John Bryans
M.A. Sociology II, Concordia University
November 1, 2019
As the anthropological and sociological turn towards the senses has continued to expand (Howes, 2010), there remains a dearth of work that engages with the “sensorium” from critical masculinity studies. While studies of masculinity typically have taken a post-structural (Atkinson, 2011) or structuralist (Connell, 2005) approach to studying the multiplicity of masculine identity (or masculinities), studies of gender and the senses have largely been the domain of the natural sciences (Zellner et al., 2007), psychology (Hirokawa & Yamazawa, 2008; Carrito et al., 2017) and phenomenology (Berggren, 2014; Veale et al., 2015; Moore & Few-Demo, 2017). While masculinity makes cameo appearances throughout various accounts of the senses in these works, much of the sociological and anthropological masculinities literature dances tantalizingly around a gender politics of the senses without fully engaging the critical tools that have classically been the hallmarks of the field (MacDonald, 2001; Hollows, 2003; Spencer, 2012). For these reasons, the socio-cultural study of the senses is ripe for a deeper investigation into how regimes of masculinity are constituted in and by the sensorium.
Building on Classen’s (2002) investigation of historical gendered associations with the senses, I will unpack three examples of recent research that take up the task of examining the sensory lives of men and masculinity in Hollywood cinema (Barker & Cottrell, 2015), labour and military service (Hockey, 2009), and surfing culture (Evers, 2009), albeit mainly from a phenomenological approach. I argue that while there has been a turn towards a more fluid and transgressive view of the senses in terms of how masculinity is enmeshed with our sensory experiences, normative gender regimes still retain what Ahmed (2013) has termed their “stickiness”, upholding hegemonic norms of masculinity. I concur with Berggren (2014) that sensory studies of masculinity would benefit from drawing on both post-structural and phenomenological frameworks.
As Howes and Classen (2013) point out, by acknowledging the role that our cultural worlds play in governing our sensory experiences, it follows that a “politics of the senses” undergirds our everyday perceptions. Certainly, as Classen (2002) argues, there is a gender politics at play by which the senses become symbolically entangled with prevailing gender norms, serving as historical accounts of the times in which they arise. Taking Irigaray’s gendered associations of the senses as a starting point (with men being associated with what is often deemed the higher order and rational visual sense while women are relegated to the lower order embodied senses), Classen demonstrates how pre-modern traditional gender coding of the senses still holds currency in late modernity. Patriarchal gender regimes that regulate how the senses can be experienced traditionally have restricted the sensuous lives of women, a power play designed to keep women subservient to men and restricting their ability to maneuver politically in the world (imagine not being allowed to read or paint or engage in public discourse, as was the case historically).
Applying these ideas to our current historical period, we can see the continued relegation of women to the domain of the body while men retain dominance over the visual, particularly evident in Mulvey’s (1989) concept of the male gaze. Emerging from her work in film studies, Mulvey coined the term and made the argument that the voyeuristic perspective of the spectator in modern cinema was the patriarchal privileging of a heterosexual male as the default viewpoint of the camera. Not only are female bodies made passively available as objects for consumption by the male gaze, but the viewer is also meant to self-identify with the perspective of the voyeur as an idealized and omnipotent masculine self (Mulvey, 1989). Although the concept still holds relevance since Mulvey first developed it, Patterson and Elliott (2002) argue that the concept has evolved since its inception, having been expanded beyond the limits of a heterosexual male construct that robs women of their agency. Framing the male gaze as part of the post-modern project of self-construction, they contend that the male gaze is just one of several subject positions that the spectator can reflexively adopt. Taking this deconstruction of the concept further, they also problematize the male gaze that they claim has become inverted upon itself, wherein the objectification and consumption of male images by male viewers troubles the notion of the heterosexual male gaze.
In their analysis of the modern day follow shot in cinema, Barker and Cottrell (2015) further problematize the male gaze with respect to how the modern-day tracking shot in film is deployed as a visual framing device to challenge hegemonic depictions of masculinity. The follow-shot as described by Barker and Cottrell is a unique framing device in that it offers a view of the back of the protagonist’s head but is not a first-person perspective nor is it a classic tracking shot. Effectively disembodying the spectator from identification with the protagonist, Barker and Cottrell argue that the follow shot offers up a perspective of masculinity in crisis by denying the audience the typical self-identification with the character on screen. By restricting our view to the back of the actor in the frame, he is reduced to an interchangeable and faceless body, a non-specific symbol of masculinity fallen into irrelevance. Applying a sensory reading to the work of Barker and Cottrell (2015) we can see how contemporary shifts in masculinity have affected the way that the visual is experienced. Here Mulvey’s (1989) male gaze is inverted on itself in the way that Patterson and Elliott (2002) suggested, but rather than images that are meant to be objectified, consumed, and taken up in the construction of the self, Barker and Cottrell show how the tracking shot is used to critique the subject positions on display and guide the spectator away from indiscriminately consuming the images of masculinity in question. That said, the focus in Barker and Cottrell’s work is primarily on revealing how the use of the camera by a filmmaker might accomplish their storytelling and social commentary goals, and less on the what the lived visual experiences of film audiences might be.
Phenomenological accounts of the senses in sociology and anthropology have made more explicit attempts to ground sensory research in everyday experiences. In order to fill a perceived gap on the sociological study of work and the senses, Hockey (2009) moves away from the classic structuralist and post-structuralist (read: Bourdieu and Foucault) positions of sociology of the body and advocates for an empirically based, materialist investigation of the mundane practices of bodies performing labour that finds its roots in phenomenological theory. Hockey uses the occupation of infantryman in the United Kingdom (which is solely the domain of men) in order to illustrate “[…] how a particular occupational body is produced through the work of specific, commonplace and inter-connected sensory practices” (2009, p.479). Drawing from ethnographic field notes he details how infantrymen engage with the senses in their training regimes, offering a “first step” in creating an account from which to engage in an analysis of working bodies. While Hockey is not writing about gender explicitly, it is hard not to see how masculinity and the senses are heavily regulated in this milieu, demanding that the infantrymen become masters of their senses on pain of failing their training or exposing themselves to risk of death when they eventually enter combat (see further Classen 2012: ch. 8 on the military drill). Admittedly, a gender analysis is not the focus of this paper, which is presented as a preliminary phenomenological investigation, and one hopes that the rich potential to engage with gender in this work does not go untapped.
Merging a phenomenological and gender framework, Evers’ (2009) ethnographic explorations into how male surfers in Australia learn to “do masculinity” through their embodied, sensory experiences goes further with respect to a gendered approach to the senses. For Evers there is an intermingling of discourse and sensory experience, each one clarifying the other. Evers speaks of “assemblages”, citing the work of Grosz (1993), that allow for multiple entities from which lived experiences emerge like, for example, all of the living and non-living features of surfing that contribute to the experience. Evers then goes on to argue that our notions of gender and masculinity are superimposed on the embodied act of surfing as a way of ordering our experiences into legibility. Evers claims his own way of theorizing masculinity is not to “look for masculinity” in the lived experience of surfing, but to allow whatever comes out of the assemblages of surfing to become the theory. In this way his notions of masculinity are not fixed, but rather a fluid identity that can shift depending on the experience.
Rather than privileging an intellectual understanding of surfing, Evers argues that surfers come to understand their embodied experiences of surfing as an “affective tuning”. In other words, surfers grasp the affective tone of their experience before they understand it intellectually. This is interesting as it appears to be a shift from one of the classic tropes of masculinity, the characterization of men as primarily rational beings (with women relegated to disorderly affectivity). In this sense Evers work is radically revisioning masculinity on an embodied level, but nevertheless surfer culture is also known for upholding and espousing misogynist ideology (Drummond, 2002). What is intriguing about Evers’ account is the notion that while surfers are actually engaged in the embodied act of surfing they might escape the rigid bounds of masculinity discourse, while the surfing culture out of the water appears to enforce these norms (Drummond, 2002). The final point Evers makes is that the act of surfing is not just an engagement in the sanctioned masculine sport of surfing, but is in fact a way that men can immerse themselves in the sensuous experience of becoming with the “assemblage” of their environment, thereby offering them a more flexible masculine identity.
While these phenomenological accounts point us in interesting directions, criticisms of this approach nevertheless persist. Howes and Classen (2013) critique the phenomenology of perception for being divorced from the social, for upholding essentialist views about what constitutes human sense experience, and for its reliance on descriptive language. They assert that one of the fundamental ways that phenomenology falls short in engaging with the senses is that it naturalizes perception (i.e. fails to grapple with the fact that the perceptual is political) and that embodied experience can never fully be expressed outside of the experience because phenomenologists must always return to language as their medium. This echoes arguments made earlier by Hockey and Allen-Collinson (2009), who also acknowledge the limitations of language in academic accounts of sensory experience, one glaring limitation being the failure to engage with some of the classic sociological variables of analysis (gender, race, class, dis/ability, etc).
A possible way out of this conundrum has been proposed by Berggren (2014) who calls for existing post-structuralist and phenomenological feminist theories to be brought back into critical masculinity studies as a way of re-reading existing work that has largely relied on critical structuralist perspectives and revisiting the role of the gendered subject embedded in structures of power. Berggren argues for a blending of post-structuralism and phenomenology, and turns to Ahmed’s (2013) notion of “sticky masculinity” as an example of a queer phenomenology. Ahmed uses the word “impressions” to account for the intertwining of emotion, thought, and embodied sensation in human experience, rather than analysing each as its own separate lens of experience. This attempt to combine the post-structural attention to discursive norms with the phenomenological focus on lived experiences and embodiment can be described as what materially and ideologically “sticks”. As Ahmed writes “what sticks ‘shows us’ where the object has travelled through what it has gathered onto its surface, gatherings that become part of the object, and call into question its integrity as an object” (Ahmed 2013, p.91; quoted in Berggren, 2014, p.245). This approach could help to fill out those accounts which focus primarily on the lived experience, and help to illuminate the embodied experience of the senses without divorcing this account from the social world and historical moment that produces it and gives it meaning. While this could also lead back into worn-out debates about the productive nature of discourse vs materiality binary, perhaps this is a way to give a richer analysis of how the senses continue to fall under the dominion of gender regimes but also destabilize our sedimented ideas of masculine and feminine.
References
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