On the other hand, NOT engaging with these issues can seem to consign them
to marginality in our discourse, if only because there is no way on xmca to
publicly judge the intensity with which postings and threads are read and
engaged with except by visible responses.
My own way in to these issues is to look at gender in a way that
foregrounds that there is also a specific masculine gender, and that it is
specialized and distinctive, and so necessarily intellectually biased or
incomplete as a perspective. It is very threatening to the enterprise of
masculine scholarship to claim, as I would, that men constitutionally
cannot ever be authoritative regarding feminist research and perspectives.
I believe this is also true of cultural limitations and class limitations
(and in the US context, also of whatever the experiential realities are
engendered by "race" differentiations), and in a peculiar way of age
limitations, as well, but gender difference in one stroke excludes half the
human universe from the claims of masculine scientific universalism, and so
is the paradigm denial of its claim to hegemony.
Nothing about academic feminism rankles men more than its ability to
exclude them from authority. This is dealt with by a standard strategy
which basically says that anything which excludes males from authoritative
knowledge must be a parochial pseudo-discipline incapable of making
universal, and therefore intellectually-satisfying-to-masculinized-males
claims. If feminism were, in this argument, a real intellectual method, it
would be open to all; this argument depends of course on the basic
assumption that all genuine intellectual methods must aspire to universal
assertions and so be constructed by universally appropriable methods.
Anything else is like not wanting to rule the world -- i.e. inconceivably
parochial and unambitious, or simply (as it would be for the ideal dominant
male), a pose.
I was almost as shocked that I had never heard about the murder of those
women engineering students in Canada as that it had actually happened. The
event would seem to be an extreme manifestation of the much more common
forms of intimidation, from verbal disparagement to physical abuse, by
which males do in fact enforce domination over females in a
social-categorial (as well as an individual) sense. Somewhere down the
hierarchy of significances of such an event is what it tells us about the
links between identities for engineers and masculinity in identity as such.
Many occupational identities are essential parts of how males construct and
maintain their masculinity, and some such occupational identities are more
shaped to this task than others (e.g. soldiers, football players, violent
criminals, and somewhere down this scale and class-shifted, engineers vs.
say dancers, elementary school teachers, librarians, or pediatricians).
Hence, no women in combat, no visible (esp. male) gays in the US military,
and by all accounts no especially warm welcome for women in US engineering
schools.
In the larger scheme of things, being an academic of any sort is not very
high in the masculinity rankings of occupations, so perhaps male academics
try harder to show how tough (-minded?) they can be, mostly by defaming the
work of their colleagues (ie. competitors), but perhaps also by showing
what great risks they have the courage to take (radical hypotheses), and
how rigorous their "arguments" (membra rigida?) can be within the canons of
masculinist, universalizing, winner-take-all logics of 'rationality'.
When considered in these terms, responses by males to academic feminism
offer important data on the social construction of masculinity and
masculinized identities, and perhaps more importantly, on the larger
identity-system in which gender is not an independent dimension, but is
integrally co-dependent with variable of class, age, culture, sexuality,
etc., in a rough description, and with more precisely definable variations
in such matters as occupation-specific practices, attitudes, etc. in the
more detailed accounts which we are mostly still lacking -- though feminist
scholarship has done much to define these issues and to consider
masculinity at least implicitly in the contrastive construction of gender.
Neither male nor female scholars can, in my view, separately construct
useful and convincing views of the gender system as such -- another
fundamental denial of the fantasy of male omnipotence, though here also of
what may the goal of some feminist theory (a general account of gender or
gender relations). Nor is it clear that it is in principle possible to
consistently combine male accounts of masculinity and female accounts of
feminine gendering into such a general account; I suspect it is not. Nor of
course could there be a strictly middle-class account of even (maybe
especially of) masculine gendering, since it is clearly, at least in my own
society, highly class-specific and class-relational. If we add in the
dimensions for cultural specificites of gendering we will not be much
further surprised, though adding those for age-specific perspectives will
upset a lot of conventional theory. If we get historically and socially
specific as well, then we get the same general paradoxes of complementarity
(or incommensurability) also across highly specific modes of social
differentiation such as "race" in late 20th-century America, or mid-century
South Africa, etc.
Educationally and politically I wish things were not so complicated and
un-assemblable; but for an inveterate theoretician (with somewhat of a
masculine-intellectual delight in complex abstraction), this order of
intricacy is a wonder! and almost enough of a joy to banish the
disappointment that what it describes can never be known by a lone hunter.
jay.
PS. I will courageously risk some of these ideas publicly at the panel on
gender at the Aarhus ISCRAT.
---------------------------
JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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