The Jackassification of Male Trouble: Incorporating the Abject as Norm

Abstract

One of the recuperative strains of masculinity politics to emerge in the 1990s became known as laddism or new laddism. A behaviour typically associated with young, heterosexual males, central to laddism’s various discursive inflections was the strategic infantilization of male subjects to the reductive stereotype that ‘boys will be boys’. This infantilization might best be understood as a highly manipulative practice, designed to cultivate the association that laddish behaviour is innate but innocuous, and something that males will overcome with time. The term ‘new laddism’ reframed this behaviour more definitively as a reactionary response to feminism; the prefixing ‘new’ implying that this behaviour pre-existed and was even spurred on the feminist movement. Critics attuned to masculinist backlash in the 1980s and 1990s noted in the discursive strategies of new laddism a calculated transposition of masculine norms, designed to license a whole range of negative behaviours. Commenting on this, Garry Whannel suggests that while new laddism defends and promotes itself as ‘a form of post-modern irony’, it actually represents a reconstruction of pre-feminist masculinity, replete with ‘masculine fears of the female Other, masquerading as desire’.³

Loving to be shattered becomes a self-preservative strategy.

Leo Bersani, Intimacies ¹

Beneath the hysteric’s rebellion and challenge to paternal authority there is thus a hidden call for a renewed paternal authority, for a father who would really be a ‘true father’ and adequately embody his symbolic mandate.²

Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology