Introduction

Abstract

What is masculinity? It’s a question to which various answers have been proffered, not only in the analytical confines of academia, but both explicitly and implicitly in self-help manuals, popular culture, feminism, governmental legislation, psychoanalytic theory, and in various quotidian interactions between boys and their fathers, husbands and wives, children and teachers, and so on and so forth. And indeed, as the chapters of this book demonstrate, it is a question which has been posed in a variety of earlier forms through a variety of historical media, from ancient theatre to medieval chronicles, from early modern letters to nineteenth-century pedagogic tracts. Pierre Bourdieu’s attempt to outline the nature of masculinity is one notable response, perhaps helpful to us most particularly in his insistence upon the deep-rooted character of patriarchy, which he sees as producing and reproducing itself not only via social relations and cultural media but also through the embodied habits and practices of everyday experience. In his account, masculinity — and particularly the habit of masculine domination — has been very hard to challenge, because it has bound itself so very closely both to social power and to ‘just how things are’: a primary example of ‘history turned into nature’, of an ideological practice cloaking itself in the guise of inescapable necessity. We are thus reminded that the analysis of gender is at the heart of the analysis of power relations and politics in general.

This primordial investment in the social games (illusio) which make a man a real man — the sense of honour, virility, ‘manliness’, or, as the Kabyles say, ‘Kabylness’ (thakbaylith) — is the undisputed principle of all the duties towards oneself, the motor or motive of all that a man ‘owes to himself’, in other words what he must do in order to live up, in his own eyes, to a certain idea of manhood.

Pierre Bourdieu, Masculine Domination¹