. 68–79.
Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture [1977]. New York: Noonday, 1998.
Farrell, Warren. The Liberated Man. New York: Random House, 1974.
Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel [1960]. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.
Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. Tender Is the Night. 1934. New York: Scribner, 1995.
Fisher, Philip. Hard Facts. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Fricker, Miranda. “Reason and Emotion.” Radical Philosophy 57 (1991): 14–7.
Goldberg, Herb. The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege. New York: Nash, 1976.
Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Hurston, Zora Neale. “The Gilded Six Bits.” In Envisioning the New Adam. Ed. P.E.M. Daly. Westport. CT: Greenwood, 1995. 81–89.
Hobson, Barbara. Making Men Into Fathers: Men, Masculinities and the Social Politics of Fatherhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Kaufman, Michael. “Men, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power.” Theorizing Masculinities. Ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994. 142–63.
Kimmel, Michael. The Gendered Society. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
———. Manhood in America: A Cultural History [1996]. New York: The Free Press, 1997.
Leverenz, David. Manhood and the American Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989.
———. Paternalism Incorporated: Fables of American Fatherhood, 1865-1940. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Norton, 1979.
Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century [1955]. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.
Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. 1984. Freedom, CA: Crossing, 1998.
Mackenzie, Henry. The Man of Feeling [1771]. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Middleton, Peter. The Inward Gaze. Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman [1949]. New York: Viking, 1996.
Newfield, Christopher. “The Politics of Male Suffering: Masochism and Hegemony in the American Renaissance.” Differences 1.3 (fall 1989): 55–87.
Pfister, Joel and Nancy Schnog (eds.). Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. New York: Harper and Row, 1966.
Pleck, Joseph and Jack Sawyer (eds.). Men and Masculinity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.
Reisdorfer, Kathryn. “Generating Alternative Representations of Fatherhood: Anzia Yezierska and Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s Narrative Spaces for Male Others.” Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Ed. E. Bueno, T. Caesar, and W. Hummel. New York: Lexington Books, 2000. 169–89.
River, Jo, and Michael Flood. “Masculinities, Emotions and Men’s Suicide.” Sociology of Health and Illness 43.4 (2021): 910–27.
Robinson, Sally. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
Rodríguez, Antonio J. La nueva masculinidad de siempre: Capitalismo, deseo y falofobias. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2020.
Salazar, Octavio. El hombre que (no) deberíamos ser: La revolución masculina que tantas mujeres llevan siglos esperando. Barcelona: Planeta, 2018.
Samuel, Lawrence R. American Fatherhood: A Cultural History. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.
Savran, David. Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Schmitt, Richard. “Profeminist Men and Their Friends.” Men Doing Feminism. Ed. Tom Digby. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. 81–98.
Schneider, Ryan. “Mourning and Passing in W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.” Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U. S. Ed. Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 106–23.
Segal, Lynne. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men [1990]. London: Virago, 1997.
Seidler, Victor J. Unreasonable Men. London: Routledge, 1994.
Shamir, Milette and Jennifer Travis (eds.). Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Simon, Linda. “Bewildering Love: John Cheever and the Legacy of Abandonment.” Naming the Father: Legacies, Genealogies, and Explorations of Fatherhood in Modern and Contemporary Literature. Ed. E. Bueno, T. Caesar, and W. Hummel. New York: Lexington Books, 2000. 223–38.
Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments [1759]. Oxford: Clarendon, 1976.
Solano, Jordi and Ritxar Bacete. Papá. Barcelona: Destino, 2021.
Spilka, Mark. Hemingway’s Quarrel with Androgyny. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.
Vickers, Brian. “Introduction.” The Man of Feeling. By Henry Mackenzie. Ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. vi–xxiv.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Wilson, August. Fences. New York: Plume, 1986.
Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. New York: Persea Books, 1975.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Armengol, J.M. (2024). Boys Don’t Cry? Masculinity and the Politics of Emotion. In: Rewriting White Masculinities in Contemporary Fiction and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53349-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53349-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-53348-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-53349-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)